American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham.
New York: Random House, 2008.
I know that some of you are wondering what Andrew Jackson has to do with the current events in our nation. You may be thinking that he lived almost 200 years ago and therefore has very little impact on what or who we are today. This is an incorrect assumption because Andrew Jackson, for better or for worse, was a prime factor in shaping the executive branch into what it looks like nowadays. If we complain about too much executive control, we can thank Jackson; if we are happy about the strong leadership in our government, we can also thank Jackson. Jackson, in so many ways, embodied who we were collectively as Americans and steered us towards the place we would eventually reach. In fact, Meachum remarks on the fact that Andrew Jackson is America. “Yet of the great early presidents and Founders, Andrew Jackson is in many ways the most like us. In the saga of the Jackson presidency, one marked by both democratic triumphs and racist tragedies, we can see the American character in formation and action. To understand him and his time helps us to understand America’s perennially competing impulses. Jackson’s life and work—and the nation he protected and preserved—were shaped by the struggle between grace and rage, generosity and violence, justice and cruelty” (p. xx).
The story of Andrew Jackson is one of surmounting seemingly impossible odds. “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” (p. 38). As you can see, the General had a mercurial temperament but also had the political savvy to when to blow hot and when to blow cold. In some ways, he’s the perfect politician—he had concrete morals and ethics (to himself) but was able to use a myriad of ways to accomplish them. Machiavelli would have been so proud! Unlike Jefferson, who was an enigma through and through, Jackson had a method to his madness.
For instance, take the Trail of Tears debacle. I think that most people read about Jackson’s inhumanity towards the Indians and this causes many to hate him outright. I disagree. Jackson merely had an idea on how the Indian question could best be solved and he stuck to it for the rest of his life. I really can’t see Jackson as the diabolical tyrant, setting out to destroy the Indians en toto. No, I see him as a man who made an incorrect assumption based on his knowledge, his perceptions, and his prejudices, which led inevitably to an incorrect decision. And since he was president, that incorrect decision affected thousands.
Let us remember that Andrew practically grew up on the frontier in Nashville, TN where the threat of Indian raids and scalpings were of very real concern. As he grew older, he watched the Americans slowly chase the Indians off their land; he also saw the deadly interactions between the two groups (including some battles that he was present at). Plus with the advent of the cotton gin, cotton was the New Big Crop in Town and that meant more slaves and more importantly, more land was needed. The Americans then started branching out and they greedily eyed the wild land of the Indian tribes. Jackson, in his mind, decided that the best policy for keeping the Indians whole and the Americans happy was to send the Indians west of the Mississippi. Sure, now it looks completely heartless and Jackson was certainly at fault in the matter. However considering that I too am an American, I understand how desperately and pointedly those Americans back then would have salivated over all that deliciously, unused land. So here’s Jackson’s plan: there would be no more fighting between the Indians and the Americans because he would give the Americans the land they wanted and send all the Indians across the Mississippi to keep them whole and to give them the land they enjoyed (unmolested).
Jackson’s mind was made up on this matter (it seemed so obvious) so he pushed the bill through Congress and that was that. As we all know in retrospect that the Indians were forced onto the Trail of Tears over thousands of miles, ending with one-fourth of them dying. Even though Jackson was no longer president when this occurred, I definitely think that he could have and should have taken greater steps to see that the Indians were treated more humanely under the circumstances. I am not defending all his actions, but Jackson’s reasoning does make some sense. “For Jackson the primary duty of federal power once invoked, was to protect the many from the few. Like the Bank, like the radicals of South Carolina, like the Washington elite, the Christian movement for justice for the Indians and for public purity posed a threat to Jackson’s vision, which held that the people (or at least white male people) were sovereign and that intermediary forces were too apt to serve their own interests rather than the public’s. Jackson’s solution? Jackson. On the Indian question, he was determined to have his way, and few doubted that he would prevail” (p. 76-77).
In other words, “Jackson was neither a humanitarian nor a blind bigot. He thought of himself as practical” (p. 96).
In his paradoxical way, he espoused rights of man but continued to own slaves and saw nothing wrong with it. In the South, slaves were owned as a way of life, end of story. Even though Jackson believed in the Declaration of Independence and fought for the idea of Union, he was particularly blind to the idea that slavery was repugnant to all these vaunted ideals. At one point, he actively worked against the Constitution to suppress abolitionist mailings in South Carolina. “If Jackson had been a president of consistent principle, the issue [slavery] would have been clear. He was the defender of the Union, the conqueror of nullification, the hero of democracy. An American organization was exercising its constitutional right to free speech and was using the public mails—mails that were to be open to all—to do so. But Jackson was not a president of consistent principle. He was a politician, subject to his own passions and predilections, and those passions and predilections pressed him to cast his lot with those with whom he agreed on the question at hand—slavery—which meant suppressing freedom of speech” (p. 304). Jackson can be very, very hard to understand at times but I believe that he was acting off a set of his own guiding principles.
When I look back to Andrew Jackson, though, I see that his main impact on us today was the establishment of the executive branch as the strongest of the three. No longer would the president bow before whims of Congress! He revolutionized the presidency through his belief that the president was a direct representative of the people of the United States, which was more than Congress could claim at the time. “Patronage, the Bank, nullification, Indian removal, clerical influence in politics, internal improvements, respect abroad—these were the questions that would define Jackson’s White House years. They were questions about power, money, God, and Jackson’s answers were linked to his expansive view of the office of president” (p. 57). Only a month in office and Jackson had vetoed his first bill. During his presidency, Congress raged at him for his tyrannical stronghold on what he believed was right. And you know what? The people loved him. I mean, absolutely loved him! He went straight to the people on any major issues, having his party-friendly newspapers print what he wanted them to say. No president had claimed to be the people’s direct representative but that is what Jackson did and nobody could stop him. “’King Andrew the First,’ as his foes styled him, was the most powerful president in the forty-year history of the office, but his power was marshaled not for personal gain—he was always in financial straits—but, as Jackson saw it, for what he believed was in the best interest of the ordinary, the unconnected, the uneducated. He could be brutal in his application of power, but he was not a brute. He could be unwavering, but he was not close-minded. He was, rather, the great politician of his time, if success in politics is measured by the affirmation of a majority of the people in real time and by the shadow one casts after leaving the stage” (p. 230).
And that, I think, is his greatest legacy—the “shadow” that he has cast ever since on our great nation. After all, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Truman all looked to Jackson and the precedents that he set. He was needy and selfish and vain and opinionated but he cared about people and he could make decisions when they were necessary. Not great decisions sometimes but he didn’t waffle. Whether you love him or hate him (there’s really no middle ground here), Andrew Jackson was and still is one of our greatest Presidents.
“In Nashville, according to legend, a visitor to the Hermitage asked a slave on the place whether he thought Jackson had gone to heaven. ‘If the General wants to go,’ the slave replied, ‘who’s going to stop him’” (p. 346)?
No comments:
Post a Comment