His lifelong political antagonist Henry Clay once likened him, not implausibly, to a tropical tornado. Mixed in with these were episodes of insubordination, usurpation, uncontrolled temper, wanton violence, and scandal. Jackson vanquished enemies in battle everywhere and won a truly astonishing victory at New Orleans.
As president he was, depending on whom one asked, either our greatest popular tribune or the closest we have come to an American Caesar. An adept manipulator of his own image, Jackson played a willing hand in fusing the political and the personal. First as a candidate and then as president, he reordered the political landscape around his own popularity. Swept into office on a wave of genuine grassroots enthusiasm, Jackson labored successfully through eight years as president to reshape his personal following into an effective political apparatus—the Democratic Party, our first mass political party, which organized under his guidance.
Those conundrums endure, and the facts, or arguments, behind them would fill a book. One is his attack on corporate privilege and on the concentrated political influence of wealth. Populists and other agrarian insurgents in the nineteenth century, and New Deal Democrats in the twentieth, claimed it as their birthright. To other recent scholars, though, the Bank Veto has seemed merely demagogic, while to most people outside the academy the whole Jacksonian struggle over banking grew to appear baffling and arcane, divorced from our present concerns.
All of that has suddenly changed. They are again often quoted, and his reputation has enjoyed, at least for the moment, a sharp uptick. The symbolic freighting of this subject can hardly be overstated. It opens a door behind which one finds Jackson the archetypal Indian-hater, the slave owner, the overbearing male patriarch, and the frontiersman not as heroic pioneer but as imperialist, expropriator, and killer.
There is no doubt that removing the American Indians, particularly those in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, was centrally important to Jackson. He claimed to be acting only on impulses of duty and philanthropy. He is a professor of history at the University of Texas-Austin and is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Andrew Jackson was born years ago this March For much of that quarter-millennium, he was one of the most admired figures in American life.
But Jackson started falling out of favor a couple generations ago. He was a tough sell amid the civil rights revolution of the s, when his unrepentant ownership of slaves marked him as one to be censured rather than praised.
Jackson owned fewer slaves than such other icons as Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson had the good grace to feel guilty about benefiting from the bondage of others, and so was easier on liberal sensibilities.
Jackson, who never admitted feeling guilty about anything, seemed to be asking for dismissal from the pantheon. Jackson first made his name as an Indian fighter; while president, he endorsed the policy of Indian relocation that culminated in the forced removal of the Cherokees to the trans-Mississippi West. By the turn of the present century, it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the one thing American schoolchildren learned about Jackson was that he was the author of the Trail of Tears.
But his case is peculiar in the extent of the fall and for what it says about historical memory. His sins were remembered because his achievements were so profound. Jackson was born a subject of the British empire; he grew to adulthood in a republic governed by elites who expected and received deference from the mass of the American people.
In most states, the right to vote was confined to white men who owned property and had been long in residence; even among white males, voters were often a small minority. Western states like Tennessee sought to attract settlers by offering them the right to vote; Eastern states eventually followed suit to keep from losing residents.
Meanwhile states shifted from having their legislatures choose the electors who in turn elected the president, to letting voters choose the electors. The consequence was that, by the time Jackson ran for president in , nearly all adult white males could vote, and their votes determined the outcome of presidential contests.
As he was leaving a memorial service for a congressman inside the U. Capitol on January 30, , deranged house painter Richard Lawrence emerged from the crowd and pointed a single-shot gold pistol at the president. When the gun failed to shoot, Lawrence pulled out a second pistol, which also misfired.
The infuriated Jackson charged the shooter and hammered him with his cane while bystanders subdued the attempted assassin. The English-born Lawrence, who believed he was an heir to the British throne and owed a massive amount of money by the U. Despite his popularity and success, Jackson's presidency was not without its controversies. One particularly troubling aspect of it was his dealings with Native Americans. He signed and implemented the Indian Removal Act of , which gave him the power to make treaties with tribes that resulted in their displacement to territory west of the Mississippi River in return for their ancestral homelands.
Jackson also stood by as Georgia violated a federal treaty and seized nine million acres inside the state that had been guaranteed to the Cherokee tribe. Although the U. Supreme Court ruled in two cases that Georgia had no authority over the tribal lands, Jackson refused to enforce the decisions. As a result, the president brokered a deal in which the Cherokees would vacate their land in return for territory west of Arkansas. Jackson also nominated his supporter Roger Taney to the U. Supreme Court.
The Senate rejected the initial nomination in , but when Chief Justice John Marshall died, Jackson re-nominated Taney, who was subsequently approved the following year. Justice Taney went on to be best known for the infamous Dred Scott decision , which declared African Americans were not citizens of the United States and as such lacked legal standing to file a suit. He also stated that the federal government could not forbid slavery in U.
The Whig party failed to win the presidential election, which was captured by Martin Van Buren. Jackson, however, left his successor with an economy ready to crater. Having taken a financial loss from devalued paper notes himself, Jackson issued the Specie Circular in July , which required payment in gold or silver for public lands.
Banks, however, could not meet the demand. When Jackson arrived in Nashville in , he met Rachel Donelson Robards, who, at the time, was unhappily married to but separated from Captain Lewis Robards. Rachel and Andrew married before her divorce was officially complete — a fact that was later brought to light during Jackson's presidential campaign.
Although the couple had legally remarried in , the press accused Rachel Jackson of bigamy. Jackson's willingness to engage his and his wife's many attackers earned him a reputation as a quarrelsome man. During one incident in , Jackson even challenged one accuser, Charles Dickinson, to a duel.
The couple also adopted Andrew Jackson Jr. On December 22, , two months before Jackson's presidential inauguration, Rachel died of a heart attack, which the president-elect blamed on the stress caused by the nasty campaign.
She was buried two days later, on Christmas Eve. After completing his second term in the White House, Jackson returned to Tennessee, where he died on June 8, , at the age of The cause of death was lead poisoning caused by the two bullets that had remained in his chest for several years. Jackson continues to be widely regarded as one of the most influential U.
His ardent support of individual liberty fostered political and governmental change, including many prominent and lasting national policies. In , Jackson acquired an expansive plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee near Nashville , called the Hermitage. At the outset, nine African American slaves worked on the cotton plantation. Jackson was among the favored predecessors of the 45th U.
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