H.W. Brands' biography of Andrew Jackson takes the appropriate posture every biography should take towards its subject: curious admiration, literary infusion, apologetics with candor, the chiseling of example.
Andrew Jackson is a beautiful figure of history for how he has remained both so unremittingly controversial and blatantly unenigmatic.
One needs no hermeneutic cipher to divine who Andrew Jackson is or what he stood for. The cryptic mind games of late modern diplomacy have no place in the world of Jackson.
The kernel of Jackson can be felt in his familial constitution. For he came from, as Brands so aptly puts it, the particularly savage tribe of Ulster Scot.
For centuries, the Ulster had fought tooth, nail, and claymore first against the perfidious brutes of Longshanks (English Sassenach) then, upon emigration to Ireland, the savage bog-trotters who clung to the Pope. under the dark, clammy skies of the northern British Isles.
If there is one thing that can be learned from Albion's Seed (and there are certainly many things to learn), the Scots-Irish are descended from centuries of brutal and ruthless warfare in the borderlands.
They knew little security, little safety, for nothing could be guaranteed among such neighbor-aggressors. This inculcated an epigenetic profusion of ruthlessness, iron-will savagery, and tribalistic fervor among the Scots-Irish that can be traced to the present day.
The deaths of Andrew Jackson's parents are a testament to such spirit. His father died before his birth from the overwork of trying to cull and tame fields of newly acquired property for the sustenance of his family in the bleak early days of Carolina settlement. His mother died having spent her last years shuttling between various Revolutionary War prison camps to bring her sons aid and plead for their freedom, exhausting every last thread of energy and soul on travel across the cold, dangerous roads of wartime colonial America.
Jackson himself demonstrated this cogenital fierceness when, in a famous encounter, as a boy the British had occupied his home and the presiding officer demanded young Andrew shine his boots. Jackson refused with impudence and even after the officer slashed the boy's cheeks with sword lacerations that would scar his cheeks for life, Andrew seemed no less obliged to submit.
Such scars would mark Andrew not just physically but would disinter themselves through a lifelong policy of hatred toward the British. One that would more than come to be avenged in the years to come.
Even as an orphan, Andrew slowly but surely found his way into an ever expanding sphere of success. He moved and became deeply affiliated with the founding members of Nashville, Tennessee, marrying Rachel Donelson through a not uncomplicated series of circumstances, but in unadulterated devotion.
It should be noted here that even though many snide or disparaging comments were made about Rachel Donelson over the years as she physically aged and did not acquire the social graces of political society, Jackson would tolerate nothing even close to a negative insinuation against his wife.
To his dying day, which lay so long after hers, he had nothing but devoted admiration for who he treated as angelic being, and though his worst detractors leveled a wide array of accusations against Jackson, no one could ever doubt the sheer loyalty and dedication he had for his wife.
Decades of legal work, speculation, and other ventures would eventually land Andrew Jackson among Tennessee's foremost gentry, including a short-lived term in Congress which Jackson resigned because he felt Washington life was a waste of time. Of course throughout this time Jackson also engaged in a number of duels and public fights, something he would never back down from even when his supporters felt he was too old to respectably engage in this kind of violence.
Aspirations and grudges led him to jockey with rivals like John Sevier until he became both a judge and the major general of the Tennessee militia.
This landed Jackson in a remarkably opportune position for the beginning of the War of 1812. For even as the federal military struggled both against the Indian forces on the Western front though led by acclaimed general William Henry Harrison as well as on the coast with defeat after defeat against the British, Jackson leveraged his state level power first to bring the Creek War to a seismic conclusion which would completely eviscerate the Indian military presence in the southern frontier.
It is far too easy to forget how dangerous how life was on the interior for the tribes of whites and Indians alike as the unilateral guarantee of security for white settler life was only produced through Jackson's military action in this corridor at this time. There has been much that has been and could be said on the morality of such actions, but as Brands points out, one must remember that Jackson's people had been engaged in such ruthless neighbor genocide for centuries back home in Britain. This was simply business as usual.
Yet Jackson's star would not rise on this most decisive victory against the natives.
Federal interests took Jackson's success under its wing as the Madison administration struggled to find a successful poster boy for their efforts. Jackson of course was remarkably aware of the propagandic manipulation of his appointments, but he leveraged them with a degree of canny subtlety one would not expect from the honest world of frontier.
