American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.

  Jackson was the only American president to take a bullet in a frontier gunfight, and the only one who tried to assault his own would-be assassin. An uneducated boy from the Carolina backwoods, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, he became a practicing lawyer, a public prosecutor, a U.S. attorney, a delegate to the founding Tennessee Constitutional Convention, a U.S. congressman, a U.S. senator, a judge of the state Superior Court, and a major general, first of the state militia and then of the U.S. Army. The glow of his victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815—as mythic a battle as Lexington and Concord—transformed him into a fabled figure. Popular songs were written about him; the anniversary of the victory, January 8, was a national occasion for Jackson banquets and Jackson parades. There were darker moments, too. He had massacred Indians in combat, fought duels, and imposed martial law on New Orleans, imprisoning those who defied him. He had married the love of his life, Rachel Donelson Robards, before she was divorced from her first husband. The scandal of his marriage stayed with him through the decades, and he believed that the stress of the charges of adultery and bigamy ultimately killed her.

  Commanding, shrewd, intuitive yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered, Jackson embodied the nation’s birth and youth. He came from virtually nothing, yet had married into, and helped define, Tennessee aristocracy. He could seem savage, yet he moved in sophisticated circles with skill and grace. In December 1814, with the Battle of New Orleans at hand, a leading hostess was disturbed to learn that her husband had invited Jackson to dinner. After warning her other guests about this “wild man of the woods,” the lady was stunned to find Jackson both elegant and charming. “Is this your backwoodsman?” her friends asked after Jackson left. “He is a prince!”

  JACKSON WAS FOND of well-cut clothes, racehorses, dueling, newspapers, gambling, whiskey, coffee, a pipe, pretty women, children, and good company. One of his secretaries observed that “there was more of the woman in his nature than in that of any man I ever knew—more of a woman’s tenderness toward children, and sympathy with them.” Depending on the moment, he could succumb to the impulses of a warlike temperament or draw on his reserves of unaffected warmth. Jackson spoke with the accent of a provincial in the capital—yet was discriminating in his choice of wines and favored Greek Revival architecture.

  He was a skilled operator, the consummate self-made man. As an orphan, Jackson adapted to shifting circumstances and cultivated the powerful. Dependent on others in his first years—largely his mother’s extended family, cousins and uncles and aunts—he spent much of his life seeking both affection and deference. The roles Jackson chose to pursue and play—frontier lawyer, state judge, military commander, foster father, attentive uncle, American president—reflected this urge to be at once admired and in charge. He was gloomy when people left him, even for a short time, and he could be the most demanding of men, insisting that others bend their lives to his. His was an interesting kind of neediness, often intertwined with sincere professions of love and regard. But in the end, when a choice came down to what Jackson wanted or what anyone else wanted, Jackson’s will, and no one else’s, prevailed. And like his country, Jackson’s family circle was riven with rivalries and veered between harmony and strife.

  IN THE LONG winter of 1832–33, staring down South Carolina, the president relied, as he always did, on his wife’s circle for affection and company. Rachel Jackson was dead; her family filled the vacuum around the man they called “Uncle Jackson.” “He lived always in a crowd,” wrote James Parton, his earliest scholarly biographer. Martin Van Buren, who served Jackson as secretary of state and as vice president, said: “I have scarcely ever known a man who placed a higher value upon the enjoyments of the family circle.”

  As he sat and stewed over South Carolina, the president relied on his nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson, whom Jackson had raised and hoped might one day succeed him to the presidency, to handle correspondence and visitors. It was the most intimate of arrangements. Donelson lived with his wife, Emily, and their children in rooms across the hall from the president in the White House, and the Donelsons were at Uncle’s call.

  Attractive, young, and headstrong, fond of parties but prone to bouts of piety, an ambitious figure in Washington society, Emily Donelson was Jackson’s official hostess. “She was a beautiful, accomplished and charming woman,” said her friend Cora Livingston, “with wonderful tact and delightfully magnetic manner.… Everyone was in love with her.”

  Andrew and Emily Donelson were joined by Major William B. Lewis, a key Jackson aide and a rival of Andrew Donelson’s for the president’s ear. Young people brightened the president’s universe, too. There was the pretty Mary Eastin, a cousin and intimate of Emily’s. The entourage included the portrait painter Ralph Earl, a favorite of the late Rachel Jackson’s, who was called “the King’s Painter” and had his own room in the White House.

