American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

Week after week, he threatened to field a powerful force, and he knew who should lead them. “When everything is ready, I shall join them myself,” Jackson said.

At Boston’s Faneuil Hall, Daniel Webster, the great Massachusetts senator, rallied to the president’s defense, denouncing South Carolina’s defiance in epic terms: “It is nothing more nor less than resistance by force—it is disunion by force—it is secession by force—it is Civil War!” The danger was real, for there was nothing foreordained about the future of American democracy in the Jackson years. The nation itself, dating from the Declaration of Independence, was barely half a century old. Now, as Jackson began his fifth year in the White House, the United States might collapse into fratricidal conflict, and foreign powers—always a threat—watched with anticipation. In a private letter in the winter of 1833, Richard Wellesley, the Marquis Wellesley and elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, hoped for “the dissolution of the American confederacy, which I think would be a great benefit to the civilized world.”

Though the immediate issue was money—South Carolina felt oppressed by federal tariffs, which it wanted to lower—the real question, everyone knew, was about power, and ultimately about slavery. If Jackson won the showdown, then Washington would be stronger and the South weaker, and a stronger Washington meant a greater threat to the future of what Calhoun called “the peculiar domestic institution of the Southern states.”

ONE OF AMERICA’S most important and most controversial presidents, Andrew Jackson is also one of our least understood. Recalled mainly as the scourge of the Indians or as the hero of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, he is only dimly remembered in the popular imagination, too far out of mind to be instructive or intriguing. Yet of the great early presidents and Founders, Andrew Jackson is in many ways the most like us. In the saga of the Jackson presidency, one marked by both democratic triumphs and racist tragedies, we can see the American character in formation and in action. To understand him and his time helps us to understand America’s perennially competing impulses. Jackson’s life and work—and the nation he protected and preserved—were shaped by the struggle between grace and rage, generosity and violence, justice and cruelty.

He was the first president to come from the common people, not from an educated elite, and he never ceased to see himself as their champion. He was the first to build what we would recognize as a political party. He was the first to maintain a large circle of private advisers—what was called his Kitchen Cabinet—to help make policy. And he was the first to insist on the deference he thought due the chief executive as the only official elected by all the people. It was a distinction he believed made the White House, not Capitol Hill, the center of national power and national action.

The America of Andrew Jackson was a country that professed a love of democracy but was willing to live with inequality, that aimed for social justice but was prone to racism and intolerance, that believed itself one nation but was narrowly divided and fought close elections, and that occasionally acted arrogantly toward other countries while craving respect from them at the same time.

Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.

He had married the love of his life, Rachel Donelson Robards, before she was divorced from her first husband. The scandal of his marriage stayed with him through the decades, and he believed that the stress of the charges of adultery and bigamy ultimately killed her.

God’s was the only will Jackson ever bowed to, and he did not do even that without a fight.

Jackson’s pallbearers drank so much as they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral that they briefly lost the body along the way.

Here was the daring Jackson, the courageous Jackson, the cool Jackson—and the erratic, blithe, boastful Jackson, a man who saw what needed to be done in a crisis but also needed his friends to carry the day. “Follow me and I’ll save you yet” are confident, inspiring, warming words, yet it was Overton who had just rescued Jackson, not the other way around.

They may have been cash-poor but they were property-rich (in acres and slaves), and they were absolutely certain of their place in the universe, which is one definition of aristocracy.

According to family tradition, Donelson was eighteen, on his way to West Point, when he found his heart stirring for the redheaded Emily, then just ten.

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.

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had not been interested in establishing the rule of the majority. Quite the opposite: The Federalist and the debates on the floor of the Constitutional Convention largely concerned how the new nation might most effectively check the popular will. Hence the Electoral College, the election of senators by state legislatures, and limited suffrage. The prevailing term for America’s governing philosophy was republicanism—an elegant Enlightenment-era system of balances and counterweights that tended to put decisive power in the hands of elites elected, at least in theory, by a country of landowning yeomen. The people, broadly defined, were not to be trusted with too much power.

