‘American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House’
How’d you like to start life like this?
Your father dies before you, the third son, are born.
Your family is left poor. Kin take in the "poor relations," but your mother is their hired help. She manages to feed and clothe her children, and scrapes together the money to send you to schools taught by Presbyterian ministers.
When you are 12, your 16-year-old brother dies in war.
When you are 14, you and your remaining brother are taken captive and an officer slices you in the head and hand with a sword, and smashes your brother in the head, seriously injuring him. Then the two of you are thrown into a prison camp. Your mother wins your release, but days later, your brother dies.
Later that year, your mother dies while away nursing sick nephews. You are now an orphan.
You go on to kill a man in a duel and run off with a married woman. Not to mention become a lawyer, a war hero and president of the country.
One of the pleasures of a well-written biography or work of history is that it allows the reader to peer into other lives, other times. It brings to life people who had been little more than thinly drawn caricatures on the pages of dry-as-dust high-school textbooks. It reminds us that these people fought and loved and gossiped and gambled and wrecked things and lived out their version of the human drama.
Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, in many ways seems more like a modern American than do the patrician figures who preceded him. In 1820s America, Jackson was revered — and despised. Victory in the Battle of New Orleans made him a hero of the War of 1812 (as celebrated in the famous Jimmy Driftwood song, “In 1814 we took a little trip along with Col. Jackson down the mighty Mississip.”) He appealed to the common man as one of them and claimed to represent the people’s interests against the wealthy and the powerful. Of course, his colorful past was fodder for opponents who charged that he wasn’t fit to be president.
Jon Meacham chronicles Jackson’s years as president in "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House" (2008, Random House). The book won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for biography. Meacham, editor of Newsweek magazine, also authored the best-sellers "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship" and "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation."
Jackson’s years in the White House, 1829-1837, were tumultuous, and they began in sorrow. His beloved wife, Rachel, had died only weeks earlier, her health destroyed in part by worry over a brutal campaign — she herself had been called a bigamist and not suitable to be a president’s wife. There had been death threats and rumors of plots to prevent Jackson from being elected.
Jackson carried with him the whiff of scandal, due to the questions and rumors surrounding the circumstances of his marriage, and, appropriately enough, much of his presidency was roiled by sexual scandal involving a member of his Cabinet. The man married a woman of dubious character, and the fallout rocked Washington and reached into the White House, dividing Jackson’s own family. Meacham devotes much of his book to the scandal and how Jackson dealt with it.
The book also deals with Jackson’s efforts to break the Bank of the United States, which he believed held unconstitutional power. In the South, the first sparks of secession were beginning to glow. Jackson was fiercely determined to keep the Union whole, and Meacham chronicles his struggles to keep the Southern states within the fold.
Meacham humanizes a larger-than-life figure in whom we today can find much to admire — for his loyalty to friends, love of family, care and concern for ordinary Americans — but also can in some ways condemn. (He kept slaves. He authorized the forced removal of Americans Indians from the Southeast, a grim and tragic episode that until today remains a blot and stain upon this nation’s character. And clergymen at the time warned him that it would be so.)
Sometimes it’s tempting to look at people from the past through the lens of our psychology-and-feelings driven modern culture, and attempt to interpret what they were feeling some 200 years ago, or longer. I’m not sure we can accurately do that. Although in many ways our forefathers were much like us, loved their children and their wives, grieved for loved ones, strove to make a living, sought fame and fortune, etc., etc., the living itself was exceedingly hard. Disease, privation and violence ruled the the day. Lucky was the child who managed to make it into adulthood without getting sick to death or getting killed.
Survival was the name of the game for Jackson and his generation. Their sacrifices bought the society we live in today, a beautiful country where one can have the luxury of introspection. "American Lion" is fascinating and well-written — I certainly recommend it — but as I closed this book for the final time, I felt — there I go, modern American that I am! — a certain unease. Andrew Jackson lived a monumental life. Why he did so, I, for one, don’t know. That he did so is enough for me.