What is not often highlighted in the closing salvo of the War of 1812 is not just how imbalanced Jackson's efforts were against the British but how many different groups he was fighting internally and externally at the same time.
Taking his forces on the dangerous journey down the Mississippi (this was the pre-steamboat era), Jackson had not only to fight against the tropical swamps and disease-ridden mosquitos which were the bane of many early modern militaries, but against his undersupplied, undisciplined and unpaid men. Even when fighting in the Creek War, mutiny always loomed on the horizon but Jackson without hesitation pointed his cannons at those who prepared to march home and cowed any and every element of rebellion.
Once in Louisiana, Jackson fought against the federal authorities in Washington and the War Department. Jackson was no stranger to berating his superiors Madison and Monroe for their incompetence and weak-willed strategy. Yet when he received a countermanding order from Washington to take his troops back home to Tennessee after having just come down to Louisiana, Jackson strictly refused.
Instead he put the city of New Orleans (a melting pot with little American connection newly acquired from the French) under martial law and began stamping his will over the cities' authorities including William Claibourne. There had been a number of plots, including one from the ignominious Aaron Burr, to turn New Orleans over to the Spanish who neighbored in both Mexico and Florida at this time, and Jackson had no trust in the city to remain loyal to the Union. The judiciary overturned Jackson's claim to martial sovereignty over New Orleans, but he ignored the courts.
The city wasted no time in investing its legal and judicial resources into appealing to Washington to have Jackson dismissed and brought to trial on war crimes.
With the delay of travel and deliberation working to his advantage, Jackson invested the remaining bounds of his energy on preparing the defenses of the city. Undermanned, he recruited from privateers, from men of all races and nationalities and no military training. He knew little time remained.
With full naval superiority, the British arrived and sailed upstream to disembark, planning to march down the bank to assault the city. Sir Edward Pakenham led 10,000 British regulars. These were not random reserves but among Britain's finest infantry who had defeated and uprooted Napoleonic forces in Spain alongside the Duke of Wellington (Pakenham's brother-in-law).
How could it be expected that less than 6,000 untrained men most of whom did not speak the same language as their commander and struggled for supplies, could take on the fully buttressed brunt of the British regular forces with cannon, calvary, naval blockade, and every conceivable resource to take the city?
Through relentess trenchwork, engineering, and haranguing of his troops, Andrew Jackson united a defense of New Orleans that is one of the most lop-sided victories in military victory. While 2,000 British regulars including the leading general Pakenham and many commanders were slaughtered against all expected odds in this clash, the Americans lost under 100 men. Those who had vanquished Napoleon stood no match the ragtag amalgam of Jackson.
The scars of the Revolution were returned mark for mark by a middle-aged Jackson who had lived longer than either of his parents and would have decades to come in shaping the United States of America.
Jackson's sheer force of conviction won him national renown and repute, for though the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed, America had at long last won independent military renown. America's final battle against Great Britain would be a resounding victory that the British would never seek to challenge again.
In the years to come, he would force the annexation of Florida from the Spanish even against the wishes of his superiors in Washington.
He would win election as America's first populist candidate and upturn the political order in Washington. He would be the only president to see the American federal debt paid off in total. He would survive an assassination attempt where two pistols at point blank missed him, and the elderly Jackson beat his attacker with a cane. He would destroy the Second Bank of the United States in a feud with the equally stubborn Nicholas Biddle, both sinking the vibrancy of the national economy into prolonged depression and mass debt default with neither refusing to budge. A feud that Jackson would win as he forced Biddle to exhaust all his resources and accumulated capital to try to preserve the bank. No one would attempt a national bank again for nearly a century and even then under a more euphemistic name.
Against the Federalist old guard, Jackson would be the one of the few to stand up to and defy Chief Justice Marshall in his notorious rejection of the Cherokee ruling. While Jackson is nearly universally condemned for the Trail of Tears today, Brands points out that we must consider Jackson's reasoning in the matter. Jackson argued that there was greater cruelty in keeping the Cherokees as a ghettoized minority in the State of Georgia who would undoubtedly suffer from the resentment and anger of white settlers and that no democracy could guarantee protection of a people not under its sovereignty when the constituents of that democracy would be incentivized every election cycle to force total reappropriation of those lands. The natives would never be safe if they remained unassimilated within American borders. Whether he was right or not, Jackson thought forcing the difficult decision would save both sides from decades of resentment and conflict that would result from moderate compromise.
