CHAPTER 2
IN 1787, AFTER a brief period of study in Salisbury, North Carolina, Jackson received his license to practice law in that state. A wild man, he worked hard and played even harder for the next four years. He challenged the first lawyer he ever tried a case against to a duel (the challenge fizzled) and arranged for the town’s prostitutes to arrive in the midst of a society Christmas ball. “He was the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in Salisbury,” a contemporary recalled. When James Parton was researching his 1860 biography of Jackson, the author traveled to Salisbury in search of stories about his subject. There he learned one local woman’s reaction to hearing that Jackson might be a candidate for the White House. “What! Jackson up for President? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury? Why, when he was here, he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house!” Reflecting for a moment more, she allowed, “It is true, he mighthave taken him out to the stable to weigh horses for a race, and might drink a glass of whiskey with him there.Well, if Andrew Jackson can be President, anybody can!”
There is no doubt that in these years Jackson was a rake, and a gambler, and a carouser. Note, however, that the “rake” had made something of a friend of the husband of this Salisbury matron, forming a connection based on sporting interests—a connection strong enough to survive the disapproval of the lady of the house.
That Jackson was on intimate terms with such established families is telling. He was not born in a station that granted him automatic access to the upper reaches of the nascent American gentry. He had to work his way into those circles with whatever he had at hand—and what he had was a charm that made other men like him and want to join him in exploits that crossed the line of respectability, but never so dramatically that they could not stumble back into the good graces of their wives and neighbors by morning. One day Jackson would draw on his capacity to make others love and follow him in the service of larger causes. But his raw ability to lead—and his sense of adventure and his infectious fearlessness—was already evident in North Carolina.
TENNESSEE WAS NOT yet a state when Jackson, then twenty-one, moved to Nashville in October 1788 and took up residence as a boarder in the house of Mrs. John Donelson, the widow of a founder of the settlement. The Donelsons were among the territory’s great families. The patriarch, Colonel John Donelson, was a surveyor who had been a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses before striking out to the west. His 1779–80 voyage on the Cumberland River aboard the flatboat Adventure was one of the prevailing stories of the age, and his mysterious death—he was shot to death in the wilderness, perhaps by Indians, perhaps by robbers—only added to his legend.
The colonel, though, survives in history mostly as the father of the wife of Andrew Jackson. Born about 1767—the year Jackson was born—Rachel Donelson came from a clan as distinguished in early American life as Jackson’s was anonymous. Rachel was a beautiful young woman with a strong sense of fun—and when Rachel met Jackson in the autumn of 1788 on the Cumberland, she was another man’s wife. Rachel Donelson and Lewis Robards of Mercer County, Kentucky, had been married since 1785; they had met and courted during a Donelson family sojourn in Kentucky. At twenty-seven, Robards was a decade older than the seventeen-year-old Rachel, and the marriage was difficult from the start. John Overton, a Tennessee judge and later Jackson ally who came to board with Lewis Robards’s mother in the fall of 1787—roughly two years after Rachel married Robards—recalled that “Robards and his wife lived very unhappily, on account of his being jealous.… My brother, who was a boarder, informed me that great uneasiness had existed in the family for some time before my arrival.” Things got so bad that one of her brothers went to Kentucky to bring Rachel home—in the fall of 1788, the same season Jackson arrived in Nashville.
Mrs. Robards was, James Parton wrote, “gay and lively … the best story-teller, the best dancer, the sprightliest companion, the most dashing horsewoman in the western country”—the kind of woman who would hold enormous appeal for Jackson. But she was, indisputably, Mrs. Robards. Having driven her off, her husband decided he wanted a reconciliation, and moved to Nashville, where they again lived together for a time. Robards soon grew jealous of Jackson’s attentions to Rachel and indulged his anger, reducing both Rachel and her mother to tears. Robards and Jackson exchanged words. “If I had such a wife, I would not willingly bring a tear to her beautiful eyes,” Jackson was said to have remarked to Robards, who replied: “Well, perhaps … but she is not your wife.”
Both threatened violence, but Jackson soon moved to another establishment—a smart tactical maneuver, as it turned out—and Robards, furious with his allegedly flirtatious wife, returned to Kentucky alone. Then came word that the unhappy husband was going to come to Tennessee yet again “to take his wife” back to his own home. He planned, it was reported, to “haunt her.” Friends arranged for Rachel to travel to Natchez, Mississippi, then controlled by the Spanish. Jackson, who knew the route, went along, and returned to Nashville. According to the Jackson version of events, it was at this point—with Rachel in Natchez, and Jackson in Tennessee, in the winter of 1790–91—that Jackson learned Robards had obtained a divorce. Jackson rushed back to Natchez and married Rachel there. Only two years later, in December 1793, did it become clear that Robards had only petitioned for a divorce in December 1790. It was not granted until September 1793, which meant that Jackson had been “married” to another man’s wife for several years. By January 1794, all was put right, and Jackson and Rachel were legally married in a ceremony in Tennessee.
Or so Jackson, as a presidential candidate, would later have the world—and history—believe. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests the two lived together as husband and wife and even referred to themselves as married—there are two surviving references to Rachel as “Mrs. Jackson” from late 1790 and early 1791—before Robards took the initial step of filing for a divorce. Their passion for each other was apparently deep enough to lead them, despite their later claims to the contrary, to choose to live in adultery in order to provoke a divorce from Robards. By the looser standards of the frontier in the last years of the eighteenth century, such a course would not have damaged their reputations, particularly if—as was the case here—the woman’s family approved.
