“What! Jackson up for President? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury?…Well, if Andrew Jackson can be President, anybody can!”
Elderly former neighbor from Salisbury, NC
Robert Remini is renowned for both the abridged version of his biography –The Life of Andrew Jackson – as well as his longer, three volume study. But he seems to fall prey to the classic conundrum facing biographers: idol worship. I suppose it is hard to spend years studying a singular individual, particularly one whose life was exciting and interesting, and not come away with a feeling you are on their team. But it is striking how easily some historians will brush aside the darker elements of character in order to aggrandize their subject. This volume was not as sycophantic as the Monroe biography, but it had its moments.
Old Hickory hasn’t aged well. He was popular in the first place because he had several legitimate achievements as President. Jackson had arguably one of the least corrupt administrations of the early Republic. He avoided nullification and secession by South Carolina by ruling with a strong hand. He paid off the national debt and spurred economic growth by extending commerce and markets abroad. He ended what he felt was a corrupt central bank, expanded the power of the Executive and acquired huge swaths of land from Native Americans (feel free to take a side on any of those).
Depending on how you keep score, these wins were either partially offset or completely overshadowed by a litany of shortcomings. Despite the original proclamation to “drain the swamp” (He declared his first responsibility would be to “reform the Government” and “purify the Departments” by rooting out all corrupt officials who were there because of “political considerations or against the will of the people”) Jackson was terrible at picking high ranking officials. This caused his administration tabloid-worthy embarrassments and the collapse of his original Cabinet within two years. He didn’t get key pieces of legislation through Congress, largely because of his temper and unwillingness to compromise. He couldn’t get Texas into the Union, although he badly wanted to. After killing the Bank of the United States he did not replace the banking system with something better and his ignorance of monetary policy would have drastic repercussions. (Ed. note: It is amusingly ironic to watch the fight over the $20 bill. Andrew Jackson HATED paper currency.) Most poignantly, his history book excerpts have to deal not just with the scourge of slavery but the Trail of Tears.
Listen. Presidential legacies are fickle. One minute, Abraham Lincoln is staring up at your portrait over his fireplace, wondering what you might do in his shoes. The next thing you know news outlets the world over are losing their minds that you’re back in the President’s office. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a big-game talking, populist war hero who was also a slave-owning, Indian-hater that almost landed in a debtors prison because he defaulted on multiple land speculation deals. But hey, they call them populists for a reason. A whole lot of people then, and now, ascribed to the Jacksonian brand of democracy.
The “common man” narrative started early for Andrew Jackson. He was born poor to Scots-Irish immigrants in the Carolinas in 1767. At three weeks old he lost his father to a logging accident. During the Revolutionary War, when he was a young teen, he lost his mother and both brothers. Bootstraps were pulled up. Nothing was given to him. He lit out for the frontier with just his grit and a gunny sack full of hope. Et cetera. Et cetera. Mixing this mythology with bona fide military glory and a cocksure posture on the soapbox it’s easy to understand Jackson’s appeal to potential voters. Congressman Jackson would go to Washington, put his head down, work hard and have a good run. Senator Jackson was a total failure. Totally unqualified for the higher chamber, Jackson resigned his Senate seat just seven months into the six-year term. Later that same year he was appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court (another post for which he was not qualified) but remained on the Bench for the years he was meant to spend in Washington. He might have left this post to become Governor of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory but Thomas Jefferson passed over him for someone else. This ended ties between the men who would so often be paired together in panegyric memories of Democrats across the country.
These stints in lawmaking were prelude to what would really define Andrew Jackson in the collective memory of Americans. To quote Remini directly, “Jackson’s reputation as general, as westerner, as frontiersman, as symbol, was made by the Creek War.” Part of the larger War of 1812, the Creek War sparked after a band of Creek Indians massacred white settlers at Fort Mims, Alabama. Some Creeks did not want war, and the factions split where some even supported the Americans as allies. Jackson needed all the allies he could find. As a major general he was faced with desertion and mutiny several times from his troops for want of reinforcements, supplies and food. He pulled all kinds of tactics, including threatening to kill any soldier that left. To really drive his point home, Jackson made an example of an 18-year old private who refused to get up until he was done with lunch despite an officer’s order to the contrary. The private drew his weapon and people shouted mutiny, but it was resolved without further incident. That is, until Jackson had him executed by firing squad in front of the 5,000 troops on hand. (This would be used against him in future political campaigns.) The Creek episode ended with Jackson’s troops annihilating the warring Creeks, then signing a peace treaty with the allied Creeks that had horrible terms for their people as punishment to ensure there would not be a future uprising.
