Andrew Jackson Make America Great Again Rachel Jackson

Chapter 1: Andy Will Fight His Mode in the World

Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson'south plantation twelve miles exterior Nashville. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the Usa the calendar month before. "How triumphant!" Andrew Donelson said of the victory. "How flattering to the cause of the people!" Now the president- elect'south family unit and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine–Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin–and, in this special twelvemonth, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.

On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the business firm, answering congratulatory letters. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to accept Jackson into Nashville, burn a twenty- four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. Rachel would exist by his side.

In the last moments earlier the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a alphabetic character. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend's adept wishes: "To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service." Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.

He knew his ballot was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson'due south forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russian federation, had procured a adult female for Arbiter Alexander I. As president, Adams was declared to have spent besides much public coin decorating the White Business firm, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti- Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson'due south foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for declared atrocities in battles confronting the British, the Spanish, and the Indians–and for being a married woman stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her showtime husband. "Fifty-fifty Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious Female parent, about fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth . . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest blood brother sold equally a slave in Carolina," Jackson said to a friend.

Jackson's advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. "The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of non but Genl Jackson but all his prominent supporters," William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an erstwhile friend of Jackson's from Tennessee.

Some Americans idea of the president-elect as a 2nd Begetter of His State. Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary State of war veteran, David Coons of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots confronting Jackson. To Coons, Jackson was coming to rule every bit a tribune of the people, but to others Jackson seemed unsafe–and so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth killing. "There are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made difficult threats with regard to you, men whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt them to practice anything," Coons wrote Jackson.

That was the turbulent globe awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the typhoon of a speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between anxiety and nostalgia. "The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty has not been disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject during the election," the speech read. However, Jackson admitted he felt "apprehension" about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson'southward words, "I shall fail" to secure "the hereafter prosperity of our love state." Perhaps the procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits; peradventure Christmas with his family unit would.

While Jackson was exterior, word came that his wife had collapsed in her sitting room, screaming in pain. Information technology had been a wretched time for Rachel. She was, Jackson's political foes cried, "a blackness wench," a "profligate woman," unfit to be the wife of the president of the U.s.a.. Shaken by the at- tacks, Rachel–also lx-1 and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat heavy–had been melancholy and anxious. "The enemies of the General take dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me," Rachel lamented during the campaign. "Almighty God, was there ever whatever affair equal to information technology?" On the way home from a trip to Nashville later the balloting, Rachel was devastated to eavesdrop a chat virtually the pulp charges against her. Her niece, the twenty-one- year- old Emily Donelson, tried to reassure her aunt merely failed. "No, Emily," Mrs. Jackson replied, "I'll never forget it!"

When news of her husband's ballot arrived, she said: "Well, for Mr. Jackson's sake I am glad; for my ain role I never wished information technology." Now the cumulative toll of the campaign and the coming administration exacted its price equally Rachel was put to bed, the sound of her cries however echoing in her slave Hannah's ears.

Jackson rushed to his married woman, sent for doctors, did what he could. Afterwards, as she lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the alphabetic character he had begun: "P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from skillful health, has been taken suddenly ill, with excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may exist the effect of this violent attack god only knows, I promise for her recovery, and in haste shut this alphabetic character, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J." Yet his hopes would non bring her back.

Rachel lingered for 2 and a half days. Jackson hovered by her side, praying for her survival. He had loved her for almost four decades. His solace through war, politics, Indian fighting, financial chaos, and the vicissitudes of life in what was so borderland America, Rachel gave him what no one else ever had. In her arms and in their home he found a steady sense of family, a sustaining universe, a place of peace in a world of war. Her love for him was unconditional. She did not care for him because he was a general or a president. She cared for him because he was Andrew Jackson. "Do not, My dear Husband, let the love of Country, fame and honor make y'all forget yous have me," she wrote to him during the State of war of 1812. "Without y'all I would think them all empty shadows." When they were apart, Jackson would sit down upward late writing to her, his candle called-for low through the night. "My heart is with yous," he told her.

Shortly after 9 on the evening of Mon, December 22, three days before Christmas, Rachel suffered an credible eye attack. It was over. Yet, Jackson kept vigil, her flesh turning common cold to his touch as he stroked her brow. With his most awesome responsibilities and burdens at hand, she had left him. "My mind is then disturbed . . . that I can scarcely write, in brusque my dearest friend my center is nigh broke," Jackson told his confidant John Coffee after Rachel'southward death.

