Posted on 04/15/2016 4:31:25 AM PDT by Kaslin
Andrew Jackson was a killer president
When he was 13, but more man than boy, Andrew Jackson got his first taste of war, helping his mother tend to the casualties after the Battle of Waxhaws. The May 1780 battle became, in legend, a massacre of defenseless colonials by British redcoats under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. Continentals who attempted to surrender were run through and slashed by the men under Tarleton, who was everything that Jackson was not. An aristocrat cavalryman and a fop, Tarleton eventually went back to England and became a member of Parliament and a general, and had his portrait painted by both Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. He was ultimately made a baronet and in 1820 a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
Jackson, a hardscrabble rebel born somewhere close to the border between North and South Carolina, was penniless, proud, and tough. And there were much bigger things than baronetcies in his future.
The following year, Jackson and his brother were captured by the British. One of the officers holding Jackson—but not the hated Tarleton—had picked up some mud on his boots and ordered Jackson to clean them. When Jackson refused, the officer slashed at him with his saber. Jackson deflected the blow, slightly, with his hand but still took a deep cut to his scalp. The wound healed, but the scar was still plainly visible, many years later, when Jackson stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office as president, and a breeze lifted his hair just enough to expose the angry mark left by the wound.
The psychic scar remained also. Jackson would recall, later, how on one occasion he had watched, from concealment, as Tarleton rode by and how easily he could have shot the man they called "the Butcher" out of his fine saddle. But Jackson would get his revenge on the British, and then some, at the Battle of New Orleans, where his soldiers killed so many redcoats that he would write, about looking over the dead scattered there, "I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day."
Even in his dying years Jackson was convinced that the British were plotting to get a foothold in the free state of Texas and wrote of the need to "take and lock the door against all danger of foreign influence."
Jackson was a fighter, in a sense that makes the contemporary politician, bragging on himself as "always fighting" for one great cause or another, come off as something of a joke. Jackson was what we would call the real deal. He spilled blood, his own and his enemy's. The saber cut was just the first of several serious wounds. When he took the oath of office as seventh president of the United States, there were two bullets embedded in his body. One was the result of a duel he had fought with a man who insulted Jackson's wife, accusing her of infidelity and bigamy. She and Jackson had married thinking, mistakenly, that she was legally divorced. When the divorce was finalized, Jackson and Rachel had quickly gone through the rituals again. For the rest of his life, Andrew Jackson would tolerate no insult aimed at her.
He met Charles Dickinson, who was known to be a good shot, near the Red River in Logan, Kentucky, on May 30, 1806. Dickinson got off the first shot and the ball hit Jackson in the chest, very close to the heart. But he remained upright, though bleeding heavily and in pain. Jackson steadied himself and took his time with his aim. So much time, in fact, that witnesses later called it dishonorable. His shot, when he finally took it, hit Dickinson, who died later that day. The ball in Jackson's chest lay too close to the heart to risk extracting it. So it remained there for the rest of his life.
In 1813 a feud between Jackson and the Benton brothers boiled over in the streets of Nashville. Jackson was shot again. This time in the shoulder. Doctors wanted to amputate Jackson's arm but he said that he would "just as soon keep it." That bullet stayed with him until 1832, when a doctor removed it—without anesthesia. By then, Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton had patched up their differences. Jackson was president of the United States and Thomas Hart Benton was a senator from Missouri, and they were political allies in one of the many epic political battles of the Jackson presidency. This one over the Bank of the United States.
But before he and Benton could become allies and before Jackson could take on the bank and its supporters, there were many more fights. These were political, not physical, but still intense and remorseless, leaving scars that were real if not so visible as the one on Jackson's head
Andrew Jackson remains one of the more troubling figures in American political history: the original populist, maker of the modern Democratic party, defender of the common man. . . and a defender, also, of slavery, who owned slaves himself and treated them with his customary hard hand. And then there were the Indians whom he fought mercilessly and subdued in battles like the one at Horseshoe Bend in Alabama, in 1814, and whose exile to the lands beyond the Mississippi River he engineered. The Trail of Tears was his doing, although the worst of the death march took place after he had gone home to Tennessee.
