by Jon Meacham
No matter how many of these words were hers, and how many were created by Jackson and ascribed to her memory, Elizabeth Jackson cast a long shadow in the life of her only surviving son.
JACKSON SPIRALED DOWNWARD and lashed out in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Before now, living in other people’s houses, Jackson had learned to manage complicated situations, maneuvering to maintain a passably cheerful (and grateful) face among people who gave him shelter but apparently little else. “He once said he never remembered receiving a gift as a child, and that, after his mother’s death, no kind, encouraging words ever greeted his ear,” recalled Mary Donelson Wilcox.
The Revolutionary War drew to a close with the American victory at Yorktown, Virginia, on the afternoon of Friday, October 19, 1781. Two years later, on Wednesday, September 3, 1783, came the Treaty of Paris, and the United States was now an independent nation. For Jackson, though, the end of war brought little peace. Living for a time with some Crawford relatives, Jackson got into a fight with one of their guests, a Captain Galbraith. Jackson thought him “of a very proud and haughty disposition,” and the two found themselves in an argument, and “for some reason,” Jackson recalled, “I forget now what, he threatened to chastise me.” Jackson replied with a flash of fire. “I immediately answered, ‘that I had arrived at the age to know my rights, and although weak and feeble from disease, I had the courage to defend them, and if he attempted anything of that kind I would most assuredly send him to the other world.’ ” That was enough for Jackson’s current Crawford host to shuffle him off to another relative. Having the unstable orphan around presented too many problems, not least the possibility of his attacking other guests.
Then came a crucial interlude in Jackson’s life: a sojourn in the cultivated precincts of Charleston. He had come into some money—either from his grandfather or perhaps from the sale of his mother’s property—and used it to finance a trip to the coast where he fell in with a fast, sophisticated circle. Some Charlestonians had retreated to the Waxhaw region during the worst of the fighting on the coast, so Jackson had something of an entrée when he arrived. Here he found the pleasures of the turf, of good tailors, and of the gaming tables. “There can be little doubt that at this period he imbibed that high sense of honour, and unstudied elegance of air for which he has since been distinguished,” wrote the early Jackson biographer Henry Lee—as well as little doubt that his love of racehorses and fine clothes had its beginnings in Charleston, too.
After Jackson returned to Waxhaw, he grew restless. From 1781 to 1784, he tried his hand at saddle making and school teaching—neither seems to have gone very well—and then left South Carolina for good. For the rest of his life, for a man who adored talk of family, friends, and old times, Jackson mentioned Waxhaw very little, the only exceptions being conversation about his mother and about Revolutionary War action in the region—both things that he could claim as his own.
Decade after decade, he never chose to find the time to go to Waxhaw. Acknowledging the gift of a map of the region the year before he was elected president, Jackson wrote a well-wisher: “A view of this map pointing to the spot that gave me birth, brings fresh to my memory many associations dear to my heart, many days of pleasure with my juvenile companions”—words that might, taken alone, suggest warm memories of his frontier youth.
Referring to his “juvenile companions,” Jackson said, “but alas, most of them are gone to that bourne where I am hastening and from whence no one returns”—in other words, they were dead. “I have not visited that country since the year 1784,” he added—which, since he was writing in midsummer 1827, means that forty-three years had passed since he bothered to return. Turning as close to home as he could, Jackson concluded: “The crossing of the Waxhaw creek, within one mile of which I was born, is still, however, I see, possessed by Mr John Crawford, son of the owner (Robert) who lived there when I was growing up and at school. I lived there for many years, and from the accuracy which this spot is marked in the map, I conclude the whole must be correct.” With that, Jackson signs off. The subject is closed.
STILL, THE ROOTS of Jackson’s intellectual and rhetorical imagination lie in Waxhaw. Down the years Jackson could quote Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Alexander Pope, and almost certainly read more books than his harshest critics believed, but the foundations of his worldview most likely came from his childhood Sundays in South Carolina, where he spent hours soaking in eighteenth-century Presbyterianism.
Elizabeth Jackson wanted her Andrew to be a minister, an ambition for him that may have been among the reasons he was able to envision himself rising to a place of authority. Even more so than in succeeding American generations, clergymen played a central and special role in the life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were often the most educated men in a given place, conversant not only with scripture but with ancient tongues and the touchstones of English literature. They held center stage, with a standing claim on the time and attention (at least feigned) of their flocks, and they presided at the most important public moments of a Christian’s life—baptism, communion, marriage, death. Jackson’s sense of himself as someone set apart—the word “ordain” shares derivation with the word “order,” and an ordained figure is one who puts things in order, arranges them, controls and even commands them—may have come in part from hearing his mother speak of him in such terms.
Jackson found other, larger spheres over which to preside than Carolina churches, but it would be a mistake to pass too quickly over the lasting influence his churchgoing had on the way he thought, spoke, wrote, and saw the world. He attended services at the Waxhaw meetinghouse throughout his early years, and these childhood Sabbaths are worth considering in trying to solve the mystery of how a man with so little formal education and such a sporadic—if occasionally intense—interest in books developed his sense of history and of humanity.
