General Andrew Jackson

“ Both Governments are the Governments of the people; improvements must be made with the money of the people, and if the money can be collected and applied by those more simple and economical political machines, the State governments, it will unquestionably be safer and better for the people than to add to the splendor, the patronage, and the power of the General Government. But if the people of the several States think otherwise they will amend the Constitution, and in their decision all ought cheerfully to acquiesce. ”

“ To the confusion of all their arrangements the great Western State of Tennessee nominated as her candidate for the Presidency General Andrew Jackson, the deliverer of New Orleans.
Jackson was a frontiersman and a soldier. Because he was a frontiersman he tended to be at once democratic in temper and despotic in action. In the rough and tumble of life in the back blocks a man must often act without careful inquiry into constitutional privileges, but he must always treat men as men and equals. ”

“ It is beyond the power of man to make a system of government like ours or any other operate with precise equality upon States situated like those which compose this Confederacy; nor is inequality always injustice. Every State can not expect to shape the measures of the General Government to suit its own particular interests. ”

“ Nothing had yet happened in the career of General Jackson which even hinted that his wiry strength of body and of will would some day win for him the enduring title, “Old Hickory.” The long, weary, homeward march from Natchez with his loyal Tennesseans was a decade ahead of him. The battles of the Horseshoe and New Orleans and the fame which followed them were undreamed-of events of a shadowy, uncertain future. No one foretold that the hickory tree would become symbolic of the man, nor that the tract of land he was buying would some day be one of the nation’s most important shrines. ”

“ In such a Government, possessing only limited and specific powers, the spirit of its general administration can not be wise or just when it opposes the reference of all doubtful points to the great source of authority, the States and the people, whose number and diversified relations securing them against the influences and excitements which may mislead their agents, make them the safest depository of power. ”

“ Jack and Frank were seated just outside the flap of Jackson’s tent, when the commander spoke these words to his officers within. Jack nodded to his companions.
“I wouldn’t care to be an army contractor and have the general on my trail,” said he. “He wouldn’t stop at much.”
“Not he,” said a young Nashville lawyer, who was in the scouts. “Jackson is a man who accomplishes everything he sets out to do. He does not know what fear is, and has the most resolute will I’ve ever known.” ”

“ Rightly considered, the policy of the General Government toward the red man is not only liberal, but generous. He is unwilling to submit to the laws of the States and mingle with their population. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement. ”

“ Every quarter of this widely extended nation has felt its blessings and shared in the general prosperity produced by its adoption. But amid this general prosperity and splendid success the dangers of which he warned us are becoming every day more evident, and the signs of evil are sufficiently apparent to awaken the deepest anxiety in the bosom of the patriot. We behold systematic efforts publicly made to sow the seeds of discord between different parts of the United States and to place party divisions directly upon geographical distinctions ”

“ Every man, in fact, who in the course of the long debate that followed condemned the acts of General Jackson in Florida was written [Pg 96] down an enemy on the tablets of his memory. He remained in Washington until the House had voted down every resolution unfavorable to his course, and he had thus won his first victory over Clay. Then he set forth on a northern journey which showed him the immense popularity he had in places like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and gave him an opportunity to increase it by the fine appearance he made in public. ”

“ He had won them back their good opinion of themselves. In the prosperous years that were to follow, Andrew Jackson, the man of the Southwest, was to stand as no other man could for the American's faith in his country against the world.
But the victorious general was still the same Andrew Jackson; he did not leave New Orleans without exhibiting some of the [Pg 83] characteristics that were so well known in Tennessee. Relaxing none of his vigilance, he kept the city under martial law after the British had sailed, and even after the British admiral had sent him word of the peace. ”

“ Jackson was a Christian. Indeed, [Pg 100] there is nothing in the man's whole life more honorable than his perfect loyalty to her. She was a simple, uncultivated, kind-hearted frontier woman, no longer attractive in person, and a great contrast to the courtly figure by her side when she and the general were in company. It is certainly true that the two used to smoke their reed pipes together before the fire after dinner, and that custom, to one ignorant of American life in the Southwest, would stamp them as persons of the lowest manners. ”

“ President, shall we see effaced, all traces of the ravages committed by the administration of Andrew Jackson! Society has been uprooted, virtue punished, vice rewarded, and talents and intellectual endowments despised; brutality, vulgarism, and loco focoism upheld, cherished, and countenanced. Ages will roll around before the moral and political ravages which have been committed, will, I fear, cease to be discernible. General Jackson’s ambition was to make his administration an era in the history of the American government, and he has accomplished that object of his ambition ”

“ Meanwhile a motley army of office seekers, personal friends, and sightseers—to the number of ten or fifteen thousand—poured into Washington to see the old régime of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts go out and the new régime of the people come in. “A monstrous crowd of people,” wrote Webster on Inauguration Day, “is in the city. I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” ”

“ Jackson cast ridicule upon the idea. "Do they suppose," said he, "that I am such a d–d fool as to think myself fit for president of the United States? No, sir, I know what I am fit for. I can command a body of men in a rough way, but I am not fit to be president." Such is the anecdote told by H. M. Brackenridge, who was Jackson's secretary in Florida. In 1821 the general felt old and weak, and had made up his mind to spend his remaining days in peace on his farm. Of personal ambition, as ordinarily understood, Jackson had much less than many other men. ”