The bond Rachel and Jackson formed from their first meeting in 1788 was strong enough, and their private visions of a life together vivid enough, for them to seek the pleasure and comfort of each other’s arms as rapidly as they could. But by the time Jackson was running for president more than thirty years later, the moral climate had moved in a stricter direction. So it is likely that the Jacksons’ sensitivity to charges of impropriety in later years was rooted in the fact that the essential charge—that Mrs. Jackson was still Mrs. Robards when she and Jackson began their life together—was true.
What had brought them together in the first place? The drama of the abusive husband, the wronged woman, and himself as the knight defending her virtue would have appealed to Jackson’s imagination: it was a role he liked to think of himself as playing. Even more fundamentally, though, from about 1788 onward, Jackson was a man in the grip of an almost feverish love, a love it seems reasonable to assume he longed to consummate as soon as he decently could. In Rachel’s big eyes he found the suggestion of a lasting love. In Jackson’s slender but strong frame she found the promise of protection and a tenderness her first husband had never given her. In capturing Rachel as his own Jackson got what he wanted, and he got it with a combination of subtlety (courting her in her mother’s house, and staying on the right side of the family) and bravery (risking his standing, and the possibility of a duel, to have her as his wife before it was legally allowed). The road to marriage with Rachel had all the elements of life Jackson found compelling: it was a cause of the heart charged by complication and danger, but with the greatest possible rewards awaiting him if he could win through—the love of a good woman and, so important to the orphan from Waxhaw, a connection to a secure, leading family of the world in which he found himself.
THEY WERE DEVOTED to each other. When Jackson was away, Rachel was given to crying and worrying. From the road or the front, he summoned all his rhetorical power to assure her of his love. Rachel once wrote Jackson a fretful note about his safety while he was on a trip to Philadelphia. He rushed to assuage her anxieties. “I have this moment recd. your letter,” he told her, “and what sincere regret it gives me on the one hand to view your distress of mind, and what real pleasure it would afford me on the other to return to your arms, dispel those clouds that hover around you and retire to some peaceful grove to spend our days in solitude and domestic quiet.” But business mattered—Jackson was on a dual judicial and commercial journey—and he confessed a dark fear to her: an early return, he said, could “involve us in all the calamity of poverty—an event which brings every horror to my mind.” He had been without resources once, and, hating the idea of once again finding himself in a dependent position, he pressed on, struggling to warm the chill of his wife’s worries with letters. Because “you are full of apprehension and doubt with respect to my safety,” Jackson told Rachel, “I have wrote you every post since I left you—and will continue to do so … may the all ruling power give you health and Peace of Mind until I am restored to your arms.”
They shared a passionate emotional attachment, but Jackson—like many husbands before and since—may have loved his wife rather more than he listened to her. He did what he wanted to do, and if his course upset his wife, sending her into gloomy moods and fits of tears, he was sorry, but Rachel’s anguish rarely affected his decisions to leave her when duty called. A public man, he savored public adulation, though he knew his wife had a point as she tried to keep him grounded amid the cheering crowds. He respected her views, for they were informed by decades of close observation of Jackson’s political life, and they were offered out of love. Rachel also knew he struggled to keep his emotions in check and warned him when she thought he was in danger of letting his passions get the better of him. “I thank you for your admonition,” Jackson wrote Rachel after one such exhortation. “I hope in all my acts and conduct through life they will measure with propriety and dignity, or at least with what I believe true dignity consists, that is to say, honesty, propriety of conduct, and honest independence.”
HE RELISHED THE roles of protector and savior. Just after dusk on a cold March day in 1791, when Jackson was practicing law on the circuit around Jonesborough, Tennessee, he and his friend John Overton were traveling with a small group through dangerous territory. Reaching the banks of the Emory River in the mountains, the lawyers spotted a potentially hostile Indian party. “The light of their fires showed that they were numerous,” Overton recalled to Henry Lee, and “that they were painted and equipped for war.” Under Jackson’s leadership (Overton credited him with a “saving spirit and elastic mind”), the travelers scrambled into the hills on horseback, riding roughly parallel to the river—which they had to cross to make it home. Pursued by the Indians, Jackson, Overton, and two others pressed on through the night, coming to a place where the water looked smooth enough to allow a hastily constructed raft and the horses to make it to the other side. Jackson took charge of the raft piled high with saddles and clothes. Overton would follow with the horses.
There was immediate trouble. The waters were not as smooth as they had appeared: a powerful undercurrent swept the boat—and Jackson—downstream, toward a steep waterfall. “Overton and his companion instantly cried out and implored Jackson to pull back,” Lee wrote. “But he either not being so sensible of the danger, or being unwilling to yield to it, continued to push vigorously forward.” Jackson struggled with his oars: disaster was at hand. He and the saddles could be lost, and the Indians were still on their trail. “Finding himself just on the brink of the awful precipice,” Lee recounted, Jackson extended his oar to Overton, who “laid hold of it and pulled the raft ashore, just as it was entering the suck of the torrent.” Catching their breath on the bank of the river, Overton and Jackson looked at each other.
“You were within an ace, Sir, of being dashed to pieces,” Overton told him. Jackson waved him off, replying, “A miss is as good as a mile; it only shows how close I can graze danger. But we have no time to lose—follow me and I’ll save you yet.” They eluded the Indians, arriving home exhausted but safe.