At one o'clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, by social club of the mayor, Nashville's church bells began ringing in tribute to Rachel, who was to be buried in her garden in the shadow of the Hermitage. The weather had been wet, and the dirt in the garden was soft; the rain made the gravediggers' chore a bear upon easier as they worked. After a Presbyterian funeral service led by Rachel'due south minister, Jackson walked the ane hundred l paces back to the house. A devastated but determined Jackson spoke to the mourners. "I am now the President elect of the United states, and in a short fourth dimension must accept my manner to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God's will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my mail of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her." God'south was the merely will Jackson e'er bowed to, and he did not even practice that without a fight.

In his grief, Jackson turned to Rachel's family. He would not–could not–go to Washington past himself. Around him at the Hermitage on this bleak Christmas Eve was the nucleus of the intimate circumvolve he would maintain for the rest of his life. At the heart of the circumvolve, destined both to provide great condolement and to provoke deep personal anger in the White House, stood Andrew and Emily Donelson. They had an ancient claim on Jackson'south affections and attention, and they were set up to serve.

While Andrew–who was also Emily'south first cousin–was to work through the president- elect'southward correspondence, guard admission to Jackson, and serve as an adviser, Emily, not yet twenty- 2, would exist the president's hostess. Attracted by the bright things of the fashionable world and even so committed to family unit and faith, Emily was at once selfless and sharp- tongued. Born on Monday, June 1, 1807, the thirteenth and last child of Mary and John Donelson, Emily was raised in the heart of frontier aristocracy and inherited a steely courage–perhaps from her gramps, a Tennessee pioneer and a founder of Nashville–that could verge on obstinacy. It was a trait she shared with the other women in her family, including her aunt Rachel. "All Donelsons in the female line," wrote a family biographer, "were tyrants." Charming, generous, and hospitable tyrants, to be sure, but yet a formidable lot–women who knew their own minds, women who had helped their husbands conquer the wilderness or were the daughters of those who had. Now i of them, Emily, would step into Rachel's place in the White House.

On Lord's day, Jan 18, 1829, Jackson left the Hermitage for the capital letter. With the Donelsons, William Lewis, and Mary Eastin, Emily'south friend and cousin, Jackson rode the two miles from the Hermitage to a wharf on a neighboring estate and boarded the steamboat Pennsylvania to travel the Cumberland River due north, toward their new home. He was, as he had said to the mourners on the day of Rachel's burial, the president- elect of the United States.

Before he left Tennessee, he wrote a letter of the alphabet to John Coffee that mixed faith and resignation. His thoughts were with Rachel, and on his own mortality. "Whether I am e'er to return or not is for time to reveal, as none only that providence, who rules the destiny of all, now knows," Jackson said.

His friends hoped that service to the nation would comfort him. "The active discharge of those duties to which he volition soon exist called, more than annihilation else, volition tend to soothe the poignancy of his grief," said the Nashville Republican and State Gazette in an edition bordered in black in mourning for Rachel. In a moving alphabetic character, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson's and a time to come secretarial assistant of land, saw that the cause of country would have to supplant Rachel as Jackson's central business. Referring to America, Livingston told the president- elect: "She requires y'all for her welfare to abandon your merely grief, to tear yourself from the indulgence of regrets which would be a virtue in a individual private, but to which you lot are not permitted to yield while and then much of her happiness depends upon your efforts in her service." Jackson understood. To rule, one had to survive, and to survive ane had to fight.

The travelers wound their way through the country to the uppercase, passing through Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, where it snowed. The president- elect was complaining of sore limbs, a bad cough, and a hand worn out from greeting so many well- wishers. "He was very much exhausted past the crowds of people that attended him everywhere, broken-hearted to meet the People's President," Mary Eastin wrote her father.

Ten days into the voyage, Emily Donelson finally plant a moment to sit down. For her the trip had been a blur of cannons, thanks, and tending to colds–she had 1, every bit did her trivial son Jackson. "I scarcely need tell you that we have been in i continual crowd since we started," Emily wrote her mother. Their quarters were overrun by guests, and at that place were ovations and shouts of joy from people along the banks of the river. The social demands of the presidency had begun, really, the moment Jackson and his party left the Hermitage. But Emily was not the kind to complain, at least non in her uncle'southward hearing. She loved the life that Jackson had opened to her and her husband.

