Andrew Jackson's conflict with the Second Bank of the United States (BUS), often portrayed as a "Bank war" involving questions of class, ideology, and personality, endures as one of the most significant political events in the antebellum era. In this dissertation, I offer a new interpretation stressing how national, public-private institutions---banks, newspapers, and bureaucratic agencies---shaped party development and public opinion. Reconceptualizing the Bank war, I focus on newspaper editors as central actors who helped craft the hyper-charged rhetoric of the Jacksonian era, as businessmen who blended public and private finance, and as crucial middle men who transmitted political ideas to voters. Amos Kendall, an editor and treasury department official who utilized state powers to build the Democratic Party and destroy the BUS, epitomized the lesser-known figures who gave the Bank war its distinct flavor. This approach contextualizes the Bank war within the transportation and communications revolution, and challenges the conventional understanding of the early United States as a "weak state."

In assessing the power of the state, I am concerned principally with institutions and bureaucratic agencies like the Post Office, and how these agencies interacted with civil society, the press, and private enterprise. Leading newspapers in the Bank war, especially the Washington Globe and National Intelligencer, received subsidies from Congress and executive department agencies. The Post Office controlled a vast network of political patronage, hired editors as postmasters, and shaped public opinion by determining the speed and accuracy of newspaper delivery. The agency's power may have exceeded that of the BUS, which implemented a feckless, half-hearted, and inconsistent media strategy. Newspapers and letters comprise the bulk of this project's primary source base. Census records, philosophical treatises, legislative records, periodicals, personal narratives, autobiographies, price currents, bank balance sheets, and other miscellaneous sources provide accompaniment.