Jackson is perhaps the quintessential figure of the anti-moderate. He was uncompromising in all his many convictions. A quick way to raise the hatred of those with any contravening opinions. And it is not unsurprising that a firebrand like Jackson would loathe a figure like Henry Clay, the model of American moderation, whom he labeled a slippery, opportunistic, visionless whisperer who poisoned the American republic through endless talk, compromise, and a refusal to decide.
This brings us to the last great crisis of Jackson's career and perhaps the most defining part of his legacy.
When his former vice president John C. Calhoun threatened complete secession from the Union over the "Tariff of Abominations" that would cost Southern planters more than Northern counterparts, Jackson immediately demonstrated characteristic wrath against such resistance. News came to Washington of military movements and ammunition stockpiling in Charleston and other locales.
Citing the Union of the states as perhaps the most inviolable principle of the United States (ironically baked into the commonplace name of this nation), Jackson promptly mobilized troops and marched them to South Carolina with orders to hang from every tree the first traitors they encountered and to decimate any city which would stand against the Union.
Such a shocking, blunt strategy would be unthinkable in many other decades of American history, but South Carolina immediately stood down and no other states stood by her defense. Jackson, being the clever politician he also was, had secretly offered an exit ramp olive branch for the South Carolina government so they could be exempted from some of the economic pain of the tariff all while clearly bending the knee to the Union. (It must be noted that Lincoln responded with far more caution and appeasement when South Carolina seceeded, though it is a stretch to compare the 1830s to the 1860s.)
The Union had never quite been a principle like this. Even in the 1810s, the Hartford Convention had bounced around the idea of a New England secession due to opposition to the War of 1812. Something Jackson also saw as an abomination.
If there is one thing which Jackson through the sheer force of his individual will has bequeathed to American politics, it is the indivisibility of the Union and the predominance of the American states as the United States. Shaped by decades of war and frontier, Jackson clung to the inviolable truth that the American states could never stand up to the encroaching powers of European empires like Britain, France, or Spain without unity. They would not be able to protect themselves from native resistance without unity. They could never succeed economically, financially, or politically without unity. The Union must be preserved at all costs even if it meant the deaths of many Americans.
It is incredible how much one man could shape the destiny of a nation.
Jackson cleared the local frontier of an Indian presence, paving the way for cotton farming in the Southern interior. Slavery which had been dying as an institution in the eighteenth century, acquired a second birth through widespread clearing of lands for safe farming.
Jackson forged a new frontier, much further West, which introduced the era of the steam boat.
Jackson brought Florida into America.
Jackson mentored and inspired the young Sam Houston who would go out and bring Texas into America.
Jackson arranged many of the cards of the deck for his spiritual successor James K. Polk to embrace Manifest Destiny through the Mexican-American War.
Jackson's military victory would earn America the prestige of a military power who would never again be defeated by a European force.
Jackson would democratize the voting blocs of America to bring unity to the various classes of working Americans who would provide a check on the elites and bankers and Washington politicians who had attempted to cement control over America.
Jackson would eliminate, if ever so briefly, the national debt and re-democratize the nation's financials that would set a century-long precedent.
Jackson would expel Native Americans from within the American heartland to empower the white settlers in the interest of peace, security, and the aggrandizement of his people, the American people.
Andrew Jackson was forged in a world of chaos and violence, where nothing was secure. And it was Jackson's fixation on building security for the United States that would set it on a remarkable course to become not just a ruling world empire, but the ruling empire. A nation-state whose security exceeded anything that Britain, France, or Spain could have dreamt of. Jackson's vision of security for the American people has been fulfilled in such superabundance that no other people can have enjoyed such a level of global security before, and perhaps ever again.
Such peace and prosperity is predicated upon the principle of the Union of the states, a seeming contradiction for an anti-Federalist like Jackson, but entirely consistent with his own predilections and psychology that these states must hang together or we must all hang separately. The expansionism of James K. Polk, the unionism of Lincoln, the soldier-statesman of Grant, the determination and hyperenergy of Theodore Roosevelt, the populists that have come and gone, all of these are children in some way of that childless president Andrew Jackson who claimed the people as his children. This orphan of a backcountry cabin through a dedicated lifetime of public service at the cost of his own family. We live in the inheritance he has left us, this nation of ours.