Andrew Jackson Read online

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Map: Jackson’s Battlefields

  CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION (1767–1805)

  1 The Prize

  2 I Could Have Shot Him

  3 Alone

  4 Away West

  5 Shadowed Love

  6 Republicans and Revolutionaries

  7 Fighting Words

  8 Rendering Judgment

  SON OF THE WEST (1805–1814)

  9 Conspiracy

  10 Affair of Honor

  11 All Must Feel the Injuries

  12 Master and Slaves

  13 Nor Infamy upon Us

  14 Native Genius

  15 Old Hickory

  16 Sharp Knife

  17 The River of Blood

  AMERICAN HERO (1814–1821)

  18 Peace Giver

  19 The Spanish Front

  20 Pirates and Patriots

  21 Day of Deliverance

  22 The Second Washington

  23 East by Southwest

  Photo/Art Insert

  24 Party and Politics

  25 Judge and Executioner

  26 The Eye of the Storm

  27 Conquistador

  THE PEOPLE’S PRESIDENT (1821–1837)

  28 Cincinnatus

  29 The Death Rattle of the Old Regime

  30 Democracy Triumphant

  31 Democracy Rampant

  32 Spoils of Victory

  33 Tools of Wickedness

  34 Jacksonian Theory

  35 False Colors

  36 Attack and Counterattack

  37 Or Die with the Union

  38 Justice Marshall for the Defense

  39 Wealth versus Commonwealth

  40 An Old Friend and a New Frontier

  PATRIARCH OF DEMOCRACY (1837–1845)

  41 The Home Front

  42 To the Ramparts Once More

  43 The Soul of the Republic

  Sources

  Annotated Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  John Quincy Adams had seen this day coming for years. His only consolation was that he had helped postpone it till now. The son of the man he considered most responsible for American independence, Adams felt a peculiar responsibility for the outcome of the republican experiment. And these last few years the experiment hadn’t been turning out well at all. His father, John Adams, and most of the other Founders had feared that republicanism would degenerate into democracy: that government of the people would become government by the people. Nothing in history disposed them to look hopefully on such a development, for never in history had ordinary people run their own affairs without very quickly running them into the ground. The elder Adams linked arms after the Revolution with those who sought to curb the popular excesses of the revolutionary era; at Philadelphia in 1787 they wrote a constitution that took power from the states and conferred it on the central government, and in doing so diminished the influence of the people in politics generally. As vice president and then president, John Adams continued to work to keep power out of the hands of the unlettered and incompetent, and in the hands of those best suited by education and experience to exercise it responsibly.

  But it was a losing cause. A first setback occurred when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams for president. Jefferson was more the aristocrat than Adams, as anyone who compared Monticello, where Jefferson’s slaves worked their master’s plantation, with the Adams home in Massachusetts, where Adams himself tilled his modest garden, could see at once. But Jefferson cast himself as the tribune of the people, and he carried the day. James Madison was hardly less elegant than Jefferson, but he, too, posed as the defender of the many against the few. By the end of Madison’s presidency the formula had been perfected, and James Monroe, yet another Virginia planter, entered the executive mansion almost unopposed.

  John Quincy Adams watched and learned. He noted, among other things, that being secretary of state gave a man a large head start toward the presidency. Jefferson had been secretary of state before becoming president; so also Madison and Monroe. Consequently when Monroe offered to make Adams his secretary of state, the offer included a presumption of the presidency thereafter, and Adams gladly accepted.

  Yet even while he did his time as a diplomat, the political climate continued to shift. Like an autumn storm that rose in the West and gathered strength as it approached the Atlantic, the wind of democracy began to blow in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi and gained force on its way east. New states entered the Union with few restrictions on the vote, and their example caused the old states to change their own rules. Equally alarming to those—like Adams—who counted on the restraining effect of representation, the states began to allow voters, rather than the state legislatures, to choose presidential electors. Campaigns for president became popularity contests. The highest office in the land went to the favorite of the lower classes.

  Adams escaped the early gusts, winning the presidency in 1824 by luck and political art. But during his four years as president he often wished he hadn’t won, so abusive was his treatment at the hands of those who claimed to speak for the people. And now—on the morning of March 4, 1829—he prepared to deliver the presidency to the man the people, in all their ignorant majesty, had chosen.

  The morning of Adams’s defeat should have been the morning of Andrew Jackson’s greatest triumph. And in some ways it was. Everything Adams deplored about the direction of American politics, Jackson applauded. To Jackson, the current contest in America was simply the latest stage of the historic struggle against privilege that ran back to the Magna Carta and included the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the English Revolution of the seventeenth, and the American Revolution of the eighteenth. At each stage the people seized more of what by right belonged to them, from those who intended that power remain the monopoly of the few. Finally, for the first time in American history, and for one of the very few times in human history, the people had chosen one of their own to govern them. And now they were to install him in the highest office in the land. A man would have been dead to noble emotion not to feel the power and meaning of the moment.

