And I agree, using the provided evidence. It is very plausible that a select group of men that, with so much control over America's economy could easily overtake America's government.
After Schlesinger's work The Age of Jackson was published critics quickly questioned not only his liberal bias views on Jacksonians and democrats but also his theory of class conflict being the cornerstone of American politics. Bray Hammond with Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, views the Jacksonians as capitalists, people who concern themselves with the accumulation of goods devoted to the production of other goods. Hammond views, what he calls, the Jacksonian attack on the Second Bank of the United States as destructive blow to American enterprise. According to Hammond, "Socially the Jacksonian revolution signified that a nation of democrats was tired of being governed, however well, by gentlemen from Virginia and Massachusetts." Hammond's view of Jacksonian politics is biased, not unlike Schlesinger, but Schlesinger being a historian postulated an entirely new idea to answer a modern question. Hammond, in the excerpts provided, wrote a commentary on another historians work, although, Hammond's work does not deserve to be discredited as a conservative backlash to a liberal movement. He makes a very interesting point, that the Jacksonians liberals were disguising themselves as compassionate, caring people only to advance their own selfish desires.
Edward Pessen, a historian in the 1970's agreed with Hammond's views on the Jacksonian party in his work, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics. Pessen says that the democratic leaders were as wealthy as their Whig counterparts. Pessen ridicules not just the Jacksonian government but goes as far as to mock the antebellum period stating, that it was not an era of reformation of American society but "an age of materialism and opportunism, reckless speculation, and erratic growth, unabashed vulgarity, surprising inequality, whether of condition, opportunity, or status, and a politic seeming deference to the common man by the uncommon men who actually ran things.