The Rise of Andrew Jackson
United States | The man who blazed the a democratic path by force
“I have been tossed on the waves of fortune from youth… It was this that gave me knowledge of human nature… There is but one safe rule: have apparent confidence in all, but never make a confidant of any until you have proven him worthy of it.”
Andrew Jackson to Richard K. Call, November 15, 1821.
Andrew Jackson, the would-be seventh president of the United States, was born on March 15, 1767, in a frontier settlement straddling the Carolinas — the son of Andrew and Elizabeth Jackson, who had crossed from Northern Ireland two years before, his father dying before his son drew his first breath. His mother and two older brothers would also perish while Jackson was a young teen, dying during the American Revolution. The war that made America an orphan made Andrew Jackson one too, and he never forgot it.
What survived was a boy who became a courier for the Continental Army at thirteen, and who was captured by the British shortly after. A British officer ordered the young Jackson to clean his boots. When he refused, the officer slashed him across the hand and the scalp. The scars remained for life. So did the hatred. No subsequent diplomacy — no treaty, no alliance, no presidential protocol — would ever fully extinguish what that moment had lit.
Jackson spent three years reading law with attorneys in North Carolina and was admitted to the bar in 1785, secured an appointment as public prosecutor in Tennessee, and began the ascent that would carry him from a frontier cabin to the White House. Along the way, he acquired extensive land, numerous slaves, and a plantation he called the Hermitage. He aligned himself with Tennessee’s principal political factions. He raced horses, fought cocks, and met insults with the only currency his world recognized — the clear and distinct possibility of violence. It was a life conducted at high velocity, by a man who had decided, at thirteen, that the world owed him nothing he was not prepared to take.
Jackson was involved in as many as 103 duels over the course of his lifetime. In 1806, he killed a man in one of them — but not before receiving a bullet that lodged permanently near his heart, where it stayed until he died. He traded gunfire with future Senator Thomas Hart Benton, bleeding from two wounds before the brawl was finished. These were expressions of a sensibility, and the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown understood them as performances of a deep code of honor — a code that clarified social rank, cemented bonds of friendship and kin, and gave violence a ritual form meant to prevent the more destructive chaos of blood feuds.
By giving gentlemen a recognized arena for settling differences, the duel was proposed to keep conflict out of households and communities. Jackson’s conflicts, in Wyatt-Brown’s reading, were distinctly American: radical, performative, personal, and political all at once. He “drove away his own dread of anonymity and emptiness by embracing both love of friends and undying vengeance against enemies.” The duel was not simply violence. It was theater — the kind that made the personal political, that aired grievances in a form his peers could understand.
The most notorious of his duels arose from a conflict with Charles Dickinson, a fellow horse breeder who accused Jackson of going back on his word over a wager and, when that proved insufficient to provoke a response, accused Jackson’s wife of infidelity. Jackson was furious but initially let the matter drop. When Dickinson took his grievance to the newspapers, claiming the future president had refused to give him the satisfaction of a duel, Jackson had had enough. On May 30, 1806, he shot Dickinson dead. The act was controversial and briefly made Jackson a political liability. It also reaffirmed his position among those who measured a man’s worth partly by his willingness to defend it with his life.
Rachel Donelson, with whom Jackson entered a relationship in 1791, was by all accounts the love of his life. The two believed, evidently in good faith, that her first husband had already divorced her. He had not — or rather, the divorce had not yet been finalized. When it was, they held a proper ceremony. The marriage was happy. Its irregular beginning was never permitted to remain a private matter. Jackson’s political enemies resurrected the charges of adultery and bigamy whenever they needed a weapon, and they wielded them with particular viciousness in the campaign of 1828. Rachel Jackson was mortified when she came upon a pamphlet circulating those allegations. She died suddenly of a heart attack shortly after her husband’s election, leaving Jackson convinced — with a fury that never diminished — that his political enemies had killed her. It was the deepest wound of his public life, and it colored everything that followed.
His public career had advanced with the same momentum that characterized his private life. In 1796, he was a delegate to the convention that drafted Tennessee’s constitution, and later that year became the state’s first member of the House of Representatives. In 1797, the legislature appointed him to the United States Senate. He resigned after one session to become a judge of the Tennessee Superior Court, and in 1802 was elected major general of the state militia — the position from which his military career, and the national fame it produced, would eventually launch him into the presidency. The arc of his rise is almost too clean to be believed, and yet it is merely the prelude to what made him dangerous.