The fight that defined his place in American political history was the election of 1824. Jackson, the frontiersman, was one of four candidates and received the greatest share, but not a majority, of the electoral votes cast. Jackson's 99 electors gave him a plurality and put him ahead of John Quincy Adams at 84. But 131 were needed to win. Jackson also ran ahead of the others in the popular vote. Which counted for nothing—except to stir passions in arguments about fairness. Of which there were to be many.
So the thing went to the House of Representatives where Henry Clay, one of the presidential candidates, was the speaker. The House was to determine which of the three top finishers would become president. This cut Clay out, since he had finished fourth. But he had those electoral votes, and he had his own agenda, namely, denying Jackson the presidency, which he believed would be "the greatest misfortune that could befall the country."
When the House voting was done, John Quincy Adams was the new president. He promptly named Henry Clay his secretary of state.
This became, in the minds of Jackson and his supporters, the "corrupt bargain." Jackson put it colorfully, "So you see, the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver—his end will be the same."
It was all done within the rules and wasn't corrupt in the sense that favors or cash were exchanged. Clay was arguably the right man to be secretary of state. And John Quincy Adams was certainly qualified to be president. More qualified, perhaps, than anyone in the land. Well bred, well educated, experienced in government, and enlightened in his views.
But while Jackson had been fighting the British and getting his scalp laid open by that officer's saber, John Quincy Adams had been in Europe, at his father's side while he conducted diplomacy for the would-be republic. Jackson and Adams could not have been more different. Adams understood the rituals of court. Jackson knew war on the frontier. That was his essence. Adams had his eye on the enlightened future of America, Jackson on the country's immediate and tumultuous expansion.
The bitterness and anger over the "corrupt bargain" ate like acid into the Adams presidency. He had entertained visions of an era in which "the spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth." He had plans for, among other projects, a national university and saw government as the duty and calling of educated and enlightened men. He despised the kind of partisan politics that had come into being around the figure of Jackson, who would be running again in 1828.
Congress would not go along with Adams's plans, and his administration failed and floundered. Jackson wrote of Adams's big vision, "I shudder for the consequence—if not checked by the voice of the people, it must end in consolidation and then in despotism."
But if Jackson feared the consequences of a strong and energetic executive, it was an opinion based not on principle but on the current occupant of the White House. When it was his time, he would bring more energy to the executive than John Quincy Adams or anyone else could have dreamed of.
Well before the election of 1828, Jackson's supporters were organizing and preparing. Martin Van Buren, then a congressman from New York and the most able of Jackson's supporters and lieutenants, assembled a coalition of "the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the north." What this coalition became was a formidable political party.
The campaign, from which Jackson remained aloof, was unambiguously dirty. His supporters floated stories about how, when he was a minister to Russia, John Quincy Adams had procured women for the czar. The Adams forces brought up all the old rumors about Jackson's wife. She was a bigamist, and Jackson's mother, by the way, a whore.
For all the sleaze, there was an important and essential subtext to the campaign. It was a fight between what Lincoln might have called two "conceptions" of the new and growing nation. What it was and would be. The conception represented by Adams was of a nation led by natural aristocrats who would see to the general welfare. That of Jackson and his supporters was of a nation in which the people ruled, through the instrument of those they elected. The distinctions were between the urban and rural. The yeomanry and the aristocracy. The common people and the elite.
Jackson won decisively. Turnout was heavy, four times that of the election of 1824. Jackson won just under 70 percent of the electoral votes and 56 percent of the popular vote. But the price was heavy. His wife suffered intensely from the attacks against her during the campaign. "The enemies of the General have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me," she wrote. Her husband's election did not relieve a heavy sense of melancholy. Three days before Christmas, she died of a heart attack. They had been together for nearly 40 years.
"My mind is so disturbed," Jackson wrote to a friend, and "my heart is nearly broke."
Jackson left Tennessee for Washington still grieving over her death and angry at the slanders directed at her during the campaign. His enemies had cost him first the presidency and then his wife. It had never been the plan for him to go to Washington and preside over another "era of good feelings." Compromise and civility were not high on his list of virtues. He was going to Washington as he went everywhere in his life, to fight.
