Thomas Hart Benton, nicknamed "Old Bullion", was an American politician, attorney, soldier, and longtime United States senator from Missouri. A member of the Democratic Party, he was an architect and
Daguerreotype of Thomas Hart Benton, c. 1850
Benton's grave at Bellefontaine Cemetery
Statue of Benton by Harriet Hosmer erected in 1868 in St. Louis at Lafayette Park
Jacksonian democracy
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Jacksonian democracy was a 19th-century American political ideology centered on expanding the political power of the “common man,” opposing entrenched elites, and asserting popular control over govern
The first inauguration of Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson
Property qualifications for suffrage 1830
George Caleb Bingham's The County Election depicts democracy in action in Missouri c. 1852, showing an "all-male polling place where voting would go on for two or three days to allow farmers to come in to the county seat" to cast their non-secret ballots. According to the Saint Louis Art Museum, Bingham's painting uses figures ranging from a newly naturalized citizen to a grizzled veteran to a couple of local drunks to demonstrate "the democratic ideal must be embraced even though uninformed votes could prevail."