Andrew Jackson

by H. W. Brands

  Jackson saw the same events but interpreted them differently. Slavery wasn’t the issue; sectionalism was. Jackson defended slavery, in part because he couldn’t envision the political economy of the South without it, but mostly because he perceived the attacks on slavery as threats to the Union. The abolitionists might not intend to shatter the Union, but that would be the consequence of their actions. South Carolina had almost seceded over a tariff; how much more dangerous must it consider attempts to abolish the institution on which its whole way of life rested? Nor would South Carolina be alone on this issue. Its southern neighbors would feel compelled to rally to its side. And who, in any case, were the abolitionists to dictate morality to the rest of the country? They were but a noisy minority. The northern states had abandoned slavery peacefully when a majority of voters there decided slavery no longer served their interests. When a majority of voters in the southern states decided the same thing, slavery would end in the South. To force the issue was to assert that the people couldn’t be trusted with political power. Jackson could never accept that.

  Jackson’s devotion to democracy was unsurprising in one born of the people and bred in the school of hard experience. He trusted the people because he was one of them, in a way none of his predecessors in the White House had been. His attachment to the Union was more difficult to explain. On most subjects his politics aligned with the traditional states’-rights preferences of the party of Jefferson. His principal complaint against the Federalists—aside from their arrogance—was that they stole power from the states, which he considered almost always more reliable in determining the will of the people than the central government at Washington. And throughout his presidency, on such bellwether issues as the Bank of the United States and internal improvements, he checked those in Congress who would have exceeded what he considered the proper bounds of federal authority. But he drew the line—a bright, sharp line, defended by arms if necessary—at anything that even hinted at secession. He would die with the Union, he said at the time of greatest strain with South Carolina. And he would take many with him.

  Jackson wouldn’t have admitted it, and might not even have recognized it, but his devotion to the Union was at least as much emotional as it was political, at least as reflexive as considered. Sometime in his early life—perhaps when the blood from that British saber wound streaked his face, perhaps when his mother and brothers died and he found himself alone, perhaps when he crossed the mountains to the frontier West—he became peculiarly attached to the cause of his country. Lacking a family, he identified with the American people. Jackson’s enemies weren’t wrong to describe him as a military chieftain, but they misunderstood what this meant. His deepest loyalties were not to friends and relations, except for Rachel, or even to his Tennessee neighbors. The clan of Old Hickory, the tribe of Sharp Knife, was the American people. Whatever endangered them—the designs of the British, the weakness of the Spanish, the resistance of the Indians, the disloyalty of the Hartford Federalists, the machinations of the nullifiers, the corruption of the Whigs—elicited an immediate response, and sometimes an intemperate one. He could no more control his devotion to the Union than he could measure his attachment to Rachel. Had he been a different man—had he inherited a different temperament from his Ulster ancestors, had he experienced a warmer childhood, had he not been forced to struggle for everything he achieved—he might have turned out less belligerent, less likely to interpret question as affront and challenge as attack. But he was the man he was.

  Yet there was more to his sensitivity to slight than his heredity and personal experience. His times contributed to the way he turned out. If he defined life as a struggle, it was largely because life for America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a struggle. Eventually, of course, the United States would turn out to be the great power of the Western Hemisphere and then of the world. But during Jackson’s lifetime this outcome was neither obvious nor inevitable. In his youth America had to struggle for its very existence against the most powerful empire in the world. Till his middle age it was beset by Britain, France, and potentially Spain, not to mention the numerous Indian allies of the Europeans. His victory at New Orleans meant the United States wouldn’t be torn in two, but the country might still be hedged about by enemies and weakened at the borders.

  Nor was the danger only external. Divisions within could be as lethal as assault from without. John Calhoun might consider nullification a constitutional issue, but for Jackson it was an existential question—in the literal sense of whether the nation would continue to exist. American life was precarious enough with the country united; with the country broken apart, the pieces would fall prey to those greedy foreigners, and to one another. Jackson’s willingness to wage war against the nullifiers signaled his conviction that in a dangerous world—the only world he knew—unity was the closest thing to a guarantee of security. Confronted by danger, the clan closed ranks. Anyone who obstructed the closing became an enemy.

