Andrew Jackson - Hardcover

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of several books, including Chants Democratic and The Rise of American Democracy. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., (1917-2007) was the preeminent political historian of our time. For more than half a century, he was a cornerstone figure in the intellectual life of the nation and a fixture on the political scene. He won two Pulitzer prizes for The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1966), and in 1988 received the National Humanities Medal. He published the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, in 2000.

Prologue

Jackson and the Age of the Democratic Revolution

In the early spring of 1835, the renowned engraver and painter Asher Durand executed the finest portrait of Andrew Jackson made during Jackson’s presidency. The artist could extract only four or five sittings from his irascible, distracted subject. Jackson, Durand reported, “has been part of the time in a pretty good humor, but some times he gets his ‘dander up’ & smokes his pipe prodigiously.” Still, the final picture was candid and persuasive, showing a careworn, elegantly attired old man, his cheeks and forehead deeply lined, lips clenched over toothless gums, and black-coffee eyes emanating both melancholy and determination.* One New York critic pronounced it “not merely a likeness but a facsimile.”1

Strong as it was, the rendering was incomplete--for hidden beneath Jackson’s shock of stiff white hair was a deep and nasty scar. As a boy soldier during the American Revolution, Jackson had been captured by British dragoons and ordered to scrape the mud off an officer’s boots. When Jackson claimed the status of a prisoner of war and refused to be shamed, the officer slashed him with a sword, nearly severing several fingers and cutting a permanent trench into the boy’s skull. Although it would not be the last violent badge of courage and honor Jackson would receive, it would remain his greatest source of pride, an eternal reminder of his patriotic suffering and dedication.

A year before Jackson sat for Durand’s portrait, while the Senate was debating whether to censure him for presidential misconduct, he learned that a Whig congressman planned to introduce articles of impeachment--and to charge that the stories about the wartime slashing had been invented as a campaign ploy.

“The damned infernal scoundrel!” Jackson snarled to his close friend and adviser Francis Blair. “Put your finger here, Mr. Blair.” The president parted his hair, and Blair was shocked to discover that he could fit his entire finger inside the scarred gash.2
Fearless, principled, and damaged, Andrew Jackson was one of the fiercest and most controversial men ever to serve as president of the United States. Like few other presidents until the present era--Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR--Jackson inspired love and hatred, with no apparent middle ground. “Talk of him as the second Washington!” the New York patrician Philip Hone wrote with sarcasm and disgust in 1833. “It won’t do now: Washington was only the first Jackson.” Hone and his conservative friends in truth thought of Jackson as an American Caesar, who had stirred up the blockhead masses, seized power, and installed a new despotism. Jackson’s more radical critics likewise detested him as a dangerous demagogue. But to his admirers, Jackson was the most courageous man in the country, the one leader, a North Carolinian observed, who “could have withstood the overwhelming influence” of the nation’s “corrupt Aristocracy,“ to safeguard equal rights and American democracy.3

There are plenty of signals in our culture today that we are supposed to admire Jackson as a great American. His picture is on thetwenty-dollar bill. His plantation home outside Nashville, the Hermitage,is a national historic monument. The imposing statue ofJackson in his general’s uniform, rearing on horseback, still dominatesLafayette Square Park as it has for more than a century and ahalf, with Jackson doffing his half-moon officer’s cap at the WhiteHouse. Separate polls of historians who vary widely in their assessmentsof the presidents consistently rate Jackson near the top, justbelow Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. Yet apart from Jefferson, no past president has suffered harsher criticism from recent historians than has Jackson--no longer a hero, in many circles, but an ignorant, violent slaveholder who suppressed the abolitionists, ruined the American economy, and perpetrated genocide on the Indians. The attacks rival in their intensity those loosed on Jackson from both the Right and the Left in his own time.

