by H. W. Brands
His soldiers might have taken alarm had the underlying complaint not been so unremarkable. No one needed to tell them about fractious bowels. Nor did the general have to apologize for a diet that often consisted of little more than gin and water, the only things his system could tolerate when his symptoms flared. Alcohol was the universal medicine. If it didn’t cure the disease—and it never did—it diminished the pain.
Jackson’s case differed from most of his contemporaries’ in ways that made his symptoms worse. The bullets he carried—from the duel with Charles Dickinson and the affray with the Bentons—had created pockets of chronic infection. The infections were low-grade and not life threatening, but they put a constant strain on his immune system, leaving him susceptible to other, opportunistic infections. Jackson’s official correspondence rarely mentioned his health, but his letters to Rachel and close friends revealed a succession of fevers, stomach and intestinal ailments, and joint pains.
The doctors were probably right to leave the bullets in place. The surgeon’s nonsterile knife was certainly more threatening to Jackson’s life than some small pieces of lead. But the lead wasn’t innocuous. In fact it slowly poisoned him, leaching its heavy metal into his bloodstream. A study conducted in the late twentieth century, on locks of Jackson’s hair, indicated levels of lead in Jackson’s blood many times higher than is commonly considered safe. And many of the symptoms he recorded—abdominal cramping, nausea, headaches, constipation (which alternated with his diarrhea)—are consistent with lead poisoning.
Jackson didn’t help himself by the medications he took. Calomel (mercurous chloride) and sugar of lead (lead acetate) were mainstays of nineteenth-century pharmacy, and for someone with Jackson’s catalog of maladies they were medications of frequent choice. He drank calomel and sugar of lead for his intestinal troubles and applied sugar of lead to his wounded shoulder and arm, and to his eyes as an eyewash. The medications afforded symptomatic relief—and produced some recognized side effects, such as heavy salivation, in the case of calomel. They probably did less systemic harm than has sometimes been suggested, but they certainly didn’t bolster his constitution.
Whatever the sources of his physical problems—gunshot wounds, parasites, heavy metals—Jackson was regularly but a step or two from physical collapse. Often the only thing that kept him upright—or bent over, rather than prostrate—was his remarkable will. Jackson could admit defeat to ill health no more readily than he could admit defeat to anything or anyone else.
Perhaps paradoxically, but in a way his men could appreciate, his chronic ill health made him seem the more heroic—even if it didn’t sell lithographs of battle scenes. They knew what it took to stay in the saddle when one’s intestines were about to explode, and how chronic pain can make cowards of the most courageous. In his unguarded moments, they could see the pain in his face and read, in his sallow skin and gaunt frame, the toll his ailments were taking on his constitution and spirit. And when they saw him rise above these, they believed they could rise above their own challenges.
Jackson’s physical troubles partly explain one of the most singular aspects of his leadership style. Again and again, at crucial moments of his public life, Jackson carried the day because his opponents were terrified of his temper. Observers likened him to a volcano, and only the most intrepid or recklessly curious cared to see it erupt.
A man in chronic pain can’t help being irritable, and irritation yields readily to anger. Jackson didn’t suffer fools gladly, not least because he was suffering enough as it was. Few of Jackson’s surviving letters are overtly introspective. He rarely spoke of his feelings per se. But one can’t help thinking that in many cases, when enemies or bad luck sent him some new vexation, he wondered why heaven was testing him so. The pressure inside the volcano grew and grew, till it erupted with awesome force.
Yet even then the Jackson will remained in charge. Like many other great men, Jackson employed his temper to effect. His anger, when he let it show, was honest enough. Feigned anger is never so terrifying as the genuine article. But he almost always used his anger, rather than letting his anger use him. His close associates all had stories of his blood-curdling oaths, his summoning of the Almighty to loose His wrath upon some miscreant, typically followed by his own vow to hang the villain or blow him to perdition. Given his record—in duels, brawls, mutiny trials, and summary hearings—listeners had to take his vows seriously.
But when anger didn’t serve, his temper could flash cold as well as hot. He never despised anything or anyone as much as he despised Britain, but he didn’t waste his energy hurling imprecations at King George III or his successors. Revenge—for Britain’s abuse of America in two wars and the oft-broken peace between, for the death of his brothers and mother, and for the scar that still etched his scalp—was a dish he was happy to take cold, that it might be taken better.
On March 21 Jackson bade farewell to the troops at New Orleans. The scene lacked the solemnity of George Washington’s famous leave-taking at the end of the Revolutionary War, if only because Jackson, as befit a democrat, addressed the rank and file together with the officers. But it captured the same patriotic poignancy. “Go, full of honour and wreathed with laurels whose leaves shall never wither,” he told them. “The man who slumbered ingloriously at home during your painful marches, your nights of watchfulness and your days of toil, will envy you the happiness which these recollections will afford.” He praised them for their loyalty and devotion, and he assured them of “the gratitude of a nation of free men” and “the approbation of an admiring world.”
