American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir—the people will set things to rights.

  SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1853, was a sparkling, unusually warm midwinter day in Washington, and thousands gathered in and around Lafayette Square for the dedication of Clark Mills’s equestrian statue of Jackson. It was a grand occasion, the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas was the keynote speaker. A vast procession—citizens and soldiers, congressmen and officers—marched from Washington’s City Hall at D Street on Judiciary Square to the White House grounds. There they saluted President Fillmore and his Cabinet, then moved back across Pennsylvania Avenue to the square. A reporter for the Washington Union wrote that twenty thousand spectators gathered in and around the park; some watched from the tops of the houses in which the Jackson circle—Van Buren, the Donelsons, the Livingstons, the Blairs—had danced and dined. Sitting at home, not far from the new memorial, Francis Blair had drafted Douglas’s remarks, eleven handwritten pages summing up the seventh president.

  Douglas reminded his listeners that the man they were commemorating had begun life as an orphan, finding his family in his country. “Nobly did the widowed mother perform her duty to those fatherless children” after the death of the first Andrew Jackson, Douglas said, but then came the Revolution. “Hugh, the elder brother of Andrew Jackson, fell in his first battle at Stono. Robert became a martyr to liberty, and lost his life from wounds received while in captivity. The mother descended to the grave, a victim to grief and suffering,” Douglas said. “Andrew was thus left alone in the world at a tender age, without father or mother, brother or sister, friend or fortune to assist him. All was gone save the high qualities with which God had endowed him, and the noble precepts which a pious and sainted mother had infused into his young heart.”

  When Jackson had died, there was a sense of completion, that the race had been finished: “He felt that his work was done—his mission fulfilled.” And there was, for a moment, unanimous tribute. “All felt that a great man had fallen,” Douglas said. “Yet there was consolation in the consciousness that the lustre of his name, the fame of his great deeds, and the results of his patriotic services, would be preserved through all time—a rich inheritance to the devotees of freedom.”

  EVEN NOW, WHEN presidents stand beneath the North Portico of the White House and look into Lafayette Square, they can see Jackson there, his sword within reach, ready to ride, ready to fight. There he is, a courageous man who could not rest, who risked everything and gave everything for his “one great family”—America.

  Nearly a century and three quarters since Jackson left Washington for the last time, the sounds and sights of Lafayette Square would be familiar to him. Behind the statue of Jackson stands the bright yellow St. John’s Church, where he often sat in Pew 54. In the church’s steeple, beneath a gold-domed cupola topped by an arrow-tipped weathervane, hangs a bronze bell struck by Paul Revere’s ancestral company. On the base of Jackson’s statue, molded from molten British arms, are the seven words from that long-ago Jefferson birthday dinner toast: “Our Federal Union: It Must Be Preserved.”

  The eyes of Jackson’s statue look south, across the Potomac River and toward the pockets of rebellion he put down—keeping watch, never blinking, never tiring. “He still lives in the bright pages of history,” Stephen Douglas said in dedicating the statue. He still lives—and we live in the country he made, children of a distant and commanding father, a father long dead yet ever with us.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AFTER MISPLACING A traveling case of documents en route from Washington to Tennessee in the summer of 1832, a regretful Andrew Jackson told Andrew Donelson that most of the lost papers were “of a private and political nature of great use to me and the historian that may come after me.” Jackson had it right: his private and political lives have kept historians and biographers on his trail for two centuries, and the complexities of his character and the consequences of his public life will always invite fresh scrutiny. A figure who could be at once so brilliant and yet so bloody-minded, so tender yet so cold, merits our attention, for the virtues and vices of this single man tell us much about the virtues and vices of our country.

  This book is not an academic study of his presidency. My aim was different. There are many books for those seeking full-scale accounts and assessments of Jackson’s life, or of his time, or of the politics and policies of his controversial careers in business, in the military, and in government. By drawing in part on previously unavailable documents—chiefly letters of Jackson’s intimate circle that have largely been in private hands for the past 175 years—I have attempted to paint a biographical portrait of Jackson and of many of the people who lived and worked with him in his tumultuous years in power.