"You must not make yourself unhappy about the states, my dear Female parent," Emily added, sending warm wishes to her male parent. The handwriting was shaky as the letter of the alphabet ended; the water was crude, the pace of the craft fast. "I hope you volition excuse this scrawl," Emily said, "equally information technology is written while the boat is running."

The speed of the boat did not seem to bother Andrew Jackson, but then he was accustomed to pressing alee. He was constantly on the run, and had been all his life. For him the journey to the White House had begun half-dozen decades before, in a tiny identify tucked away in the Carolinas–a place he never visited, and spoke of only sparingly, called Waxhaw.

Jackson grew up an outsider, living on the margins and at the mercy of others. Traveling to America from Ireland in 1765, his father, the senior Andrew Jackson, and his mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, moved into a tiny community a few hundred miles northwest of Charleston, in a spot straddling the border between North and S Carolina. "Waxhaw" came from the proper name of the tribe of native Indians in the region, and from a creek that flowed into the Catawba River. Though the Revolutionary War was eleven years away, the relationship betwixt King George Three and his American colonies was already strained. The year the Jacksons crossed the Atlantic, Parliament passed the Quartering Human activity (which forced colonists to shelter British troops) and the Stamp Human activity (which levied a revenue enhancement on virtually every slice of paper on the continent). The result: the Massachusetts legislature called for a colonial congress in New York, which issued a "Announcement of Rights and Grievances" against King George Three. Hitting, too, was a remark made past a consul from South Carolina, the Jacksons' new home. "At that place ought to be no more New England men, no New Yorkers," said Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, "only all of us Americans!"

Jackson'southward father, meanwhile, was trying to establish himself and his family unit in the New World. Though a human being, his son recalled, of "contained" means, he was, it seems, poorer than his in- laws, who might accept made him experience the disparity. While the other members of the extended family unit began prospering, Jackson moved his wife and two sons, Hugh and Robert, to Twelve Mile Creek, vii miles from the eye of Waxhaw. His wife was pregnant when the first Andrew Jackson died unexpectedly. It was a confusing, unsettling fourth dimension. The baby was most due, a snowstorm–rare in the South–had struck, and Jackson's pallbearers drank then much every bit they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral that they briefly lost the trunk along the style.

Shortly thereafter, on Sun, March fifteen, 1767, Mrs. Jackson gave nascency to her third son, naming him Andrew after her late husband. He was a dependent from commitment forward. Whether the birth took place in N or South Carolina has occupied historians for generations (Jackson himself thought it was South Carolina), simply the more important fact is that Andrew Jackson came into the earth nether the roof of relatives, not of his own parents. Growing up, he would be a guest of the houses in which he lived, non a son, except of a loving mother who was never the mistress of her own household. One of Mrs. Jackson's sisters had married a Crawford, and the Crawfords were more affluent than the Jacksons. The loss of Mrs. Jackson's married man only made the gulf wider. When the Crawfords asked Mrs. Jackson and her sons to live with them, it was non wholly out of a sense of familial devotion and duty. The Jacksons needed a home, the Crawfords needed help, and a bargain was struck. "Mrs. Crawford was an invalid," wrote James Parton, the early on Jackson biographer who interviewed people familiar with the Jacksons' days in Waxhaw, "and Mrs. Jackson was permanently established in the family unit as housekeeper and poor relation." Even in his mother's lifetime, Jackson felt a sure inferiority to and distance from others. "His kittenish recollections were of humiliating dependence and galling discomfort, his poor mother performing household drudgery in return for the niggardly maintenance of herself and her children," said Mary Donelson Wilcox, Emily and Andrew's oldest girl. He was not quite part of the core of the world around him. He did non fully belong, and he knew it.

God and war dominated his babyhood. His mother took him and his brothers to the Waxhaw Presbyterian meetinghouse for services every week, and the signal intellectual feat of his early years was the memorization of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. Most stories about the immature Jackson too paint a portrait of a child and immature man full of energy, fun, and not a petty fury. Like many other children of the frontier, he was engaged in a kind of abiding brawl from nascency–and in Jackson's instance, it was a ball in which he could non stand to lose footing or points, even for a moment.

Wrestling was a common pastime, and a contemporary who squared off against Jackson recalled "I could throw him 3 times out of four, merely he would never stay throwed." As a applied joke his friends packed extra powder into a gun Jackson was about to fire, hoping the recoil would knock him down. Information technology did. A furious Jackson rose up and cried "Past God, if one of you laughs, I'll kill him!"