The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful, with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that will. The idea and image of a strong president claiming a mandate from the voters to unite the nation and direct the affairs of the country from the White House took permanent root in the Age of Jackson. “I have great confidence in the virtue of a great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result,” Jackson wrote in 1828. As long as the government heeds the popular will, Jackson said, “the republic is safe, and its main pillars—virtue, religion and morality—will be fostered by a majority of the people.”

thousand in 1837. Regular transatlantic steamship travel began in 1838. The Jackson years were also roiled by conversations and controversies about race, religion, immigrants, and the role of women. In 1829, the year Jackson took office, David Walker, the son of a slave, published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a popular pamphlet that worried Southern slaveowners and inspired abolitionists. The blacks of the United States, wrote Walker, were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more.” If an “attempt” was made by blacks for liberty, Walker said, the slaves should feel justified to take up arms. “Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife and dear little children? … Believe this, that it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” From 1829 to 1837, there were slave disturbances, revolts, or conspiracies in Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi, Missouri, and Louisiana. From 1830 to 1835, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina passed laws prohibiting teaching slaves to read. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator.

If he felt a temporary resort to autocracy was necessary to preserve democracy, Jackson would not hesitate.

By corruption, Jackson did not mean only scandal and mismanagement. He meant it in a broader sense: in the marshaling of power and influence by a few institutions and interests that sought to profit at the expense of the whole.

IN THE VAST stretches of Indian land, particularly in the Southwest, Jackson saw a monumental task: the removal of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi. It was, said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, “the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war.” Jackson believed in removal with all his heart, and by refusing to entertain any other scenario, he was as ferocious in inflicting harm on a people as he often was in defending the rights of those he thought of as the people. To Jackson the interests of whites were paramount in the removal question. To those who argued for Indian rights, he justified his course by arguing that removal would guarantee the survival of the tribes, which would otherwise be wiped out, and by asserting that coexistence was impossible. In an 1833 book entitled Indian Wars of the West, Timothy Flint summed up the arguments of those in favor of removal: “Collisions, murders, escapes of fugitive slaves, and the operations of laws and usages so essentially different, as those of the white and red people, will forever keep alive between the contiguous parties feuds, quarrels, and retaliations, which can never cease until one of the parties becomes extinct.” Flint concluded that advocates of removal “see the race perpetuated in opulence and peace in the fair prairies of the west. Here they are to grow up distinct red nations, with schools and churches, the anvil, the loom, and the plough...

IN THE CHURCHES and meeting rooms of organizations such as the American Sunday School Union, in pulpits and pews, the leaders of evangelical Christianity’s newly energetic campaign to bring religious precepts to public life were eager to enlist Jackson in their ranks. Church and state, these Christians believed, should be intertwined, arguing, in the words of a movement pamphlet entitled An Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government, that “Without religion, law ceases to be law, for it has no bond, and cannot hold society together.” In 1827 the Reverend Ezra Stiles Ely of Philadelphia, a prominent Presbyterian minister and leader of the national church, called for the formation of “a Christian Party in Politics.” While many religious believers pursued large moral causes such as the abolition of slavery and justice for the Indians—causes that also attracted secular supporters—many others sought to impose a narrower religious agenda on the rest of the nation. Such Christians opposed travel and the transport and delivery of mail on the Sabbath, as well as the testimony of nonbelievers in courts of law. In early 1829, Ely wrote Jackson to pass along a letter from the Reverend Lyman Beecher of Boston, one of the great ecclesiastical figures of the age, asking that Jackson not ride on Sundays en route to Washington. Ely and Beecher hoped, they said, that “no Christian ruler of a Christian people should do violence to his own professed, personal pri...

PATRONAGE, THE BANK, nullification, Indian removal, clerical influence in politics, internal improvements, respect abroad—these were the questions that would define Jackson’s White House years. They were questions about power, money, and God, and Jackson’s answers were linked to his expansive view of the office of the president. He would die for the Union; his foes were fighting to keep the possibility of secession alive. Jackson believed that the president should use his powers with a firm hand; his foes thought of the Congress as the government’s center of gravity. And so Jackson began his presidency prepared for anything, in much the way he used to travel through the Tennessee wilderness forty years before, looking out for danger, guarding those in his care, and promising to save them all yet.