  In Washington, this inner circle was augmented by the president’s Kitchen Cabinet, a shifting cast of characters that, depending on who was doing the counting, included Andrew Donelson, William Lewis, Martin Van Buren, journalists Amos Kendall and Francis Preston Blair, and Roger B. Taney, who served Jackson as attorney general and secretary of the Treasury before going on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. A shrewd New York politician, Van Buren—he was known as “the Little Magician”—was a widower whose lack of domestic obligations enabled him to be with the president as often as the president wished it. Taken all in all, it was an eclectic circle, linked by bonds of affection and roiled by jealousies and rivalries both large and small. It was, in other words, like most families—only this one lived in the White House and shaped the private world of the president of the United States.

  FEROCIOUS IN DEFENSE of the people and things he loved, Jackson was equally fierce, and often ruthless, in the pursuit of anyone or anything he believed to be a threat to the world as he saw it. He dominated the times, and the evidence of his strength and the aura of his authority led some to think of him as the “Old Lion”; to others he was “the lion of Tennessee.” In 1830 Oliver Wendell Holmes published a poem, “To a Caged Lion,” which captures the awe with which the creatures were regarded. Holmes’s lion is “the terror of the trembling wild” before whom “all nature shrunk.”

  For all his vices—and he had many—Jackson refused to accept defeat, either in his own life or in the life of the country. Surrender was unthinkable, for surrender meant an end to the story, and he believed America’s story and his own were still unfolding. Jackson’s saga would end only when he was buried in the corner of his wife’s garden in Tennessee. America’s, he insisted, would never end.

  “I for one do not despair of the Republic,” he would often say, adding: “The Republic is safe.” Another aging former president took a dimmer view. “My hopes of a long continuance of this Union are extinct,” John Quincy Adams, the sixth president—who was the son of the second—told his diary.

  Steadiness of faith was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought. The art of leadership required both, as did the nation. Life in the arena was rough and tiring, yet Jackson savored the fight and found solace in the unending work democracy demanded of its champions. “I was born for a storm,” Jackson once said, “and a calm does not suit me.” It was a good thing he felt this way, for defending and shapi
ng America was not easy. But for Andrew Jackson, nothing ever had been.

  PART I

  THE LOVE OF

  COUNTRY,

  FAME AND HONOR

  Beginnings to Late 1830

  CHAPTER 1

  ANDY WILL FIGHT

  HIS WAY IN THE WORLD

  CHRISTMAS 1828 SHOULD have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States in November. “How triumphant!” Andrew Donelson said of the victory. “How flattering to the cause of the people!” Now the president-elect’s family and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine—Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin—and, in this special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.

  On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty-four-gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. Rachel would be by his side.

  In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service.” Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.

  He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson’s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti-Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians—and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her first husband. “Even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth … and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” Jackson said to a friend.

  Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. “The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson but all his prominent supporters,” William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an old friend of Jackson’s from Tennessee.

  Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His Country. Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary War veteran, David Coons of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots against Jackson. To Coons, Jackson was coming to rule as a tribune of the people, but to others Jackson seemed dangerous—so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth killing. “There are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made hard threats with regard to you, men whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt them to do anything,” Coons wrote Jackson.

  That was the turbulent world awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the draft of a speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between anxiety and nostalgia. “The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty has not been disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject during the election,” the speech read. Still, Jackson admitted he felt “apprehension” about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson’s words, “I shall fail” to secure “the future prosperity of our beloved country.” Perhaps the procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits; perhaps Christmas with his family would.

  While Jackson was outside, word came that his wife had collapsed in her sitting room, screaming in pain. It had been a wretched time for Rachel. She was, Jackson’s political foes cried, “a black wench,” a “profligate woman,” unfit to be the wife of the president of the United States. Shaken by the attacks, Rachel—also sixty-one and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat heavy—had been melancholy and anxious. “The enemies of the General have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” Rachel lamented during the campaign. “Almighty God, was there ever any thing equal to it?” On the way home from a trip to Nashville after the balloting, Rachel was devastated to overhear a conversation about the lurid charges against her. Her niece, the twenty-one-year-old Emily Donelson, tried to reassure her aunt but failed. “No, Emily,” Mrs. Jackson replied, “I’ll never forget it!”

