IN LATE JANUARY 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was at home in wintry Springfield, Illinois, contemplating his course. The South was seceding, the Union in danger of dying. In search of a quiet place to work on his inaugural address, Lincoln walked through streets of mud and ice to his brother-in-law’s brick general store, Yates and Smith, near the corner of Sixth and Adams. Lincoln had told his friend and law partner William Herndon that he would need some “works” to consult. “I looked for a long list, but when he went over it I was greatly surprised,” Herndon recalled. In the course of drafting his inaugural, Lincoln asked for a copy of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s speech on the Compromise of 1850, Webster’s second reply to Hayne—and Jackson’s Proclamation to the People of South Carolina.
Reading Jackson’s words in the small, sparsely furnished upper room, Lincoln found what he needed: the example of Andrew Jackson, a president who had fought secession and chaos, rescuing the Union from an armed clash with a hostile South twenty-eight winters before. Now, three decades on, in a time of even greater trial, Lincoln looked to Jackson to arm himself against disunion and despair.
“The right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question,” Lincoln had said at the end of 1860. “It was fully discussed in Jackson’s time, and denied … by him.… It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment. He was not elected for any such purpose.” For Jackson the will of the people was majestic, even magical, and Lincoln agreed. “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments,” Lincoln wrote, “is the only true sovereign of a free people.” For Lincoln as for Jackson, a majority was neither always right nor always wrong. The right would depend on the circumstances. But the president’s duty was constant: to preserve the Union, for without the Union no progress was possible.
JACKSON HAS INSPIRED some of the greatest men who have followed him in the White House—presidents who have sought to emulate his courage, to match his strength, and to wage and win the kinds of battles he waged and won. Running at the head of a national party, fighting for a mandate from the people to govern in particular ways on particular issues, depending on a circle of insiders and advisers, mastering the media of the age to transmit a consistent message at a constant pace, and using the veto as a political, not just a constitutional, weapon, in a Washington that is at once politically and personally charged are all features of the modern presidency that flowered in Jackson’s White House.
He also proved the principle that the character of the president matters enormously. Politics is about more than personality; the affairs of a great people are shaped by complex and messy forces that transcend the purely biographical. Those affairs, however, are also fundamentally affected by the complex and messy individuals who marshal and wield power in a given era. Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably. But he gave his most imaginative successors the means to do things they thought right.
“Jackson had many faults,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “but he was devotedly attached to the Union, and he had no thought of fear when it came to defending his country.… With the exception of Washington and Lincoln, no man has left a deeper mark on American history; and though there is much in his career to condemn, yet all true lovers of America can unite in paying hearty respect to the memory of a man who was emphatically a true American, who served his country valiantly on the field of battle against a foreign foe, and who upheld with the most staunch devotion the cause of the great Federal Union.” Roosevelt approved of Jackson’s “ ‘instinct for the jugular’ ” and capacity to “recognize his real foe and strike savagely at the point where danger threatens.”
A man of strength, TR admired Jackson’s. “The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people … was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln,” Roosevelt said. “Other honorable and well-meaning presidents, such as James Buchanan, took the opposite, and, as it seems to me, narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people, and can do nothing, no matter how necessary it be to act, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action.” For Jackson and for TR, the presidency, in this light, was not an arm of government but its heart, beating vitally.
President Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin was also fascinated by Jackson. On a visit to the Hermitage on Saturday, November 17, 1934, the paralyzed FDR was helped out of his car in front of the house, and, with locked steel braces on his legs, he forced himself forward balanced by the arm of an aide on one side and a cane on the other. Greeted at the door by the sound of “Hail to the Chief” being played on Jackson’s old pianoforte, Roosevelt, one witness said, “bowed gallantly” to Mrs. Emily Walton, a descendant of Rachel’s who had known Jackson in his old age—a living link from Jackson, the nineteenth-century founder of the Democratic Party, to Roosevelt, its greatest twentieth-century champion. Though ramps had been installed to smooth the way for Roosevelt’s wheelchair, he chose to stay on his feet, sitting only for a grand Southern breakfast in the dining room. Walking was awkward and painful for Roosevelt, but some occasions were so important to him that he eschewed his chair. Paying tribute to Jackson was such an occasion.