  Jackson’s appeal to the American people was the appeal of the chieftain to the tribe. They loved him because he was their protector, their hero. But they also loved him because he embodied their hopes and fears, their passions and prejudices, their insight and their ignorance, better than anyone before him. By the standards of a later day, Jackson’s democracy had far to go. The “people” he and his contemporaries spoke of were almost exclusively adult white males. But even this minority of the American population signified a tremendous expansion of political participation since Jackson’s youth. Democracy, as he would have been the first to admit, was a work in progress. And the American people were happy to march forward behind him. They chose him for what he was, but equally for what they were. His strengths were their strengths, his weaknesses their weaknesses. Democracy was—and is—a leap of faith. They placed their faith in him because he placed his faith in them.

  At the time that Jackson learned Congress had voted to annex Texas, he knew he was dying. “When I attempt to walk, I am at once suffocated for the want of breath,” he wrote James Polk at the end of February. Merely writing was “a great oppression.” In March he informed Francis Blair, “This may be the last letter I may be able to write you.” Yet though his body was failing, his mind and will remained strong. “Strange as it may appear, my nerves are as steady as they were forty years gone by.”

  Slowly, one system after another shut down. His kidneys gave way, causing his body to retain fluids. “I am swollen from the toes to the top of the head,” he wrote. The fluid collected around his stomach, triggering nausea that kept him from eating. The fluid pressed on his lungs, making breathing harder than ever, and on his heart, causing it to flutter and strain.

  At the end of May he got word that the last chapter in the Texas story was being written, as the people of the republic overwhelmingly approved the annexation offer. “Texas comes into the Union with a united voice,” he said. “I knew British gold could not buy Sam Houston.”

  Even as Jackson wrote, Houston was returning once more to the house of his second father. Houston had left Texas and was at New Orleans, awaiting a steamboat to take him upriver to Nashville. He wanted to be the one to tell Jackson that Texas was finally part of the Union. He also wanted his new wife and their year-old son to meet the greatest man he had ever known.

  On the way he heard that Jackson was fading and couldn’t be long for earth. Houston tried to make the captain push the steamboat faster, but the current in the river held them back. The small family arrived at Nashville on the evening of June 8. The city knew, and Houston now learned, that Jackson’s condition was critical. Houston commandeered a carriage and ordered the driver to summon all the speed the horses could muster. Through the twilight they galloped toward the Hermitage.

  On the road they discovered they were too late. Jackson’s doctor, coming from the deathbed, informed them that the old general had died at six o’clock. He had retained his faculties to the end and, after bidding good-bye to his
family and the members of his household, had slipped quietly away.

  The Houstons proceeded, sadly and now slowly, to the house, where Jackson’s body lay in the peace of death. Taking Sam Jr. in his arms, Houston raised the child to the edge of Jackson’s high bed. “My son,” he said, “try to remember that you have looked on the face of Andrew Jackson.”

  Jackson had bested some rivals and outlasted others. John Marshall, of course, was gone, his place on the nation’s highest court taken by one of the country’s most ardent Jacksonians. Nicholas Biddle died in retirement under a cloud created, ironically, by the very properties of the banking system Jackson had assailed and he had defended. Biddle and his new bank speculated in cotton as the country recovered from the panic of 1837; when cotton plunged, the bank was left holding notes it couldn’t redeem. Biddle escaped before the crash, but the experience did nothing for his once formidable reputation. The bank expired in 1841, Biddle in 1844.