  When news of her husband’s election arrived, she said: “Well, for Mr. Jackson’s sake I am glad; for my own part I never wished it.” Now the cumulative toll of the campaign and the coming administration exacted its price as Rachel was put to bed, the sound of her cries still echoing in her slave Hannah’s ears.

  Jackson rushed to his wife, sent for doctors, did what he could. Later, as she lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the letter he had begun: “P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from good health, has been taken suddenly ill, with excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may be the result of this violent attack god only knows, I hope for her recovery, and in haste close this letter, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J.” Yet his hopes would not bring her back.

  Rachel lingered for five days. Jackson hovered by her side, praying for her survival. He had loved her for nearly four decades. His solace through war, politics, Indian fighting, financial chaos, and the vicissitudes of life in what was then frontier America, Rachel gave him what no one else ever had. In her arms and in their home he found a steady sense of family, a sustaining universe, a place of peace in a world of war. Her love for him was unconditional. She cared for him not because he was a general or a president. She cared for him because he was Andrew Jackson. “Do not, My beloved Husband, let the love of Country, fame and honor make you forget you have me,” she wrote to him during the War of 1812. “Without you I would think them all empty shadows.” When they were apart, Jackson would sit up late writing to her, his candle burning low through the night. “My heart is with you,” he told her.

  Shortly after nine on the evening of Monday, December 22, three days before Christmas, Rachel suffered an apparent heart attack. It was over. Still, Jackson kept vigil, her flesh turning cold to his touch as he stroked her forehead. With his most awesome responsibilities and burdens at hand, she had left him. “My mind is so disturbed … that I can scarcely write, in short my dear friend my heart is nearly broke,” Jackson told his confidant John Coffee after Rachel’s death.

  At one o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, by order of the mayor, Nashville’s church bells began ringing in tribute to Rachel, who was to be buried in her garden in the shadow of the Hermitage. The weather had been wet, and the dirt in the garden was soft; the rain made the gravediggers’ task a touch easier as they worked. After a Presbyterian funeral service led by Rachel’s minister, Jackson walked the one hundred fifty paces back to the house. Devastated but determined, he then spoke to the mourners. “I am now the President elect of the United States, and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God’s will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her.” God’s was the only will Jackson ever bowed to, and he did not do even that without a fight.

  IN HIS GRIEF, Jackson turned to Rachel’s family. He would not—could not—go to Washington by himself. Around him at the Hermitage on this bleak Christmas Eve was the nucleus of t
he intimate circle he would maintain for the rest of his life. At the center of the group, destined both to provide great comfort and to provoke deep personal anger in the White House, stood Andrew and Emily Donelson. They had an ancient claim on Jackson’s affections and attention, and they were ready to serve.

  While Andrew—who was also Emily’s first cousin—was to work through the president-elect’s correspondence, guard access to Jackson, and serve as an adviser, Emily, not yet twenty-two, would be the president’s hostess. Attracted by the bright things of the fashionable world and yet committed to family and faith, Emily was at once selfless and sharp-tongued. Born on Monday, June 1, 1807, the thirteenth and last child of Mary and John Donelson, Emily was raised in the heart of frontier aristocracy and inherited a steely courage—perhaps from her grandfather, a Tennessee pioneer and a founder of Nashville—that could verge on obstinacy. It was a trait she shared with the other women in her family, including her aunt Rachel. “All Donelsons in the female line,” wrote a family biographer, “were tyrants.” Charming, generous, and hospitable tyrants, to be sure, but still a formidable lot—women who knew their own minds, women who had helped their husbands conquer the wilderness or were the daughters of those who had. Now one of them, Emily, would step into Rachel’s place in the White House.

  ON SUNDAY, January 18, 1829, Jackson left the Hermitage for the capital. With the Donelsons, William Lewis, and Mary Eastin, Emily’s friend and cousin, Jackson rode the two miles from the Hermitage to a wharf on a neighboring estate and boarded the steamboat Pennsylvania to travel the Cumberland River north, toward their new home. He was, as he had said to the mourners on the day of Rachel’s burial, the president-elect of the United States.