Andrew Jackson: SLE

 

"Desperate courage makes One a majority."

"The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it."

As I noted in my article about him, Ulysses Grant is quite a bad candidate for a SLE American president. Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) is a far better candidate, in fact, the seventh president is one of the clearest SLE cases in American political history, and it is the consistency across decades of wildly different settings — frontier lawyer, duelist, Indian-war commander, general at New Orleans, senator, president — that confirms the type. The same man who took a bullet inches from his heart in 1806 and stayed upright long enough to kill the man who shot him was the same man who beat a would-be assassin with his cane at the age of sixty-seven when both the attacker's pistols misfired. The same man who invaded Spanish Florida without proper authorization was the same man who vetoed more bills than all six of his predecessors combined and told Chief Justice John Marshall, in effect, to enforce his own decision, if he wants to.

What you see in Jackson, from his earliest documented behavior, is a SLE-ish near-total fearlessness. His biographer Don Hickey, who went through his military record campaign by campaign, concluded that he was "always cool under fire and thus could issue whatever orders were needed to salvage just about any situation." At New Orleans in December 1814, hearing that the British had landed below the city, Jackson's response was not to prepare defenses and wait — it was to march out that night and attack. The instinct to move first, before the opponent has time to organize, is characteristic of the type. He assembled one of the most heterogeneous armies in American history — regulars, Tennessee and Kentucky militia, Louisiana Creoles, Free Men of Color, Choctaws, and Jean Lafitte's Baratarian pirates — and inflicted 2,037 casualties on the British for a cost of 71 of his own.

His duels show the same thing at the personal scale. The Charles Dickinson duel of 1806 is revealing for its execution. Dickinson was an expert marksman; Jackson let him fire first, took the bullet in the chest, put his hand over the wound to staunch the bleeding, steadied himself, and returned fire. When his first shot misfired — which by the rules of honor should have ended the duel — he re-cocked the weapon and shot again, killing Dickinson. This was a breach of etiquette that contemporaries noticed and remembered. Not that this stopped Jackson, given that Wikipedia actually has an article with the title "List of violent incidents involving Andrew Jackson". 

The temper is the piece of him that almost every contemporary remarked on, and it is described in exactly the terms the type calls for. Jackson flew into rages over small insults, challenged men to duels over perceived slights, and had the tendency, noted by biographer Remini, of taking any disagreement as a test of personal honor that required a physical answer. The Wikipedia article observes that "he was able to use his temper strategically to accomplish what he wanted. He could keep it in check when necessary: his behavior was friendly and urbane when he went to Washington as senator". The temper was real, but it was also an instrument — opponents who underestimated him learned this the hard way. That combination of genuinely short fuse and strategic use of it is characteristically SLE.

His charisma was not that of an SEE showman who dominates through charm, social reading, and the gift of persuasive insincerity. Jackson was a bad flatterer, was "uncomfortable personally campaigning" in the 1828 election, and his followers, not he, ran the campaign on his behalf. He dominated through physical presence and the credible threat of consequence. 

The presidency shows the same cluster of traits transposed to political combat. He used the veto as a personal weapon, not a constitutional last resort, casting twelve vetoes against nine from all his predecessors combined. He destroyed the Second Bank through what was effectively a siege of will over four years, ignoring advice from nearly everyone in his cabinet. He told the Cherokee, through the Indian Removal Act and the aftermath of Worcester v. Georgia, that the Supreme Court's ruling in their favor would not protect them because he would not enforce it. He faced down the South Carolina nullifiers in 1832-33 with an explicit threat of military force against any state that tried to secede, and they backed down. The pattern is the same: identify an obstacle and refuse to stop until it breaks. 

The piece of him that is harder to see at first, but which completes the picture, is his personal attachment to his wife Rachel. She had been married when he met her, and the scandal of their relationship — she became his wife before her divorce was finalized — followed him the rest of his life. He defended her memory with the same pugnacity he brought to his own honor, and his hatred of the men who had attacked her in the 1828 campaign was personal and lifelong. 

Jackson has been caricatured, by some of his own contemporaries and by later historians, as a rube — "no deep thinker", as the Miller Center summary puts it. But Jackson's four-year destruction of the Bank, his decades-long construction of the Democratic Party, and his remarkable consistency of political purpose from the 1820s onward are not the products of a simple mind. They are the products of a mind entirely focused on force and outcome, with no wasted motion on theory. As Talanov's description says, SLE is quite a quick-thinking type.

For most of the century after his death, Jackson's reputation in American memory was close to heroic (showing that a SLE leader can, in fact, leave that memory of him). He was the hero of New Orleans, the frontier commoner who broke the aristocratic monopoly on the presidency, the defender of the Union against nullification in preventing the secession of South Carolina over protectionist tariffs that hurt the plantation owners, and the slayer of the plutocratic Second Bank of the United States. His face went on the twenty-dollar bill in 1928 and stayed there without serious objection for decades. Through the 1950s he was routinely ranked by presidential historians in the top tier of American presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.

The turning point was the centering, from the 1970s onward and accelerating in the 2000s, of the Indian Removal Act and its consequences. The Trail of Tears — the forced march that killed perhaps four thousand Cherokee, alongside the removal of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations — went from a regrettable episode within a larger positive story to the defining fact of his presidency. His ownership of some 150 slaves at his death, the brutality documented in his own hand (the 1804 advertisement offering extra payment for every hundred lashes given to a runaway, up to a potentially fatal three hundred), and his active political defense of slavery as an institution (although his main motivation for this appears to have been the same reason he opposed the secessionist plantators of South Carolina — to preserve the Union) have been pulled from the footnotes to the center of the portrait. In recent presidential-historian surveys he has dropped from the top tier into the middle of the pack. Jackson has probably suffered more reputational damage in the last half-century than any American president whose policies once enjoyed such broad approval, and the SLE traits that his contemporaries admired as strength, decisiveness, and democratic vigor — the disregard for constraint, the willingness to use force, the refusal to be stopped by institutions — are precisely what the contemporary reassessment counts against him.