American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

Trust no one except those who have proved themselves, yet never let those who have failed the test know that when they look at you, they are looking at a mask, not at your true self.

abundance,” she wrote to her mother in December 1824. “Everything,” she added, “was new and interesting to me.” Emily and Andrew spent their

at this early period of the experiment of our Republic, men are found base and corrupt enough to barter the rights of the people for proffered office, what may we not expect from the spread of this corruption hereafter,” Jackson told Lewis. Washington, Rachel said, was a “terrible place.”

The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful,

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.

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.” IN JACKSON’S ERA America was moving from a way of life based on farms to one fundamentally linked to a larger industrialized economy.

In 1830, the first tract on birth control in North America, Moral Physiology, was published, and in 1833 Oberlin College, in Ohio, was founded—the first American college to be open to blacks and whites, men and women. In these decades the American Journal of Science and Arts explored chemistry, geology, zoology, botany, and mineralogy, and by the middle of the nineteenth century “scientists” were distinct from “philosophers.”

For eight days in Cincinnati in April 1829, two men—the evangelical Alexander Campbell and the atheist Robert Owen—faced off in a public debate pitting Christianity against atheism.

preserve capital to spend on those speeches and those battles. 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.

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.

The president, Jackson believed, should be an instrument of the people against the combined interests of the rich and the incumbent.

Instrument of the people

“Our system of government was by its framers deemed an experiment, and they therefore consistently provided a mode of remedying its defects,” Jackson wrote in the message. It was time, he said, to put the presidency on a different footing. 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. It was an oversimplified view, to be sure, but he was convinced of it, as he was convinced that he was to play the hero’s role.

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.

“Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names.… It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new states.… That step cannot be retraced. A state cannot be dismembered by Congress.”

Indian policy cant be retraced