American Lion

by Jon Meacham

While a congressional probe failed to produce a resolution of censure against Jackson for overstepping his authority, the questions about Florida—like those about his marriage, his duels, and martial law in New Orleans—provided Jackson’s political foes with much ammunition. There would be more than a few fights over these issues in the 1820s, a decade in which Andrew Jackson moved from the front lines of the South and West to the trenches of national politics.

  THE DIARY OF a young woman from South Carolina who spent two days at the Hermitage with Jackson and Rachel in September 1827, a year before his election as president and her death, offers an intimate account of the Jacksons’ married life, of Rachel’s kindness, and of Jackson’s force of personality. The traveler, Julia Ann Conner, was from a well-connected family, and she and her party arrived at the Hermitage at dusk on Monday, September 3, 1827. As the visitors entered the front hall, they looked up to see General and Mrs. Jackson coming down the main stairs. Jackson struck Conner as a “venerable, dignified, fine-looking man, perfectly easy in manner.… Mrs. Jackson received us with equal politeness.” Rachel led her guests into the drawing room for refreshments, then took Conner out into the garden for a walk. At supper Jackson “pronounced with much solemnity of manner a short grace and then performed the honors of the table with an attentive politeness which usually characterizes a gentleman—everything was neat and elegant—a complete service of French china, rich cut glass—damask napkins.”

  The house was filled with history, and with tokens of tribute. The brace of pistols Lafayette had given to Washington were on the mantelpiece, a gift to Jackson from the Washington family. “They are preserved with almost sacred veneration,” Conner said, as was a small pocket spy glass of Washington’s. There was a silver urn from South Carolina, a gold snuffbox from New York—all signs of respect to the Hero of New Orleans.

  The Hero himself cast a kind of spell over Conner. “The manners of the General are so perfectly easy and polished and those of his wife so replete with kindness and benevolence that you are placed at once at ease,” she said.

  Conner owed Jackson a small debt: he helped her at chess. She was playing another houseguest, and Conner recalled that Jackson “stood at my side, and being an excellent player he frequently directed my moves—apparently much interested in the fate of the game … there were no traces of the ‘military chieftain’ as he is called!”

  This sketch of Jackson the tactician—a player of chess, a game that rewards strategy and foresight—explains much about Jackson’s character. He could sometimes seem reckless, but more often he was playing the games of politics and war with the kind of skill and patience chess requires. And Conner was surely right when she observed that he was “much interested in the fate of the game”—he was always interested in the fate of the game, or of the battle, or of the vote.

  CONNER DETECTED SOMETHING in her few days under his roof that many of Jackson’s foes never did: that he was far more than a frontier soldier. His enemies never quite saw that the largest fact about Jackson was not a problem with his “passions”—the contemporary sense of the word was “temper”—but his ability, more often than not, to govern them and harness the energies that would have driven other, less sophisticated men to political ruin. “Sophisticated” is not a word often used to describe Andrew Jackson, but it should be. The number of scandals that threatened to consume him between his admission to the bar and his election to the White House—martial law in New Orleans, the execution of mutineers in the field, invading Florida arguably without proper authority, killing British subjects, his murky marriage, his slaying of Charles Dickinson, the gunfight with the Bentons—would have ended most political careers.

  Yet Jackson endured and conquered. He knew how to make amends when he had to and possessed enough charm to turn longtime enemies into new friends. Jackson could, of course, lapse into alarming violence, but he also had a capacity for political grace and conciliation when the spirit moved him. In Washington in 1823–24, Jackson spent a few months as a senator from Tennessee. Jackson needed to put as many hatreds and grudges as he could to rest in preparation for the 1824 presidential campaign. Thomas Hart Benton—of the brawl with the Benton brothers—was by then a senator from Missouri. He and Jackson served together on a committee. Writing to Rachel, Jackson’s friend and Senate colleague John Henry Eaton reported: “The General is at peace and in friendship with … Col. Benton: he is in harmony and good understanding with every body, a thing I know you will be happy to hear.” Eaton was not exaggerating. “His temper was placable as well as irascible, and his reconciliations were cordial and sincere,” Benton said after Jackson’s death. “Of that, my own case was a signal instance. After a deadly feud, I became his confidential adviser; was offered the highest marks of his favor; and received from his dying bed a message of friendship, dictated when life was departing, and when he would have to pause for breath.”

  Jackson could absorb the essence of a situation at a glance. “The character of his mind was that of judgment, with a rapid and almost intuitive perception, followed by an instant and decisive action,” said Benton. Was his “instant and decisive action” always right? No—far from it. But behind his bluster lay a skill for controlling, containing, and even erasing the damage his rashness could cause. “No man,” a longtime Jackson intimate told James Parton, “knew better than Andrew Jackson when to get into a passion and when not.” To manage conflicting forces of emotion and pragmatism is the rarest of political gifts. For all the indictments to the contrary, Jackson had that gift—and used it to further his own fortunes, and to secure the future of the nation. Faith in his ability to maneuver out of any corner—to face down a man at twenty-four feet while blood leaked into his own boot, to save a wounded arm after taking another bullet, to elude enemies in the forest, to arrest an outlaw, to manipulate, usually from afar, congressional investigations—sustained him. “He was a firm believer in the goodness of a superintending Providence, and in the eventual right judgment and justice of the people,” said Benton. “I have seen him at the most desperate part of his fortunes, and never saw him waver in the belief that all would come right in the end.”