  I was surprised—delightedly so—by the number of new sources that emerged in the course of my work on Jackson, sources that provide hitherto unknown details about a lost world that foreshadowed and shaped our own. In a private collection of letters kept by Mrs. John Lawrence Merritt, I discovered new details about Emily Donelson’s role in the life of the White House, including the fact that John Henry Eaton spoke of resigning in the spring of 1829—a course that, if followed, might have preserved John C. Calhoun’s viability as a presidential successor to Jackson and would certainly have changed the course of Jackson’s first term. I am grateful to Mrs. Merritt and to her daughter, Caroline van den Berg, for making these papers available to me.

  The correspondence owned by Mrs. Merritt and the unpublished letters in the Benjamin and Gertrude Caldwell Collection now at the Hermitage also shed fresh light on Emily and Andrew Donelson’s early centrality to Rachel and Andrew Jackson and include allusions to the great issues of the White House years: the tariff, nullification, the Bank war, and the battle to succeed Jackson in 1836. In John Donelson’s Cleveland Hall collection are numerous letters from Andrew Donelson and several from Andrew Jackson, Jr. They offer details about the ferocious partisan politics of the 1830s, about life in the White House and in the Jackson circle in the South, and about the extent of slave trading in the president’s family during the White House years. The private collection of letters and memorabilia held by Scott Ward of Atlanta, a descendant of Andrew Jackson, Jr., was illuminating, and includes the reply of Thomas Marshall to the last letter of Jackson’s life.

  My debts to the owners of these papers are enormous, and not only for making their papers available to me and granting permission for me to quote from them. I am also grateful for their hospitality and grace. Janice and John Donelson, the current owners of Cleveland Hall, were welcoming, charming, witty, and gracious hosts, allowing me to spend many happy hours in their grand house near the Hermitage reading and transcribing a collection of letters, most of them between Andrew Donelson and his brother-in-law Stockley, papers that had never before been seen outside a very small family circle. This book was strengthened by their willingness to grant me access to the documents at Cleveland Hall, and by their putting me in touch with other Donelson relatives. Scott Ward and his family also kindly opened their house to me, and I spent a delightful afternoon as their guest.

  The Cleveland Hall, Merritt, and Caldwell letters were critical, as were unpublished letters and diary entries from the papers of John Quincy Adams and those of his wife, Louisa, and the many collections cited in the Notes. These include letters from the British, Dutch, and French diplomatic archives; their envoys were shrewd observers of the Washington scene. From letters of Treasury Secretary Samuel Ingham detailing his near gunfight with John Eaton to a note of Richard Wellesley, the Marquis Wellesley and elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, on the possible collapse of the Union during the crisis over nullification, I found the archival sources on Jackson and his contemporaries to be rich, illuminating, and, perhaps as important, fun. I am also grateful to Maria Campbell for sharing “The Memoirs of Mrs. Eliza Williams Chotard Gould,” a private, unpublished account by her gre
at-great-great-grandmother that provides us with an eyewitness portrait of Jackson in New Orleans on the eve of, and just after, his victory over the British.

  Anyone who contemplates Jackson owes a special debt to three important historians and their monumental work. James Parton’s three-volume life of Jackson is indispensable. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson is a rich and invaluable portrait of the political and intellectual milieu of the early nineteenth century and its lasting legacy to the nation. As a counselor, neighbor, and friend, Professor Schlesinger was unfailingly kind to me, and I am grateful to him and to his wife, Alexandra, for years of good company and wise guidance. The work of Robert V. Remini, the National Book Award–winning historian of Jackson, is deep and far-ranging. Dr. Remini’s three-volume biography and his numerous other works offer readers intelligent and detailed accounts of Jackson’s life and times. I learned much not only from Dr. Remini’s books, which I read growing up in Tennessee, but from many conversations with him. He was welcoming, gracious, generous, and astute. He read the manuscript early on (some parts more than once), and I am indebted to him.

