American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

He would be gracious in conquest, but he wanted the conquered to acknowledge defeat and ask how to make reparations.

One reason the story may have been “confused” and even “unintelligible” to the former president is that those who knew all were not talking much, and those who knew only a little were talking a great deal—a common feature of life in Washington.

Amend the Constitution, Jackson said, to allow the people to have their choice, but—sensitive to the possibility that a president, too, could be corrupt—limit the executive to a single four- or six-year term, thus checking the danger of a despot.

Jackson believed the country was being controlled by a kind of congressional-financial-bureaucratic complex in which the needs and concerns of the unconnected were secondary to those who were on the inside.

“Executive encroachment.… The histories of all nations which have lost their liberties lay before them and they saw on their pages that arbitrary Executive discretion and will … had been the destroyers of national liberty throughout the greater part of the world … and the fathers did intend … to establish a government of law and of checks and restraints upon Executive will, in which no case should exist in which the fate of the humblest citizen whether in private or in public life could depend upon the arbitrary will of a single man.”

Jackson was committed to the idea that if left to their own devices, the elite would serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of the many.

“I foresaw the powerful effect, produced by this moneyed aristocracy, upon the purity of elections, and of legislation; that it was daily gaining strength, and by its secret operations was adding to it.”

calico “serves to show their loyalty to the Jackson party”; in 1828, Old Hickory’s partisans had worn it as a sign of support for their candidate.

Webster said: “They significantly declare that it is time to calculate the value of the Union; and their aim seems to be to enumerate, and to magnify, all the evils, real and imaginary, which the Government under the Union produces. The tendency of all these ideas and sentiments is obviously to bring the Union into discussion as a mere question of present and temporary expediency; nothing more than a mere matter of profit and loss.”

Images of war were on everyone’s minds. “It is a kind of moral gladiatorship in which characters are torn to pieces, and arrows, yes, poisoned arrows, which tho’ not seen are deeply felt, are hurled by the combatants against each other,” Mrs. Smith said. “The Senate chamber is the present arena and never were the amphitheatres of Rome more crowded by the highest ranks of both sexes.”

The climax of the battle came on January 27, a cold Wednesday. With Donelson and Lewis in the Capitol, ready to take word back to Jackson down Pennsylvania Avenue, Webster, dressed in a Revolutionary blue coat with a white cravat, brought his most important speech to a close. He stood to Calhoun’s left, and when his eyes wandered upward they would rest on a glorious Rembrandt Peale portrait of Washington captioned PATRIAE PATER, a visual icon of the verbal creed Webster was enunciating in the crimson-draped chamber. Addressing the presiding officer, as was customary, Webster offered words that became one of the noblest passages in the American canon: I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counselor in the affairs of this Government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the People when it shall be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in...

Daniel Webster of Dartmouth, distinguished member of the Supreme Court bar, legendary writer and orator, was about as unlike Andrew Jackson as anyone could be. Webster disagreed with Jackson on virtually every other major issue, including the role of executive power. Yet these two men from opposite ends of the nation found themselves allied on the country’s most fundamental question. Convinced that the Union should stand strong, with the people at its mystical center, Jackson did not believe any amount of Southern sophistry—as he saw it—could destroy America. Webster’s achievement in the last week of January 1830 was to add the elements of emotion and imagination to a debate that had been more about law and interpretation. Abstraction was now pitted against patriotism, details against ideals, particulars against the universal. It was the kind of war Andrew Jackson fought well, and he was indebted to Daniel Webster for arming the soldiers of Union with the weapons of light and memory and hope. On the other hand, Calhoun’s forces believed that they, not Jackson and his followers, were battling for the true spirit of the Founders against the usurpations of a power-hungry president. Webster had redefined—in some ways invented—an idea of perpetual union that appealed to a growing continental power seeking strength at home and respect abroad. For many, allegiance to the Union was now no longer a debatable point. It was a given, or ought to be—and if some failed to salute, then t...

Livingston’s legal training and his ambivalent view of power and position—he liked them, but hated angling for them—gave him a nuanced understanding of politics and statecraft.

The cost of partisanship for partisanship’s sake—of seeing politics as blood sport, where the kill is the only object of the exercise—was, Livingston said, too high for a free society to pay. Differences of opinion and doctrine and personality were one thing, and such distinctions formed the natural bases of what Livingston called “the necessary and … the legitimate parties existing in all free Governments.” Parties were one thing; partisanship another. “The spirit of which I speak,” Livingston said as he argued against zealotry, “… creates imaginary and magnifies real causes of complaint; arrogates to itself every virtue—denies every merit to its opponents; secretly entertains the worst designs … mounts the pulpit, and, in the name of a God of mercy and peace, preaches discord and vengeance; invokes the worst scourges of Heaven, war, pestilence, and famine, as preferable alternatives to party defeat; blind, vindictive, cruel, remorseless, unprincipled, and at last frantic, it communicates its madness to friends as well as foes; respects nothing, fears nothing.”

