West (in those days the Mississippi Valley) in large numbers, seeking their own lands. These people, many of whom made their start as small farm or plantation owners, embraced a new, democratized form of politics that appealed to their interests. "Jacksonian Democracy," the name given to this new democratic political culture, saw the West as the future, and resisted such institutions as banks and high tariffs, which were seen as beneficial to Eastern financial elites. Most important, many of these new states extended the vote to all white men, a trend which emerged in the East as well. In short, the West opened new opportunities, both economic and political, to ordinary men.

Modern historians, however, strongly dispute this thesis, especially by demonstrating that this new democratization of American politics was based on limiting the freedoms available to others. Most of the so-called "free" land in the West, for instance, had been opened by the removal of Indian peoples in the period 1820-1840, and the same period witnessed the explosion of the cotton economy and the resulting spread of slavery into the region. Even if ordinary white people, the bread and butter of Jacksonian Democracy, didn't own slaves themselves, they certainly aspired to own them. Historians tend to emphasize that slavery, in many ways, was at the heart of the economic changes that made westward expansion and the spread of democracy possible.