Last week, Donald Trump won reelection on the back of an evolving coalition. Trump turned out a more diverse racial coalition than most Republicans before him, and used populist and protectionist rhetoric to reclaim working-class voters that first elevated him to the presidency. Another part of his coalition is a fusion of populists and more traditional conservatives who differ from Trump’s tendency toward arbitrary uses of executive power. The latter often support him in spite of this, but they remain distinctly aware that other Trump supporters voted for the president precisely because of such tendencies.

　　Trump of course is hardly the first American to be accused of Caesarist tendencies. Two centuries ago Andrew Jackson ran for president of a distinctive brand of American politics that eventually bore his name and has endured into the twenty-first century. Walter Russell Mead notes that in domestic politics, historic and latter-day Jacksonians “are skeptical of big business, hate the political and social establishment, and demand ‘common sense’ solutions to complex problems.” Jacksonians then and now “support the military but not an officer class seen as distant from the values and folkways of the nation—West Point stuffed shirts in the nineteenth century, woke generals’ today. They assume the political class is deeply and irreformably corrupt.” To these dispositions Jacksonians wedded an affinity for “strong leaders, even those like George Washington and the two Roosevelts who come from elite backgrounds and whose policy preferences don’t always align perfectly with Jacksonian ideas.” Though Mead says Jacksonians are also “deeply skeptical of most politicians,” their loyalty once won is “enduring.”

　　But Jackson’s coalition included more than his so-called Jacksonian base. He was also supported by a conservative element that nonetheless was wary of the Tennesseans worst excesses. Planters in the Tidewater states and middle-class businessmen in northern cities joined Jacksonian farmers to make Jackson president twice. In 2024, Trump’s neo-Jacksonians similarly joined with Reaganites and devotees of George W. Bush to deliver him the election.

　　No figure loomed larger as an exemplar of conservative opposition to Jackson within his own coalition than Tennessee congressman and frontier hero David Crockett. While Crockett agreed with much of Jackson’s agenda, he nonetheless defied the seventh president when he acted autocratically or unconstitutionally. Perhaps the nearest approximation of this in our time was former Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, whose principled conservatism never slipped into pining for the affirmation of the American Left. Sasse, like Crockett, left Congress—but in both cases, their constitutionalism and willingness to defy popular presidents remain vitally important for the maintenance of a constitutional republic.

　　The 1828 electorate that voted Andrew Jackson into the presidency featured the widest franchise yet in a general election. Jackson earned 55 percent of the vote and carried a healthy majority of states. Perhaps more important than even the vote was the general perception that Jackson was a man of the people, protecting them from the wiles of a corrupt elite. That this supposedly corrupt elite included pious and almost pedantically moral outgoing president John Quincy Adams seems not to have occurred to the Jacksonian coalition. Jackson scholar Daniel Feller notes that Jackson’s followers felt a personal connection to him, and he used that dexterously to his political advantage. Jackson “melded the amorphous coalition of personal followers who had elected him into the countrys most durable and successful political party, an electoral machine whose organization and discipline would serve as a model for all others.”

　　People remember Crockett; the mass of Jacksonian flunkies have faded into political oblivion.

　　In other words, Jackson’s supporters’ fanaticism meant that the militia general-turned-president enjoyed incredibly wide latitude in presidential action that his predecessors, with the exception possibly of Washington, did not. Jackson’s aggressive and sometimes combative personal conduct, combined with his equally belligerent politics, united his enemies. Feller rightly states that Jackson’s “controversial conduct in office galvanized opponents to organize the Whig party. The Democratic party was Jacksons child; the national two-party system was his legacy.”

　　Few politicians in Tennessee dared defy Jackson even before he gained the presidency—so when Tennessee assemblyman David Crockett did just that, it was obvious to Tennesseans that Crockett’s political guiding star was more than the personality of Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s political machine regularly attacked opponents with what bordered on unprecedented character assassination. In 1824, Crockett ended up on the wrong end of that machine by supporting incumbent US Senator John Williams over Jackson. Crockett biographer William C. Davis writes that Tennessee’s election for US Senator—in 1824 state legislatures chose US Senators—proved to be embarrassingly close, and Crockett repeatedly took a lead in supporting Williams.” Jackson won narrowly “and Crockett, though friendly to Jackson’s presidential aspirations, made no effort to downplay his opposition.”

