The Life of Andrew Jackson

by Robert V. Remini

Jackson’s Bank veto is the most important veto ever issued by a President. Its novel doctrines advanced the process already in train by which the presidency was transformed and strengthened. To begin with, Jackson accomplished something quite unprecedented by writing this veto. Previous Presidents had employed the veto a total of nine times. In forty years under the Constitution only nine acts of Congress had been struck down by the chief executive, and only three of these dealt with important issues. In every instance the President claimed that the offending legislation violated the Constitution. It was therefore generally accepted that a question of a bill’s constitutionality was the only reason to apply a veto. Jackson disagreed. He believed that a President could kill a bill for any reason—political, social, economic, or whatever—when he felt it injured the nation and the people. The implications of such an interpretation were enormous. In effect it claimed for the President the right to participate in the legislative process. Jackson invaded the exclusive province of Congress. According to his view, Congress must now consider the President’s wishes on all bills before enacting them, or risk a veto. It must defer to the will of the executive if it expects to legislate successfully. Jackson’s interpretation of presidential prerogatives, there-fore, essentially altered the relationship between the legislative and executive branches of government. The President now had a ...

“The Union must be preserved,” Jackson reiterated, “and its laws duly executed.” Poinsett was directed to tell the Unionists in South Carolina “that perpetuity is stamped upon the constitution by the blood of our Fathers.” Nothing could dissolve the Union. Nothing. Constitutional amendment was the process provided to secure needed changes. For this reason a state may not secede, much less “hazard” the Union. “Nullification therefore means insurrection and war; and the other states have a right to put it down.”23

The central question of the nullification controversy, raised by the tariff dispute, was whether the states had the right to declare federal law invalid within their boundaries (and, if necessary, to secede from the Union) in order to protect their rights. And Andrew Jackson had an absolutely clear answer to this question. It was simple and direct. It may not have been historically accurate, but he sincerely believed it to be so. The federal government, he said, was “based on a confederation of perpetual union” by an act of the people. A state may not invalidate federal law and may never secede. Moreover, the people, not the states, granted sovereignty to the federal government through the Constitution. They called the Union into existence, they created the federal government, and they granted federal power. These actions, he insisted, were taken by the people at conventions when they ratified the Constitution. And in ratifying the Constitution the people automatically amended their state constitutions to accord with the new arrangement.

Jackson did not deny the “natural right” of rebellion when all effort to redress oppression had been exhausted. But all such effort had not been exhausted in the present instance, he insisted.5

President Jackson marks an important break with the past. He is the first and only statesman of the early national period to deny publicly the right of secession.

One factor compelling South Carolina’s withdrawal from a stance of confrontation was the cool reception the doctrine of nullification received from other southern states. The Alabama legislature, for example, pronounced the doctrine “unsound in theory and dangerous in practice.” Georgia said it was “mischievous,” “rash and revolutionary.” Mississippi lawmakers chided the South Carolinians for acting with “reckless precipitancy.”23 “Nullification is dead,” declared Jackson. But “the next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.”

the President explained his symptoms to Dr. Physick, ending with a typical Jacksonian admonition. “Now, Doctor, I can do any thing you think proper to order, and bear as much as most men. There are only two things I can’t give up: one is coffee, and the other is tobacco.”17

He was to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Harvard University and nothing under heaven was going to prevent his appearance. John Quincy Adams, an overseer of the university, was appalled. As “an affectionate child of our Alma Mater,” he wrote, he could not witness “her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”26 But Jackson was no illiterate frontiersman, much less a barbarian, even though his grammar and spelling lacked “refinement.” He combined grace of manner with impressive intellectual power. And although he was indifferent to spelling he did, on occasion, write with eloquence and enormous stylistic skill.

What made the situation all the more precarious was Jackson’s ignorance of financial matters and his total lack of appreciation for the fiscal value of the BUS and its importance to the American economy. The Bank was interlaced with the economy. To damage it of necessity would devastate the financial and business communities. Moreover, the men associated with Jackson in this perilous “experiment” were equally ignorant.

It was during this “Panic session” that a new party—the Whig party—emerged. The forces producing it had been in train for a number of years, but the pressures of the Bank War and Jackson’s imperial presidency finally brought it into being during the late winter and early spring of 1834. National Republicans, Bank men, nullifiers, high-tariff advocates, friends of internal improvements, states’ righters, and—most particularly—all those who abominated Jackson or his reforms slowly converged into a new political coalition that quite appropriately assumed the name “Whig.” Derived from British politics, the name signified opposition to the monarchical party which advocated strong executive leadership. Also, the name was associated with the patriotic cause during the American Revolution.

