Born Fighting (20 page)

Only a small group of sailors and Marines had stood their ground as the British advanced toward Washington. As a reciprocal gesture, when the Redcoats entered the city, the only official building they declined to burn was the house of the Marine Corps commandant, which to this day is known as the oldest continuously standing building in Washington. Reaching the White House, the British found it abandoned with a full meal having been prepared in the kitchen. They delightedly ate the meal and then burned the president’s house while other Redcoats torched the War and Treasury buildings as well as the Navy Yard, where they also burned all the naval vessels on the eastern side of the river.
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And so, with a false optimism eerily similar to that of the long-dead Maj. Patrick Ferguson at King’s Mountain a generation before, the British hardly expected the supposedly ragtag Indian fighters of the frontier militia awaiting them at New Orleans to have the staying power to resist their attack. And the capture of New Orleans would be a valuable strategic prize. Sitting as it did at the mouth of the Mississippi River, British military control of the city would choke off the vital river traffic that fed America’s newly formed Western territories along a host of Mississippi river towns that stretched from New Orleans to Memphis and St. Louis, as well as the Ohio River towns in Indiana and northern Kentucky. But Old Hickory out-thought and out-prepared the invading British. And as the backwoods militia had done at King’s Mountain, he fought them frontier-style, with highly accurate sharpshooters firing from behind concealed positions—in this case, bulletproof cotton bales.

During the main battle, the British, 8,000 strong, used fifty barges to ferry troops toward their attack on the American positions. Jackson’s 5,700 soldiers were mostly Tennessee and Kentucky riflemen bolstered by New Orleans locals—a mix of Creoles, Frenchmen, pirates, and a unit of free blacks that Jackson had armed and brought to the battlefield despite the protests of local leaders. The Redcoats, many of them veterans of campaigns against the French and more recently the burning of Washington, advanced in traditional European style. Their scarlet tunics were marked by white cross-belts, leading Jackson to order his men to simply hold their fire until the Redcoats came within range, and then aim their bullets just above the cross-belts. Fire discipline and pinpoint accuracy were the key. The British soldiers had never before faced frontier long rifles or the coolheaded men who fired them, and it was a brutal slaughter in front of the cotton bales. At one point an entire regiment of kilted Scottish highlanders died in the advance, only a few dozen of them even reaching the parapets where they would have engaged the Americans hand to hand. Pakenham was wounded three times before he finally fell. In all the British lost more than 2,000 soldiers dead and another 500 as prisoners, at an American cost of only eight dead and 13 wounded.
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In handing this invasion force one of the most devastating and humiliating defeats in the history of British arms, Jackson became an immediate national hero, symbolizing the very ascendancy of the new nation. Even nearly 150 years later, the battle was still being celebrated in popular song—Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans” was a huge hit in the summer of 1959, selling 2 million copies and topping the
Billboard
charts six weeks in a row. The legend-makers usually omit the tales of Jackson’s autocratic martial rule in New Orleans leading up to the battle, when he happily offended the city’s feckless, pleasure-loving elite by throwing a legislator into jail for writing a newspaper article that defied his authority, and then arresting a federal judge who released the legislator. The Louisiana Senate deliberately omitted his name from a list of officers it thanked for saving the city.
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But such confrontations with America’s elites had become commonplace for Old Hickory, who no doubt consoled himself through the adulation of the people and the gold medal issued to him by a grateful Congress.

The military campaigns continued, as did his popular adulation and his delight in provoking those he viewed as aristocracy. Now commanding the entire Southern division of the United States Army, he entered the Spanish territory of Florida, from which the Seminole Indians were conducting raids on American soil, and largely on his own initiative seized Pensacola from the Spanish on May 24, 1818. When the Spanish governor protested the legality of his takeover and demanded that Jackson remove his forces from Florida, Jackson captured the governor, his staff, and his soldiers and had them all transported to Cuba “until the transaction could be amicably adjusted between the two governments.”
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The “transaction” was in fact resolved in February 1819 when Spain decided it had no choice but to sell its Florida territory to the United States for $5 million.

With the takeover of Florida, Jackson’s military career reached its natural conclusion. Old Hickory was now in his mid-fifties. He had lived a hard life and his health was beginning to fail. Additionally, due in great part to his own efforts, the entire Southern region east of the Mississippi River was now under American governance. Now, after twenty years away from government, Jackson was turning his eyes again to politics, deciding to run for the presidency. And he brought with him a list of accomplishments that would make a frontiersman’s heart swim with admiration.

But to the American political elite, then as well as now, Jackson’s personal history was nauseatingly crude and violent while his populist beliefs were a threat to the existing order. As Arthur Schlesinger points out in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book
The Age of Jackson
, when Old Hickory decided to run for president he was “specifically opposed by the guardians of Virginia orthodoxy. Jefferson himself is supposed to have told Daniel Webster, ‘he is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. . . . He is a dangerous man.’ ”
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Alexis de Tocqueville would write shortly after his arrival in America, “All the enlightened classes are opposed to General Jackson.”
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Indeed, when Jackson was elected, his predecessor, New England political scion and former president John Quincy Adams, refused to attend the inauguration, and when Harvard awarded Jackson an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1833, Adams wrote to his alma mater that it was a “disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”
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Jackson had expected such resistance and had built his political base on a natural constituency of frontiersmen from what was then called the West and the simple wage earners of the cities in the North, in the process founding the modern Democratic Party. As the eminent historian Vernon Louis Parrington wrote in his Pulitzer Prize–winning classic
Main Currents in American Thought
, “In the person of Old Hickory they saw the visible embodiment of their vague aspirations, and they turned to him with an unquestioning loyalty that nothing could weaken. He was our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. . . . He was one of our few Presidents whose heart and sympathy were with the plain people, and who clung to the simple faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the rich. . . . In short, General Jackson represented the best which the new West could breed in the way of capable and self-reliant individualism, and the backwoodsmen loved him for the enemies he made, and backed him loudly in his fight against the aristocratic East.”
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As Jackson ran for president, these aristocratic forces were adept at using the press in attempts to savage his reputation and persistently question the honor of his wife. When he first ran for President in 1824, the
London Times
sardonically observed, “The journals in the interest of the President [John Quincy Adams] teem with the most violent abuse of General Jackson. They prove too much; for if Jackson has been guilty of one half of the atrocities ascribed, it should not be a question of whether he is to be the next President, but whether he ought not to be hanged. They accuse him of adultery, treason, and repeated murders, and yet, till he pretended to the chief place, he was hailed as the American hero.”
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His wife, Rachel, herself was deeply affected by such calumnies and after he won the election four years later, she died of a sudden heart attack shortly before he took office. For the rest of his own life Jackson believed that her death was caused by these intense assaults on her character.

