Born Fighting (19 page)

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Old Hickory
                              

MODERN
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DAY HISTORIANS
and political scientists often minimize the Jackson presidency by claiming that there were no remarkable leaps forward—no Louisiana Purchases, no great statements equal to the intellect of Adams and Jefferson, no wars—while Jackson stoically marched the Indian tribes off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears and the nation seemed obsessed with internal bickering. They neglect to consider that this very internal conflict and the changes it brought to the American political structure comprised one of the most fundamental shifts in the nation’s history, and also that Andrew Jackson rewrote the book on American political leaders just as surely as Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway remade the narrative form of the novel. Lots of people could write like Hemingway—although not as well—once he showed them how. And the same thing could be said for the political talent of Andrew Jackson: Lots of politicians could approach the voters in the homespun style of Andrew Jackson—although rarely as authentically—once he showed them how.

The Scots-Irish culture has to date produced at least a dozen other presidents, some of them pretty fine leaders, but Old Hickory remains in a class by himself. Andrew Jackson was an original, an unusual and fearless leader who dominated the American political process more fully than any president before or since. And he did so not through the tedious, secretly sneering Machiavellian half-truths that pervade so much of today’s carefully scripted American politics. Jackson gained power, and also governed, through the force of his personality, fueled by a directness that came from an entire lifetime of overcoming obstacles that most politicians either manage to evade or have been spared through the circumstances of their birth and upbringing.

By the age of fourteen, Andrew Jackson was an orphan in the wilderness of the Carolina mountains, having lost his entire family. He was also a scarred combat veteran.

His father, for whom he was named, died a month before he was born, having migrated from Ulster with enough money to purchase two hundred acres of farmland in the mountainous Waxhaws settlement where North and South Carolina came together. Both of his older brothers died as teenage soldiers in the Revolution, one from exhaustion after the Battle of Stono Ferry and the other from smallpox after being held as a prisoner of war. Captured along with his brother while serving as a thirteen-year-old soldier, Jackson also caught smallpox, somehow surviving a forty-mile journey on foot after a prisoner exchange and arriving home “a raving maniac” from the fever.
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Earlier, a British officer had slashed him with a sword deep on the hand and across his head when he refused to clean the man’s boots, leaving scars that would remind him for the remainder of his life that tyranny and human denigration were more than words. His mother, Elizabeth, a fiercely anti-British Presbyterian, had nursed many of the mangled survivors after the infamous Col. Banastre Tarleton massacred Buford’s surrendering regiment, and then left for Charleston to tend to American prisoners of war kept aboard ships in the city’s harbor. She herself caught cholera while on the ships and died there, to be buried in an unmarked grave.

Though left motherless, fatherless, and without siblings, the young boy-man still carried with him the social status of his family. His grandfather was a reasonably well-to-do weaver and merchant in Carrickfergus, on the northern Irish coast just outside Belfast. His father had held a good piece of property near the town of Castlereagh and had been the leader of a large group of Presbyterians who migrated to the Carolinas in 1765.
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This family status, while not one of great wealth, was still significant in the backwoods communities and would open doors for him during his early life. At the same time he was a wild daredevil who in his youth loved “gambling, drinking, cockfighting and horse racing—mostly horse racing, a sport he could never resist,” and at the age of fifteen blew a three- or four-hundred-pound inheritance from his grandfather in one wild and glorious spree.
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Scarcely schooled, Jackson worked odd jobs while living with different aunts, uncles, and cousins, until at the age of seventeen a lawyer in Salisbury, North Carolina, named Spruce McCay hired him so that he might “read the law” and become an attorney. After two years with McCay, he moved on to study under Col. John Stokes, a powerful attorney who had lost a hand at Tarleton’s massacre and no doubt already knew of the young Jackson’s wartime service as well as his family heritage. Six months later he was admitted to the North Carolina bar. A year after that, in the spring of 1788, he and a few friends set out for the wild unknown of middle Tennessee. “Each man was equipped with a horse, a few belongings, a gun, and a wallet containing letters from distinguished citizens of the old community to the settlers of the new.”
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He was heading for Nashville, and the letters were probably more important than the horse or even the gun since they allowed Jackson to transfer his social status to the new frontier. And a raw frontier it was. At this time “the Nashville community consisted of a courthouse, two stores, two taverns, a distillery, and a number of cabins, tents, houses, and other nondescript shelters.”
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Arriving in Nashville in 1788, he was immediately taken in as a boarder by the widow of Col. John Donelson, who eight years before had led a group of about 120 settlers to this remote outpost, including his wife and eleven children. Donelson, a patriarch of the settlement, had recently been murdered, either by a white robber or an Indian. Most of his children were now grown, although his youngest daughter, Rachel, now twenty-one, was living at home. Rachel had married a prominent Kentuckian, but the couple was having continuing marital difficulties. Three years later Jackson would marry Rachel, under the false impression that her first husband had obtained a divorce in Virginia. He had not, and their legal maneuverings, which required them to remarry a few years later, would haunt the honor of his wife for the rest of her life.