The rise of a nation with a large number of voters, living at great distances from one another, dependent for information and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who, consumed with the tasks and troubles of his own life, had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader’s political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician’s message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson’s political appeal came out of the same tradition—a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance. A Scottish visitor to Albany in the late 1820s noted an American love of what he called “the spirit of electioneering, which seems to enter as an essential ingredient into the composition of everything.” But it was a highly personal kind of electioneering: “The Americans, as it appears to me, are infinitely more occupied about bringing in a given candid...

The transaction between a potential president and the people is often as much about the heart as it is about the mind. “The large masses act in politics pretty much as they do in religion,” a Democratic senator said in the Jackson years. “Every doctrine is with them, more or less, a matter of faith; received, principally, on account of their trust in the apostle.” And they trusted Jackson. They might not always agree with him, they might cringe at his excesses and his shortcomings, but at bottom they believed he was a man of strength who would set a course and follow it, who would fight their battles and crush their enemies.

WHEN THE PROCESSION arrived, the mansion was all his—and theirs. Angry with Adams for the attacks on Rachel during the campaign, Jackson had refused to call on his predecessor, and so President Adams had moved out the night before and made no public appearances on Inauguration Day. (He learned of the moment of the transfer of power when, riding his horse, he heard the Capitol cannon fire in the distance.) It is possible that Jackson’s failure to communicate directly with Adams helped lead to the disaster that followed, a legendary scene in American history that has forever linked Jackson with the image of a crowd trashing the White House. “No arrangements had been made,” Mrs. Smith noted, and “no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob.”

A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.

It was a determination that would help change the course of American politics.

As improbable as it sounds, though, the future of the presidency was at stake.

“the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”

It was a political affair, but its sexual elements also raised important questions for the women of the age. Cultural interpretations of the Eaton affair emphasize the significance of sexual purity to women in the early nineteenth century. Margaret Eaton was, fairly or not, a symbol of promiscuity. She was a threat to the domestic realm—the realm in which the women of Washington held power.

In naming directors, Biddle told McLean, “their personal independence and their fitness for that particular duty must be the primary inquiry—their political preferences only a secondary concern. The great hazard of any system of equal division of parties at a board is that it almost inevitably forces upon you incompetent or inferior persons in order to adjust the numerical balance of directors.”

Though he is largely forgotten, Evarts was one of the great American moral figures of the first decades of the nineteenth century. In speaking out against the forced removal of the Indians from their homes to lands west of the Mississippi, he was to Indian removal roughly what William Lloyd Garrison was to slavery: a force calling on the country to respect the rights and dignity of a persecuted people. Born in Vermont in 1781, the son of a farmer, Evarts entered Yale in 1798. Under its president, Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the college was suffused with the idea of Christian service. “In whatever sphere of life you are placed, employ all your powers and all your means of doing good, as diligently and vigorously as you can,” Dwight preached in a sermon entitled “On Personal Happiness.” For Dwight and, ultimately, for Evarts, faith was about not only personal conversion but social transformation and the health of the nation. In their minds, and in the minds of thousands of American believers, there was a direct connection between the godliness of the people and the fate of the country.

Jackson believed, too, that virtue was essential to the maintenance of a republic, but he thought religious and philanthropic organizations were as corruptible and susceptible to manipulation by the powerful as any other human institution. Evangelical leaders he referred to as “religious enthusiasts” were standing in the way of Indian removal, one of his most cherished projects. While religion was important in his private life (“Gentlemen, do what you please in my house,” Jackson would tell guests, but “I am going to church”), he believed in keeping religion and politics, as well as church and state, as separate as one reasonably could. Despite his lifelong commitment to Presbyterianism, Jackson had never taken the public step of what was known as “joining the church”—that is, making a public confession of faith in a particular congregation, which in turn enabled one to receive Holy Communion. Around 1826, according to an early biographer, he explained to Rachel the reasons for his reluctance: he did not want to appear to be making a show of his faith for public consumption—a show that might provoke attacks. “My dear, if I were to do it now, it would be said all over the country that I had done it for political effect,” Jackson said. “My enemies would all say so. I can not do it now, but I promise you that when once more I am clear of politics I will join the church.”

Jackson liked to think of himself as first and foremost a republican—a man who believed the best government was the one that meddled least in the affairs of the governed. For Jackson, the primary duty of federal p...