Here was the daring Jackson, the courageous Jackson, the cool Jackson—and the erratic, blithe, boastful Jackson, a man who saw what needed to be done in a crisis but also needed his friends to carry the day. “Follow me and I’ll save you yet” are confident, inspiring, warming words, yet it was Overton who had just rescued Jackson, not the other way around. It was partly this boldness and resilience that attracted men and women to Jackson’s side in the first place, for in doubtful moments people need someone who can reassure them amid danger. Jackson was such a man—and he always had wise friends nearby who loved him enough to overlook or chuckle at his professions of pride, and then mount up to ride with him again.
STILL, JACKSON’S PRIDE led him into peril more than once. In Knoxville in the autumn of 1803, in the midst of a quarrel with Tennessee governor John Sevier over which man would become major general of the state militia, Jackson alluded to his own past “services” to the state. “Services?” Sevier replied. “I know of no great service you have rendered the country, except taking a trip to Natchez with another man’s wife.”
“Great God!” Jackson roared. “Do you mention her sacred name?”
Then, according to a contemporary’s recollection, “several shots were fired in a crowded street. One man was grazed by a bullet; many were scared; but, luckily, no one was hurt.” The story is chiefly interesting for the light it sheds on Jackson’s sensitivities about Rachel’s honor. “Sevier had touched on a subject that was, with Jackson, like sinning against the Holy Ghost: unpardonable,” recalled the source.
No one died in the Sevier shootout, but Jackson could, and did, kill in cold blood. In 1806, an argument over a horse race—the dispute also apparently included a slur against Rachel—degenerated into a duel between Jackson and a man in Nashville named Charles Dickinson. Jackson was determined to have satisfaction, waving off reports that Dickinson might leave the city before the showdown. “It will be in vain, for I’ll follow him over land and sea,” Jackson said.
At seven o’clock on the morning of Friday, May 30, 1806, on the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, Jackson and Dickinson faced each other at twenty-four feet. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and he hit Jackson in the chest with a bullet. Though wounded, Jackson coolly leveled his own pistol at his opponent, and fired. The trigger caught halfway; Jackson cocked the gun again and fired, killing Dickinson. Only later, as his boot filled with blood after he had left the dueling ground, did the extent of Jackson’s wound become clear. He carried Dickinson’s bullet in his body until he died. Even in pain—the wound complicated his health for decades—Jackson never let his mask drop. “If he had shot me through the brain, sir,” Jackson told a friend, “I should still have killed him.”
In fact, Jackson made more friends than he fought duels, and in the practice of law, the pursuit of politics, and his mastery of the military—his three overlapping professions—he inspired great loyalty. Jackson’s willingness to risk his own life to protect others won him the respect and thanks of his contemporaries and made them amenable to forgiving him his (many) trespasses. It was he who escorted parties of settlers through forests filled with Indians; it was he who enforced justice in a region that could have turned lawless; it was he who rallied volunteer troops and rode to the enemy. As an Indian fighter, Henry Lee wrote, Jackson’s “gallantry and enterprise were always conspicuous, attracted the confidence of the whites, and inspired honour and respect among the savages, who gave him the epithets of the sharp knife and the pointed arrow.” By projecting personal strength, Jackson created a persona of power, and it was this aura, perhaps more than any particular gift of insight, judgment, or rhetoric, that propelled him forward throughout his life.
As a judge of the Tennessee Superior Court—a post he held from December 1798 until July 1804—Jackson was riding circuit when he encountered the case of a man, Russell Bean, who had been indicted for “cutting off the ears of his infant child in a drunken frolic.” The local sheriff was afraid of Bean, who refused to appear in court. “Russell Bean would not be taken,” the sheriff told Jackson, who later related the incident to Henry Lee. “At this Judge Jackson expressed much astonishment, and peremptorily informed the officer ‘that such a return was an absurdity and could not be received, that the culprit must be arrested, and that he [the sheriff] had a right to summon the posse comitatus, to aid in the execution of the law.’ ” The sheriff asked Jackson to join the posse, and after arming himself, Jackson agreed. “Sir, I will attend you and see that you do your duty,” he said to the sheriff, who led Jackson to the place in town where Bean, “armed with a dirk and a brace of pistols,” was “boasting of his superiority to the law and entertaining the populace with taunts and reflections upon the cowardice of the sheriff and the pusillanimity of the court.” Then the court—in the person of Jackson—appeared. “Now, surrender, you infernal villain, this very instant,” Jackson said, “or I’ll blow you through.”
Wilting under Jackson’s “firm advance and formidable look,” Bean was “unnerved entirely.” He dropped his guns. “I will surrender to you, sir, but to no one else,” Bean said to Jackson.
Jackson could be touchy and unreasonable, but here, in a corner of Tennessee, we can see the faith others put in Jackson at times of peril and the respect his bravery inspired in his foes. “When danger rears its head, I can never shrink from it,” Jackson once told Rachel. He did what others would not—or could not—do. In a world of threats, that willingness made him a hero, a central figure, someone who could be counted on.
HE WAS BECOMING a man of standing in Nashville, and in that role he and Rachel were Aaron Burr’s hosts in Nashville in 1805. A former vice president and the man who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Burr was an adventurer at the center of a murky ongoing conspiracy in these years to lead a military expedition of some kind in the Southwest, possibly to marry U.S. land with Spanish holdings to create a stand-alone republic or empire. It was an elusive scheme, and with Jackson, Burr seems to have spoken only of preparing a force in the event of war with Spain in Florida, a subject of perennial interest in the Southwest at the time. At Burr’s request, Jackson agreed to build five boats and supply them with provisions.
