American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

Jackson’s decisions about federal appointments involved much more than the lingering historical image of the “spoils system,” a principle summed up by New York senator William Marcy in a speech he delivered about the new class of politicians: “They see nothing wrong in the rule, that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” Jackson was far from the last American president to arrive in Washington with the cry that the preceding administration had made a grand mess of things. Yet he firmly believed he was coming to power after a long period of sustained official corruption—he called the government “the Augean Stable,” seeing himself as Hercules—and viewed what he broadly referred to as “reform” as a moral as well as a political task. In Jackson’s mind, sins in the public sphere represented, as he said, a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage.” There was always graft, which was regrettable, but what truly worried Jackson was what he saw as a pattern by Washington officials to deploy public money and means to perpetuate and promote themselves and their allies in office. Such corruption, as Jackson saw it, was possibly fatal to the American experiment, a fear grounded in the old notion that society was organic, and that an affliction in one part of the state could infect and even kill the whole.