American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

JACKSON’S MOST SIGNIFICANT rivals in national politics in the 1820s and 1830s were formidable men. There was John C. Calhoun, the tall, thin, Yale-educated South Carolinian with a brilliant mind and a weakness for the cause of states’ rights and for the preservation of slavery. There was Henry Clay of Kentucky, a man not unlike Jackson—a frontier lawyer with a taste for gambling and strong drink who rose in the world through government service, became master of a great house in Lexington, Ashland, and was driven by presidential ambitions. A career politician, Clay saw the emerging power of the West and longed to be its voice—and its first son to live in the White House. There was John Quincy Adams, the son of the first President Adams, a scholarly diplomat and legislator whose social shyness masked a bold vision of national destiny: he championed, among other things, a proposed American university and great internal construction projects. And there was Andrew Jackson.