Book Review: American Lion Portrays Jackson’s Roaring Presidency
By Tim Neagle
Few presidents provide a biographer with more colorful material than Andrew Jackson. Jon Meacham is the latest to benefit from Old Hickory’s uproarious career with his fine new account of Jackson in the White House, American Lion.
Jackson was already famous when he was elected president in 1828; indeed, he had been the most famous person in America ever since his great victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. But this book covers in a couple of chapters Jackson’s pre-presidential career, which was chockfull with duels, brutal Indian wars and headstrong actions, such as kicking the Spanish out of Florida without authorization from anyone in Washington. How many other presidents carried two bullets in their body from gunfights?
Jackson’s presidential career began in 1824, when he led the pack of candidates in the popular and electoral votes, but did not command a majority. The election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where John Quincy Adams emerged victorious after rival candidate Henry Clay threw his support to Adams. In return, Adams made Clay Secretary of State, a move denounced by furious Jackson supporters as a “corrupt bargain.”
Jackson began running for president in 1828 from the moment of his defeat in 1824. In his single-minded pursuit of the presidency, Jackson resembles a later president, Ronald Reagan, a figure who provides many parallels with Jackson. Bolstered by many states adopting universal manhood suffrage in the years between the elections, Jackson galloped to an easy victory over incumbent Adams in 1828, kicking off a memorable two terms in the White House.
He quickly proved to be the most powerful president in the brief history of the republic. His unprecedented use of patronage and the presidential veto were among the tools Jackson used to build his presidency. Critics howled about the reign of “King Andrew I,” but Jackson remained extremely popular with ordinary Americans.
His administration was, for both good and ill, one of the most eventful in American history. Under Jackson:
• thousands of Cherokee Indians were forced to leave their Georgia homeland and re-settle beyond the Mississippi River; many died on the infamous “Trail of Tears”
• South Carolina claimed the power to nullify laws of the federal government of which it didn’t approve. Jackson famously faced down the nullifiers, threatening to hang them from the nearest tree, while at the same time reducing the tariff that brought about the crisis in the first place
• the mails were purged of anti-slavery material sent to the South by abolitionists, a blatantly unconstitutional move on Jackson’s part. The president, Meacham notes repeatedly, was a staunch defender of slavery and a stern master to his own slaves
• American settlers in the Mexican province of Tejas were encouraged by Jackson to revolt. Jackson’s protégée, James K. Polk, would bring the Republic of Texas into the Union a decade later
• most famously of all, Jackson killed the Bank of the United States, at the time the central clearinghouse of American finance. Unfortunately, Jackson didn’t replace the bank with any adequate financial system, bringing on the Panic of 1837, which led to a decade-long depression.
These and other aspects of Jackson’s two terms in office are thoroughly examined in Meacham’s book. Unfortunately, so is the contretemps that dominated much of Jackson’s first term, the imbroglio over Margaret Eaton, the new bride of Secretary of War John Eaton. In that strictly puritanical time, Mrs. Eaton was widely considered to be a woman of easy virtue before her marriage to Eaton, whom she was accused of co-habiting with before the marriage. Other wives of Cabinet members refused to have anything to do with Mrs. Eaton, a snub that infuriated Jackson.
Meacham covers this controversy at great and wearying length. When the Eatons finally leave Washington near the end of Jackson’s first term, it is as large a relief to the reader as it must have been to the ladies of Washington at the time.
Meacham is good at re-staging such scenes as Jackson’s famous toast at a Jefferson Day banquet. Led by Vice President John Calhoun, nullifiers and their allies had delivered a series of toasts supporting South Carolina. When it came to be Jackson’s turn, he stared directly at Calhoun and gave his toast: “The Union. It must be preserved.” Accounts of the night say Calhoun was shaken to his core, and his glass trembled so much that he spilled some of his wine. But the Vice President stuck to his guns; his toast in reply to Jackson’s was, “The Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.”
American Lion has its flaws. Meacham’s book sometimes suffers from Meacham’s occasionally purple prose: “He lived for power. Take that away, or threaten to, and the mask would fall revealing a vulnerable, often violent man torn between tenderness and wrath.”
But on the whole, this is a fine account of one of our more interesting presidents. As Old Hickory himself might have said, By the Eternal, you should read this book!