A more appealing, sanitized version of the backwoodsman candidate surfaced in the early 1820s. It portrayed him as an outsider, a man of natural talents drawn from the “native forests,” who was capable of cleaning up the corruption in Washington. His nomination provoked “sneers and derision from the myrmidons of power at Washington,” wrote one avid Jackson man, who decried the “degeneracy of American feeling in that city.” Jackson wasn’t a government minion or a pampered courtier, and thus his unpolished and unstatesmanlike ways were an advantage.
