American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

But to some degree politics and statecraft always involve the character of the leader, and the character of Andrew Jackson was, in the end, well suited for the demands of the White House. He was strong and shrewd, patriotic and manipulative, clear-eyed and determined.

Closing his inaugural address, he said he longed to “foster with our brethren in all parts of the country a spirit of liberal concession and compromise, and, by reconciling our fellow-citizens to those partial sacrifices which they must unavoidably make for the preservation of a greater good, to recommend our invaluable government and Union to the confidence and affections of the American people.” Evincing a practical understanding of how a leader could make real an idealistic vision of public life, Jackson was engaged in presidential leadership of the highest order, for he was being forthright about a central truth of a democratic republic: that if each part made a sacrifice of some kind, then the whole could thrive, producing, hopefully, what Jackson called “a united and happy people.”

Standing armies and military chieftains can no longer uphold tyranny against the resistance of public opinion. The mass of the people have more to fear from combinations of the wealthy and professional classes—from an aristocracy which through the influence of riches and talents, insidiously employed, sometimes succeeds in preventing political institutions, however well adjusted, from securing the freedom of the citizen.…

He would, he said, call in loans and restrict credit in order to create a popular backlash against Jackson. It was a bald, bold maneuver—and one that played into Jackson’s caricature of the Bank as an aristocratic institution more interested in self-perpetuation than in the good of the country.

Is Andrew Jackson to bow the knee to the golden calf?

“in the case Biddle’s mob ever showed themselves around the Capitol to threaten the Houses, they should see the ringleaders hanging as high as Haman about the square.”

“We are in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government, and to the concentration of all power in the hands of one man,”

“There are but two channels … through which the President can communicate with the people—by messages to the two Houses of Congress, as expressly provided for in the Constitution, or by proclamation, setting forth the interpretations which he places upon a law it has become his official duty to execute. Going beyond is one among the alarming signs of the times which portend the overthrow of the Constitution and the approach of despotic power.”

He was, he insisted, the defender of the liberties of the people. The Senate, however, was, as he put it, seeking to “concentrate in the hands of a body not directly amenable to the people a degree of influence and power dangerous to their liberties and fatal to the Constitution of their choice.”

“Infatuated man! Blinded by ambition—intoxicated by flattery and vanity! Who, that is the least acquainted with the human heart; who, that is conversant with the page of history, does not see, under all this, the workings of a dark, lawless, and insatiable ambition …? He claims to be, not only the representative, but the immediate representative of the American people! What effrontery! What boldness of assertion! The immediate representative! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors.”

Clay said that the “army and the navy, thank God, are sound and patriotic to the core. They will not allow themselves to be servile instruments of treason, usurpation, and the overthrow of civil liberty, if any such designs now exist.”

“The cursed Negroes were all so stupid and confused that nothing could be done until some white one came to their relief.”

The odds of two guns failing to fire during the attack, it was later determined, were 125,000 to one.

Deprived of solid evidence of a broader plot against the president, Blair and the Globe settled for blaming anti-Jackson Senate speeches for the attack. Because of the assaults of men like Calhoun, the Globe asserted, Lawrence, a “sullen and deep-brooding fanatic” who was “violent in his expressions of hostility to the Administration of the President,” took up arms. “Is it … a strained inference that this malignant partisan might have been fired to commit the deed by the violent denunciations fulminated against the President?”

he freed none in his will.

Jackson may have opposed states’ rights when it came to nullification, but on slavery, as on the Indian question, he was not interested in reform. Jackson, who believed in the virtues of democracy and individual liberties so clearly and so forcefully for whites, was blinded by the prejudices of his age, and could not see—or chose not to see, for other Americans of the age did recognize the horror of the way of life Jackson upheld—that the promise of the Founding, that all men are created equal, extended to all.

A slave at the Hermitage, Alfred, once had a revealing exchange with Roeliff Brinkerhoff, a tutor Andrew Jackson, Jr., had hired for his children (Brinkerhoff was later a prison reformer and the author of a seminal text on military logistics). “Alfred was a man of powerful physique, and had the brains and executive powers of a major-general,” Brinkerhoff recalled. “He was thoroughly reliable, and was fully and deservedly trusted in the management of plantation affairs.” Brinkerhoff ran into Alfred one evening on the grounds but found him “unusually reticent and gloomy.”

Looking at Brinkerhoff, Alfred asked: “You white folks have easy times, don’t you?” “Why so, Alfred?” I asked. “You have liberty to come and go as you will,” he replied. I soon found that he was full of discontent with his lot, and I thought it wise to turn his attention to the brighter side.… I showed him how freedom had its burdens as well as slavery; that God had so constituted human life that every one in every station had a load to carry, and that he was the wisest and the happiest who contentedly did his duty, and looked to a world beyond, where all inequalities would be made even. Alfred did not seem disposed to argue the question with me, or to combat my logic, but he quietly looked up into my face and popped this ques...

Led by the president, the Jackson circle lived with a wrong, profited from it, and actively protected it. And so, while Andrew Donelson was in the White House, securing—or trying to secure—new slaves for Poplar Grove, Jackson, vacationing with Emily and the children at the Rip Raps, moved to curb the ...