IN 1941, BEFORE America entered World War II, FDR equated his coming task with Jackson’s battle to save the Union. “Responsibility lay heavily upon the shoulders of Andrew Jackson,” FDR told the nation that spring. “In his day the threat to the Federal Union came from within.… In our own day the threat to our Union and our democracy is not a sectional one. It comes from a great part of the world which surrounds us, and which draws more tightly around us, day by day.” Jackson had met the challenge of the hour and rescued the Union with a “rugged, courageous spirit”—and Roosevelt found comfort in the thought that a revival of that spirit, with himself taking over Jackson’s role as savior president, would see the country through.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was so absorbed by Jackson that Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s partner in a failed haberdashery, once recalled that the future president was always off in a corner reading books about Jackson rather than tending to the few customers who did come in.
Truman, who had spent his childhood soaking up heroic stories about Jackson, commissioned a statue of Old Hickory to sit outside the Kansas City Courthouse (as the presiding judge of Jackson County, he traveled to the Hermitage in 1931 to record the dimensions of Jackson’s clothing in order to get the memorial exactly right), and, in 1945, put a small bronze of the Jackson statue on a table in the Oval Office. In a more substantive vein, Truman drew on Jacksonian imagery to build on the New Deal and secure America’s place in a new global order—tasks not unlike the ones Jackson had faced when he broadened democracy and fought to establish the United States’ place in the family of nations a century before.
“He wanted sincerely to look after the little fellow who had no pull,” Truman said of Jackson, “and that’s what a president is supposed to do.” Looking abroad, Truman, like Jackson, spoke bluntly about America’s role. It was Jackson, Truman said, who “helped once again to make it clear … that we were becoming a stronger and stronger country and wouldn’t always be a weak, upstart little nation that had to kowtow to the big European powers.”
When Truman lit the National Community Christmas Tree on a snow-covered South Lawn in 1945, the first Christmas Eve ceremony after four years of world war, the new president was facing a new and frightening age. Summoning the heroes of the Republic, Truman spoke of the Washington Monument, of the memorials on the Mall to Lincoln and to Jefferson, and of the statue of Jackson in Lafayette Square. “It is well in this solemn hour that we bow to Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln as we face our destiny with its hopes and fears—its burdens and its responsibilities,” Truman said. “Out of the past shall we gather wisdom and inspiration to chart our future course.”
JACKSON’S REMAINS LIE next to Rachel’s in the garden grave near the winding Cumberland, the river that took him so often to and from Washington. His tombstone reads only:
GENERAL
ANDREW JACKSON,
MARCH 15, 1767–
JUNE 8, 1845.
The modesty of the inscription seems fitting, for all one needs to do to see his legacy is look up from the slab and breathe in the light of a united nation, a country that has emerged from the fires of conflict both at home and abroad stronger and freer. The Hermitage’s slave quarters are near Jackson’s tomb, a rebuke to the generations of white Americans who limited crusades for life and liberty to their own kind, and a reminder that evil can appear perfectly normal to even the best men and women of a given time.
“The victor in a hundred battles has at last fallen,” Levi Woodbury, whose bust the president kept in the Hermitage, said in a eulogy to Jackson. “The pilot, who weathered the storm in the fiercest hurricanes of political strife, looks no longer to the compass or the clouds to guide us; and the Christian as well as the sage and patriot of the Hermitage—who still prayed for his country, after the power to do aught else had ceased—has gone to his great and glorious reward, while we linger a little longer to … try to profit by his bright example.”
