Andrew Jackson's legacy remembered
Lynn Bonney - Special to the Gazette
Friday, March 6, 2009
“American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” by Jon Meacham, Random House, 2008, $30.
Ask most Americans what they know about Andrew Jackson and the answers would probably include Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans and the storied inauguration reception, which became a mob scene as supporters almost wrecked the White House in celebration of their fellow Tennessean’s victory.
Now another native son of Tennessee, Jon Meacham, has fleshed out the Jackson presidency in “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” a portrait of the man who defined the presidency as we know it today. Meacham’s readable prose brings to life the America of the 1830s and the boy who survived a brutal youth to become a war hero. The only member of his family to live through the American Revolution, Jackson saw the nation as his family and he put personal loyalty above all else – a strength and a flaw in his administration.
Jackson lost the love of his life, Rachel Donelson Robards, to a heart attack shortly after he was elected to the presidency. The couple had married, unaware, perhaps, that she was not officially divorced from her first husband. The happy marriage was the subject of gossip, which Jackson believed caused stress that led to her death. He surrounded himself with members of her family, who accompanied him to Washington and filled out his household for the rest of his life.
The Washington of Jackson’s time wasn’t so much different from today. There were sex scandals: Meacham recounts Jackson’s pleasure in the marriage of his old friend John Henry Eaton, his secretary of war, to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, a woman whose reputation scandalized polite society. Many proper Washingtonians refused to call on Margaret Eaton, despite her husband’s powerful position. In later years, Meacham writes, Margaret Eaton said, “I never had a lover who was not a gentleman and was not in a good position in society.”
Jackson also spent much of his presidency embroiled in a struggle with Nicholas Biddle and the Bank of the United States. His aim was to break the bank, literally, and he accomplished that aim, insisting that the bank furthered the interest of a powerful few at the expense of the American people.
During Jackson’s era, the nation wrestled with the question of nullification: Did states have the right to declare that federal laws were null and void within their borders? This dispute, which led to a break with his first vice president, South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, prefigured the Civil War. Indeed, Meacham writes, Abraham Lincoln drew on Jackson’s writings in forming his policies opposing secession.
Lincoln was not the only president who admired Jackson. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were also students of his two terms that established the office of the president as the seat of Washington power.
Less admirable was Jackson’s treatment of American Indians. He was embroiled in a lengthy seven-year war with the Seminoles and he was responsible for the relocation of the Cherokees. He was also a lifelong slave-owner, a conflicted man whose personality swung between kindness and coldness — much beloved and much despised by those who knew him.
Meacham captures it all and presents a man whose legacy is with us still, truly an American lion.
F Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”