“Some foundation there must be to give rise to so much talk,” Louisa Adams wrote to her husband of Margaret’s reputation, “but my own belief is that it is a trick of the Carolina party to sow discord among the Administration and to get the W[ar] D[epartment] into their own hands.” Mrs. Adams was on to something.

That a president would have wide power to reward loyalists with offices, both to thank them for their steadfastness and to ensure that he had a cadre of people at hand who would presumably execute his policies with energy and enthusiasm, is now a given, but Jackson was the first president to remake the federal establishment on such a large scale. The old officeholders could be forgiven for imagining themselves immune to the vagaries of politics. By James Parton’s count, Washington and Adams had removed 9 people each; Jefferson, 39 (illustrating the victory of the Democrat-Republicans over the Federalists); Madison, 5; Monroe, 9; and John Quincy Adams, 2. By the time Jackson was done, he had turned out fewer than one might suppose, but still a historic number: about 919, just under 10 percent of the government. And he had made a particularly high number of changes among those civil servants directly appointed by the president himself.

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.

The pastor of the city’s Third Presbyterian Church, Ely was among the best-known clerics of the day. Christian voters, Ely had said in his celebrated 1827 sermon on a “Christian Party in Politics,” should join forces to keep “Pagans” and “Mohammedans” (Muslims) from office as well as deists like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Unitarians like John Quincy Adams. The essence of the sermon: “Every ruler should be an avowed and a sincere friend of Christianity.… Our civil rulers ought to act a religious part in all the relations which they sustain.”

In his vision of Christian voters marching as to war, Ely was attempting to undo the work of decades by ensuring that only avowed Protestants would hold public office.

The theocratic kingdom Ely hoped for was not at hand, but the evangelicals’ challenge to the mainstream, so manifest in the Jackson administration, was to be a constant force in the life of the nation.

The Southern states were anxious for more land, especially to grow cotton, and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes held rich acreage—great

Writing the Creeks, Jackson explained why he thought removal was essential. “Friends and Brothers, listen: Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace.… Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it,” Jackson wrote. “There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.” The message was unmistakable: to survive, the Indians had to surrender, and go.

The ideology behind the whites’ views of the Indians was driven by religious fervor and land fever.

In the first year of the administration of Andrew Jackson, the governor of Georgia, George C. Gilmer, said that “treaties were expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without bloodshed to yield up what civilized peoples had a right to possess by virtue of that command of the Creator delivered to man upon his formation—be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”

Promises, treaties, and assurances of fatherly solicitude and care were, in the end, worth nothing. For public consumption and to assuage private consciences, advocates of removal used the language of religion or of paternalism. Jackson spoke of himself as the Indians’ “Great Father” all the time—and he almost certainly believed what he was saying. He thought he knew best, and he had convinced himself long before that he was acting on the best interests of both the Indians and white settlers.

But the raw fact remains that the American government—and, by extension, the American people of the time—wanted the land. So they took it.

Power was paramount; successive presidents found it impossible to balance moral concerns with the practicalities of the white American appetite for Indian land.

The politics of the issue as Jackson came to power in the White House reflected the ambivalence many white Americans felt about the Indians. The whites wanted the land but knew, or strongly suspected, that it was wrong to drive the Indians out.

Note the first step: emigration.

While he took an extreme view of Indian matters, however, he was on the extreme edge of the mainstream, not wholly outside it. Jackson was neither a humanitarian nor a blind bigot. He thought of himself as practical. And enough Americans believed that Indian removal was necessary in the late 1820s and 1830s that Jackson was able to accomplish it politically. The moral case was not hard to make, and men like Evarts and New Jersey senator Theodore Frelinghuysen did so beautifully. In the April 1830 debates over the Indian removal bill, Frelinghuysen would say: “However mere human policy, or the law of power, or the tyrant’s plea of expediency, may have found it convenient at any or in all times to recede from the unchangeable principles of eternal justice, no argument can shake the political maxim—that where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be, in the free exercise of his own modes of thought, government, and conduct.” And: “We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our Southern frontier—it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forests, and still, like the horseleech, our insatiated cupidity cries, give, give.” And finally: “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No.” But the answer was, tragically, yes. Indian removal was possible because enough white ...