by Jon Meacham
ALSO BY JON MEACHAM
American Gospel:
God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
Franklin and Winston:
An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship
Voices in Our Blood:
America’s Best on the Civil Rights Movement (editor)
Copyright © 2008 by Jon Meacham
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Meacham, Jon.
American lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House/Jon Meacham.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-822-5
1. Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1829–1837. 4. Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845—Family. 5. Jackson, Andrew, 1767–1845—Friends and associates. I. Title.
E382.M43 2008 973.5′6092—dc22 2008023466
[B]
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
To Mary, Maggie, and Sam
The darker the night the bolder the lion.
— THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
Life-Histories of African Game Animals
I was born for a storm and a calm does not suit me.
— ANDREW JACKSON
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note on the Text
Principal Characters
Prologue: With the Feelings of a Father
The White House, Washington, Winter 1832–33
I: THE LOVE OF COUNTRY, FAME AND HONOR
Beginnings to Late 1830
1. Andy Will Fight His Way in the World
2. Follow Me and I’ll Save You Yet
3. A Marriage, a Defeat, and a Victory
4. You Know Best, My Dear
5. Ladies’ Wars Are Always Fierce and Hot
6. A Busybody Presbyterian Clergyman
7. My White and Red Children
8. Major Eaton Has Spoken of Resigning
9. An Opinion of the President Alone
10. Liberty and Union, Now and Forever
11. General Jackson Rules by His Personal Popularity
II: I WILL DIE WITH THE UNION
Late 1830 to 1834
12. I Have Been Left to Sup Alone
13. A Mean and Scurvy Piece of Business
14. Now Let Him Enforce It
15. The Fury of a Chained Panther
16. Hurra for the Hickory Tree!
17. A Dreadful Crisis of Excitement and Violence
18. The Mad Project of Disunion
19. We Are Threatened to Have Our Throats Cut
20. Great Is the Stake Placed in Our Hands
21. My Mind Is Made Up
22. He Appeared to Feel as a Father
23. The People, Sir, Are with Me
24. We Are in the Midst of a Revolution
III: THE EVENING OF HIS DAYS
1834 to the End
25. So You Want War
26. A Dark, Lawless, and Insatiable Ambition!
27. There Is a Rank Due to the United States Among Nations
28. The Wretched Victim of a Dreadful Delusion
29. How Would You Like to Be a Slave?
30. The Strife About the Next Presidency
31. Not One Would Have Ever Got Out Alive
32. I Fear Emily Will Not Recover
33. The President Will Go Out Triumphantly
34. The Shock Is Great, and Grief Universal
Epilogue: He Still Lives
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
About the Author
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
In the interest of clarity, I have often taken the liberty of modernizing the (distractingly erratic) spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure in primary sources from Jackson’s era. On some occasions I have let the Ur-formulation stand to give readers a sense of the texture and style of correspondence in those years. In any event, the source for every quotation in this book is cited in the Notes. In no case has an edit altered the writer’s intention or meaning.
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) sixth president of the United States, he served as a congressman from Massachusetts from 1831 until his death
Louisa Catherine Adams (1775–1852) wife of John Quincy Adams and a shrewd observer of Washington politics
Thomas Hart Benton (1782–1858) onetime aide-de-camp to General Jackson, he later brawled with Jackson; in 1821 he was elected senator from Missouri, and was a Jackson ally on Capitol Hill during the White House years
Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844) president of the Second Bank of the United States
Francis Preston Blair (1791–1876) founding editor of the pro-Jackson Washington Globe and Jackson adviser
John C. Calhoun (1782–1850) vice president of the United States under Adams and Jackson, senator from South Carolina during Jackson’s second term
Henry Clay (1777–1852) Kentucky congressman and senator, secretary of state under John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s 1832 National Republican opponent for president
John Coffee (1772–1833) Tennessee planter, military officer, and Jackson confidant
Andrew Jackson Donelson (1799–1871) nephew of Rachel and Andrew Jackson, private secretary to President Jackson, husband of Emily Tennessee Donelson
Emily Tennessee Donelson (1807–1836) niece of Rachel and Andrew Jackson, official White House hostess, wife of Andrew Jackson Donelson
Mary Eastin (1810–1847) friend and cousin of Emily Donelson’s and member of Jackson’s White House circle; married Lucius Polk in the White House in 1832
John Henry Eaton (1790–1856) Tennessee senator, Jackson adviser, secretary of war
Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton (1799–1879) widow of John Timberlake of the U.S. Navy and wife of John Henry Eaton
Jeremiah Evarts (1781–1831) corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, author of the “William Penn” essays opposing Indian removal
Theodore Frelinghuysen (1787–1862) New Jersey senator, defender of the rights of the Indians
Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) seventh president of the United States
Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson (1767–1828) wife of Andrew Jackson
Amos Kendall (1789–1869) Kentucky editor, Jackson adviser, Democratic strategist, postmaster general