  Daniel Feller, the editor of the Jackson papers and the author of two essential works (The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics and The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840), was a welcoming adviser on all things Jacksonian. He fielded many questions with grace and read the manuscript with care. Daniel Walker Howe, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, graciously commented on the manuscript and was generous with his insights about Jacksonian America. Sean Wilentz’s work is as formidable as he is approachable and kind. His The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln is a landmark book, and I learned much from his Andrew Jackson, which he wrote for a series edited by Arthur Schlesinger. Amid a hugely busy life of publishing his The Age of Reagan and teaching at Princeton, Professor Wilentz took the time to offer me guidance, read my manuscript, and share his insights. I am grateful for his counsel and his friendship. The historians Catherine Allgor, H. W. Brands, Andrew Burstein, Donald Cole, William Freehling, Richard Latner, and John Marszalek each took the trouble to weigh in on different sections of the manuscript, and I am grateful for their generosity and wisdom. Mark Cheathem was an invaluable reader. Matthew Warshauer, whose forthcoming Andrew Jackson in Context brilliantly sorts through the historiographical debate, was a wise and generous reader.

  The presidential historian Michael Beschloss was, as always, a brilliant counselor. I am blessed with Michael’s friendship and grateful for his generous gifts of time, insight, and guidance.

  Walter Isaacson—distinguished editor and biographer of Kissinger, Franklin, and Einstein—read and commented on the manuscript with characteristic grace and insight; I am in his debt. Doris Kearns Goodwin generously read the manuscript. She is a cheerful and wise friend, as is Tina Brown, who brought her keen biographer’s eye to the book.

  The curator of the Hermitage, Marsha Mullin, was kind and helpful, always willing to field the oddest of questions with sure and steady grace. Tireless in her generosity, committed to the highest standards of scholarship and integrity, Marsha never failed to respond with intelligence and good cheer to my curiosity about the nooks and crannies of Andrew Jackson’s life and family. I knew I was in the best of hands when she tagged along as I counted off the number of paces it would have taken Rachel Jackson’s pallbearers to carry Mrs. Jackson’s coffin from the house to the garden tomb.

  Through the kindness of Mrs. Laura Bush and of Jean Becker, President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, I was able to spend a delightful three hours touring the private quarters of the White House with William Allman, who was a patient and fascinating guide to the mansion and its history. I am grateful to Mrs. Bush for her courtesy and to Gary Walters, the White House chief usher, for arranging the visit, and to Melissa Naulin. It was invaluable as I tried to envision the rooms as they were in the Jackson years, and there was a quiet thrill to be able to stand in the current Lincoln Bedroom, which was Jackson’s office, and listen to the ticking of the French clock on the mantel—a sound Jackson heard all those years ago.

  Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian of the U.S. Senate and a fine author, generously devoted a morning to walking me through the Capitol as it existed in Jackson’s day. It was a delightful and memorable expedition, and I am grateful for his wisdom and enthusiasm. John B. Fox, Jr., of Harvard College, generously showed me the room in which Jackson received an honorary degree in 1833 (a ceremony of which John Quincy Adams decidedly disapproved). Hayden G. Bryan, the executive director for operations at St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square, was helpful about the architecture and history of the parish.

  In Nashville, I was fortunate to have found myself sitting next to Robin Saxon at dinner one winter night in 2003. Amid steaks and martinis with Alexandra and Arthur Schlesinger, Dolores and John Seigenthaler, and Judge Gilbert S. Merritt, talk turned to Tennessee’s most formidable president. (We also spent time discussing Orestes Brownson, prompting Arthur to note that this was probably the first dinner-table conversation to do so in a very, very long time.) Judge Merritt is a Jackson cousin, and Robin was just ending a term as president of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association. Later in the year, when I embarked on this project, one of my first calls was to Robin, whom I reached while she was—I love the South—shooting ducks. Robin became a friend of the book, setting up sessions with the Donelson clan and helping me collect documents from different family collections.