If Jackson had been a president of consistent principle, the issue would have been clear. He was the defender of the Union, the conqueror of nullification, the hero of democracy. An American organization was exercising its constitutional right to free speech and was using the public mails—mails that were to be open to all—to do so. But Jackson was not a president of consistent principle. He was a politician, subject to his own passions and predilections, and those passions and predilections pressed him to cast his lot with those with whom he agreed on the question at hand—slavery—which meant suppressing freedom of speech. He had done the same in the case of the Cherokees and the state of Georgia, allowing a particular issue to trump his more general vision of government, a vision in which people who obeyed the laws were entitled to the protection of the president.

How to exert control over the mob, make clear his own powers, and yet not advance the abolitionist cause? Jackson and Kendall chose the simplest route: they tacitly allowed the suppression of the antislavery mailings. THE EPISODE AFFIRMED the power of the president, and it captured the intransigence of the slaveholding class. “So the pamphlet controversy in that winter of 1835–36 first showed to the broad public of the new nation that the defenders of slavery were proposing an intellectual blockade,” wrote the scholar William Lee Miller. “And it began to suggest, therefore, that that institution, even if confined to the South, was incompatible with republican government. Not only was the enslaved black person denied every freedom, but now the white person was to be denied the freedom to talk about it.”

Van Buren, said fellow New Yorker William Seward, was “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard old man.”

The Republican savored baiting Donelson and those in Jackson’s shadow. In July, the paper kept raising the stakes. “We do not feel disposed, either from inclination or duty, to enter the lists against the great Jackson himself, but to all the would-be little Jacksons, who cloak their designs under his name, and hope to ride into office upon his back, we say—come on—stand out like men, and fight upon your own hook,” it said on July 14.

The significance of the episode of the Republican’s attacks is how it illuminates Jackson’s determination to have everything arranged to suit himself, and to secure the image he so cherished. So it was that Jackson would authorize, or tacitly allow, political work for Van Buren while insisting that he would never do such a thing.

Osceola led the Seminole war party, and the conflict had the usual elements: white greed, internal Indian divisions (Osceola had murdered a rival Seminole who had chosen to comply with removal), and, for whites, alarming word that escaped slaves were finding sanctuary among the Seminoles.

IN NORTHERN GEORGIA in these late autumn and early winter months of 1835–36, Jackson’s men were completing the work of Cherokee removal. On Tuesday, December 29, 1835, the administration signed the Treaty of New Echota, a pact purportedly with the Cherokee Nation setting terms for the final removal of the tribe west of the Mississippi. The Cherokees who signed the treaty, however, were not representative of the tribe as a whole. They were part of what was known as the “Treaty party,” a group in opposition to Chief John Ross’s “National party.” Ross, who represented an estimated 16,000 out of 17,000 Cherokees, was against removal and, if removal had to come, he wanted to hold out for a more advantageous deal with the government. But the Treaty party took the current offer, and the administration chose to believe that the signers had the authority to commit the entire Cherokee Nation.

The time came, but the vast majority of Cherokees had not left their lands. Thus began the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokees to the West. The military could be brutal, and an estimated 4,000 of the 16,000 Cherokees who were forced out died along the way. “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,” said one Georgia volunteer.

In his farewell address in March 1837, Jackson said that “the philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression, and that the paternal care of the General Government will hereafter watch over them and protect them.” Did Jackson believe this? Probably; the human capacity to convince oneself of something one wants to think true is virtually bottomless.

“I think, Emily, with all due deference to the Good Book, that love and patience are better disciplinarians than rods.”

Tell them that, henceforward, no matter what daring or outrageous act any President may perform, you have forever hermetically sealed the mouth of the Senate. Tell them that he may fearlessly assume what powers he pleases, snatch from its lawful custody the public purse, command a military detachment to enter the halls of the Capitol, overawe Congress, trample down the constitution, raze every bulwark of freedom; but that the Senate must stand mute, in silent submission, and not dare to raise its opposing voice.…

white and black.”

“Christ has no respect to color,”

“She belonged to the women of restless heart whose lives are always stormy, sometimes great, and rarely happy,” wrote a journalist who had known her.

The Hermitage’s slave quarters are near Jackson’s tomb, a rebuke to the generations of white Americans who limited crusades for life and liberty to their own kind, and a reminder that evil can appear perfectly normal to even the best men and women of a given time.

We profit, too, from a leader’s dim example. The great often teach by their failures and derelictions.

Speaking of Jackson in death, alluding to the crisis with South Carolina in 1832–33, George Bancroft said: “The moral of the great events of those days is this: that the people can discern right, and will make their way to a knowledge of right; that the whole human mind, and therefore with it the mind of the nation, has a continuous, ever improving existence; that the appeal from the unjust legislation of to-day must be made quietly, earnestly, perseveringly, to the more enlightened collective reason of to-morrow; that submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people, when in error, will amend their doings; that in a popular government, injustice is neither to be established by force, nor to be resisted by force; in a word, that the Union which is constituted by consent, must be preserved by love.”