William B. Lewis (1784–1866) second auditor of the Treasury, Jackson adviser
Edward Livingston (1764–1836) lawyer, Louisiana congressman, senator, secretary of state, minister to France, and Jackson friend
John Marshall (1755–1835) chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1801 until his death thirty-four years later
Joel R. Poinsett (1779–1851) world traveler, congressman, physician, botanist, and crucial Jackson ally in the nullification crisis with South Carolina in 1832–33
Roger B. Taney (1777–1864) attorney general, secretary of the Treasury, chief justice of the U.S. after John Marshall
Martin Van Buren (1782–1862) governor of New York, secretary of state, vice president after Calhoun, and eighth president of the United States
Daniel Webster (1782–1852) lawyer, congressman, and senator from Massachusetts; a supporter of Jackson’s on the question of the Union, Webster opposed the pr
esident on almost everything else
PROLOGUE: WITH THE FEELINGS OF A FATHER
The White House, Washington, Winter 1832–33
IT LOOKED LIKE war. In his rooms on the second floor of the White House, in the flickering light of candles and oil lamps, President Andrew Jackson was furious and full of fight. He had just been reelected to a second term as America’s seventh president, and South Carolina was defying him. He hated it, for he believed to his core that the state was about to destroy the nation. For Jackson, the crisis was not only political. It was personal. Four hundred and fifty miles down the Atlantic seaboard from Washington, in Charleston, radicals were raising an army to defend South Carolina’s right to nullify federal laws it chose not to accept—the first step, Jackson believed, toward secession, and the destruction of the Union. “I expect soon to hear that a civil war of extermination has commenced,” Jackson said, musing about arresting the Southern leaders and then hanging them.
Gaunt but striking, with a formidable head of white hair, a nearly constant cough, a bullet lodged in his chest, Jackson, sixty-five years old that winter, stood six foot one and weighed 140 pounds. Over a midday glass of whiskey in the White House with an old friend, Jackson pounded a table as he pondered the crisis: “By the God of Heaven, I will uphold the laws.” Week after week, he threatened to field a formidable force, and he knew who should lead them. “When everything is ready, I shall join them myself,” Jackson said.
At Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Daniel Webster, the great Massachusetts senator, rallied to the president’s defense, denouncing South Carolina’s defiance in epic terms: “It is nothing more nor less than resistance by force—it is disunion by force—it is secession by force—it is Civil War!” The danger was real, for there was nothing foreordained about the future of American democracy in the Jackson years. The nation itself, dating from the Declaration of Independence, was barely half a century old. Now, as Jackson began his fifth year in the White House, the United States might collapse into fratricidal conflict, and foreign powers—always a threat—watched with anticipation. In a private letter in the winter of 1833, Richard Wellesley, the Marquis Wellesley and elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, hoped for “the dissolution of the American confederacy, which I think would be a great benefit to the civilized world.”
Dispatching troops and a warship, the Natchez, to Charleston, Jackson, the general whose steadfastness in adversity and against the British in the War of 1812 had earned him the nicknames “Old Hickory” and “the Old Hero,” was determined to keep America together. He loved the Union with a consuming devotion. In the radicals’ camp, Robert Woodward Barnwell, a South Carolina congressman, passed along reports that Jackson was set on war if the state defied him. “Nothing but blood will satisfy the old scoundrel,” Barnwell said. Jackson’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun, had resigned and taken up South Carolina’s cause. Though the immediate issue was money—South Carolina felt oppressed by federal tariffs, which it wanted to lower—the real question, everyone knew, was about power, and ultimately about slavery. If Jackson won the showdown, then Washington would be stronger and the South weaker, and a stronger Washington meant a greater threat to the future of what Calhoun called “the peculiar domestic institution of the Southern states.”
Watching the crisis grow, Webster said, “I am prepared any day to hear that matters have come to blows in Charleston.” It was rumored that excited radicals in South Carolina were buying medals emblazoned “John C. Calhoun, First President of the Southern Confederacy,” and readers of the Columbia Telescope in the state capital considered this fiery plea: “The present is not a time for cold temporizing policy.… THIS UNION MUST BE DISSOLVED.”
To save the country required strength, subtlety, and a sure sense of what the broader American public wanted. “I will meet all things with deliberate firmness and forbearance,” Jackson said, “but woe to those nullifiers who shed the first blood.” He would be patient, but he would do what it took. His blend of solicitude and sanction reflected his view that politics was at once clinical and human, driven by both principles and passions that he had to master and harness for the good of the whole. As president, Jackson believed he bore the duties of a father who alone carried the responsibility for protecting the nation.