That Jackson was not privy to a treasonous conspiracy seems evident; his call for the militia to make itself ready noted that they would move “when the government and constituted authorities of our country require it.” Burr had other ideas, including the possibility of seizing New Orleans. Beginning to suspect trouble, Jackson wrote several officials, including President Jefferson and Louisiana governor William C. C. Claiborne. “I fear there is something rotten in the State of Denmark,” Jackson told Claiborne. Ultimately Jefferson had Burr arrested and tried for treason; Burr was acquitted in 1807. The episode illuminates two elements of Jackson’s character: his ambition to secure the nation from foreign threats, an ambition so abiding that he very nearly allowed himself to become entangled in a terrible conspiracy; and, second, his equally abiding love of the nation as a family that could not be broken up.
JACKSON WAS forty-five years old when America and Britain went to war in 1812, and he was viewed as a formidable leader of men. By this time he had served as attorney general for Tennessee in its territorial days, in 1791; been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796; moved to the U.S. Senate in 1797; served as a judge from 1798 to 1804; and, in 1802, had also become major general of the state militia. All the while he struggled to build his planting and commercial interests, from buying huge tracts of land to running a frontier store. “He loves his country and his countrymen have full confidence in him,” Tennessee governor Willie Blount wrote to the secretary of war at the outbreak of hostilities in 1812. “He delights in peace; but does not fear war. He has a peculiar pleasure in treating his enemies as such; with them his first pleasure is to meet them on the field. At the present crisis he feels a holy zeal for the welfare of the United States, and at no period of his life has he been known to feel otherwise.” Since his mother and his brothers had died for the Union, he would defend the nation to the death.
It was not only courage and conviction that turned Jackson into a great general and a transformative president. He cared about his followers, thought of them as his family, and communicated this warmth in word and deed. Speaking of his men at a low moment in the War of 1812, Jackson promised to “act the part of a father to them.” Many leaders say such things and do not mean them, and many followers dismiss such sentiments as words without substance. Jackson was different. He proved his love in times of crisis, earning capital with his troops that both gave him a nickname and formed a bond of affection and respect between himself and his followers that lasted for the rest of his life.
In the cold winter of 1812–13, just months after the United States declared war on Great Britain, Jackson assembled his volunteers—2,071 in all—to march south, toward New Orleans. Jackson’s army set off in January 1813, and, five hundred miles later, at Natchez, federal military authorities told Jackson to hold up, and soon the secretary of war ordered him to disband and return to Nashville. By now 150 of Jackson’s men were sick, 56 could not sit up, and Jackson had a total of eleven wagons for the trip. “They abandon us in a strange country,” he angrily wrote to Governor Blount, adding: “And I will make every sacrifice to add to their comfort.” Lee captured Jackson’s bleak view: “They had sacrificed domestic comforts, abandoned civilian pursuits, cherished heroic visions; and voyaged a thousand miles—all as it seemed for nothing—and were suddenly left without motives for action, subjects for hope, the power of progression, or the means of return—between them and their homes frowned a vast wilderness where the ambushed savage lurked intent on theft and murder.…” As they prepared to move out, the doctor, Samuel Hogg, asked Jackson what he was to do.
Jackson did not hesitate. “To do, sir? You are to leave not a man on the ground.”
“But the wagons are full,” Hogg said, “and they will convey not more than half.”
“Then let some of the troops dismount, and the officers must give up their horses to the sick,” Jackson replied. “Not a man, sir, must be left behind.”
Hogg took Jackson at his word, and asked for the general’s own horses, which Jackson handed over. In wonder and with admiration his men watched this tall, determined figure press on. “I led them into the field,” Jackson wrote Rachel, and “I will at all hazard and risk lead them out. I will bring on the sick, or be with them—it shall never be said … they have been abandoned by their general.” To the Tennessee politician Felix Grundy, he said: “And as long as I have friends or credit, I will stick by them. I shall march them to Nashville or bury them with the honors of war. Should I die I know they would bury me.” On foot, he saw them home, and by the time they arrived in Nashville they were calling him “Old Hickory.” Jackson had done what his own parents never had. He had stayed the course with those in his charge, and delivered them from danger. He had done a father’s work.
BACK IN NASHVILLE for a time, Jackson slipped from the role of the protective commander and let his temper get the best of him during a foray into frontier violence. In 1813, a friend of Jackson’s in Nashville quarreled with Jesse Benton, the brother of Thomas Hart Benton, a future United States senator from Missouri. Jackson became entangled in the affair and before long—such were the complexities and short fuses in frontier Tennessee—he had let it be known that he would whip Thomas Benton when their paths crossed.
They crossed on Saturday, September 4, 1813, at about nine o’clock in the morning. Jackson and General John Coffee were in Nashville, walking from the post office, when Jackson, who happened to have his riding whip in his hand, saw Tom and Jesse Benton standing by the City Hotel. Jackson, brandishing his whip, could not resist the opportunity. “Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you,” Jackson told Tom Benton. “Defend yourself.”
Jackson pulled a gun and moved toward Tom, backing him around the hotel. Chaos ensued: an armed Jesse fired at Jackson, who fell with a serious wound in his upper left arm. Coffee rushed toward the sound and, finding Jackson in a spreading pool of blood, proceeded to shoot at Tom Benton. The shot went wide, but Coffee scrambled to beat Benton with the gun when Benton crashed down a flight of stairs. A nephew of Rachel’s then arrived on the scene, wrestled Jesse Benton to the floor, and tried to kill him with a dirk knife.
