The Presidency That Roared
Early in “Moby-Dick,” Melville announces his intention to celebrate the “democratic dignity” of ordinary men. To them he shall “ascribe high qualities, though dark.” For support in this endeavor, Melville appeals to the “great democratic God!” the deity “who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!”
AMERICAN LION
Andrew Jackson in the White House
By Jon Meacham
Illustrated. 483 pp. Random House. $30
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek and author of “Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship,” discerns a similar democratic dignity in the seventh president of the United States. But he underplays the consequences of his subject’s darker qualities, especially the fact that, like Captain Ahab, Jackson was willing to destroy everything in order to exact revenge.
Born in 1767 along the border between North and South Carolina, Andrew Jackson experienced the American War of Independence as a brutal civil war. Ill-treated by British officers and imprisoned near Charleston, Jackson was the only member of his immediate family to survive the conflict. He migrated to Nashville, where he established himself as a lawyer, planter, politician and militia officer. Jackson fell in love with Rachel Donelson Robards, a woman he courted and lived with before she was officially divorced from her first husband. The Jacksons had a happy marriage, but whispers about the origins of their relationship dogged them until Rachel’s death in December 1828. Her disconsolate husband blamed her fatal coronary on stress caused by partisan attacks during the recently concluded presidential campaign.
By then, Jackson was a national hero, mainly because of his exploits during the War of 1812, particularly the victory over an experienced British Army at New Orleans in January 1815. Denied the presidency by the House of Representatives in 1825 despite his victory in the popular vote, he claimed the White House four years later on a surge of highly organized support.
Jackson arrived in Washington seething with resentment. Still mourning Rachel, he delighted in the marriage, on Jan. 1, 1829, of his old friend John Henry Eaton to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake. Gossips were also happy. The Eatons were said to have lived together long before her husband’s suicide cleared the way for a legal union, a scandal enhanced by Peggy’s reputation as a woman who did as she pleased. (“The fact is,” she later recalled, “I never had a lover who was not a gentleman and was not in a good position in society.”)
What made this private matter a public one was Jackson’s appointment of John Eaton as his secretary of war. When the respectable women of Washington, led by Floride Calhoun, wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, spurned Mrs. Eaton, an outraged Jackson flew to the defense of his friend’s wife. The president promptly divided Washington into two camps: friends who would receive Peggy and enemies who would not. Blessed was the politician without a wife in Washington in 1829, and none more so than Martin Van Buren, the (luckily) widowed secretary of state. Free to call on Peggy Eaton and ride horses with Jackson, he displaced Calhoun as vice president in the second Jackson administration and entered the White House himself in 1837.
John Quincy Adams, whom Jackson had defeated in 1828, observed these events with philosophical satisfaction. “You must read Tacitus and the Epistles of Pliny to understand this system of maneuvering,” Adams advised his son. If the boy was “disgusted with the diminutive rivalries [and] the paltry altercations . . . of our public men,” he should remember that men will rail “at each other . . . as long as there are prizes to contend for which move their avarice or their ambition.”
And yet, Meacham hastens to add, while the personal shapes political culture, it does not preclude the pursuit of principled policies. Jackson, he argues, agreed with Adams’s “central point: politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.”
For Jackson, however, personal loyalty was always the supreme law. Just as he valued his friends and family, so he idolized the Union as a mystical structure that allowed individuals like him to go their own way and become somebody. His enemies — Adams, Calhoun, Henry Clay — were the people’s enemies. More than misguided, they were reprehensible men who, believing that they were somehow better than people like the Jacksons and the Eatons, would destroy the Union to satisfy their own ambition. Reinventing the presidency, Jackson constructed himself as a wielder of popular against institutional power, an outsider sent to Washington on a tide of populist resentment to keep unscrupulous insiders from taking the people’s money and subverting their will.
In this spirit, Jackson slashed and burned his way through Washington from 1829 to 1837. He issued 12 vetoes, more than his six predecessors combined. Jackson took on the established order in politics, dismissing a considerable number of federal officeholders and thwarting the hopes of his well-established rivals. In 1832, he vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, objecting to government involvement in a monster institution that, he believed, served the interests of the few at the expense of the many. He strenuously rejected the doctrine of nullification, advanced by Calhoun and other South Carolinians, which asserted the rights of states to declare federal laws null and void within their borders. He feuded with France over money owed to the United States and encouraged Americans in the Mexican state of Texas to rebel against their government in Mexico City. Roundly criticized in Washington — he was the first president to be formally censured by the Senate — Jackson won re-election in 1832 in a landslide.
“American Lion” is enormously entertaining, especially in the deft descriptions of Jackson’s personality and domestic life in his White House. But Meacham has missed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of American populism as personified by Jackson. What does it mean to have a president who believes that the people are a unified whole whose essence can be distilled into the pronouncements of one man? Populist resentment is to democracies as air is to fire. But republics may endure best when leaders remain uncertain — as several dozen did in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — as to whether the people can be entirely trusted with their own government. Was the United States really better off without the Bank of the United States? Did the removal of native peoples west of the Mississippi constitute smart policy? Should we assume that what is best for the United States (as defined by men like Jackson) is best for us all?
Pondering such questions may lead us to reconsider the significance of a pair of toasts exchanged at an 1830 dinner in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. “Our Union — it must be preserved!” President Jackson exclaimed. “The Union,” Vice President Calhoun replied, “next to our liberty the most dear.” Majority rule and minority rights: the challenge even today is to sustain a just balance.
Andrew Cayton teaches history at Miami University of Ohio and is the co-author, with Fred Anderson, of “The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000.”
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