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JACKSON, Andrew
(1767–1845), seventh president of the U.S. (1829–37),
the first president of humble origins. His election to the highest
office in 1828 was long regarded as a great victory for the common
people, and the political movement he led was known as Jacksonian
Democracy.
Born March 15, 1767, of a Scotch-Irish immigrant family in
the Waxhaw settlement on the western frontier of South Carolina,
Jackson was orphaned at the age of 14 and was brought up by an uncle
who was a well-to-do slave owner. As a result, the young Jackson
moved among wealthy men who monopolized prestige and political influence
in the backcountry. He became a lawyer at age 20 and as a prosecuting
attorney in Nashville, Tenn., showed no sympathy for debtors unable
to meet their mortgage payments. Blessed with great courage and
an iron-willed determination that inspired fear and respect among those
who crossed his path, Jackson quickly became one of the leaders
in the new state of Tennessee. His marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards
(1767–1828), whose father had great prestige, abetted Jackson’s
career and social standing. Jackson and his wife were unaware, however,
at the time of their marriage that her divorce from her first husband
had not yet been technically completed, and his political enemies
thereafter referred to the couple as adulterers.
After helping to draft the Tennessee constitution in 1796,
Jackson was elected the state’s first congressman, serving
one year in the U.S. House of Representatives and then for a year
in the U.S. Senate. In 1798 he was appointed judge of the superior
court in Tennessee. Feared for his hair-trigger temper and his prowess
as a duelist, in 1802 Jackson was elected major general of the Tennessee
militia. He was by this time a slave owner, businessman, and land
speculator. Although his commercial fortunes fluctuated, he was generally
a successful property owner. As an ambitious man, however, he longed
to play a greater part in the nation’s affairs; the outbreak
of the War of 1812 provided this opportunity.
In the early part of the war Jackson’s feats in crushing
the Creek Indians won him national acclaim. The Creeks were British
allies, who had threatened U.S. southwestern borders. Jackson’s
decisive victory at Horseshoe Bend, Ala., in March 1814, destroyed
the Creeks; the harsh peace treaty he imposed deprived them of more
than 8 million ha (20 million acres) of land—an area larger than
that of most of the states in the Union. Old Hickory, as Jackson
was now known because of his toughness, had given the nation a taste
of military glory. On Jan. 8, 1815, Jackson’s motley army
won an amazingly one-sided victory at New Orleans over a British
army composed largely of veterans. Jackson became a national hero.
Detractors scoffed that his victory had come after the peace treaty
ending the war had been signed in Europe. Had the British taken
New Orleans, however, they undoubtedly would have held on to it,
treaty or no treaty. Good Democrats to this day celebrate January
8.
In the years immediately following, Jackson maintained his prominence
but not without creating a furor—as his actions often did.
Early in 1818, without clear authorization, he violated Spanish-owned
territory by chasing the hostile Seminole Indians into Florida, where
he then created another international incident by putting two British
subjects to death. Although this behavior disturbed the administration
of President James Monroe, it was enthusiastically endorsed by the nationalistic
majority of Americans. In 1821 he was appointed governor of Florida
(ceded by Spain to the U.S. in 1819), and his high-handed actions
in that office created new diplomatic storms. Nothing, however,
could detract from his glowing reputation. Influential Tennessee
friends made plans early in the 1820s to have Jackson run for the
presidency in 1824.
Although Jackson at first professed a lack of interest, claiming
he was not fit to hold the office, he quickly shed his reservations.
He accepted a seat in the Senate in 1823, the better to promote
his nomination, and the following year he became one of five presidential
candidates. Jackson received a plurality of electoral votes, but
in the absence of a majority, the names of the three leading vote-getters
were placed before the House in accordance with the provisions of
the U.S. Constitution. When the House chose John Quincy Adams president,
and Adams in turn appointed Henry Clay secretary of state, Jackson
and his supporters were furious. They charged that Adams and Clay
had devised a “corrupt bargain,” in which the
new president paid off Clay for having used his influence in the
House to swing the vote against Jackson. Never letting up on this charge,
the Jacksonians harassed the Adams administration incessantly and
effectively. Profiting from the excellent organization of the new
Democratic party and its masterful electoral tactics, Jackson won
a smashing victory in 1828 after perhaps the most vicious presidential
election campaign in U.S. history.