  John Quincy Adams was too stubborn to let go. And the more deathlike the prospect for the nation, the more tenaciously he clung to life. He had the grim satisfaction of witnessing the outbreak of the war against Mexico he had predicted as a result of taking Texas. He watched the war aggravate the tensions between North and South, as he had also predicted. He had prayed to die in the breach, and he was finally granted his prayer. In February 1848, just as the treaty ending the war and definitively confirming American possession of Texas (and California) reached Washington from Mexico City, he suffered a stroke in the well of the House. He was placed unconscious on a sofa. He died there two days later.

  Henry Clay held on a few years more. At the very moment the negotiators in Mexico were concluding the peace treaty, James Marshall quite by accident discovered gold in California. The discovery touched off an astonishing migration to this newest American West, as hundreds of thousands of people rushed from all over the world to California to stake their claim to the golden bounty. By the summer of 1849 California contained enough people to qualify for statehood; by the end of that year those people had written a constitution and sent it to Washington for approval.

  California’s demand for admission touched off the most portentous debate in the Senate since the nullification crisis of 1833. As Jackson had predicted, the crisis this time was about slavery—in particular, about whether the territory acquired from Mexico would be slave or free. John Calhoun, also clinging to life but looking more like Jackson every year, as tuberculosis consumed him from within and gave him the haunted look of one living on will alone, insisted that it be slave. Anything else, he said, any abridgment of the right of slaveholding citizens to establish themselves in any part of the federal domain, was unconstitutional and grounds for secession.

  Daniel Webster was no more willing to brook such inflammatory talk from Calhoun than he had been during Jackson’s presidency. And he answered the South Carolinian in terms no less eloquent than before. The Union must survive, he said. The Union would survive.

  As he had in 1833, although without the war-threatening help of Jackson, Clay arranged a compromise. California was admitted to the Union free, but the rest of the Mexican cession was opened to slavery. And the South received a second quid pro quo: a much harsher fugitive slave law.

  Calhoun died amid the debate over the Compromise of 1850. Clay and Webster survived till 1852. By then the Compromise of 1850 was looking less like a formula for keeping the Union together than a recipe for blowing it apart. North and South each fixed on the parts of the package it didn’t like. The Whigs, the party created in opposition to Jackson, disintegrated. Jackson’s own party, the Democrats, divided more deeply along sectional lines than ever.

  Sam Houston held out the longest. Elected to the Senate from the post-republic state of Texas, he carried the banner of Jackson and the Union back to Washington. He decried the extremism on both sides of the slavery issue, condemning in a single breath the abolitionists of the North and the fire-eaters of the South. The charisma that had marked him, a generation earlier, as the likely heir to Jackson grew manifest again, and he was spoken of for president, a southern Unionist in the Jackson tradition. But he wasn’t Jackson, and the 1850s weren’t the 1820s. His foes in the Texas legislature defeated his reelection to the Senate, and, though he was promptly chosen governor by the people of Texas, he couldn’t stop his state from seceding after the election of 1860. He thereupon signed his own political death warrant by refusing to forsake the Union for the Confederacy. In announcing his refusal, he summoned the spirit of Jackson. “I have seen the patriots and statesmen of my youth, one by one, gathered to their fathers, and the government which they had created rent in twain,” he said. “And none like them are left to unite it once again. I stand the last almost of a race, who learned from their lips the lessons of human freedom.”

  But even as Houston lamented the apparent demise of the Jacksonian dream—that the people could govern themselves and defend the government they created—another heir to the tradition stepped forward. Abraham Lincoln was an unlikely Jacksonian: an opponent of slavery, a corporate attorney, a defender of banks. But he was also a child of the frontier, a son of the West, an Indian fighter, a common man, and, most decisively, a devout believer in democracy and the Union. It was Lincoln who articulated the Jacksonian creed best—better than Jackson himself—when he declared that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” must not perish from the earth. And when it didn’t, when the Union emerged intact from its severest trial, it stood as a monument to Andrew Jackson, who had devoted his life to making democracy possible and the Union indivisible.