  Jackson felt it all—and much besides. The thousands of farmers, mechanics, and crossroads merchants who had come to Washington City to inaugurate him, and the hundreds of thousands of their brethren who had voted for him, could almost taste the fruits of their hero’s triumph, but Jackson alone knew what the victory had cost him. He had been fighting for the people’s right to direct their own affairs since the Revolutionary War, when, as a mere boy, he took up arms against Britain. A gash to the head from a British sword left him with a permanent crease in his skull and an abiding hostility to all things British; smallpox contracted in a British prison marked the beginning of a lifetime of compromised health. The war also cost him his mother and brothers (his father had died before his birth), throwing him orphaned upon a turbulent, threatening world.

  As a young man he entered politics in Tennessee. He battled the antidemocratic forces in the state and the nation, going so far as to challenge George Washington when the father of his country adopted what Jackson took to be excessive airs. His audacity on behalf of the people earned him enemies who slandered him and defamed even his wife, Rachel. He dueled in her defense and his own, suffering grievous wounds that left him with bullet fragments lodged about his body.

  When the British again threatened American autonomy, by provoking Indian attacks in the West and seizing ships and sailors on the Atlantic, Jackson joined his voice to those of others demanding war in defense of American security and rights. When the war came, he led an offensive against the Indians and, upon its success, took charge of the defen
se of the Mississippi against Britain’s attempt to sever the United States along the line of the great river. At New Orleans in 1815 he threw the redcoats back, to their astonishment and that of most of his compatriots. The victory won him the adulation of the American people, who hailed him as a second Washington, but the campaign added to the ranks of his political enemies, who carped at his boldness and his impatience with the forms of military command.

  The second war against Britain made clear to many Americans something Jackson had sensed from the first: that the struggle for American popular rights was of a piece with the struggle for North America itself. The opponents of popular rights had filled the ranks of the Loyalists during the first war against Britain; the same opponents, or their heirs, had been conspicuously apathetic, in some cases seditious, during the second British war. Jackson’s victory at New Orleans didn’t end the British threat; the British still held Canada, and their ally Spain occupied Florida and Mexico. As long as these foes hovered about America’s borders, the American experiment in self-government remained in peril. And while it did, Jackson couldn’t rest.

  Not that he would have rested anyway. His entire life, Jackson had known only struggle. He struggled against poverty as a child, against authority as a youth, against the British and Spanish and Indians as a soldier, against the enemies of popular rule as an elected official. His struggles defined him.

  They also defined his era in American history, which was how he came to symbolize it. Much later, after America became a world power, it could be difficult to remember a time when the success of the American experiment in self-government did not seem assured. But it never seemed assured to Jackson and most of his generation. He and they fought two wars against Britain, an undeclared naval war against France, and countless battles against Indians. They struggled for independence, for security, for the land that provided the opportunity to pursue the happiness of which their Declaration of Independence spoke. They also fought among themselves: over the meaning of the American Revolution, over the Constitution, over republicanism and democracy, over slavery and expansion. Perhaps Jackson exaggerated the degree of danger his country and his conception of government faced. But if he did, he wasn’t alone, and it was all those who shared his perception of the precariousness of their world who had made him their president.

  And so he came to Washington. Yet even this greatest of his public triumphs was marred by the cruelest personal blow he had ever suffered. Just before he was to leave the Hermitage, his home near Nashville, for Washington, Rachel died. The proximate cause was physical, a failing heart. But the deeper cause was the strain his race for the presidency had placed on her mind and soul. In their desperation to cling to power, the partisans of John Quincy Adams had recirculated and embellished the earlier libels against Rachel’s character. Jackson blamed the Adams men for her death, but he couldn’t help asking himself whether he had been complicit. It was, after all, his ambition for the presidency that had provoked the latest attacks against her. If he had retired to the Hermitage, as she wished, rather than continue his struggle against the foes of popular rule, she would still be alive. The knowledge was a burden, the heaviest he had ever borne.

  But as he rose from the ground beside her grave, the very weight of her death confirmed his resolve to carry the struggle forward. He couldn’t bring her back, yet he could fight on, to ensure that those who killed her not benefit from their crime. Like most other great warriors, Jackson had always conflated the personal with the public; his own enemies became the enemies of his cause. So they did now, more than ever.

  And on the morning of March 4, 1829, with the memory of Rachel in his heart and the cause of the people in his mind, he set off from his hotel to the Capitol to take his oath of office.

  The struggle for North America began long before Andrew Jackson was born. Like similar struggles on all the inhabited continents, it ran back millennia, perhaps to the moment humans first found their way across the Arctic plain from Asia. Oral tradition and archaeological evidence indicate that conflict was a regular feature of life among the North Americans. They fought for forests where the game was most abundant, for rivers where the fish were thickest, for bottomlands where their corn and beans and squashes grew most readily. Great warriors were the heroes of their tribes, emulated by other men, sought by women, hallowed in memory. Strong tribes expanded their territories, driving the weak to less-favored regions and sometimes to extinction. Diplomacy complemented military force: the Iroquois confederation made that alliance a terror to its neighbors.