The service the Jacksons attended most likely started in midmorning. A psalm was sung—but without organ music, for Presbyterians were austere not only in their theology but in their liturgy—and a prayer said. Church historians suspect such prayers could stretch beyond twenty minutes in length. Then came a lesson from scripture—the selection could range from an entire chapter of a book of the Bible to a shorter reading followed by an explication—followed by the centerpiece of the morning: the minister’s sermon, an address that could range in length from thirty minutes to an hour. Another psalm or hymn closed the morning, which had by now consumed two hours of the day. There was a break for lunch, then an afternoon version of the same service, which everyone attended as well.
From his babyhood, then, Andrew Jackson probably spent between three and four hours nearly every Sunday for about fourteen years hearing prayers, psalms, scripture, sermons, and hymns: highly formalized, intense language evoking the most epic of battles with the greatest of stakes. In the words flowing from the minister on all those Sundays, Jackson would have been transported to imaginative realms where good and evil were at war, where kings and prophets on the side of the Lord struggled against the darker powers of the earth, where man’s path through a confusing world was lit by a peculiar intermingling of Christian mercy and might. God may well plan on exalting the humble and meek, but Jackson also heard the call of Gideon’s trumpet—the call to, as Saint Paul put it, fight the good fight.
Throughout his life, when he was under pressure, Jackson returned to the verses and tales of the Bible he had first heard in his childhood. He referred to political enemies as “Judases,” and at one horrible moment during the attacks on Rachel’s virtue in the 1828 campaign, Jackson’s mind raced to the language and force of the Bible in a crowded collection of allusions. “Should the uncircumcised philistines send forth their Goliath to destroy the liberty of the people and compel them to worship Mammon, they may find a David who trusts in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob, for when I fight, it is the battles of my country,” Jackson wrote a friend.
That the ima
ge of King David—ancient Israel’s greatest monarch—came to Jackson’s mind is telling, for the connection he himself was drawing between David’s struggles and his own suggests the breadth of Jackson’s heroic vision of himself. David was a ruler who, chosen by the prophet Samuel, rose from obscurity to secure his nation and protect his people. A formidable soldier, he was a man of greatness and of God who was not without sin or sadness: that he stole Bathsheba, another man’s wife, stretches the analogy further than Jackson would ever have gone, but the story of lost fathers and sons in the tale of the death of David’s son Absalom echoed in Jackson’s own life. The Lord’s promise to David in II Samuel—“And thine house and thine kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever”—would have resonated in Jackson’s imagination, for his life was dedicated to building not only his own family but his nation, and perhaps even founding a dynasty in which Andrew Donelson, as his protégé, might, as Jackson put it, “preside over the destinies of America.”
JACKSON SAID HE read three chapters of the Bible every day. His letters and speeches echo both scripture and the question-and-answer style of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. If the Bible, psalms, and hymns formed a substantial core of Jackson’s habits of mind, books about valor, duty, and warfare also found their way into his imagination. Jackson had only a handful of years of formal education—he was the least intellectually polished president in the short history of the office—and his opponents made much of his lack of schooling. When Harvard University bestowed an honorary degree on President Jackson in 1833, the man he had beaten for the White House, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate, refused to come, telling the university’s president that “as myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Adams’s view was common in Jackson’s lifetime.
Jackson was not, however, as unlettered as the caricatures suggest. He was no scholar, but he issued elegant Caesar-like proclamations to his troops, understood men and their motives, and read rather more than he is given credit for. “I know human nature,” he once remarked, and he had learned the ways of the world not only on the frontier but also in snatches of literature. There was Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, a story of redemption (the vicar faces much misfortune, yet perseveres through faith to a happy ending). It is not difficult to see why Jackson was drawn to the tale. “The hero of this piece,” Goldsmith wrote in an “Advertisement” for the book, “unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family.”
Jackson’s surviving library at the Hermitage is full of books of theology, history, and biography. There are numerous volumes of sermons (most, if not all, of them Rachel’s), and a fair collection of the works of Isaac Watts. His secular shelves are heavy on Napoleon, George Washington, and the American Revolution.
A favorite book was Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. The story of Sir William Wallace—a reluctant, noble warrior brought into combat against the domineering and cruel English when the king’s soldiers murder his wife—affected Jackson perhaps more than any other piece of writing outside scripture. “I have always thought that Sir William Wallace, as a virtuous patriot and warrior, was the best model for a young man,” Jackson once wrote. “In him we find a stubborn virtue … the truly undaunted courage, always ready to brave any dangers, for the relief of his country or his friend.”
The story, published in 1809, is something of a potboiler. More colorful than subtle, it is nonetheless a powerful book, and Jackson thrilled to it. “God is with me,” Wallace says as he realizes his wife is dead. “I am his avenger … God armeth the patriot’s hand!” The cause of Scotland became one with Wallace’s personal crusade for justice.