We profit, too, from a leader’s dim example. The great often teach by their failures and derelictions. The tragedy of Jackson’s life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift. The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections and promises to all—belatedly, it is true, but by saving the Union, Jackson kept the possibility of progress alive, a possibility that would have died had secession and separation carried the day.
Speaking of Jackson in death, alluding to the crisis with South Carolina in 1832–33, George Bancroft said: “The moral of the great events of those days is this: that the people can discern right, and will make their way to a knowledge of right; that the whole human mind, and therefore with it the mind of the nation, has a continuous, ever improving existence; that the appeal from the unjust legislation of to-day must be made quietly, earnestly, perseveringly, to the more enlightened collective reason of to-morrow; that submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people, when in error, will amend their doings; that in a popular government, injustice is neither to be established by force, nor to be resisted by force; in a word, that the Union which is constituted by consent, must be preserved by love.”
Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir—the people will set things to rights.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1853, was a sparkling, unusually warm midwinter day in Washington, and thousands gathered in and around Lafayette Square for the dedication of Clark Mills’s equestrian statue of Jackson. It was a grand occasion, the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, and Senator Stephen A. Douglas was the keynote speaker. A vast procession—citizens and soldiers, congressmen and officers—marched from Washington’s City Hall at D Street on Judiciary Square to the White House grounds. There they saluted President Fillmore and his Cabinet, then moved back across Pennsylvania Avenue to the square. A reporter for the Washington Union wrote that twenty thousand spectators gathered in and around the park; some watched from the tops of the houses in which the Jackson circle—Van Buren, the Donelsons, the Livingstons, the Blairs—had danced and dined. Sitting at home, not far from the new memorial, Francis Blair had drafted Douglas’s remarks, eleven handwritten pages summing up the seventh president.
Douglas reminded his listeners that the man they were commemorating had begun life as an orphan, finding his family in his country. “Nobly did the widowed mother perform her duty to those fatherless children” after the death of the first Andrew Jackson, Douglas said, but then came the Revolution. “Hugh, the elder brother of Andrew Jackson, fell in his first battle at Stono. Robert became a martyr to liberty, and lost his life from wounds received while in captivity. The mother descended to the grave, a victim to grief and suffering,” Douglas said. “Andrew was thus left alone in the world at a tender age, without father or mother, brother or sister, friend or fortune to assist him. All was gone save the high qualities with which God had endowed him, and the noble precepts which a pious and sainted mother had infused into his young heart.”
When Jackson had died, there was a sense of completion, that the race had been finished: “He felt that his work was done—his mission fulfilled.” And there was, for a moment, unanimous tribute. “All felt that a great man had fallen,” Douglas said. “Yet there was consolation in the consciousness that the lustre of his name, the fame of his great deeds, and the results of his patriotic services, would be preserved through all time—a rich inheritance to the devotees of freedom.”
EVEN NOW, WHEN presidents stand beneath the North Portico of the White House and look into Lafayette Square, they can see Jackson there, his sword within reach, ready to ride, ready to fight. There he is, a courageous man who could not rest, who risked everything and gave everything for his “one great family”—America.
Nearly a century and three quarters since Jackson left Washington for the last time, the sounds and sights of Lafayette Square would be familiar to him. Behind the statue of Jackson stands the bright yellow St. John’s Church, where he often sat in Pew 54. In the church’s steeple, beneath a gold-domed cupola topped by an arrow-tipped weathervane, hangs a bronze bell struck by Paul Revere’s ancestral company. On the base of Jackson’s statue, molded from molten British arms, are the seven words from that long-ago Jefferson birthday dinner toast: “Our Federal Union: It Must Be Preserved.”
The eyes of Jackson’s statue look south, across the Potomac River and toward the pockets of rebellion he put down—keeping watch, never blinking, never tiring. “He still lives in the bright pages of history,” Stephen Douglas said in dedicating the statue. He still lives—and we live in the country he made, children of a distant and commanding father, a father long dead yet ever with us.