  But how did he transform himself from a “slobbering” young man lashing out at an unfair and largely uncaring world to become what Henry Wise, the Virginia governor and an astute Jackson observer, called a cool calculator? Part of the answer lies in the fact that his ambition to succeed was matched by his intellectual capacity to realize that his anger would tend to block, not fuel, his rise. It is the unusual human being who can identify and control particular impulses, but Jackson turned himself into such a man in order to get what he wanted, which was a place among those at the top, not the bottom, of life.

  He referred to his ability to manage his temper as his “Philosophy.” When Rachel was under attack in the 1828 campaign, Jackson struggled to hold his anger in check. “How hard it is to keep the cowhide from some of these villains,” he confided to John Coffee. “I have made many sacrifices for the good of my country—but the present, being placed in a situation that I cannot act, and punish those slanderers, not only of me, but Mrs. J. is a sacrifice too great to be well endure[d] yet … I must bear with it.” Jackson strained to remain calm. “My Philosophy is almost worn out,” he said as the campaign continued, “but all my enemies expect is, to urge me to some rash action, this they cannot do until the election is over.” Even then, Jackson would not give his foes the satisfaction of playing into the caricature of a wild-eyed backwoodsman brandishing a whip and a pistol. He would turn a serene—and sad, after Rachel’s death, but still serene—face to the country.

  In doing so Jackson mirrored a national phenomenon. Control over how one appeared to the rest of the world was a subject of popular concern in the America of Jackson’s time, and he was in many ways an example of a recognizable type: a man from the bottom rungs of society on the rise and in search of a code of manners. “What makes the gentleman?” had once been a topic of debate between
Andrew and an uncle of his on a rainy day in Waxhaw. “The boy said, Education; the uncle, Good Principles,” a son of the uncle recalled to James Parton.

  They were both right: principles presumably flowed from education, whether or not the education came in a classroom. For all of the Founders’ talk about equality and natural rights and the evils of monarchy and aristocracy, Americans were obsessed with marks of class distinction from colonial days. It began, in a way, with the greatest Founder of all: as a schoolboy, George Washington filled part of an exercise book with one hundred and ten Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. General Daniel Smith, Andrew Donelson’s maternal grandfather, advised young men in his family to consult Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, a kind of manners manual written by Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield. The essence of Chesterfield was to make oneself pleasant and genial but to be forever wary of others. Jackson, who believed in self-mastery, certainly spoke in such terms. “You cannot have forgotten the advice I give to all my young friends,” Jackson wrote an acquaintance in 1826, “that is to say, as they pass through life have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.”

  This is deft Machiavellian—and Chesterfieldian—counsel. Trust no one except those who have proved themselves, yet never let those who have failed the test know that when they look at you, they are looking at a mask, not at your true self. Life, Jackson was saying, particularly political life, can be theatrical—an exercise in assessing other people’s minds and motives and then designing your own response with an awareness of the gulf between appearance and reality. It was Chesterfield’s creed, and Jackson subscribed to it.

  CHAPTER 3

  A MARRIAGE, A DEFEAT,

  AND A VICTORY

  THE YEAR 1824 was pivotal for Jackson and his family. It was the year Jackson first ran for president, and the year Emily and Andrew Donelson married. Raised in comfort but far from spoiled, Emily and Andrew, well-educated and well-mannered, began their married lives with high expectations. Jackson thought Donelson a likely president; Emily impressed those around her. “Emily, it is hoped, will make a fine woman and I know her to be more than ordinarily smart,” her sister remarked. Their lives were already interwoven with politics. Educated at West Point, Transylvania University, and Nashville’s Cumberland College, Andrew Donelson delivered a July Fourth oration at Nashville in the summer of 1824, and he spoke like an aspiring statesman—a bit floridly and overlong, perhaps, but he was young, and there was time to learn. In his uncle he had the best of teachers.

  According to family tradition, Donelson was eighteen, on his way to West Point, when he found his heart stirring for the redheaded Emily, then just ten. She was leaving her log schoolhouse on Lebanon Road, heading for home, which was known as “the Mansion” in the family. Donelson happened across the schoolchildren. “On the way, a stream had to be waded or crossed on a narrow log,” a family chronicler wrote. “Other children got over as best they could, but not so Princess Emily, for her Fairy Prince took her in his arms, restoring her to earth on the other side. In later years Donelson related that he realized then that he loved her.” By 1823, the love affair was evident, and Jackson began singling Emily out for his regards in letters to Donelson. “Present me affectionately to Miss E.,” he wrote in January 1824.

  Jackson trusted Donelson. “I sincerely thank you for your attention to my business,” Jackson wrote his nephew from Washington in April 1824. “I assure you it gives me pleasure to find that my private concerns are kept so snug and all my debts paid, and accounts so nearly closed.”