Everyone survived, but Jackson sustained the worst injuries in the melee. While being tended to by doctors, he bled through two mattresses. The physicians wanted to amputate Jackson’s left arm, but Jackson refused, and with enough force from his bloody bed to carry the point.
“I’ll keep my arm,” he said simply.
A month later, while Rachel was still nursing Jackson back to health, news arrived that Creek Indians under the leadership of Red Eagle had massacred white settlers at Fort Mims, a fortification about forty miles north of Mobile. Red Eagle (his father was Scottish, his mother Creek) had been influenced by Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who hoped to unite the Indians into a force that, armed and supplied by the British and the Spanish, would crush the white Americans who were usurping their land. “Let the white race perish!” Tecumseh said. “War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!”
Men like Jackson had long been troubled by visions of Indians colluding with London and Madrid to check American expansion, threaten the Union, and possibly undo the Revolution. To Jackson it was a given that the Indians—in this case the Creeks—were in league with America’s European rivals.
The Creek attack on Fort Mims had taken place on Monday, August 30, 1813. It was brutal; as a historian of Alabama described it, 250 whites, including women and children, “were butchered in the quickest manner, and blood and brains bespattered the whole earth. The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting their heads against the stockading. The women were scalped, and those who were pregnant were opened, while they were alive, and the embryo infants let out of the womb.” Until then, the Creeks had been fighting a factional war; by assaulting Fort Mims, the tribe irrevocably widened the conflict. That the fort had provided protection for settlers who had themselves attacked Red Sticks—named for their red war clubs—made no difference to the whites in the region who panicked at reports of the massacre.
They sent for Jackson. “Those distressed citizens of that frontier [have] … implored the brave Tennesseans for aid,” he said. “They must not ask in vain.” Forcing himself into battle—he was in terrible shape from the Benton brawl—Jackson won a bloody victory at Tallushatchee, a village filled with Red Sticks. “We shot them like dogs,” said David Crockett. Richard Keith Call, then a lieutenant under Jackson, was troubled by the toll Jackson’s men had exacted. “We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin,” Call said. “Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins.” The bloodshed was repulsive. “In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters,” Call said. “Heart-sick I turned from the revolting scene.”
Jackson, however, believed justice had been done. “We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims,” he told the governor of Tennessee. Difficult months followed. Supplies were few, and the troops’ discontent tested Jackson’s hold over his men. (Matters turned so grim that Jackson ordered the executions of six militiamen.) Still, he triumphed, winning victories from Talladega to Horseshoe Bend. The Creek War ended in August 1814—nearly a year after Fort Mims—with Jackson’s winning the cession of twenty-three million acres of land to the United States (three fifths of modern-day Alabama and one fifth of Georgia).
Jackson never rested. Though he had crushed the Creeks, he still believed the Indians a live threat, a willing tool in the hands of the British and the Spanish. To the south, he defended Mobile against a British attack and then struck to the east, at Spanish Florida, where he was convinced that Madrid (and London) was “arming the hostile Indians to butcher our women and children.” He threatened Pensacola, which prompted the Spanish authorities there to seek British protection; soon Jackson took the city’s major fort, and then turned back to the west, toward New Orleans. It was late November 1814.
AT NEW ORLEANS, Jackson continued the work of a conqueror. On Wednesday, December 16, with the British close by, he imposed martial law on the city, defying a writ of habeas corpus and jailing the federal district judge who issued it. (Lincoln would cite Jackson when suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War.) For this he was fined, and one of the last efforts of his life was to press Congress to refund the penalty.
However ruthless his rule, Jackson impressed the city. In the second week of December 1814, he was at a party when word came of the beginning of an engagement with the British. “The dancing was over, and in the greatest alarm everyone was for hastening to their homes; when the General in his elegant, persuading, convincing manner assured the company that only himself and staff need leave, that there was no danger, and he would feel greatly obliged if the dancing was resumed,” Mrs. Eliza Williams Chotard Gould, who was there, recalled in a private memoir. “Such were his powers of persuasion that the affrighted company became calm, and cheerfully took partners again.” It was a brief respite—the crowd did soon go home—but Jackson had proved himself a reassuring commander.
On the eve of the battle, from a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, Mrs. Gould and her family watched Jackson approach on horseback. Seeing the women in tears, Jackson “expressed his regret at our alarm, insisted that we were in no danger, that the American arms would be victorious and the British whipped back to their vessels,” Mrs. Gould recalled. “His confident manner and expressions … dissipated for a time our distress.” Jackson’s men, she said, “were the most splendid horsemen I ever saw.”
Jackson engaged the enemy in a climactic battle on Sunday, January 8, 1815, winning a victory reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt. Though the battle came after the war had ended—news of the treaty signed in Ghent on Christmas Eve would not reach New Orleans for several weeks—the victory was stunning. The British lost nearly three hundred men, with another twelve hundred wounded and hundreds more taken prisoner or missing. Only thirteen Americans died, with thirty-nine more suffering wounds. “It appears that the unerring hand of providence shielded my men from the powers of balls, bombs, and rockets, when every ball and bomb from our guns carried with them the mission of death,” Jackson said. Gazing across the battlefield as the cannon smoke lifted, John Coffee thought “the slaughter was shocking,” and soon living British soldiers who had hidden beneath their fallen comrades’ red coats rose from the heaps of corpses. “I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day,” Jackson recalled.