  The arrival of the Europeans added new elements to the competition. These far-easterners possessed weapons the aboriginals hadn’t seen: steel knives, swords, and axes; muskets and rifles; cannon. But their most potent agents of conquest were ones neither they nor their victims understood: the pathogens to which long exposure had inured the Europeans but that devastated the native Americans. In many instances the novel diseases raced ahead of European settlers, who arrived to discover human deserts and concluded that the Christian God in his wisdom and power had prepared the way for their colonies.

  But the diseases didn’t kill all the Indians. Those who survived often welcomed the interlopers, at least at first. Especially after smallpox and the other epidemics killed as many as three-fourths of the members of the afflicted tribes, there seemed room enough for all. And the newcomers’ traders brought goods the natives quickly learned to value: iron pots, which bested clay for durability; steel blades, which held an edge longer than flint or obsidian; rifles, which felled game at distances arrows couldn’t reach and gave their possessors an advantage in battle over tribes that lacked them. Some purists among the Indians rejected everything European, but most of the natives adapted happily to the improved lifestyle the new technology brought.

  In time, however, the palefaces got pushy. Their farmers followed the traders and expropriated Indian land. This was when the real struggle started. In New England in the 1670s a coalition led by a chief the English called King Philip contested the advancing settlement by destroying several towns and killing the inhabitants. The English fought back, with the help of Indians holding a grudge against Philip’s group, and eventually won. Philip was beheaded and his captured followers enslaved.

  The Indians’ resistance grew more sophisticated. They discovered that the Europeans belonged to more than one tribe, with the French as hostile to the English as either were to any of the Indians. Some Indians sided with the French, others with the English, and when the French and English went to war—as they did once a generation—the various Indian tribes exploited the opportunities to their own advantage. The largest of the conflicts (called the French and Indian War by the English in America) began in 1754 and inspired the Delawares and Shawnees, allies of France, to try to drive the English away from the frontier. To this end they launched a campaign of terror against British settlements in the Ohio Valley. The terror began successfully and over three years threatened to throw the English all the way back to the coast. But British victories in Canada and elsewhere weakened the French and emboldened Britain’s own allies, including the Iroquois, and when the war ended in 1763 the French surrendered all their North American territories.

  This was good news for Britain’s American subjects but bad news for nearly all the Indians of the frontier, including Britain’s allies. As long as the British and French had vied for control in America, each had to bid for the support of the Indians, who learned to play the Europeans against one another. With the French departure the bidding ended and the Indians were left to confront British power alone.

  The Ottawa chief Pontiac was among the first to appreciate the new state of affairs. The Ottawas had long been rivals of the Iroquois and were recently allies of the French. For both reasons they fought against the British in the French and Indian War. When that war ended in French defeat, Pontiac saw disaster looming for the Ottawas—and for Indians generally. A tall, powerful warrior with a striking mien, he was als
o a charismatic political leader and an adroit diplomat. The fighting between Britain and France had hardly ceased before he welded together a coalition of tribes dedicated to expelling the British from the interior of the continent. Pontiac’s forces besieged Fort Detroit above Lake Erie during the spring of 1763. From there the offensive spread north and east along the Great Lakes and south into the Ohio Valley. One British garrison after another was surrounded and destroyed. As this was a psychological offensive as much as a military one, the methods of destruction often included the most gruesome treatment of those soldiers, traders, and dependents who fell into the attackers’ hands.

  The assault on a British fort at Mackinac showed the swiftness with which the Indians commenced their attacks and the brutality with which they completed them. Pontiac’s campaign was spreading faster than the news of it, and the troops and traders at Mackinac knew of no reason to fear the large group of Ojibwas who approached the fort in amicable fashion and commenced a game of lacrosse immediately beneath the walls. The British came out to watch, as they did on such occasions. The intensity of the game mounted, until one of the players threw the ball close to the gate. The laughing, cheering spectators took no alarm when both teams tore after it. But then the players dropped their lacrosse sticks, snatched war axes from under the robes of their women, and rushed through the unguarded gate. The surprise was total and the carnage almost equally so. A trader named Alexander Henry, who managed to hide in a storage closet, left a chilling account:

  Through an aperture, which afforded me a view of the area of the fort, I beheld, in shapes the foulest and most terrible, the ferocious triumphs of barbarian conquerors. The dead were scalped and mangled; the dying were writhing and shrieking under the unsatiated knife and tomahawk; and from the bodies of some, ripped open, their butchers were drinking the blood, scooped up in the hollow of joined hands, and quaffed amid shouts of rage and victory.

  The story was much the same all along the frontier. The offensive continued to outrace reports of it, and in many cases the first intimation the English settlers and soldiers had of trouble was the arrival of war parties. One by one the garrisons fell, until Pontiac and his allies controlled the entire region west of Fort Pitt, at the forks of the Ohio. Isolated frontier settlements were even more vulnerable and the destruction was commensurately greater. Some two thousand settlers were killed, and about four hundred soldiers. Many others were taken hostage. Those who survived the attacks and evaded capture fled east, bearing tales of calamity and horror.