“The veto message was a hodgepodge of constitutional and expedient arguments, but in its very logical fuzziness lay its political strength,”

“Jackson was the first President to advance the theory that the President was the representative of the people and that a mandate from the ballot box warranted his intervention in the legislative process,” wrote the scholar C. Perry Patterson in 1947, two years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, a president who had adopted a Jacksonian view of the White House’s power. Jackson, Patterson said, had “asserted that the veto was a legislative power given to the President without directions or limitations, and that the President was even more competent than the Congress by virtue of his national and representative character to judge the wishes of the electorate.”

If Jackson wanted a stronger presidency, then he would have to pay politically with charges of autocracy and overreaching.

Those who backed Jackson stood to be rewarded by favorable coverage in administration newspapers and might be heeded on matters of local patronage.

“General Jackson rules by his personal popularity, which his partisans in the Senate dare not encounter by opposing anything that he does; and while that popularity shall last, his majorities in both houses of Congress will stand by him for good or evil. It has totally broken down in the Senate both the esprit de corps and the combination against the Executive, which, from the last session of Mr. Jefferson’s administration, had presided in many of their deliberations and governed many of their decisions.”

Jackson had thus made himself arguably the most powerful president since the creation of the office forty years before.

South Carolina’s course was beginning to be set.

Jackson welcomed a new member of his circle, Francis Preston Blair, who had moved from Kentucky to Washington to become the founding editor of a new administration newspaper. The brainchild of the politically brilliant Amos Kendall—who had run his newspaper in Kentucky, the Argus, with the help of Blair—the newspaper, to be called the Globe, was to be of what Jackson called “the true faith,” meaning it was to support the White House totally and without reservation. Kendall was a critical figure in Jackson’s universe. Harriet Martineau, a British writer touring the United States, once recorded a brief Kendall sighting. “I was fortunate enough once to catch a glimpse of the invisible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America,” Martineau said. “He is supposed to be the moving spring of the whole administration; the thinker, planner, and doer; but it is all in the dark.… Work is done, of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with a superstitious wonder; and the invisible Amos Kendall has the credit of it all.” Blair was Kendall’s friend, but he would soon become a force in his own right. And the most important force of all, Jackson, was feeling triumphant, as well he should have: Blair’s coming gave Jackson absolute power over his own newspaper—which in turn meant absolute power over how the country, or at least the part of the country that read the administration’s paper, saw the White House.

“The conquering Hero is again in the field, and it must now be seen who are his friends and who are his foes,” the paper said.

Mr. Calhoun’s name is to be run as a candidate, not because it is expected he can be elected, but to defeat the election by the people, and thus throw it into the House of Representatives, where it can be managed as to their best … interests.…

So it was that the former secretary of war decided to kill the former secretary of the Treasury.

treasurer of the United States),

(the register of the Treasury).

In a civil struggle, he said, “all the kindly feelings of the human heart would be eradicated, and for them would be substituted those burning and savage passions … which pour rancours into the bosoms of friends” and which, in the end, could lead to “the spectacle of brother armed against brother, of parent against child, and of the child against his parent.”

Jackson’s vision of direct democracy opened the way to mob rule in which an exercised majority had the power to make bad policy and persecute those who, in the spirit of the Constitution, deserved protection.

IT WAS A time of division, but the mere fact of political and cultural division—however

however serious and heartfelt the issues separating American from American may be—is not itself a cause for great alarm and lamentation. Such splits in the nation do make public life meaner and less attractive and might, in some circumstances, produce cataclysmic results.

On Tuesday, May 15, 1832, after a ceremonial feast of boiled dog with representatives of other Great Lakes tribes, Black Hawk sent emissaries to arrange a parley with the white soldiers. But the militiamen seem to have had a good deal to drink, and while accounts are confused, it appears clear that they, not Black Hawk’s warriors, shed first blood. Forty of Black Hawk’s men then crushed the Illinois militia, killing twelve (only three Sacs died, and they had been among those seeking a parley). Hearing the reports, Jackson ordered Winfield Scott into action, putting the general in command of a thousand federal troops. Slowed by a deadly outbreak of cholera among his men, Scott did not make it to the front until after the war was over. Landing at Fort Gratiot, north of Detroit, some of Scott’s soldiers, in terror from watching the sick die on board, escaped to the forests, only to die on the run; their corpses, it was said, were eaten by wolves and wild hogs. Along the Mississippi, the Black Hawk War basically ended with the Battle of Bad Axe on Thursday, August 2, 1832, where hundreds of Indians, including women and children, were killed, many of them drowning as they tried to escape across the river.