Jackson, too, had lost those he loved to the English. Orphaned in Waxhaw, he would struggle to build and keep a family everywhere else. In those distant forests, makeshift battlefields, and richer relatives’ houses he had seen the centrality of strength and of self-confidence. Both elements, so essential to his character and his career, can be traced to his mother’s influence, which was brief but lasting. In his mind she remained vivid and her example did, too—the example of strength amid adversity and of persevering no matter what. It is also likely that her dreams remained with him: chiefly her ambitious hope that he would become a clergyman, thus exercising authority and earning respect, all in the service of a larger cause. In the end Jackson chose to serve God and country not in a church but on battlefields and at the highest levels—but he did choose, as his mother had wished, to serve.
CHAPTER 2
FOLLOW ME AND
I’LL SAVE YOU YET
IN 1787, AFTER a brief period of study in Salisbury, North Carolina, Jackson received his license to practice law in that state. A wild man, he worked hard and played even harder for the next four years. He challenged the first lawyer he ever tried a case against to a duel (the challenge fizzled) and arranged for the town’s prostitutes to arrive in the midst of a society Christmas ball. “He was the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in Salisbury,” a contemporary recalled. When James Parton was researching his 1860 biography of Jackson, the author traveled to Salisbury in search of stories about his subject. There he learned one local woman’s reaction to hearing that Jackson might be a candidate for the White House. “What! Jackson up for President? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury? Why, when he was here, he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house!” Reflecting for a moment more, she allowed, “It is true, he might have taken him out to the stable to weigh horses for a race, and might drink a glass of whiskey with him there. Well, if Andrew Jackson can be President, anybody can!”
There is no doubt that in these years Jackson was a rake, and a gambler, and a carouser. Note, however, that the “rake” had made something of a friend of the husband of this Salisbury matron, forming a connection based on sporting interests—a connection strong enough to survive the disapproval of the lady of the house.
That Jackson was on intimate terms with such established families is telling. He was not born in a station that granted him automatic access to the upper reaches of the nascent American gentry. He had to work his way into those circles with whatever he had at hand—and what he had was a charm that made other men like him and want to join him in exploits that crossed the line of respectability, but never so dramatically that they could not stumble back into the good graces of their wives and neighbors by morning. One day Jackson would draw on his capacity to make others love and follow him in the service of larger causes. But his raw ability to lead—and his sense of adventure and his infectious fearlessness—was already evident in North Carolina.
TENNESSEE WAS NOT yet a state when Jackson, then twenty-one, moved to Nashville in October 1788 and took up residence as a boarder in the house of Mrs. John Donelson, the widow of a founder of the settlement. The Donelsons were among the territory’s great families. The patriarch, Colonel John Donelson, was a surveyor who had been a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses before striking out to the west. His 1779–80 voyage on the Cumberland River aboard the flatboat Adventure was one of the prevailing stories of the age, and his mysterious death—he was shot to death in the wilderness, perhaps by Indians, perhaps by robbers—only added to his legend.
The colonel, though, survives in history mostly as the father of the wife of Andrew Jackson. Born about 1767—the year Jackson was born—Rachel Donelson came from a clan as distinguished in early American life as Jackson’s was anonymous. Rachel was a beautiful young woman with a strong sense of fun—and when Rachel met Jackson in the autumn of 1788 on the Cumberland, she was another man’s wife. Rachel Donelson and Lewis Robards of Mercer County, Kentucky, had been married since 1785;
they had met and courted during a Donelson family sojourn in Kentucky. At twenty-seven, Robards was a decade older than the seventeen-year-old Rachel, and the marriage was difficult from the start. John Overton, a Tennessee judge and later Jackson ally who came to board with Lewis Robards’s mother in the fall of 1787—roughly two years after Rachel married Robards—recalled that “Robards and his wife lived very unhappily, on account of his being jealous.… My brother, who was a boarder, informed me that great uneasiness had existed in the family for some time before my arrival.” Things got so bad that one of her brothers went to Kentucky to bring Rachel home—in the fall of 1788, the same season Jackson arrived in Nashville.
Mrs. Robards was, James Parton wrote, “gay and lively … the best story-teller, the best dancer, the sprightliest companion, the most dashing horsewoman in the western country”—the kind of woman who would hold enormous appeal for Jackson. But she was, indisputably, Mrs. Robards. Having driven her off, her husband decided he wanted a reconciliation, and moved to Nashville, where they again lived together for a time. Robards soon grew jealous of Jackson’s attentions to Rachel and indulged his anger, reducing both Rachel and her mother to tears. Robards and Jackson exchanged words. “If I had such a wife, I would not willingly bring a tear to her beautiful eyes,” Jackson was said to have remarked to Robards, who replied: “Well, perhaps … but she is not your wife.”