These forces succeeded in denying Jackson the presidency in 1824 when he received a clear plurality over John Quincy Adams and two other candidates in both the popular and Electoral College votes, causing him to lose decisively to Adams when the election was thrown into the partisan House of Representatives. Undeterred, Jackson and his supporters used this setback to widen his popular base even further as he traveled extensively over the next four years, running on an adamantly populist platform. In 1828 “Jackson won 647,276 popular votes to Adams’s 508,064. The number of voters who participated in this election nearly quadrupled the 1824 figure, and of these Jackson took approximately 56 percent—a smashing victory that remained unequaled in the nineteenth century.”
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For eight years Andrew Jackson dominated American politics, bringing a coarse but refreshing openness to the country’s governing process. Founded on intense patriotism and the dignity of the common man, his presidency was notable for two remarkable achievements, both of which reflected not only his courage but also his political acumen and the strength of his core political beliefs. The first involved his passion for ridding the government of policies and practices that unduly favored the aristocracy. The second, which would eventually play itself out on the battlefields of the Civil War, reflected his equally strong passion that the Union of the states was permanent and must never be allowed to dissolve.

On July 10, 1830, Jackson vetoed legislation that renewed the charter of the Second National Bank, knowing full well that it would at least briefly send the nation into financial and political turmoil. Contemporary Americans who are accustomed to seeing a “national bank” on every street corner frequently misunderstand the power that had been given to this one central bank. Nor is it easy in modern days to comprehend the stakes for the American political system that were in play with Jackson’s veto. Historian Robert Remini writes that Jackson’s veto of the bank charter “was the most important presidential veto in American history.”
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Vernon Louis Parrington went further, calling it “the most courageous act in our political history.”
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The political establishment was firmly against Jackson on the issue, as was two-thirds of the press. Most predicted that he would find a convenient way to avoid the veto. What they failed to understand was that Jackson, in the words of Schlesinger, “cared less for his popularity than for his program.”
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Why did he feel so strongly when other powerful people did not? The arguments for and against the bank charter were complex, but Jackson’s conclusion was simple, concerned with the very soul of a new nation. Whatever its economic merits, the bank as it was legally constructed represented the raw power to intimidate and control a whole nation. Many newspapers feared the prospect of diminished advertising revenues if they failed to support the bank. Powerful politicians worried correctly that they would lose lucrative retainers and personal profit flows if they did so. But Andrew Jackson saw the need to confront a system that threatened to corrupt the state at the hands of a growing aristocracy who were benefiting merely from personal influence in ways that completely eluded the ordinary citizen.

The Second National Bank was in reality a private monopoly, insulated from competition by federal law. It had been given extraordinary powers by a Congress that in the aggregate accepted the notion that government policies might openly favor—and insulate from public scrutiny—the wealthy. Indeed, many members of Congress who supported the bank were also on its payroll through a system of blatant payoffs. One can do no better here than to allow Schlesinger to explain. The bank “served as a repository of the public funds, which it could use for its own banking purposes without payment of interest . . . [It] was not to be taxed by the states and no similar institution was to be chartered by the Congress. . . . It enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the currency and practically complete control over credit and the price level. . . . [Its President Nicholas] Biddle not only suppressed all internal dissent but insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people. [Biddle had written in 1824 that] ‘no officer of the government, from the President downwards, has the least right, the least authority, the least pretence, for interference in the concerns of the bank.’ In Biddle’s eyes the Bank was thus an independent corporation, on a level with the state, . . . the keystone in the alliance between government and the business community.”
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Nicholas Biddle, headstrong and self-assured to the point of arrogance, was from a wealthy Philadelphia family. He had powerful allies, including the respected and famed orator Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, who was a longtime political adversary of Jackson, and New England political giant Sen. Daniel Webster, who made no secret that the retainer he received from the bank had become “a dependable source of private revenue.” Biddle also controlled a passel of effective lobbyists. As they moved the legislation through Congress, Clay famously promised his colleagues that, “should Jackson veto it, I shall veto him!”
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Jackson vetoed it, and when they tried to veto him in 1832, he was reelected with 687,502 votes against a combined total of 566,297 from two other opponents, one of whom was Clay. His electoral college majority was even stronger—219 to a combined total of 67 for his opponents, including 11 that South Carolina’s electors had cast for a Virginian who had not been on the original ballot. Although these numbers were overwhelming, historians such as Robert Remini nonetheless point out that the issue did indeed hurt Jackson, as he became “the only President in American history whose reelection to a second term registered a decline in the percentage of popular votes.”
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In short, although Clay and Biddle took their best shot, Old Hickory, as with so many other battles in his life, was left bloody but unbowed when the duel was done.