Jackson and Rachel and a small entourage left New Orleans in early April. They proceeded slowly north to Natchez, taking two weeks to get there on account of spring rains that softened the roads, but also because everyone on the Mississippi wanted to see the man who had saved them from the British and the Indians. “He is every where hailed as the saviour of this country,” John Reid remarked. “He has been feasted, caressed, and I may say idolized. They look upon him as a strange prodigy; and women, children, and old men line the road to look at him as they would at the Elephant.” Jackson himself explained how he and the others had dined their way up the river. “In New Orleans there was two public dinners given to me and suit; one up the coast at which a number of the most respectable citizens of Orleans attended with Colonel Fortier’s band; and every place dinners were prepared. . . . At Natchez a ball and supper was given to Mrs. Jackson, and the next day a dining to myself and suit at Washington, and on yesterday a dinner at Greenville.”
The celebrating increased as the party neared Nashville. Militiamen who had preceded him home made an escort for the final miles. Politicians past, present, and prospective crowded to share his aura. Senator Grundy conveyed the gratitude of the state and the republic. Governor Blount hosted the finest dinner Tennessee had ever laid on. The procession didn’t end till his supporters deposited him at the Hermitage and heard him explain the meaning of the recent events:
The sons of America, during a most eventful and perilous conflict, have approved themselves worthy of the precious inheritance bequeathed to them by their fathers. They have given a new proof how impossible it is to conquer free men fighting in defense of all that is dear to them. Henceforward we shall be respected by nations who, mistaking our character, had treated us with the utmost contumely and outrage. Years will continue to develop our inherent qualities until, from the youngest and the weakest, we shall become the most powerful nation in the universe.
Some revolutions start quietly, with a change of minds. John Adams contended that the American Revolution began this way. “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced,” he said. “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.”
Other revolutions begin with a bang, but few so literally as the revolution Robert Fulton set in motion in 1807 when he nosed his steamboat Clermont into the Hudson current at New York a
nd headed upstream toward Albany. The Pennsylvanian had apprenticed to a jeweler in Philadelphia before falling for the visual arts and traveling to England to study painting. But British art in the 1790s held less fascination for Fulton (and most other objective observers) than British science and technology, and Fulton found himself hobnobbing with James Watt and other pioneers of steam power. Separately he studied navigation, especially the craft of canals, and won a patent for a better mechanism for lifting boats through locks. He crossed the English Channel to Paris, reflecting en route on the vagaries of wind and tide. In the calmer waters of the Seine he married his interest in steam to his navigational affinity and built a prototype steamboat. It worked but elicited insufficient approbation from the French government or French investors to make Fulton think he could become rich cruising the watercourses of Napoleon’s empire. He returned to America, with higher hopes. And on the morning of August 17, 1807, with his Boulton & Watt (of Birmingham) engine belching and clattering, he launched a revolution that changed American lives, American politics, and the American economy as much as anything that ever happened between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Andrew Jackson’s victories in the War of 1812—over the Creeks in Mississippi, the Spanish in Florida, and the British at New Orleans—fairly annihilated the political will to separatism that had infected the American West since the birth of the republic. Robert Fulton’s victory—over gravity on the Hudson and prospectively on the rivers of the American interior—eliminated the economic complaints that had kept separatism alive. Jackson never met Fulton (who died suddenly in 1815, before winning the wealth he had come home to attain), nor did his particular cast of mind and temperament attune him to technology as a shaper of human destiny. But between them, the soldier and the inventor cemented East and West together in the Union, securing the nation’s future as Americans spread across the continental heartland.
Though Jackson didn’t meet Fulton, there was a personal connection nonetheless. To commercialize his invention, Fulton formed a partnership with Robert Livingston, who outlived him and helped spread the new technology. Livingston was the brother of Jackson’s attaché at New Orleans. Besides assisting in the great victory of January 8, Edward Livingston seems to have been the first to articulate the thought that would drive American politics—almost like a steam engine—during the next two decades. “General, you are the man,” Livingston told Jackson not long after the battle. “You must be President of the United States.”
James Madison wouldn’t have gone that far, but he certainly believed that the victorious general ought to be associated with the Madison administration as closely as possible. Jackson had hardly reached Nashville on his return from New Orleans when he received a request that he visit Washington. The public motive for the invitation was to pick Jackson’s brain regarding a reorganization of the American army. Madison was still fending off criticism for allowing the British to burn Washington and otherwise rampage about the country. The president needed to show that he was doing something to guarantee that such disaster not recur. And who better to advise the administration than the hero of New Orleans? Madison’s private motive was to keep Jackson happy and supportive of the administration, lest he develop political ambitions of his own. James Monroe was in line to receive the Republican nomination, which, particularly after the Federalists’ flirtation with secession, was tantamount to election. Neither Madison nor Monroe wished to jeopardize the anointing.
Jackson accepted the invitation, although he left open just when he would head east. After nearly two years away from home, he wasn’t eager to depart. Rachel deserved better than that, as did Andrew Jr. and Lyncoya (the Creek child he rescued from the ruins of Tallushatchee). Various decisions about the operation of the Hermitage had to be made. Perhaps most important, his constitution required mending. “My health is not restored; I have frequent returns of the old complaint,” he wrote Edward Livingston in July, referring to the dysentery.