His inaugural address was almost cryptic. He promised to "keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority." He would, as well, "observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy" and would "give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people."
And, finally, he promised to undertake "the task of reform, which will require particularly the correction of those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections, and the counteraction of those causes which have disturbed the rightful course of appointment and have placed or continued power in unfaithful or incompetent hands."
Pedants might argue that he was 0-for-3 on those promises. Especially as regards the Indians.
Still, he was now president, and it was time to celebrate. Throngs of spectators followed President Jackson to the White House, which, in those days, was open to the public on inauguration days. The numbers overwhelmed good order. People climbed in through the ground floor windows, broke some furniture, and left a mess. Jackson was obliged to leave by a back entrance until order was restored. Accounts of the episode exaggerated it until it became a kind of drunken brawl and served to confirm the worst fears of Jackson's political enemies, who believed that with his election, the age of mob rule had arrived.
Nothing against you. Was a great read. Just questioning the title, the peridical and their agenda.
Thank you for posting an interesting article about an important president. John Quincy Adams is my line (though I am not sure by blood, as there is an adoption somewhere along the way), but he is not a favorite of mine.
Excellent article. Read every word.
That said, Go Trump!
Even in his dying years Jackson was convinced that the British were plotting to get a foothold in the free state of Texas and wrote of the need to “take and lock the door against all danger of foreign influence.”
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Here is the point: The British have finally gotten one of their own as a Senator from Texas, now running for President. ;-)
David Crockett hated Jackson for his treatment of the Indians.
All analogies/parallels are flawed, just like apples at a farmer's market. I picked the one with the fewest and smallest blemishes, so don't blame me if it's a bit tart.
True enough. That analogy was the low hanging fruit.
A little larger please. Having trouble seeing this morning. Thanks.
Interesting, and while Trump may be an egomaniac and a boor, he is no Jackson.
Strikes me that there is a much better argument to remove Jackson from our currency than there is for doing in Hamilton. If the Washington Redskins name is offensive, then what can one say about the Trail of Tears $20?
I agree
excellent point
Interesting piece, thanks
In front of the Maryland State Capitol stands a statue of Roger Taney the first catholic Supreme Court justice, appointed by andrew Jackson to replace John Marshall. Taney was later the author of the Dred Scott decision ... An act that helped propel an obscure state senator named Abraham Lincoln into the presidency. Chief Justice Taney administered the oath of office to Lincoln, who had no respect for him .. Taney lost his personal fortune in the civil war and died in poverty on the day slavery was outlawed in Maryland. His slaves were freed and given pensions in the terms of his will... A bit of rambling here but always an interesting period in us history and the interrelationships of the individuals who made it
His wife conveniently, for him, died of a heart attack in the same way Breitbart and Scalia conveniently died of heart attacks, too.
Huh?
You’re welcome
“take and lock the door against all danger of foreign influence.”
Yes, I believe this is a great idea. Now, remind me again, is a Canadian a foreign influence?
A good read, but:
” . . .the Battle of Waxhaws. The May 1780 battle became, in legend, a massacre of defenseless colonials by British redcoats under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton.”
If the author is implying that it was not, in reality, a massacre (of the American soldiers who had been wounded or surrendered), he is at variance with every historian I have ever read on the subject.
“His inaugural address was almost cryptic. He promised to ‘keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the executive power, trusting thereby to discharge the functions of my office without transcending its authority.’
If the author is saying that the sentence he is quoting is cryptic, I disagree.
I thought of Jeb bush as the scion of aristocracy raised to assume the presidency
Trumps “ frontier” is the economy and he is eager to try to expand and tame it ... His wife is also subject to attacks that wound him deeply ... He is a rough and plain spoken man like Jackson but that is being held against him as “ vulgar” ... People prefer the Henry Clay’s ( Cruz) who give fine speeches and know how to use “ the rules”
I don’t need no backhanded compliments and like I said I won’t let anyone tell me what articles I can post and from which site. I am tired of this BS.
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