Land-hungry Americans were already pouring through the backcountry of the coastal South when the first great crisis of Jackson’s military career arrived. The Indian tribes who lived in what would become Alabama and Mississippi appeared, to settlers and the politicians who served them, as the main obstacle to what they had already decided was inevitable. Presidents Jefferson and Monroe had argued that the southeastern tribes should exchange their eastern lands for territory west of the Mississippi. Neither took decisive steps to make this happen. The first major transfer of land came only through war.
In 1813, a faction of Creek warriors known as the Red Sticks — insisting on their right to keep their land and their culture — massacred some 250 white settlers at Fort Mims. Jackson retaliated by burning a Creek village, killing men, women, and children alike, and established the tactical principle that would govern his Indian campaigns: rewards in land and plunder for those who fought alongside him, destruction for those who did not. He told his allied fighters, Cherokee and friendly Creek among them: “If either party, Cherokees, friendly Creeks, or whites, takes property of the Red Sticks, the property belongs to those who take it.”
The climactic engagement came at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Jackson led an expedition against approximately one thousand Creek warriors. His white troops failed a frontal assault. It was the Cherokee — promised the government’s friendship in exchange for their service — who turned the battle, swimming the river to strike the Creek from behind. Jackson’s force killed roughly eight hundred of them. The treaty that followed forced the Creek to surrender twenty million acres — half of what is now Alabama, a fifth of Georgia — in what historians have called the largest single Indian cession of southern American land.
The friendly Creek who had fought for Jackson expected loyalty in return. What they received was indifference at best. Jackson’s feelings toward Native Americans had been shaped by his Revolutionary War experience: to him, they were forever the allies of his greatest enemy. When the friendly Creek chief Big Warrior protested, Jackson told him,
“Listen… The United States would have been justified by the Great Spirit, had they taken all the land of the nation… We bleed our enemies in such cases to give them their senses.”
The intimacy of the language — the paternalism of it, the menace beneath it — was its own kind of answer.
After defeating the Creek, Jackson invaded Florida, took Pensacola, and moved his force of Tennessee fighters to New Orleans to defend the strategic port against British attack. On January 8, 1815, a force of battle-tested British veterans of the Napoleonic Wars attempted to take the city. They encountered Jackson and his militia outside New Orleans and were devastated — more than two thousand killed against American losses the Americans could measure in the dozens.
The Battle of New Orleans was the most glorious American military victory anyone alive could remember. It was fought, famously, two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed, making it legally unnecessary. None of that diminished its political force. Jackson was catapulted to national prominence as a war hero, the defender of the Mississippi Valley, the guarantor of American expansion westward.
Over the following years, he led the way in the Indian removal campaign, helping to negotiate nine of the eleven major treaties that stripped eastern tribes of their lands, mastering the technique of pitting native tribe against native tribe — using each accommodation to isolate the next holdout. By the 1820s, he had emerged as the head of a new Democratic Party, and the presidency waited for him like a bill come due.
The founders had envisioned the United States as a republic, not a democracy. They had placed the Electoral College in the Constitution as a safeguard against simple majority rule, and for decades the republic operated on a code of deference — the practice of showing respect for those who had distinguished themselves through military accomplishment, educational attainment, or family pedigree. By the 1820s, that code was crumbling. Americans were embracing majority rule and rejecting old forms of political authority.
New politicians learned to harness the magic of popular appeal — addressing the resentments, fears, and passions of ordinary citizens in a language that had no patience for the older idiom of learned restraint. Twelve of the original thirteen states had enacted landed property qualifications for voting in the 1780s. By 1830, the trend toward broader suffrage had swept all the states, and many new western states had abandoned property qualifications entirely. The ground was shifting beneath American politics, and Andrew Jackson was already standing on the new terrain.
Presidential aspirants in that era did not campaign personally — their supporters took the lead. The Tennessee legislature nominated Jackson in 1822 and appointed him to the Senate to give him a national forum (this is how you became a U.S. Senator until the 20th century). On Capitol Hill, he comported himself with conspicuous dignity, working to dispel the image of the man he acknowledged others saw: one who “carried a scalping knife in one hand and a tomahawk in the other and was always ready to knock down and scalp any and every person who differed from me in opinion.”
In 1824, none of the presidential candidates won a majority of the electoral vote, and the choice fell to the House of Representatives. House Speaker Henry Clay delivered the necessary votes to send John Quincy Adams to the White House — even though Jackson had run ahead of Adams in both the popular and electoral tallies. When Adams appointed Clay as secretary of state, Jackson castigated Clay as “the Judas of the West,” accusing him of conspiring to make Adams president in exchange for the premier cabinet position. He spent the next four years organizing his revenge.