Jackson valued two things in life above all others: his country and his family. He saw little distinction between the two, and his instinct to fight and to defend both—to be a father twice over—drove him from his obscure birth in the Carolinas to the pinnacle of power.
Orphaned at fourteen, Jackson never knew his own father, who died the year he was born. “I have been Tossed upon the waves of fortune,” Jackson once said, and he spent his life seeking order amid chaos and authority among men. The Revolutionary War had claimed the lives of his mother and his brothers. Suffering those losses at such a young age, Jackson saw his life and the life of the country as one. America, he once said, was “one great family.” In a draft of his second inaugural address in 1833, he wrote, “I feel in the depths of my soul, that it is the highest, most sacred and most irreversible part of my obligation, to preserve the union of these states, although it may cost me my life.”
The nation, then, played a decisive role in his emotional universe. Jackson carried an image of the Union around in his head, a vision of the United States and its people as an extension of his own clan in which he was alternately father and son. From childhood, Jackson was in search of a structure into which he could fit, find reassurance and stability, and come to control. In the midst of the crisis with South Carolina in the winter of 1832–33, in a draft of his proclamation on nullification to the people of that state, Jackson wrote, “I call upon you in the language of truth, and with the feelings of a Father to retrace your steps.”
With the feelings of a father. Jackson’s familial vision had intriguing implications for the life of the nation. For General Jackson, it meant that in battle he was fighting not for a distant cause but for the survival of his own kin. For President Jackson, it meant that there was little difference between the personal and the political. His was a White House roiled by intrigue, war, and sexual scandal, and it left a permanent mark on the nation. This book is not a history of the Age of Jackson but a portrait of the man and of his complex relationships with the intimate circle that surrounded him as he transformed the presidency. The story of Jackson’s life and of his White House years is of his long, unrelenting war to keep his family and his country safe—a long, unrelenting war that helped shape the way we live now.
ONE OF AMERICA’S most important and most controversial presidents, Andrew Jackson is also one of our least understood. Recalled mainly as the scourge of the Indians or as the hero of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, he is only dimly remembered in the popular imagination, too far out of mind to be instructive or intriguing.
Yet of the great early presidents and Founders, Andrew Jackson is in many ways the most like us. In the saga of the Jackson presidency, one marked by both democratic triumphs and racist tragedies, we can see the American character in formation and in action. To understand him and his time helps us to understand America’s perennially competing impulses. Jackson’s life and work—and the nation he protected and preserved—were shaped by the struggle between grace and rage, generosity and violence, justice and cruelty.
A source of inspiration to Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, revered by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and hailed by Harry Truman as one of the four greatest presidents—along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—Jackson expanded the powers of the presidency in ways that none of his six predecessors had. He was the first president to come from the common people, not from an educated elite, and he never ceased to see himself as their champion. He was the first to build what we would recognize as a political party. He was the first to maintain a large circle of private advisers—what was called his Kitchen Cabinet—to help make policy. And he was the first to insist on the deference he thought due the c
hief executive as the only official elected by all the people. It was a distinction he believed made the White House, not Capitol Hill, the center of national power and national action.
The country that Jackson presided over from 1829 to 1837 was smaller than one might think, surrounded by once and possibly future foreign foes. There were twenty-four states in 1828. Arkansas and Michigan would be admitted late in Jackson’s presidency, with Florida coming in just before his death in 1845 and Texas not long after. The British had the nation hemmed in to the north, in Canada; Britain and Russia had claims to the Pacific Northwest. The Gulf of Mexico worried Jackson as an invasion route for a foreign power.
Beyond the physical threats, Jackson saw more oblique but no less dangerous perils. Before Jackson, power tended toward the elites, whether political or financial. After Jackson, power was more diffuse, and government, for better and for worse, was more attuned to the popular will. He may not have consciously set out to leave such a legacy, but he made the case for democratic innovation and popular engagement in politics at a time when many in Washington would have preferred that the people play the role they were assigned at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787: as voters who cast their ballots and then allowed intermediary institutions—from the state legislatures that elected U.S. senators to the Electoral College, which chose presidents—to make the real decisions. Jackson wanted to give the people a more dramatic part to play, and he rewrote the script of public life to give them one.
It would be both glib and wrong to say that the Age of Jackson is a mirror of our own time. The cultural, political, moral, and intellectual universe Jackson inhabited has to be viewed on its own terms. Still, there is much about him and about his America that readers in the early twenty-first century may recognize. His was an age of fascination with politics, patriotism, gossip, and religion; both “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “Amazing Grace” took root in the popular culture during Jackson’s presidency. The America of Andrew Jackson was a country that professed a love of democracy but was willing to live with inequality, that aimed for social justice but was prone to racism and intolerance, that believed itself one nation but was narrowly divided and fought close elections, and that occasionally acted arrogantly toward other countries while craving respect from them at the same time.