There are many narrative routes to take from here. Most choose his defining battlefield moment, the Battle of New Orleans, which propelled him to rock star status and a legit presidential contender. Some veer to his nasty dueling habit and that time he caught one in the chest and shot his opponent in cold blood. I could revisit the “corrupt bargain” that kept him from the Oval Office in 1824 and his subsequent derailment of John Quincy Adams’ presidency. How about the Bank War, which featured the first major veto of a bill that was just because the President didn’t like it, vastly elevating the role of the Executive in the legislative process (and is a big reason so many people have a hard on for AJ)? Oh! Oh! I know. The first attempted assassination of a sitting President! All are worthy of further study, but I shall not be your teacher. I feel compelled to stick to the Native soil.
“Over the next few years Jackson emerged as a fire-breathing frontiersman obsessed with the Indian presence and the need to obliterate it.” That’s how Remini put it in his biography referring to his presidential subject in the last 1790s. He follows it with a direct quote from Jackson, “What motives Congress are governed by with Respect to their pacific Disposition towards Indians I know not; some say humanity dictates it; but Certainly she ought to extend an equal share of humanity to her own Citizens; in doing this Congress would act Justly and Punish the Barbarians for Murdering her innocent Citizens.” After ascending to the Presidency in 1828, Andrew Jackson put his Indian Removal plans into action with devastating effect.
Part of the settlements after the War of 1812 included Article IX of the Treaty of Ghent, which stated that all land taken from the Indians prior to 1811 must be returned. At the time, over 23 MILLION acres of land were acquired by Jackson from the Creeks. Jackson chose to ignore the order and move them along. Now-President Jackson had always feared invasion from the Gulf of Mexico and insisted the Indians be removed for national security. He saw two options: “to become industrious Citizens” and assimilate or “remove to a Country where they can retain their ancient customs, so dear to them, that they cannot give them up in exchange for regular society.” Many believed, likely including Jackson himself, that the only way to preserve any given Native tribe as a people and a culture was to get them the hell out of the way of the inevitable movement of white settlers to the South and West. Legislatively, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized Jackson to fulfill his promise, exchanging unorganized public land west of the Mississippi for lands in the east. The cost of removal was absorbed by the government and the moving Indians were to be given a year’s support for subsistence. Time to hit pause for a second. It was at this point in the book where the author, to me, goes total fanboy. What follows these details is an impassioned plea that Jackson had the Indians’ best interests at heart and he alone saved them from annihilation. That the removal was not a punishment, but a bridge to perpetuity. This argument might hold more water if he hadn’t earlier referred to Jackson as, I repeat, “a fire-breathing frontiersman obsessed with the Indian presence and the need to obliterate it.” Mississippi even named its capital after him because moving out so many Indians led the way for settlement in the state.
Look, I’m not so naïve as to think those same Natives wouldn’t have been overrun by land-grabbing whites had they been allowed to stay. But the resultant Trail of Tears surely was not the best nor the only alternative available. After the affected Cherokee were strong-armed into relinquishing their lands (some 8 million acres) and given $5 million for their troubles in late 1835, the Trail began. Of the roughly 18,000 trekking Cherokee, about 4,000 died because of the removal alone. Jackson was already comfortably retired by the time the migration actually started, but he had set everything in motion.
Jacksonian Democracy is defined in this biography as a state where the people are sovereign, their will absolute. Liberty survives only when defended by the virtuous. It sounds great. And it’s easy to co-opt. “The people” can range from the truly virtuous (think, campaigners for universal suffrage) to the self-righteous (think, white supremacists). Some use courts and legislation to defend this liberty. Others use assault rifles.
Andrew Jackson lives on as an ethos. Those that revere him see the everyman. Those that revile him see his treatment of those with skin darker than his. Sound familiar? History goes in cycles. Is it such a stretch to look at the last four years as a sampler platter of Jacksonianism? I’ll let historian Jill Lepore bring it home, “East of piffle and west of hokum, the Boy from Hope always grows up to be a Man of the People. Will we ever stop electing Andrew Jackson?”
Trivia
- First US Presidential assassination attempt – Jan 30, 1835 – in the rotunda of the Capitol building after a funeral procession for a House member
- Was a POW during the American Revolution at just 13 years old
- Owned up to 150 slaves
- Dueled at least a dozen times, killing at least one
- He really did have a big block of cheese in the White House lobby. West Wing shout-out!
Follow-up Reading
- Trail of Tears by John Ehle
- American Lion by Jon Meacham
- Andrew Jackson and the Bank War by Robert V Remini