Brilliant propagandists, the Democrats had depicted Old Hickory as
a man devoted to the common people. Many of Jackson’s supporters,
however, did not know where he stood on the issues of the day, either
because of his silence or his lack of clarity. He nevertheless proved
to be a surprisingly effective as well as vastly popular president.
In replacing longtime federal officeholders with appointees of his
own party, Jackson claimed that he was substituting commoners for
aristocrats. In vetoing a bill that called for federal assistance
in the laying of a road in Clay’s home state of Kentucky,
Jackson posed as defender of strict construction of the Constitution.
In refusing to interfere when Georgia violated Indian rights on
territories guaranteed by federal treaty, he appeared as the champion
of states’ rights. In threatening to send federal troops
into South Carolina if that state persisted in its attempts to nullify
or ignore the tariff laws, Jackson appeared to be a strong supporter
of national power. Finally, in perhaps the most significant act
of his first administration, Jackson told the nation that his veto
on July 10, 1832, of the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the
United States was a blow against monopoly, aristocratic parasites,
and foreign domination and a great victory for honest labor. Most
historians think that the actual effect of Jackson’s banking
policy was to destabilize the nation’s currency and help
bankers friendly to Jackson.
During his first term Jackson frequently relied for advice
on an informal group derided by his opponents as the “Kitchen
Cabinet”—supposedly because they met in the White
House kitchen. Martin Van Buren and John H. Eaton (1790–1856),
who belonged to this group, were also members of the official cabinet.
Jackson’s reelection in 1832 by a large majority
indicated the popularity of his policies. Of course, not everyone
agreed with them. Some of his supporters thought his financial policies
a disaster. Nevertheless, they remained publicly uncritical and
loyal to him, because they were convinced that to desert him, even
when he was wrong, was political suicide.
In 1834 an opposition party, the Whigs, was formed in order
to fight what they called “King Andrew” and his
tyranny. They were incensed above all by Jackson’s decision
to place federal moneys in the vaults of so-called pet banks, under
the direction mainly of Democratic bankers, rather than with the
more reliable Bank of the United States (the charter of which was
to run out in 1836). In pushing through this policy, Jackson dismissed
two secretaries of the treasury who would not go along with him
and brushed aside the opposition of a congressional majority. Led
by Henry Clay, the Senate, for the only time in its history, in
1834 voted to censure a president, charging Jackson with dictatorial
and unconstitutional behavior. Jackson and his friends did not rest
until they succeeded three years later in physically expunging from
the record of the Senate the evidence of the censure. Nevertheless,
when Jackson left office in 1837, he was beloved by the people;
he withdrew to the Hermitage, his magnificent residence outside
Nashville, where he died on June 8, 1845.
Modern historians are skeptical of the Jackson legend. They
note that Jackson and his party did not so much expand political
democracy as they used and benefited from it. They observe that
Jackson was a large slave owner and that his party was the enemy
of free blacks and their rights. They point to Jackson’s
willingness to deny antislavery pamphlets the use of the U.S. mails.
They decry the cruelties, illegality, and hypocrisy of his Indian
policy, which forcibly removed southern tribes from lands guaranteed
them by federal treaties and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. They
observe that for all of Jackson’s talk of helping working
people, Democratic policies accomplished little. They are dismayed
by Jackson’s addiction to violent confrontation in foreign
policy, as in 1835, when he brought the country to the brink of war
with France over that nation’s delay in paying its debt
to the U.S.
Jacksonians called their political opponents aristocrats,
themselves the party of the people. In fact, Jacksonian leaders
were almost everywhere as atypically wealthy, as unrepresentative
of the common people, as were the Whigs. Many Jacksonian civil-service
appointees were notorious not for being commoners but for their
inefficiency or their flagrant corruption.
Jackson did help revolutionize and strengthen the presidency.
He vetoed more bills, for example, than had all his predecessors
combined. Furthermore, in vetoing bills merely because he disliked
them, he repudiated the tradition originated by George Washington
that the veto was a hangover from monarchy, rarely to be exercised
by presidents in a republic. Since Jackson’s time it has
been commonplace for presidents to repeat the Jacksonian assertion
that the president represents the will of the people better than
does Congress. Jackson’s chief legacy to the nation was
what political scientists call the strong presidency and a tradition whereby
leaders and parties constantly proclaim their love of the people.