“ It thus favors combinations to squander the treasure of the country upon a multitude of local objects, as fatal to just legislation as to the purity of public men.
If a system compatible with the Constitution can not be devised which is free from such tendencies, we should recollect that that instrument provides within itself the mode of its amendment, and that there is, therefore, no excuse for the assumption of doubtful powers by the General Government. If those which are clearly granted shall be found incompetent to the ends of its creation, it can at any time apply for their enlargement ”

“ Jackson meant to serve the people faithfully, but he entered upon the duties of his great office in the spirit of a victorious general. The sort of politics most in accord with his feeling was the sort of politics which prevailed in New York and Pennsylvania. Jackson once declared, "I am not a politician, but if I were, I should be a New York politician." Before long, a leading New York politician, Senator Marcy, expressed the sentiment of his fellows when he said, "To the victors belong the spoils." That was a sentiment which a soldier President could understand. ”

“ He has not the power to appoint one of his friends.” In the second place, the new Governor’s status was wholly anomalous, since Congress had extended to the territory only the revenue and anti-slave-trade laws, leaving Jackson to exercise in other matters the rather vague powers of the captain general of Cuba and of the Spanish governors of the Floridas. And in the third place, before his first twenty-four hours were up, the new executive fell into a desperate quarrel with his predecessor, a man of sufficiently similar temperament to make the contest a source of sport for the gods. ”

“ That this Government may be so administered as to preserve its efficiency in promoting and securing these general objects should be the only aim of our ambition, and we can not, therefore, too carefully examine its structure, in order that we may not mistake its powers or assume those which the people have reserved to themselves or have preferred to assign to other agents. ”

“ General Jackson has set up extraordinary claims to the presidency; is a prominent candidate and stands charged with being guilty of the odious practice of "negro trading," and "trafficking in human flesh." This charge, if true, we think, ought forever to silence his claim and pretensions to that high office. This, of itself, (if there were not a hundred other good reasons why he ought not to be president) should be deemed and taken as conclusive against him by the free citizens of America. ”

“ It is certainly good to be able to think of him, fierce man that he was, as turning from fondling a child to enter on his soldier's career.
Mr. Benton's account of the matter is questioned, but it is certain that Jackson offered his services, with those of 2500 volunteers, immediately after the declaration of war. The government accepted the offer, but left him in idleness until October, 1812, when the governor of Tennessee was asked for volunteers, ostensibly to reinforce General Wilkinson at New Orleans. ”

“ What ever the proper authority in the exercise of constitutional power shall at any time here after decide to be for the general good will in that as in other respects deserve and receive the acquiescence and support of the whole country, and we have ample security that every abuse of power in that regard by agents of the people will receive a speedy and effectual corrective at their hands. ”

“ As to the public lands, he favored a liberal policy, with the object of developing the western country by attracting settlers rather than raising money to be spent by the government. On the general question of the powers of the government he stood for a stricter construction of the Constitution and greater respect for the rights of the States than Adams believed in. So, notwithstanding Jackson's tariff views, the mass of the people held him a better representative of Jeffersonian Democracy than his rival.
But a party is an organization, and not merely a list of principles. ”

“ Stokely and Andrew J. Donelson, around him every day, and his adopted son, Andrew Jackson, relieved him of all the minute attentions to guests.
“Henry Lee, of Virginia, was, we may say, resident 72 for the time with him, as he was engaged in writing for his election some of the finest campaign papers ever penned in this country. One of Lee’s fugitive pieces, on the death of an Indian youth, the son of a chief who was killed at the battle of the Horseshoe, whom the general had taken as a godson, an orphan of one of his victories, is a precious pearl of poetry in prose. ”

“ Jackson returned to Tennessee to find himself 37 the most popular man in the State. Nashville gave him the first of what was destined to be a long series of tumultuous receptions; and within a month the news came that William Henry Harrison had resigned his commission and that Jackson had been appointed a major general in the army of the United States, with command in the southwestern district, including Mobile and New Orleans. “Thus did the frontier soldier, who eighteen months earlier had not commanded an expedition or a detachment, come to occupy the highest rank in the army of his country. ”

“ Jackson's collision with Chief Justice Marshall over this question had very far-reaching effects, which historians have somewhat neglected in their study of the consequences of his course on other questions. No statesman, no President, had done so much as the great Chief Justice to make the general government strong and to restrain the States. Jackson, disagreeing with some of Marshall's views, never lost an opportunity to put on the bench a man of his own way of thinking. ”

“ But the chief attraction of Mobile for the General was its proximity to Florida. In July he had written to Washington asking permission to occupy Pensacola. Months passed without a reply. Temptation to action grew; and when, in October, three thousand Tennessee troops arrived under one of the subordinate officers in the recent Creek War, longer hesitation seemed a sign of weakness. Jackson therefore led his forces against the Spanish stronghold, now in British hands, and quickly forced its surrender. His men blew up one of the two forts, and the British blew up the other. ”