The 1828 campaign was built on that grievance and on the contrast it dramatized. A slogan of the day captured it cleanly: “Adams who can write, Jackson who can fight.” Democratic organizations, such as Hickory Clubs, worked tirelessly on his behalf. Pro-Jackson newspapers heralded the hero of New Orleans while denouncing Adams as an aristocrat. Jackson gave one major campaign speech in New Orleans on January 8, the anniversary of his victory over the British, and let his surrogates do the rest.
In November 1828, in the first presidential contest in which popular votes determined the outcome, Jackson won 56 percent of the popular vote and 68 percent of the electoral vote. It was the climax of several decades of expanding democracy in the United States and the end of the older politics of deference. After 1828, national politicians no longer deplored the existence of political parties — parties were now understood to mobilize and deliver voters, sharpen candidates’ differences, and create loyalty. The Whigs would become the top-down party. The Democrats would embrace, as their defining creed, the sovereignty of the individual.
The new administration arrived in Washington carrying the resentments that had produced it, and it found in the capital a set of resentments aimed right back. The crystallizing scandal involved a woman named Margaret O’Neal — known as Peggy — a well-connected Washington socialite whose marriage to a naval officer had done little to quiet the rumors about her relationship with John Eaton, a United States senator from Tennessee. When her husband committed suicide in 1828, the rumors intensified.
Eaton and Mrs. Timberlake married soon after, with the full approval of President Jackson. Washington’s socialites, led informally by Floride Calhoun, the wife of Vice President John C. Calhoun, snubbed the new Mrs. Eaton as a woman of low moral character. The parallel to what had been done to Rachel Jackson was not lost on anyone. Jackson defended Peggy Eaton fiercely. Calhoun fell out of favor. Martin Van Buren, who defended the Eatons and organized social gatherings that included them, became close to Jackson in the process and would become his chosen successor. The episode illustrated something essential about the Jacksonian political world: loyalty was not incidental to the enterprise — it was the enterprise.
Jackson committed himself to his image as the president of the common man, installing spittoons in the White House and offering unprecedented hospitality to the public. He also appointed only loyalists to office, replacing even competent civil servants with party allies — a practice that became known as the spoils system. The most notorious instance occurred in New York City, where a Jackson appointee made off with over $1 million. His opponents offered it as proof that the Democrats were disregarding merit, education, and respectability in governing the nation.
His supporters replied that previous administrations had been no different, only more hypocritical about it. Jackson believed in a limited federal government and anticipated the rapid settlement of the nation’s interior through land sales, which would spread economic democracy among settlers. Both convictions pointed in the same direction when it came to Native Americans. Their removal was, in his framework, not a contradiction of democratic principle but an expression of it — the extension of democratic settlement westward, over whatever and whoever stood in the way.
Politically, Jackson was considered a champion of states’ rights and a small-d democrat — a Jeffersonian, in the shorthand of the day. He famously refused to recharter the Second National Bank and vetoed federally funded internal improvements. But when South Carolina, its slave plantation elite suffering under the national tariff, declared it could nullify that federal law, Jackson showed a different face entirely.
His Nullification Proclamation of 1832, written by Secretary of State Edward Livingston, declared nullification to be unconstitutional and insisted that the federal courts were the only route for redress by aggrieved states. He backed the proclamation with the Force Act, in which Congress authorized military action against any state that resisted the tariff. In defending the Constitution, Jackson called it “a sovereign act of the people collectively.” It was the first great blow against the theoretical underpinnings of secession — and it came from the same man who had dispossessed thousands of Cherokee from their homeland.
The contradictions were not lost on his contemporaries. They remain instructive now. Eventually, South Carolina and the federal government compromised, but the question the crisis had raised would not stay answered. It shattered the next generation over the right of states to condone ownership of human beings. By then, Andrew Jackson — the son of immigrant parents, the hero of New Orleans, the architect of Indian removal, and the defender of federal supremacy — had died a wealthy owner of one hundred fifty slaves.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 appropriated $500,000 to relocate eastern tribes west of the Mississippi. Jackson had argued for the legislation on the grounds that the government had to move Indians westward in order to save their civilization from whites — a paternalism so complete it could barely recognize itself as the violence it was. The Cherokee Nation decided to fight. Their legal challenge had the support of anti-Jackson members of Congress, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. They retained former attorney general William Wirt, who argued that the Cherokee constituted an independent foreign nation and that an injunction should be placed on Georgia’s efforts to eradicate them.
In 1831, the Supreme Court found that the Cherokee did not meet the criteria for a foreign nation. The following year, in Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in their favor, finding that the Cherokee constituted “distinct political communities” with sovereign rights to their own territory. Jackson ignored the ruling. He had no legal obligation to enforce it, and he had no political intention of doing so. The Court had spoken, and the president had simply declined to be moved. The incident remains one of the starkest illustrations in American history of what happens when executive will collides with judicial authority and the executive chooses not to blink.