He would have stayed home longer had he not received a puzzling letter from Washington. The War Department had naturally followed Jackson’s trial on the contempt charges arising from the martial law question in New Orleans. Neither Madison nor Alexander Dallas, who had succeeded Monroe as war secretary, wanted to upset Jackson, but at the same time they couldn’t well be caught on the wrong side of the Constitution. Dallas told Madison he would seek a formula whereby he could “manifest a just respect for the Constitution and laws without wounding the pride or feelings of General Jackson.” It wasn’t easy, and the letter Dallas sent Jackson simply confused the issue. The secretary said that military necessity could create situations in which the defense of the Constitution demanded suspension of certain of its parts. And the president was inclined to defer to the judgment of the commander on the spot. “Where no difference of opinion can occur as to the purity or the sincerity of the motive to action, where the exigency was great, and where the triumph has been complete, the judgment of a responsible and distinguished officer merits implicit confidence.”
Had Dallas stopped there, Jackson would have felt vindicated. But the secretary wanted to cover his other flank and so switched to the opposite side of the issue. “The case of military necessity which creates its own law must not be confounded with the ordinary case of military service, prescribed and governed by the law of the land. In the United States there exists no authority to declare and impose martial law, beyond the positive sanction of the acts of Congress.” Admittedly, a field commander must be able to ensure the safety of his forces. “But all his powers are compatible with the rights of the citizens and the independence of the judicial authority. If, therefore, he undertake to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, to restrain the liberty of the press, to inflict military punishments upon citizens who are not military men, and generally to supercede the functions of the civil magistrate, he may be justified by the law of necessity, while he has the merit of saving the country, but he cannot resort to the established law of the land for the means of vindication.”
So what was Dallas—with the endorsement, Jackson accurately assumed, of the president—saying? Apparently that Jackson was right to have done what he did but that Judge Hall was, too. Jackson couldn’t tell what the administration’s game was, but he could guess that the president and his men wanted to have things both ways.
Jackson received this letter in early September. He penned a cursory rebuttal, deciding to save the rest for a personal meeting with Dallas and the president in Washington. “I expect to set out thither in a few weeks and hope, after my arrival there, to be able to give such explanation of my conduct as may be satisfactory,” he told Dallas.
Jackson’s journey east was another triumphal progress. The citizens of eastern Tennessee turned out to hail the greatest man the state had ever produced. In the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia he was likened to that commonwealth’s first citizen, General Washington. A dinner at Lynchburg in Jackson’s honor included among the guests the aging Thomas Jefferson, who perhaps marveled that war brought out the best in certain people, including this one who had always seemed so rash during Jefferson’s presidency. The master of Monticello toasted the hero of New Orleans: “Honor and gratitude to those who have filled the measure of their country’s honor.” Jackson replied: “James Monroe, late secretary of war,” which was interpreted as at once personally gracious, Monroe being a Virginia protégé of Jefferson’s, and politically significant, in that Monroe was the leading contender for the succession to Madison.
Jackson and his party reached Washington on the evening of November 16, “having traveled all day in a cold rain,” as John Reid explained to his wife. Reid went on to describe the peculiar protocol of the capital, at least as it applied to Jackson.
Yesterday we visited the President and his lady, the secretary of state and his lady, the secretary of the treasury and his lady, and the secretary of war and his lady. . . . Now from your country education, you may suppose we visited, respectively, these husbands
and wives in the same apartment. By no means. First we enter the Lord’s apartment, making a bow as we enter, and another, as you may guess, as we leave the room. The Lord follows us to the door and makes another low bow (all in the awkwardest style) just about the time our backs are turning upon him. We, of course, turn about two quarters round, which occasions in turn a very awkward position both of the body and mouth, while we are making our second bow and taking our second adieu. Then we enter a passage which leads directly to the door that opens upon the street, with hearts brim full of joy at our deliverance. All of a sudden this pleasing sensation is chilled by a great big footman who comes hurrying after us, enquiring, “Will you not see the lady? She expects and desires your presence in her parlour.” So we turn immediately back and are conducted up stairs to the lady’s parlour, where we either find her gently reclining on a couch, or the apartment empty, until she makes her appearance, full-rigged from the dressing room. A few very civil things are said by her and the General, and then we retire again with our double bows. This is the routine of “high life.”
Now this, undoubtedly, is the kindest, the most polite, and the best natured circle in the world. I’ll give you a proof. While we were at the President’s he turned to me and observed with the most smiling countenance, “I hope Mrs. Reid is with you in the city. I have a great desire to see her.” I replied, “She is left on the way, but would undoubtedly have come had she known how warm a side you had for her.” This was said (although said good humouredly) in such a way that methought he immediately became two inches lower—his hair became curly, and red both of his nostrils and eyelids appeared. The truth is, he was perplexed by the appearance of General Jackson, who, whenever the conversation flagged, was looking with a melancholy air out at the window, on the ruins of our public buildings.