  Flattering Donelson, Jackson told him: “I hold no correspondence with any one but yourself.… I will have to bring you on with me; I have been this winter at a great Loss for some confidential friend to aid me.” To be with Jackson probably meant a move to Washington, for his presidential prospects looked strong. According to family tradition, it was this letter, in the spring of 1824, that prompted Donelson to propose to Emily.

  He did not want to go to the capital without her as his bride. After reading his uncle’s summons to duty, Donelson went to Emily and, in a conversation at the Mansion, the two realized they had reached a turning point. Rachel and Andrew Jackson helped things along. “Romance was not a stranger to Rachel’s heart, and she had watched with the greatest interest the growing fondness between Andrew and Emily and had encouraged its development,” noted the family chronicler. “She would send the young lovers out to walk under the tall poplars, or to sit together under the vine-covered bower in her garden.” Andrew and Emily became engaged in Rachel’s Hermitage garden. A September date was set.

  Jackson was delighted with the match. The Donelsons were the kind of young people he loved to have with him: smart, attractive, loyal. As a wedding gift Jackson gave them a large tract of land within a mile of the Hermitage. Weeks after the wedding, performed at the Mansion by the Reverend William Hume, they would be on the road with Aunt and Uncle Jackson, heading to Washington. From their experiences on the journey, it is clear that their married life began as it would go on: marked by politics, drama, and risk.

  Just a few days from Nashville, outside Harrodsburg, Kentucky, they all nearly died in a serious carriage accident. “The tongue snapped at the top of a very steep and rocky hill, and it was by the interposition of divine Providence that our lives were spared,” Emily wrote home. By the next day, though, “a splendid ball” at Lexington had lifted their spirits, and it was on to Washington, where an amazed Emily watched Lafayette and Jackson greet each other at their lodgings.

  Between scenes of great men saluting each other, evenings “crowded with company,” and “boarding at an excellent house,” Emily was finding life with Uncle congenial. “We are very comfortably situated here. We live very well [and] have everything in abundance,” she wrote to her mother in December 1824. “Everything,” she added, “was new and interesting to me.”

  Emily and Andrew spent their Sundays at the more fashionable Episcopal church rather than the Presbyterian and Methodist ones Rachel frequented; for Rachel it was another sign of the capital’s dissipated ways. “Much visiting in the grandest Circles in the City,” Emily’s father wrote of the young couple’s initial journey to the capital. “I am afraid it will spoil Emily and Andrew.” The Donelsons enjoyed themselves, going to plays such as Virginias; or, The Liberation of Rome and The Village Lawyer. “The extravagance is in dressing and running to parties,” Rachel wrote home. He kept quiet about it, but Jackson’s own view of life in the city had more in common with the young people’s than it did with his wife’s. In 1824–25, however, politics was more consuming than parties, and Jackson was losing.

  JACKSON’S MOST SIGNIFICANT rivals in national politics in the 1820s and 1830s were formidable men. There was John C. Calhoun, the tall, thin, Yale-educated South Carolinian with a brilliant mind and a weakness for the cause of states’ rights and for the preservation of slavery. There was Henry Clay of Kentucky, a man not unlike Jackson—a frontier lawyer with a taste for gambling and strong drink who rose in the world through government service, became master of a great house in Lexington, Ashland, and was driven by presidential ambitions. A career politician, Clay saw the emerging power of the West and longed to be its voice—and its first son to live in the White House. There was John Quincy Adams, the son of the first President Adams, a scholarly diplomat and legislator whose social shyness masked a bold vision of national destiny: he championed, among other things, a proposed American university and great internal construction projects. And there was Andrew Jackson.

  There were, at the same time, more and more ordinary people to think of, as more and more ordinary
people—all male, to be sure, and all white—shared in the extension of the right to vote. By 1828, nearly all states had essentially universal male suffrage. The result: a surge in eligible voters, many with an economic stake in the future of the country. In 1828 and 1832, the years of Jackson’s White House victories, record numbers of such Americans cast ballots. Turnout rose from 27 percent in 1824 to 57 percent in 1828.

  The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had not been interested in establishing the rule of the majority. Quite the opposite: The Federalist and the debates on the floor of the Constitutional Convention largely concerned how the new nation might most effectively check the popular will. Hence the Electoral College, the election of senators by state legislatures, and limited suffrage. The prevailing term for America’s governing philosophy was republicanism—an elegant Enlightenment-era system of balances and counterweights that tended to put decisive power in the hands of elites elected, at least in theory, by a country of landowning yeomen. The people, broadly defined, were not to be trusted with too much power.

  This creed, best articulated by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, lay at the heart of presidential politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century, years in which a small establishment in the capital essentially decided on its own who would have the chance to live in the White House. Nominees were chosen by congressional caucuses on Capitol Hill (called “King Caucus”), and the men who were nominated to run tended to be secretaries of state from Virginia or Massachusetts. It was a tidy, insular way to choose a president, and it lasted for more than a quarter of a century.

  Then came 1824. In a four-way race between Jackson, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, Jackson led in the popular vote for president, but no candidate had the necessary Electoral College majority, so the contest went to the House of Representatives. There Jackson lost.