THE “NOW LET him enforce it” remark is like the more colorful images from holy scripture: historically questionable but philosophically true.

Even God became an issue of contention as the congressional session went on, with Jackson and Henry Clay squaring off over church and state amid a plague. The trouble had begun in Quebec, when a ship arrived from Europe in June 1832. Forty-two of the passengers were dead or dying from cholera, a communicable illness spread through food and water and caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which strikes the intestines, leading to diarrhea, vomiting, and, in the worst cases, death through dehydration. In two weeks the disease struck New York with such ferocity that the mayor canceled its Fourth of July parade; 2,565 people in the city ultimately died. From Philadelphia to Baltimore to Washington, west to Cincinnati and Chicago and south to New Orleans, the disease terrified the country. On June 27, 1832, Henry Clay proposed that Jackson declare a day of prayer and fasting to seek divine relief from the outbreak. The proposition was good politics—people in the afflicted states might be grateful, and religious believers who were undecided in the presidential race could see Clay’s initiative as evidence of a good soul who shared the essence of their faith. Yet as he had been when Ezra Stiles Ely made the case for the election of “Christian Rulers,” Jackson was reluctant to mix God and government so overtly.

“I am no sectarian, though a lover of the Christian religion,” he said while in the White House. “I do not believe that any who shall be so fortunate as to be received to heaven through the atonement of our blessed Savior will be asked whether they belonged to the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Episcopalian, the Baptist, or the Roman Catholic [faiths]. All Christians are brethren, and all true Christians know they are such because they love one another. A true Christian loves all, immaterial to what sect or church he may belong.”

Taney demurred, citing the press of business before the Supreme Court, but, given his own opposition to recharter, was pleased that Carson was so determined to vote with Jackson against the Bank. After the vote, Taney was surprised to hear that Carson had voted with Biddle. “Upon my return I mentioned what had passed to a friend … who[said]that[Carson] … had obtained a loan of twenty thousand dollars from the Bank, and had changed his opinion.” Reflecting on the sequence of events, Taney was philosophical about what had transpired, seeing in it evidence of both perennial human weakness and the threat that an institution such as the Bank posed in a democracy: Now I do not mean to say that he was directly bribed to give his vote. From the character he sustained and from what I knew of him I think he would have resented anything that he regarded as an attempt to corrupt him. But he wanted the money, and felt grateful for the favor, and perhaps thought that an institution which was so useful to him, and had behaved with so much kindness, could not be injurious or dangerous to the public, and that it would be as well to continue it. Men when under the influence of interest or passion often delude themselves thoughtlessly, and do not always acknowledge even to themselves the motives upon which they really act.… It was one of the dangers arising from this mammoth money power, that its very duties as collecting and disbursing agent brought it constantly in contact with members of ...

JACKSON’S DECISION WAS framed in sweeping terms, arguing that the goal of government should be to better the lives of the many, not reward the few.

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” Jackson said, continuing: Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.

The expectation was that the government in Columbia would move toward nullifying the federal tariff—a step that could mean the state would seize the federal forts and installations in Charleston harbor.

The 1832 contest featured much that was to become commonplace in American politics: national nominating conventions, intense tactical organization, considered use of the incumbent’s time and energies in appearances before the public, and an interesting but unsuccessful third-party bid.

But the king understood what the commoners wanted, and needed. They wanted a champion, and needed—or at least thrilled to—the drama of the new kind of campaigning.

“We do not recollect before to have heard of a President of the United States descending in person into the political arena.”

It was, in a way, politics as entertainment, but it was also a serious, even sacred undertaking.

The Constitution, he said, “forms a government, not a league.… It is a government in which all the people are represented.”

Behold it as the asylum where the wretched and the oppressed find a refuge and support.

Disunion by armed force is treason.

The multitude believe and applaud all that their leaders say, and are blindly led on to their destruction.”

Two months afterward, on Wednesday, May 1, 1833, Jackson observed in a letter that “the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question.” Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.

The most enduring political rhetoric both inspires and instructs, lifting an audience outside its natural selfish cares to see how a certain course will, in the end, serve a nation and its people well. This is a matter of more than soaring prose or vivid imagery, though both are crucial. It is also about arming the audience with facts or thoughts they have not yet known or contemplated. Jackson’s second inaugural address met both tests. Withstand the temptations of the moment, Jackson was saying, and the nation would be all the stronger for it, all the more respected, all the more special. Jackson’s words were not those of an incipient tyrant, or a shallow thinker, or a barely restrained bully. They were the words of a man who thought of himself as an American first and last—not a Carolinian, not a Tennessean, not a Westerner, not a Southerner, but an American.