Modern scholarship was initially shaped--as in many ways it continues to be--by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s, admiring Age ofJackson, published in 1945. Rejecting earlier portrayals of Old Hickory as a western outsider battling eastern privilege, Schlesinger narrated the politics of the 1820s and 1830s as more of a struggle between classes than between regions, focused on Jackson’s famous war against the Second Bank of the United States. Urban workingmen and distressed small farmers, Schlesinger argued, united behind the noble liberal Jackson, a true common-born man of the people, in an all-out struggle against shortsighted bankers and businessmen. Over the succeeding decades, numerous biographers and historians, including Robert V. Remini and Charles Sellers, offered modified versions of Schlesinger’s interpretation. Most recently, these admirers have depicted Jackson as the enemy of a soulless “market revolution” that transformed American economic and social life and widened material inequality.

Other historians over the past thirty years, however, have presented intensely negative assessments of both Jackson and his presidency. Some have drawn on the critical ripostes to Schlesinger that appeared in the 1940s and 1950s, notably by Richard Hofstadter and Bray Hammond. Far from being a forerunner of democratic liberalism, Hofstadter and Hammond claimed, Jackson represented an aggressive, self-promoting class of entrepreneurs who pioneered the cutthroat, laissez-faire capitalism that would come to dominate the country during the Gilded Age. Later scholars, led by Michael Paul Rogin, focused on the even darker sides of Jackson’s presidency--his unwavering dedication to Indian removal and his attacks on abolitionism--and recast Jackson as an avatar of racism. Rogin’s Freudian interpretation of what he described as Jackson’s genocidal viciousness against the Indians also signaled a new emphasis on Jackson’s psychology and character as the taproots of his politics. In later variations, Jackson has appeared as a traumatized product of the raucous southern backcountry, whose unbalanced quest for manly honor--what one scholar has called his “search for vindication”--caused him to lash out at chimerical threats ranging from the Cherokees to the Second Bank. If, as the 1960s slogan ran, the personal is the political, then Jackson was a leader twisted by inner rages--a man, one historian has recently written, whose arrogance should repel all “who identify with the world’s oppressed and seek remedies for the sins of violence and covetousness.”4

This clash of historical interpretations of Jackson is confusing. Behind it lie long-term changes in basic political ideas and sensibilities that make assessing Jackson’s legacy--or that of any political figure before the Civil War era--extremely difficult. The basic American vocabulary is very different now than it was in the 1830s. Should Jackson, for example, be considered a liberal or a conservative? Today, liberalism is loosely equated, sometimes in caricatured ways, with an interventionist federal government, a distrust of the free market, a dedication to civil rights (especially for blacks, women, and homosexuals), a wariness of the military, and a weakness for educated, even elitist cultural prejudices. Conservatives, according to the same broad depictions, supposedly believe in state rights, want to reduce government’s involvement with the economy, are skeptical about or hostile to civil rights legislation, idolize the military, and emanate a down-home, anti-elitist (some say anti-intellectual) style. By these lights, Jackson, a southwestern slaveholder and military hero with populist appeal, who believed in limited government, ought to be considered a forerunner of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush--a view some modern conservative commentators are eager to endorse.

Such transposing of political labels in the search for political forerunners is anachronistic, deceptive, and often distorted. The idea, for example, that there has always been a pro-big government party and a laissez-faire party, and that presidents can be judged by which they adhere to, is as useless in interpreting the politics of the 1830s as it is for interpreting our own time. American political parties have always blended “small government” and “big government” policies. Today, the Republican Party rejects federal regulation of business, but shows a robust willingness to regulate the affairs of individuals over certain social, cultural, and political issues. Without embarrassment, Republican leaders look to the federal courts, sometimes at the direct expense of state rights, to secure what they consider a favorable outcome. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, is much more attentive to regulating business, but comparatively laissez-faire on cultural and social matters--and, when it suits them, Democrats kick and scream about violations of state rights. Likewise, in Jackson’s day, both the Jackson Democrats and their Whig Party opponents favored minimal government on some issues but not on others. This does not mean that political parties are unprincipled and bend their ideas merely to advance their own interests; it means that party politics cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas about federal versus state powers, in either the past or the present.

There is an additional danger in confusing the means and ends of one historical period for those of another. Before the advent of large national corporations and heavy industry, American liberals commonly pursued their goals with what are now considered conservative policies, and vice versa. Jackson, for example, sought to sever the connection of government and private business, w...