As a group, Whigs tended to be socially conservative, economically venturesome, and politically hostile to “Jacksonian equalitarianism.” For the most part they included industrialists, bankers, “go-ahead” businessmen, and conservative farmers from all sections.

“The President is the direct representative of the American people,” Jackson declared. Moreover, he is “responsible to them.” That last statement was totally novel. It was a modern idea in keeping with the democratic spirit of the times, but it was certainly not one the Whigs could approve with their philosophy about legislative government constituting the basis of republican rule. They insisted that the President was responsible to Congress. The opposition press agreed that Jackson’s statement about his rights and his relationship to the American people had “produced everywhere as great a sensation as within the hall of Congress.”

In introducing and ultimately winning acceptance of his interpretation of presidential powers, Jackson liberated the chief executive from the position of prime minister responsible only to Congress. With Jackson, the chief executive no longer served simply as the head of a coordinate branch of the government; no longer was he restricted in his actions by what the Congress would allow him. Henceforth he could assert himself as the spokesman of all the people and by the skillful use of his powers force the legislature to follow his lead. This did not free him from the political necessity of working with Congress to accomplish the public will, but it did allow him to assume greater control of the government and to dominate and direct public affairs.

President Jackson achieved something as unique as it was triumphant, namely, the elimination of the national debt!

new year began on a spectacular note it soon soured when Jackson was nearly killed in an assassination attempt. It was the first time a President had been attacked with intent to kill.

The would-be assassin turned out to be one Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter. He was quickly hurried off to “civil authorities” and incarcerated. When the House sergeant-at-arms asked him why he attempted to assassinate the President, Lawrence replied that Jackson had murdered his father three years before. He also claimed to be the legitimate heir to the British throne and that Jackson had impeded his succession. “There is nothing but madness in all this,” said John Tyler. Indeed. Lawrence was immediately brought to trial but on April 11, 1835, he was found not guilty because “he was under the influence of insanity.”3 He was committed to an asylum. Said one newspaper dolefully: “It is a sign of the times,”4 a sign that something powerful and frightening was operating in the country which was changing its character and mood.

Poverty, urban crime and violence, blatant and vulgar materialism, the disparity of wealth and privilege spawned by the industrial revolution, racial and religious bigotry—these, too, increased. Social conditions fell to such a depth that reform movements had already begun. These were organized attempts to change and better American society, to combat materialism, to raise the quality of education, to advance the rights of women, to free the slaves, to ameliorate working conditions, to improve penal and mental institutions, and to establish temperance as a national virtue.6 The assassination attempt, therefore, was only one more indication that something was terribly amiss with American life and needed attention and healing.

Historians generally have tended to deny that Jackson held any firm philosophy of government that guided his actions. They choose to believe that he was principally motivated by private animosities and deep-seated prejudices, by passion and pride. They do him a grave injustice. Actually Jackson not only subscribed to a definite philosophy of government but he imposed that philosophy on his party and because of it markedly hurried the democratizing process that had already begun.

In keeping with this principle, Jackson tried to abolish the College of Electors in the selection of the chief executive by proposing a constitutional amendment. In addition, he said the President should serve no more than a single term of either four or six years. Jackson advocated a single term in order to place the President beyond the reach of improper—“corrupting”—influences. Moreover, he believed that United States senators should be directly elected by the people. Also, their term should be limited to four years and they should be subject to removal. In Jackson’s mind, the Senate was an elitist body of men committed to the principles of aristocracy and totally unrepresentative of the American people.

ONE OF ANDREW JACKSON’S MORE NOTABLE, and deeply felt, failures as President was his inability to bring Texas into the Union.

anyone at virtually any hour could walk into the mansion to see the President and shake his hand. One foreign visitor was stunned to find no guard at the White House. A porter opened the front door when he knocked, a single servant ushered him into a large parlor, and Old Hickory interrupted what he was doing to greet the visitor and chat with him for a few minutes.

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There were many specifics to Jackson’s accomplishments as President. He saved the Union and put down nullification. That above all was his crowning achievement. Almost as important was his unique success in paying off the national debt. As for “reform,” Jackson did indeed— according to a recent study on the subject—provide the American people with one of the most honest and least corrupt administrations in the early history of this nation.11

PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON had been in office hardly a month when he caught a bad cold, ate and drank to excess in order to combat it, and succumbed to pneumonia. He was the first President to die in office. The day following his death, John Tyler, a staunch states’-righter from Virginia and a former Democrat, succeeded to the presidency and both parties waited anxiously to see whether his policies would take a Whig or Democratic configuration.