He was now a national, in fact international, figure of renown. In the city on Monday, January 23, 1815, the city’s ranking Roman Catholic priest thanked God for Jackson: “It is Him we intend to praise, when considering you, general, as the man of His right hand.… Immortal thanks be to His Supreme Majesty, for sending us such an instrument of His bountiful designs!”
New Orleans made him, and he was becoming a player on a larger stage—a prospect that provoked anxieties on Rachel’s part and insecurities on Jackson’s. Worried that her husband’s head would be turned by his popularity—among American figures to that date, only Washington enjoyed a reputation of comparable scope—Rachel cautioned him against valuing glory above family. “The attention and honors paid to the General far excel a recital by my pen,” Rachel wrote a friend after ceremonies celebrating Jackson in New Orleans in 1821. “They conducted him to the Grand Theater; his box was decorated with elegant hangings. At his appearance the theater rang with loud acclamations, Vive Jackson. Songs of praise were sung by ladies, and in the midst they crowned him with a crown of laurel.” But Rachel was thinking of things greater than earthly grandeur. “The Lord has promised his humble followers a crown that fadeth not away; the present one is already withered, the leaves are falling off.… Oh, for Zion! I wept when I saw this idolatry.”
Her husband, however, loved it. “I wish your carriage well repaired or exchanged for a new one,” Jackson wrote Rachel after New Orleans. “You must recollect that you are now a Major General’s lady, in the service of the U.S., and as such you must appear elegant and plain, not extravagant, but in such style as strangers expect to see you.” Louise Livingston, the wife of Jackson’s friend Edward Livingston, arranged Rachel’s wardrobe. Jackson wanted to look his part, too. “Bring with you my sash,” he told Rachel as she set out to come to New Orleans.
She was uncomfortable with splendor; he enjoyed the great life. She hated traveling; he spent much of his time on the road. She disliked the cut-and-thrust of politics; he adored maneuvering and governing. She was drawn to the pew, the plantation, and the fireside; he was, despite many protestations to the contrary, a thoroughly social creature, delighted by crowds and parties and the risks and rewards of the public stage.
During the turmoil of the 1824 presidential campaign, she complained that Jackson had failed to heed her counsel to avoid the political arena. “I knew from the first how wrong it was, but my advice was nothing,” Rachel confided to a friend. “His health is not good, and a continual uneasy mind keeps him unwell. I saw from the first it was wrong for him to fatigue himself with such an important office.” Yet within eight months of his losing the White House to John Quincy Adams in the election of 1824, the campaign of 1828 was under way. Rachel was Jackson’s shelter from the storm, and he loved her for that. Sadly for her, he also loved the storm, and so she had less of him than she would have liked.
CHILDREN MIGHT HAVE made the rough edges smoother, but the Jacksons did not have any of their own. Watching her husband playing with a relative’s baby—“This little pig went to market; this little pig stayed home; this little pig went squeak, squeak!” said the Hero of New Orleans—Rachel, according to a family story, cried: “Oh, husband! How I wish we had a child!” With grace, Jackson said, “Darling, God knows what to give, what to withhold; let’s not murmur against Him.”
Rachel would recount this scene, adding: “He would have given his life for a child; but knowing how disappointed I was at never being a mother, he, pitying me, tried to console me by saying: God denies us offspring that we may help those who have large families and no means to support them.” She recalled, too, that “once, returning from a child’s funeral, the bereaved mother’s frantic grief almost unmanning us, he said, ‘Your heart, my love, will never be pierced by that cruel knife.’ ”
There were consolations. Andrew Donelson, who grew up to serve as his private secretary, was one. A nephew of Rachel’s, born in 1799, Andrew Jackson Donelson could not remember a time when he was not part of the Jackson world; the Jacksons had taken charge of his care and education after his father died in 1804. Jackson, it seemed, was the only one who could fill his father’s role: when a well-off planter courted his mother, Andrew Donelson cut the man’s saddle stirrups. In 1808 Rachel’s brother Severn Donelson’s wife had twin boys and offered to allow the Jacksons to adopt one of the infants. They accepted, christening the child Andrew Jackson, Jr. “The sensibility of our beloved son has charmed me, I have no doubt, from the sweetness of his disposition,” Rachel wrote Jackson in 1813.
At war with the Creek Indian Nation in November 1813, Jackson’s interpreter found a small boy, Lyncoya, on the battlefield. The boy’s family was dead—“destroyed,” as Jackson put it to Rachel, at the hands of Jackson and his men—and Jackson saw himself and his own plight during the Revolution in the child’s eyes. With a combination of charity and condescension, he adopted Lyncoya on the spot and sent him to the Hermitage “for” Andrew junior as a playmate. “Keep Lyncoya in the house,” Jackson wrote Rachel. “He is a savage but one that fortune has thrown in my hands.… I therefore want him well taken care of, he may have been given to me for some valuable purpose. In fact, when I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him.” Lyncoya lived at the Hermitage for the next fifteen years, dying of illness in 1828.
Andrew junior and the numerous Donelson cousins filled the Jacksons’ lives and house; taken together, the Donelson-Jackson clan was one of the most important in the state. General Daniel Smith, Andrew Donelson’s mother’s father (Jackson had helped her elope with Samuel Donelson, so in a way Andrew Donelson even owed Jackson his very life), served in the U.S. Senate, and the interlocking families owned large tracts of land around Nashville and beyond. Jackson and the Donelsons moved with the mightiest men in Tennessee—generals, governors, and planters. They may have been cash-poor but they were property-rich (in acres and slaves), and they were absolutely certain of their place in the universe, which is one definition of aristocracy. General Smith built a house named Rock Castle, which was, a relative recalled, “reputed to be the handsomest south of the Ohio or west of the Alleghenies.”
