Yes, but he did so for the wrong reasons, resulting in the worst depression (that probably would have happened anyway) until the Great Depression. He insured it would happen by issuing his infamous Specie Circular just before he left office.
What brought the problem in the first place was the success of the Erie canal. Paid for with state bonds, it was finished before schedule and under cost. The bondholders made a fortune.
This gave other states the idea to do the same, but all of their ideas were based on connecting the Ohio river to the Great Lakes. So they issued bonds before asking if it was a feasible project. It wasn’t.
Though the bonds were purchased with dollars, many of those indirectly backing them did so with privately issued currencies from local banks. Their accounts, purchased with dollars, were recorded in the bank’s currency.
Would Jackson have known or cared about this developing crisis? He might have known, but his impulse was to attack the wealth and the major banks, because he hated them as people. This even included his own Democrat vice president, who got blamed for it. He also deeply distrusted the Second Bank of the United States, because as was long suspected in the South, he saw in it the end of slavery.
The Specie Circular, however, in one fell swoop, wiped out thousands of local bankers, their families, and national prosperity by requiring currencies to all be backed by specie. And when the states discovered that they were going to get the brunt of the depression, they all renounced their bond debts.
Some even incorporated into their constitutions that the bond debts would never be repaid, in whole or in part.
Eminent domain takings upon behalf of barge companies and railroads were Lincoln's stock and trade as an Illinois lawyer. It wrecked any future potential for a market in real estate options with which to build productive rights of way.
Thanks for the details.
No, the bankers did it -- in retaliation -- by severely contracting credit, something Andrew Jackson had no power to permit, or to deny. They had the power of the purse over the economy, they knew it, and they used it. In pique at Jackson.
Though the bonds were purchased with dollars, many of those indirectly backing them did so with privately issued currencies from local banks. Their accounts, purchased with dollars, were recorded in the bank’s currency.
Which made every bank issuing such scrip a sort of mini-Fed (and Nicholas Biddle merely intended his bank to be a much bigger version of the same thing), with all the bankers, collectively, in effect taking over the supply of money in the economy just as the Fed has done since 1913, howbeit with less legal leverage and with narrower bases of supply.
They hadn't the authority to "coin" real money, but the use of scrip put them in the game anyway .... contrary to the letter and intent of the Constitution, that only lawful money be used for tender.