Jackson’s energies, his legal profession, and his affiliation with the leading families of the new territory allowed him to move quickly to the forefront of Tennessee’s still-emerging political establishment. He was a delegate to the state’s first constitutional convention, became Tennessee’s first congressman in 1796, and soon thereafter moved to the U.S. Senate after William Blount was expelled for misconduct. But by 1798 he had grown tired of Washington and resigned from the Senate in order to serve as a judge on Tennessee’s Superior Court. Then in 1802, at the age of thirty-five, he achieved a long-held goal by winning election as major general of the Tennessee militia.

Jackson had made his way to the top of Tennessee’s often-raucous political hierarchy not only through shrewdness, but also by a reputation for audacious conduct. Naturally combative, he also knew that his frequent acts of boldness were the coin of the realm in American frontier society, the surest way to gain him entrance into the ruling circle, just as centuries before they would have earmarked him as a future tribal chief. Andrew Jackson knew the game, both viscerally and from having studied it. He was well read on the ways of the ancient Scottish chieftains and also required his subordinates to study those histories.
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But one cannot simply invent courage for political gain. Jackson was a true fighter, and not merely on the battlefield. He fought his first duel at the age of twenty-one. While seeking election to head the militia, he gained a reputation for unshakable boldness when he physically faced down Tennessee’s most famous war hero, John Sevier, who had been one of the commanders at the Battle of King’s Mountain. A few years later he took a bullet in the chest that he would carry for the rest of his life, said to be too close to his heart for any doctor to extract. This bullet was the result of a duel with Charles Dickinson, the best shot in Tennessee. Ostensibly over an argument about a horse race, the dislike ran far deeper, as Dickinson had repeatedly implied that Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was a bigamist. Dickinson fared worse. After taking the hit, in very ungentlemanly fashion Jackson had coldly and deliberately shot Dickinson dead. He took another slug in the shoulder in 1813 at the age of forty-six, nearly losing his arm, from the brother of a much younger man he was busily caning for having publicly insulted him. Within a few months he was out of his sickbed, leading a war party against the Creek Indians. The bullet would not be extracted until 1832. The man he caned, Thomas Benton, found it necessary to hurriedly leave Nashville after the incident, later resurfacing as an influential senator from Missouri and becoming one of Jackson’s staunchest political allies.

On the battlefield he was unbeatable, making up for his lack of formal military training through audacity and personal example. He had a leadership style that combined praise and discipline in order to get the most out of every soldier, an ability to out-think his enemies, and a ruthless ferocity once combat began. His toughness was matched by the special kind of humility before his troops that would impress any modern-day soldier or Marine. In the tradition of the great warrior chieftains from William Wallace forward, Jackson made no distinction between himself and his men other than the authority that came from command. At one point early in 1813, he ordered his officers to give their horses to sick soldiers, turning over all three of his own in order to march alongside his men. It was his soldiers who first began calling him by the famous sobriquet Old Hickory, because of the unbreakable resoluteness of their far-older general.