AFTER NEW ORLEANS Jackson continued his battles against the Indian tribes in the South and West, and between 1816 and 1820 signed treaties giving the United States tens of millions of acres (this was in addition to his vast Creek acquisition). In the spring of 1816 his obsession with securing the nation’s borders—and thus ensuring the safety of the country—led him to write Mauricio de Zuniga, the commandant of Pensacola. Florida remained in Spanish hands, and Jackson’s incursion before the Battle of New Orleans had only provisionally taken care of the problem of having a foreign foe in such proximity. The occasion for the letter to Zuniga: fugitive American slaves were escaping to a fort occupied by blacks along the Apalachicola River. Allowing slaves to seek shelter at what he called the “negro fort,” Jackson told Zuniga that the situation “will not be tolerated by our government, and if not put down by Spanish Authority will compel us in self-defense to destroy them.” Within months, another American general, Edmund Pendleton Gaines, did exactly that, destroying the fort (and the 270 people inside it).
But the Spanish remained, and by 1817 Jackson was able to direct his fire toward two of his great nemeses—Spain and the Indians—at once. The Seminoles declined to leave their lands north of the Florida border—they were supposed to under the terms of Jackson’s agreement with the Creeks—and instead fought back, trading bloodbath for bloodbath with the Americans, with the Seminoles escaping to Spanish-held Florida for safety.
President Monroe, in a letter dated Sunday, December 28, 1817, authorized Jackson to quell the Seminole threat—and suggested that a broader victory would not be unwelcome. “This is not a time for you to think of repose,” Monroe wrote Jackson. “Great interests are at issue, and until our course is carried through triumphantly … you ought not to withdraw your active support from it.” Was Monroe only interested in subduing the Seminoles? Or was he hinting, and perhaps hoping, that Jackson might go further, seizing Florida and driving out the Spanish?
Whatever Monroe meant—and the letter is diplomatically oblique—Jackson moved against both the Seminoles and the Spanish and conquered Florida. In the course of the invasion he ordered the executions of two British subjects, provoking a crisis with England. Jackson claimed he had authorization from Monroe for the seizure of Florida, but no evidence of such permission (beyond the December 28 letter) ever came to light. Jackson’s adventure roiled Washington. In Monroe’s Cabinet, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and Treasury Secretary William Crawford denounced the seizure; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who believed in the virtues of American control of the continent, defended Jackson. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Henry Clay—like Calhoun and Crawford, a man with presidential ambitions—denounced Jackson, arguing that to allow Jackson’s actions to stand uncensored would mark “a triumph of the military over the civil authority … a triumph over the constitution of the land.”
While a congressional probe failed to produce a resolution of censure against Jackson for overstepping his authority, the questions about Florida—like those about his marriage, his duels, and martial law in New Orleans—provided Jackson’s political foes with much ammunition. There would be more than a few fights over these issues in the 1820s, a decade in which Andrew Jackson moved from the front lines of the South and West to the trenches of national politics.
THE DIARY OF a young woman from South Carolina who spent two days at the Hermitage with Jackson and Rachel in September 1827, a year before his election as president and her death, offers an intimate account of the Jacksons’ married life, of Rachel’s kindness, and of Jackson’s force of personality. The traveler, Julia Ann Conner, was from a well-connected family, and she and her party arrived at the Hermitage at dusk on Monday, September 3, 1827. As the visitors entered the front hall, they looked up to see General and Mrs. Jackson coming down the main stairs. Jackson struck Conner as a “venerable, dignified, fine-looking man, perfectly easy in manner.… Mrs. Jackson received us with equal politeness.” Rachel led her guests into the drawing room for refreshments, then took Conner out into the garden for a walk. At supper Jackson “pronounced with much solemnity of manner a short grace and then performed the honors of the table with an attentive politeness which usually characterizes a gentleman—everything was neat and elegant—a complete service of French china, rich cut glass—damask napkins.”
The house was filled with history, and with tokens of tribute. The brace of pistols Lafayette had given to Washington were on the mantelpiece, a gift to Jackson from the Washington family. “They are preserved with almost sacred veneration,” Conner said, as was a small pocket spy glass of Washington’s. There was a silver urn from South Carolina, a gold snuffbox from New York—all signs of respect to the Hero of New Orleans.
The Hero himself cast a kind of spell over Conner. “The manners of the General are so perfectly easy and polished and those of his wife so replete with kindness and benevolence that you are placed at once at ease,” she said.
Conner owed Jackson a small debt: he helped her at chess. She was playing another houseguest, and Conner recalled that Jackson “stood at my side, and being an excellent player he frequently directed my moves—apparently much interested in the fate of the game … there were no traces of the ‘military chieftain’ as he is called!”
This sketch of Jackson the tactician—a player of chess, a game that rewards strategy and foresight—explains much about Jackson’s character. He could sometimes seem reckless, but more often he was playing the games of politics and war with the kind of skill and patience chess requires. And Conner was surely right when she observed that he was “much interested in the fate of the game”—he was always interested in the fate of the game, or of the battle, or of the vote.
CONNER DETECTED SOMETHING in her few days under his roof that many of Jackson’s foes never did: that he was far more than a frontier soldier. His enemies never quite saw that the largest fact about Jackson was not a problem with his “passions”—the contemporary sense of the word was “temper”—but his ability, more often than not, to govern them and harness the energies that would have driven other, less sophisticated men to political ruin. “Sophisticated” is not a word often used to describe Andrew Jackson, but it should be. The number of scandals that threatened to consume him between his admission to the bar and his election to the White House—martial law in New Orleans, the execution of mutineers in the field, invading Florida arguably without proper authority, killing British subjects, his murky marriage, his slaying of Charles Dickinson, the gunfight with the Bentons—would have ended most political careers.