　　Crockett’s support for Jackson’s presidential ambitions remained steady despite the former’s support for Jackson’s opponent in the Senate election. Crockett’s political future looked bright. He won a seat in Congress and took his place in the House of Representatives in March 1827. Crockett’s personality and ambitions fed his desire to be liked, but this desire to be liked did not induce Crockett to publicly disavow enemies of Jackson, nor did Crockett’s people-pleasing lead him to cease social discourse with Jackson’s enemies. In 1827, Jackson nursed his seething hatred of Henry Clay, who he believed robbed him of the presidency in a “corrupt bargain” struck with John Quincy Adams to make Clay Secretary of State in exchange for Adams becoming president. Crockett visited a chief ally of Clay in Tennessee, John Patton Erwin, in the fall of 1827. Crockett admitted his support for Jackson and the Jacksonian program but told Erwin he was not going to be a toady for Jackson. He committed to “pursue his own course.”

　　Far from being an overly independent congressman who defied the president routinely to curry favor with opposition figures, Crockett proved to be an enthusiastic Jacksonian. He took up some of the more controversial and unorthodox Jacksonian causes. Crockett proposed abolishing the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he accused of being an institution that did little more than babysit the sons of wealthy Americans. He disliked giving pensions to prominent military officers’ families, which he believed Congress could not lawfully do. Insofar as the Jacksonians were undermining a debased elite, Crockett saw them as agents of constitutional government.

　　Yet these years of relative support for Jackson, were not enough to keep Crockett in the good graces of Jacksonian voters or even the president himself. No position of Crockett’s enraged Jackson, and Jacksonians broadly, more than his vote against the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jackson had been pushing the bill as a signature piece of legislation that he hoped would, in his words, save Indian nations by getting them out of the way of white settlement. Crockett loathed the act and campaigned against it, even as he ensured his constituents he bore no ill will towards the president. Crockett maintained that the law was simply unjust, and it was his duty to oppose it. His constituents punished him by electing his opponent in the 1830 midterms, although they sent him back to Washington as their congressman two years later.

　　By 1833, Crockett—despite remaining a committed political Jacksonian—openly defied Jackson, particularly because of what he believed was the president’s unconstitutional veto of the Bank of the United States. Crockett never embraced the bank, and was not a “bank man,” but he was convinced that the Bank’s charter was constitutional and that Jackson acted outside of his authority when he vetoed its recharter in 1832. Jackson’s veto convinced Crockett “that Old Hickory had become a tyrant, abetted now by having Van Buren as vice-president, obviously the hand-chosen successor.” During the 1834 congressional canvas, “Crockett spoke out strongly for rechartering the bank and holding onto its deposits,” and accused Jackson “of seeking to close the bank in order to take control of the deposits himself to use for the purpose of ensuring Van Buren’s succession.” The United States, he declared, could “be a nation of laws or have a despot.” Crockett, still actively supporting the bulk of the Jacksonian political program, nonetheless answered Jacksonian newspapermen who questioned his intelligence by mocking Jackson. “It is objected to me that I want learning. Look to your President. Look to your President I say. What does he know?”

　　Voters in Tennessee—loyal to Jackson—finally sent Crockett packing for good in the gall of 1834. When he left office in early 1835, Crockett apocryphally quipped: “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.” Where Crockett did not go was over to the opposition or to the press to make himself a darling of the Whig Party. He did, in fact, go to Texas, where he now lies buried after his death fighting the forces of the Mexican dictator at the Alamo in March 1836.

　　Crockett’s resistance to Jackson helped sustain the burgeoning Whig opposition to Jackson after 1835; but in many ways, Crockett can be called an early Whig, despite his longtime support for much of the Jacksonian program. In our own time, congressmen willingly supporting presidents’ policies while also defying them when necessary seem in short supply. The electoral consequences, it seems, are just too high. David Crockett was a loyal Jacksonian, who seemed willing to pay the price for principled opposition to his when it came time to. His name and reputation are relatively well known, almost two centuries after his death. People remember Crockett; the mass of Jacksonian flunkies have faded into political oblivion.