Perhaps partly because he was fatherless, he may accept felt he had to do more usual to evidence his strength and thus secure, or effort to secure, his place in the community. "Mother, Andy will fight his fashion in the world," a neighborhood boy recalled saying in their childhood. Clearly Jackson seethed below the surface, for when flummoxed or crossed or frustrated, he would piece of work himself into fits of rage so paralyzing that contemporaries recalled he would begin "slobbering." His prospects were not auspicious: here was an plain unbalanced, excitable, insecure, and defensive boy coming of age in a culture of confrontation and violence. It was not, to say the least, the best of combinations.

His mother was his hope. His uncles and aunts apparently did not have a neat deal of interest. They had their ain children, their own problems, their own lives. Elizabeth Jackson was, however, a resourceful woman, and appears to have made a good scrap out of picayune. There was some money, perhaps income from her late husband'south farm, and gifts from relatives in Ireland–plenty, anyhow, to ship Jackson to schools where he studied, for a time, under Presbyterian clergy, learning at to the lowest degree the basics of "the dead languages." He learned his most lasting lessons, however, not in a classroom simply in the chaos of the Revolutionary War.

The nascence of the Democracy was, for Jackson, a fourth dimension of unrelenting death. A week after Jackson's eighth birthday, in March 1775, Edmund Burke took note of the American hunger for independence. "The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am agape, unalterable by any human art," he said. Inside sixteen months Burke was proved correct when the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4, 1776, a midsummer Th. By 1778, the S was the focus of the state of war, and the British fought brutally in Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1779, Andrew's brother Hugh, merely sixteen, was fighting at the front and died, it was said, "of heat and fatigue" after a disharmonism between American and British troops at the Battle of Stono Ferry, south of Charleston. It was the first in a series of calamities that would strike Jackson, who was thirteen.

The British took Charleston on Fri, May 12, 1780, then moved due west. The few things Jackson knew and cherished were soon under siege. On Monday, May 29, at about three o'clock in the afternoon, roughly three hundred British troops under the control of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton killed 113 men near Waxhaw and wounded another 150. Information technology was a vicious massacre: though the rebels tried to surrender, Tarleton ordered his men forward, and they charged the Americans, a insubordinate surgeon recalled, "with the horrid yells of infuriated demons." Fifty-fifty after the survivors fell to the basis, asking for quarter, the British "went over the ground, plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life."

The following Dominicus was no ordinary Sabbath at Waxhaw. The meetinghouse was filled with casualties from the skirmish, and the Jacksons were there to assistance the wounded. "None of the men had less than three or iv, and some as many every bit xiii gashes on them," Jackson recalled.

He was so immature, and so much was unfolding around him: the loss of a brother, the coming of the British, the threat of death, the sight of the bleeding and the dying in the most sacred identify he knew, the meetinghouse. The enemy was everywhere, and the people of Waxhaw, like people throughout the colonies, were divided past the war, with Loyalists supporting George Three and Britain, and others, usually chosen Whigs, throwing in their lot with the Congress. As Jackson recalled it, his mother had long inculcated him and his brothers with anti- British rhetoric, a stand up she took because of her own father, back in Republic of ireland. The way Mrs. Jackson told the story, he had fought the troops of the British rex in action at Carrickfergus. "Frequently she would spend the winter's night, in recounting to them the sufferings of their grandfather, at the siege of Carrickfergus, and the oppressions exercised by the nobility of Ireland, over the labouring poor," wrote John Reid and John Eaton in a biography Jackson approved, "impressing it upon them, as their kickoff duty, to expend their lives, if it should become necessary, in defending and supporting the natural rights of human." These words were written for a book published in 1817, later Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans and preparatory to his inbound national politics, which may account for the unlikely prototype of Mrs. Jackson tutoring her sons in Enlightenment political thought on cold Carolina evenings. Merely at that place is no doubt that Jackson chose to remember his upbringing this fashion, which means he linked his female parent with the origins of his love of country and of the common human being.

In the split between the revolutionaries and the Loyalists Jackson saw immediate the brutality and bloodshed that could outcome when Americans turned on Americans. "Men hunted each other like beasts of casualty," wrote Amos Kendall, the Jackson intimate who spent hours listening to Jackson reminisce, "and the savages were outdone in cruelties to the living and indignities on the dead."

Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton–known as "Bloody Tarleton" for his butchery–one time rode so close to the young Jackson that, Jackson recalled, "I could have shot him." The boy soaked up the talk of state of war and its rituals from the local militia officers and men. Months passed, and in that location were more battles, more killing. "Boys big enough to bear muskets incurred the dangers of men," wrote Kendall–and Jackson was big enough to acquit a musket.

In Apr 1781, later a nighttime spent on the run from a British political party, he and his blood brother Robert were trapped in one of their Crawford relatives' houses. A neighboring Tory alerted the redcoats, and presently Andrew and Robert were surrounded. The soldiers ransacked the house, and an imperious officeholder ordered Jackson to polish his boots.

Jackson refused. "Sir," he said, with a hitting formality and coolness nether the circumstances for a fourteen- year- old, "I am a pw, and claim to be treated as such." The officeholder and then swung his sword at the young human. Jackson blocked the blade with his left manus, but he could not fend it off completely. "The sword point reached my caput and has left a marking in that location . . . on the skull, besides as on the fingers," Jackson recalled. His brother was next, and when he also refused the order to clean the boots, the officer smashed the sword over Robert'due south head, knocking him to the floor.

In some ways, Andrew was strengthened by the blows, for he would spend the rest of his life standing up to enemies, enduring pain, and holding fast until, after much trial, victory came. Robert was not so fortunate. The two boys were taken from the firm to a British prison camp in Camden, almost 40 miles away. The journey was difficult in the April heat: "The prisoners were all dismounted and marched on human foot to Camden, pushed through the swollen streams and prevented from drinking," Jackson recalled. The mistreatment continued at the campsite. "No attending whatever was paid to the wounds or to the comfort of the prisoners, and the small pox having cleaved out among them, many fell victims to it," Jackson said. Robert was sick, very sick. Their female parent managed to win her sons' release, and, with a badly sick Robert on one equus caballus and Mrs. Jackson on another, a barefoot Andrew–the British had taken his shoes and his coat–had to, equally he recalled, "trudge" forty- five miles dorsum to Waxhaw.

They made a ragged, lonely little group. En road, even the weather turned against them. "The fury of a violent tempest of rain to which we were exposed for several hours earlier we reached the cease of our journey caused the pocket-size pox to strike in and consequently the next day I was dangerously sick," Jackson recalled. 2 days later on Robert died. "During his confinement in prison," Jackson'south earliest biography said, Robert "had suffered greatly; the wound on his head, all this fourth dimension, having never been dressed, was followed by an inflammation of the brain, which in a few days after his liberation, brought him to his grave."

Two Jackson boys were now expressionless at the easily of the British. Elizabeth nursed Andrew, now her but living child, back from the precipice–and and so left, to tend to two of her Crawford nephews who were sick in Charleston.

Jackson never saw her once more. In the autumn of 1781 she died in the littoral metropolis tending to other boys, and was buried in obscurity. Her clothes were all that came dorsum to him. Even past the rough standards of the frontier in late eighteenth- century America, where affliction and expiry were common, this was an extraordinary run of terrible luck.

For Jackson, the circumstances of Elizabeth'south final mission of mercy and burial would be perennial reminders of the tenuous position she had been forced into by her own husband's expiry. Showtime was the occasion of her visit to Charleston: to care for the extended family, leaving her own son behind. Yet selfless her motives–she had nursed the state of war's wounded from that start Waxhaw massacre in the late spring of 1780–Elizabeth had nevertheless gone to the coast for the sake of Jackson's cousins, not her ain children. The uncertainty over the fate of her remains was a affair of concern to Jackson fifty-fifty in his White House years. He long sought the whereabouts of his mother'southward grave, but to no avail. Perhaps partly in reaction to what he may have viewed as the lack of respect or intendance others had taken with his female parent's burial, he became a conscientious steward of such things–a devotee of souvenirs, a keeper of tombs, and an observer of anniversaries. The first woman he always loved, his mother, rested in oblivion. The 2d woman who won his heart, Rachel, would be memorialized in stateliness and grandeur at the Hermitage after her expiry, and in his last years he would spend hours in the garden, contemplating her tomb. Bringing his mother domicile had been beyond his power. The story of Jackson's life was how he strove to see that little else ever would be.

...

Excerpted from American Lion by Jon Meacham. Copyright © 2008 by Jon Meacham. Excerpted by permission of Random House Grouping, a division of Random Business firm Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/03/99915988/examining-the-fiery-legacy-of-andrew-jackson

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