Yet Jackson endured and conquered. He knew how to make amends when he had to and possessed enough charm to turn longtime enemies into new friends. Jackson could, of course, lapse into alarming violence, but he also had a capacity for political grace and conciliation when the spirit moved him. In Washington in 1823–24, Jackson spent a few months as a senator from Tennessee. Jackson needed to put as many hatreds and grudges as he could to rest in preparation for the 1824 presidential campaign. Thomas Hart Benton—of the brawl with the Benton brothers—was by then a senator from Missouri. He and Jackson served together on a committee. Writing to Rachel, Jackson’s friend and Senate colleague John Henry Eaton reported: “The General is at peace and in friendship with … Col. Benton: he is in harmony and good understanding with every body, a thing I know you will be happy to hear.” Eaton was not exaggerating. “His temper was placable as well as irascible, and his reconciliations were cordial and sincere,” Benton said after Jackson’s death. “Of that, my own case was a signal instance. After a deadly feud, I became his confidential adviser; was offered the highest marks of his favor; and received from his dying bed a message of friendship, dictated when life was departing, and when he would have to pause for breath.”
Jackson could absorb the essence of a situation at a glance. “The character of his mind was that of judgment, with a rapid and almost intuitive perception, followed by an instant and decisive action,” said Benton. Was his “instant and decisive action” always right? No—far from it. But behind his bluster lay a skill for controlling, containing, and even erasing the damage his rashness could cause. “No man,” a longtime Jackson intimate told James Parton, “knew better than Andrew Jackson when to get into a passion and when not.” To manage conflicting forces of emotion and pragmatism is the rarest of political gifts. For all the indictments to the contrary, Jackson had that gift—and used it to further his own fortunes, and to secure the future of the nation. Faith in his ability to maneuver out of any corner—to face down a man at twenty-four feet while blood leaked into his own boot, to save a wounded arm after taking another bullet, to elude enemies in the forest, to arrest an outlaw, to manipulate, usually from afar, congressional investigations—sustained him. “He was a firm believer in the goodness of a superintending Providence, and in the eventual right judgment and justice of the people,” said Benton. “I have seen him at the most desperate part of his fortunes, and never saw him waver in the belief that all would come right in the end.”
But how did he transform himself from a “slobbering” young man lashing out at an unfair and largely uncaring world to become what Henry Wise, the Virginia governor and an astute Jackson observer, called a cool calculator? Part of the answer lies in the fact that his ambition to succeed was matched by his intellectual capacity to realize that his anger would tend to block, not fuel, his rise. It is the unusual human being who can identify and control particular impulses, but Jackson turned himself into such a man in order to get what he wanted, which was a place among those at the top, not the bottom, of life.
He referred to his ability to manage his temper as his “Philosophy.” When Rachel was under attack in the 1828 campaign, Jackson struggled to hold his anger in check. “How hard it is to keep the cowhide from some of these villains,” he confided to John Coffee. “I have made many sacrifices for the good of my country—but the present, being placed in a situation that I cannot act, and punish those slanderers, not only of me, but Mrs. J. is a sacrifice too great to be well endure[d] yet … I must bear with it.” Jackson strained to remain calm. “My Philosophy is almost worn out,” he said as the campaign continued, “but all my enemies expect is, to urge me to some rash action, this they cannot do until the election is over.” Even then, Jackson would not give his foes the satisfaction of playing into the caricature of a wild-eyed backwoodsman brandishing a whip and a pistol. He would turn a serene—and sad, after Rachel’s death, but still serene—face to the country.
In doing so Jackson mirrored a national phenomenon. Control over how one appeared to the rest of the world was a subject of popular concern in the America of Jackson’s time, and he was in many ways an example of a recognizable type: a man from the bottom rungs of society on the rise and in search of a code of manners. “What makes the gentleman?” had once been a topic of debate between Andrew and an uncle of his on a rainy day in Waxhaw. “The boy said, Education; the uncle, Good Principles,” a son of the uncle recalled to James Parton.
They were both right: principles presumably flowed from education, whether or not the education came in a classroom. For all of the Founders’ talk about equality and natural rights and the evils of monarchy and aristocracy, Americans were obsessed with marks of class distinction from colonial days. It began, in a way, with the greatest Founder of all: as a schoolboy, George Washington filled part of an exercise book with one hundred and ten Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.General Daniel Smith, Andrew Donelson’s maternal grandfather, advised young men in his family to consult Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, a kind of manners manual written by Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield. The essence of Chesterfield was to make oneself pleasant and genial but to be forever wary of others. Jackson, who believed in self-mastery, certainly spoke in such terms. “You cannot have forgotten the advice I give to all my young friends,” Jackson wrote an acquaintance in 1826, “that is to say, as they pass through life have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.”
This is deft Machiavellian—and Chesterfieldian—counsel. Trust no one except those who have proved themselves, yet never let those who have failed the test know that when they look at you, they are looking at a mask, not at your true self. Life, Jackson was saying, particularly political life, can be theatrical—an exercise in assessing other people’s minds and motives and then designing your own response with an awareness of the gulf between appearance and reality. It was Chesterfield’s creed, and Jackson subscribed to it.