He was a firm believer in both discipline and forgiveness. Not unlike the legendary George Patton, another general of Scots-Irish heritage, cowardice repulsed him while courage in the face of great danger overwhelmed his emotions. On two different occasions during the harrowing Indian wars he allowed soldiers under his command to be summarily shot for mutiny and disobedience. On another, when rations were running low and a company of volunteers had decided to return to Tennessee, Jackson rode his horse in front of them to block them and personally threatened to shoot the first man who took a step toward home. No one called his bluff.
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And yet when the great Creek warrior Chief Red Eagle defied almost impossible odds of survival by riding directly into Jackson’s camp and personally surrendering, Jackson let him go. Red Eagle, bold and intelligent, was also known as William Weatherford, as he was seven-eighths white. In terms that by themselves might otherwise have endeared him to his Jackson-led enemies, Red Eagle used to boast that he had French, Scottish, Spanish, and Creek ancestors, “but not one drop of Yankee blood.”
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Many Indian tribes had sided with the British during the War of 1812, the Creeks among them. In August 1813, Red Eagle had led a raiding party of 800 braves against a settlement at Fort Mims, Alabama, killing and scalping more than 400 settlers. As war historian Robert Leckie observed, of the entire garrison of 550 “whites, half-breeds, Indians and Negroes . . . fifteen persons escaped, and most of the Negroes were spared for slaves, but everyone else in Fort Mims was cut down.”
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Jackson, his arm still in a sling from the slug that had smashed his shoulder while caning Thomas Benton, had tracked the “Red Stick” warriors for months, slaughtering thousands of Indians in retaliations just as brutal as the Creek attack, and also soundly defeating Red Eagle’s warriors in several major battles. Notably, among his able lieutenants in this first major incursion (both of Scots-Irish descent) were Sam Houston, who would gain great fame during the campaigns against the Mexicans in Texas, and legendary frontiersman Davy Crockett, who would later die at the Alamo. Jackson had at first been livid when Red Eagle rode into his camp, but his calculated ranting failed to intimidate the Indian leader, who told him simply, “I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. . . . You may kill me if you wish.” Jackson held back his soldiers, who wished to do just that, and let Red Eagle depart, claiming, “Any man who would kill as brave a man as this would rob the dead.”
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Such empathy did not extend to warriors alone. In the aftermath of a particularly bloody attack on the Creek village of Talluschatches, “a dead Indian mother was found on the field still clutching her living infant. Jackson asked other Indian women to care for the child, but they refused. ‘All his relations are dead,’ they said. ‘Kill him, too.’ The General rejected this solution and afterward took the boy, named Lincoyer, back to the Hermitage and provided him with every advantage, including a good education. Unfortunately Lincoyer died of tuberculosis before reaching the age of seventeen.”
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And so the general who would lay fire to whole Indian villages during war, who as president is most remembered in modern times for enforcing the legislation that sent the Indian tribes westward from their historic lands to the arid reservations of Oklahoma, had the instinctive compassion to bring an orphaned Indian baby into his own home. The man who himself had been orphaned by war and who would never father children of his own was clearly not so much an “Indian hater” as he was a determined warrior.

He proved that at New Orleans. Jackson’s victory over the British in January 1815 was a tactical gem, as one-sided a defensive victory as King’s Mountain had been in the offense, but on a much larger scale. Even more, these were British regulars backed by a naval armada and commanded by Sir Edward Pakenham. Pakenham had fought superbly in Europe against the French. Five months after the New Orleans battle, his brother-in-law the Duke of Wellington would defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. In campaigns farther to the north and east the battle-hardened British regulars had made quick work of most of the American militia units they had faced. In August 1814 they had sailed up the Patuxent River to the outskirts of Washington, DC, marching through the area for five days before they found a unit that would even fight them. Finally at Bladensburg, Maryland, they caught up with an American force, and the skirmish lasted for about fifteen minutes before the U.S. soldiers dropped their guns and fled.