The man who had provided the vehicle for that ruling was Samuel Worcester, a Congregationalist missionary and federal postmaster of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, who had gone to live among the Cherokee in Georgia in opposition to removal. A Georgia law forbade whites — except agents of the federal government — from living in Indian territory. Worcester’s federal postal appointment gave him the right to remain, and when he was first arrested, he was released on those grounds. Jackson’s supporters then succeeded in having Worcester’s postal job taken away. He was re-arrested. A court sentenced him to four years of hard labor.
The case that bore his name became the vehicle through which Marshall issued his ruling on Cherokee sovereignty. The Supreme Court cannot enforce its own decisions. When it became clear that the federal government would not enforce this one, those who understood the situation accepted that removal was now inevitable. The majority of the Cherokee stayed on their land regardless. It took the United States Army to move them. In 1835, an unauthorized faction of Cherokees signed a treaty selling all tribal lands to the state of Georgia, which promptly resold the land to white settlers. The Cherokee Nation was given a deadline of May 1838 to voluntarily evacuate. When the majority refused, the Army rounded them up at gunpoint and forced them onto a twelve-hundred-mile journey west.
Conducted in the winter, without adequate food, clothing, or shelter, it killed as many as four thousand of the fifteen thousand Cherokee who made it. One in four did not survive. The march became known as the Trail of Tears, and it was not unique. The Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were compelled to make similar journeys. The removal of the Five Civilized Tribes is a study in what majority rule can become when it is not constrained by the rights it claims to protect.
The policy of removal led some Indians to resist with arms. In 1832, the Fox and Sauk peoples, led by the Sauk chief Black Hawk, moved back across the Mississippi River to reclaim their ancestral home in northern Illinois. White settlers panicked at the return. Militias and federal troops mobilized quickly. At the Battle of Bad Axe — also known as the Bad Axe Massacre — militia forces killed more than two hundred Native men, women, and children. Some seventy white settlers and soldiers died in the conflict. The war lasted only weeks. It illustrated with the terrible economy how much white settlers on the frontier feared and despised Indians in the Age of Jackson — and how swiftly the machinery of the state could be set in motion when that fear found an outlet. Black Hawk’s resistance was extinguished before it had properly begun. The lands it was meant to recover were never recovered. The principle it expressed — that a people might return to the country of their birth — was treated not as a legal question but as a military one, and answered accordingly.
What remained, after Jackson, was a nation that had learned something about itself — not all of it flattering, not all of it yet admitted. In 1845, a New York newspaper editor named John O’Sullivan introduced a phrase that gave a name to what Americans had already long believed: Manifest Destiny. The idea was that the United States was destined to extend itself across the continent — that expansion was not merely possible but divinely ordained, the special role of a Protestant, democratic people spreading their values westward by right and duty.
The phrase caught because it consecrated an impulse that required no consecration to function. Americans were moving west with or without the blessing of a theological formula. O’Sullivan gave them a theology for what they were already doing. In this climate of conviction, voters in 1844 elected James K. Polk, a slaveholder from Tennessee, because he vowed to annex Texas as a new slave state and secure the Oregon territory. He delivered on both promises. The Oregon territory was obtained through negotiation with Great Britain. The territory south of it — the lands that would become California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona — required force. The United States invaded Mexico in what was its first offensive war and secured the territory through conquest.
The economic logic ran alongside the territorial one. The United States continued to expand commercially through investment in foreign markets and international trade, and with growing commercial interests came a larger navy and an increasing international presence. The republic turned to the Pacific for new opportunities, establishing a presence in China, opening Japan and Korea to Western commercial interests, projecting American power far beyond the continent that Manifest Destiny had told it was its natural domain. The continent, it turned out, was not enough.
The story of Andrew Jackson is not a story about a monster, nor about a hero — though it is a story in which real heroism and real monstrousness appear side by side, often in the same man, in the same year, sometimes in the same act. It is a story about the cost of expansion, about the uses to which democracy can be put, and about the terrible efficiency of a political system that has decided what it wants and is willing to cross any line to get it. Jackson did not invent American ambition. He simply knew, better than almost anyone of his era, how to make it move.
Bibliography | Notes
Blakemore, Erin. “Andrew Jackson’s Duels.” JSTOR Daily, June 12, 2015.
Edmunds, R. David. Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. New York: Anchor Books, 1988.
Greenstein, Fred I. “Andrew Jackson: Force of Nature.” In Inventing the Job of President. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Hickey, Donald R. The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.