  I am grateful to many historians who patiently answered my questions and shared their insights: James Chace, David Herbert Donald, Walter T. Durham, David McCullough, Harold Moser, Merrill Peterson, William Seale, James Smylie, Clyde N. Wilson, and Professor the Reverend Canon J. Robert Wright. Andrea Mitchell kindly arranged for me to lunch with her husband, Alan Greenspan, when he was serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve; I was seeking guidance on Jackson’s Bank war, and Dr. Greenspan was a great help.

  Librarians and archivists on both sides of the Atlantic were generous guides to Jackson’s vanished world. My thanks to: Charles Greene of the Princeton University Library; Nancy Shawcross of the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books and Manuscripts Library; John McDonough, now retired from the Library of Congress; Bob Duncan and Barbara Garrett of the Maury County Archives; Tom Price of the James K. Polk Home; William Bynum, Fred Hauser, Beth Bensman, and Kenneth J. Ross of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia; Annie Armour of the University Archives of The University of the South; Jane Reed and Maureen Manning of the University Club Library; Tom Kanon of the Tennessee State Library and Archives; Deborah Pavlich of Montgomery Place, the Livingston family house in the Hudson Valley; Lydia Tedrick of the White House Curator’s Office; the Office of the Director, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.; Henry Fulmer of the South Caroliniana Library, the University of South Carolina; and the staff of the Newsweek Research Center. And a very special word of thanks to Jeffrey Flannery, head of the Library of Congress Manuscript Reading Room.

  The following people and institutions kindly granted me permission to quote from unpublished material: Mrs. John Lawrence Merritt for her collection in Winter Park, Florida. John Donelson for the Donelson Family Private Collection, Cleveland Hall, Nashville; Scott Ward for the Scott Ward Collection, Atlanta; Maria Campbell for “The Memoirs of Mrs. Eliza Williams Chotard Gould”; and The University of the South for the papers of Leonidas Polk.

  For kindnesses large and small, I thank: Shaima Ally, Carl Byker, Dr. and Mrs. William T. Cocke III, Joe Contreras, Judy Cormier, Deidre Depke, E.J. Dionne, Jr., Jack Donelson, Lewis Donelson, Cynthia A. Drayton, Tammy Haddad, Hope Hartman, Lucy Howard, Robbie D. Jones, Claudia Kalb, Kate Leffingwell, the Reverend Luis Leon, Barbara Liberman, Waring McCrady, Nora Frances McRae, Susan McVea, Chris Matthews, Morgan Merrill, Deborah Millan, David Olivenbaum, Donna Pahmeyer, Rob Pearigen, Perri Peltz, Holly Peterson, William R. Polk, Anne Pope, Anna Quindlen, Julia Reed
, Sam Register, Douglas Robbe, Mitchell Rosenthal, Doug Spence, Sarah Stapleton, Tom Watson, George F. Will, David Wilson, Frank Wisner, and Ted Yeatman.

  Margaret Shannon once again did first-rate work, particularly in identifying and collecting the scholarly literature on Jackson and his times. Jack Bales again created a masterful bibliography and checked citations with a searching eye. Dalit Herdoon Haim was essential in searching archives in London and in Oxford, as were Alice Jouve in Paris and Celeste Walker in Massachusetts, at the Adams Papers. I am also grateful to Lennart van Oudheusden for his help with the Huygens archival material in Amsterdam, and to Jessica Rosenberg for translating documents from the French. Brian Gallagher, Matthew Price, Hanna Siegel, Molly Bennet, Christopher Swetala, and Honor Jones were terrific closing fact-checkers. And countless thanks to Barbara DiVittorio, who has long kept my life in order while playing a vital role in the culture of Newsweek. I owe her an enormous debt.

  I am beyond fortunate to count Mike Hill as my friend. He is perennially tireless, cheerful, enthusiastic, generous, and smart.

  Louisa Thomas was crucial, first in helping to search out and mine archival material and in managing the fact-checking of the manuscript, which she did from abroad before taking pains to be in New York as the book was closing. She went over every word—often more than once—and she always made sure I was on solid ground. An astute reader and perceptive critic, Louisa has been invaluable to me on two books, and I am grateful to her for her intelligence, her steadiness, her commitment, and her good humor in trying circumstances.