  The principal sources for this book are the words of Andrew Jackson and his contemporaries: their letters, diaries, memoranda, and recollections. References to these constitute the great majority of the citations below. Two published collections of Jackson papers have been invaluable: the Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (CAJ), edited by John Spencer Bassett, and The Papers of Andrew Jackson (PAJ), edited by Sam B. Smith and Harriet Chappell Owsley. These collections together contain a very large portion of the most valuable materials from Jackson’s hand. Of the unpublished Jackson collections, the most important is at the Library of Congress. When a manuscript letter of Jackson or someone else has been published, the published version has usually been cited in the notes below, for reasons of accessibility.

  The citations cover all direct quotations and certain specific items of information. Sources of background information or context have not been cited but can be identified in the Annotated Bibliography.

  In many of the quotations, spelling and punctuation have been corrected or brought to modern norms. One aim is to spare readers of this long book the fatigue of wrestling with unfamiliar orthography. The other aim is to do justice to the authors of the quotations, who lived before spelling became standardized. Poor spelling today is considered a mark of ignorance; most persons in Jackson’s day harbored no such prejudice. Thomas Jefferson’s orthography wasn’t as imaginative as Jackson’s, but it could be idiosyncratic in its own way, and no one thought the sage of Monticello the dimmer for it. Readers who feel they have been deprived of the flavor of the original spelling are invited to seek it out, in the sources cited.

  CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION (1767–1805)

  1. THE PRIZE

  “Through an aperture”: Parkman, 217. (Full bibliographic information on this title and others can be found in the bibliography.)

  “It is amazing”: Amherst, 310.

  “Could it not be contrived . . . execrable race”: Knollenberg, 492–93.

  Bouquet distributed: Kent, 763.

  “The smallpox . . . by the disorders”: Knollenberg, 493–94.

  “Every day . . . in the woods”: Parkman, 279–81.

  “When I do consider . . . forward that way”: Ford, 93, 103.

  “His looks spoke out”: Fischer, 615.

  Philadelphia seems likeliest: Parton (1:48) and other early biographers place the landing at Charles Town, bu
t James (Life, 789–90) argues convincingly for Pennsylvania. Remini (Jackson and Course of American Empire, 427) concurs with James.

  “200 acres”: Deed from Thomas and Sarah Ewing, Dec. 17, 1770, PAJ, 1:3–4.

  “But he would never . . . I’ll kill him”: Parton, 1:64.

  2. I COULD HAVE SHOT HIM

  “A picture of a man”: Parton, 1:83.

  “full of enterprise”: Buchanan, Road, 60.

  “mangled in the most shocking manner”: Ibid., 63.

  “If any persons”: Bass, 79.

  “Not a man was spared”: Buchanan, Road, 84.

  “I have cut”: Bass, 81–82.

  “I’ll warrant Andy thought of it”: Parton, 1:89.

  “I frequently heard”: Jackson recollections, undated, PAJ, 1:7.

  “Tarleton passed . . . could have shot him”: Ibid., PAJ, 1:5

  3. ALONE

  “Andrew, if I should not see you . . . made my way”: Buell, 1:56–57.

  “a very proud and haughty disposition”: Jackson recollections, undated, PAJ, 1:7.

  “He had a habit”: Buell, 1:63–64.

  “I immediately answered”: Jackson recollections, undated, PAJ, 1:7.

  “It was too foolish . . . avoided him after that”: Buell, 1:63–64.

  “three hundred or four hundred pounds sterling”: Ibid., 1:57.

  “I had new spirits”: Parton, 1:98.

  “None of them believed”: Buell, 1:69.

  “What? Jackson for president?”: Parton, 1:109.

  “is sufficiently recommended”: S. Ashe and J. Williams to Justices of North Carolina, September 26, 1787, PAJ, 1:10.

  “1. I will practice law because it affords me”: Advertisement by William Tatham of Knoxville, reprinted as appendix 2 in Parton, 1:628–29.