American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  “Then let some of the troops dismount, and the officers must give up their horses to the sick,” Jackson replied. “Not a man, sir, must be left behind.”

  Hogg took Jackson at his word, and asked for the general’s own horses, which Jackson handed over. In wonder and with admiration his men watched this tall, determined figure press on. “I led them into the field,” Jackson wrote Rachel, and “I will at all hazard and risk lead them out. I will bring on the sick, or be with them—it shall never be said … they have been abandoned by their general.” To the Tennessee politician Felix Grundy, he said: “And as long as I have friends or credit, I will stick by them. I shall march them to Nashville or bury them with the honors of war. Should I die I know they would bury me.” On foot, he saw them home, and by the time they arrived in Nashville they were calling him “Old Hickory.” Jackson had done what his own parents never had. He had stayed the course with those in his charge, and delivered them from danger. He had done a father’s work.

  BACK IN NASHVILLE for a time, Jackson slipped from the role of the protective commander and let his temper get the best of him during a foray into frontier violence. In 1813, a friend of Jackson’s in Nashville quarreled with Jesse Benton, the brother of Thomas Hart Benton, a future United States senator from Missouri. Jackson became entangled in the affair and before long—such were the complexities and short fuses in frontier Tennessee—he had let it be known that he would whip Thomas Benton when their paths crossed.

  They crossed on Saturday, September 4, 1813, at about nine o’clock in the morning. Jackson and General John Coffee were in Nashville, walking from the post office, when Jackson, who happened to have his riding whip in his hand, saw Tom and Jesse Benton standing by the City Hotel. Jackson, brandishing his whip, could not resist the opportunity. “Now, you damned rascal, I am going to punish you,” Jackson told Tom Benton. “Defend yourself.”

  Jackson pulled a gun and moved toward Tom, backing him around the hotel. Chaos ensued: an armed Jesse fired at Jackson, who fell with a serious wound in his upper left arm. Coffee rushed toward the sound and, finding Jackson in a spreading pool of blood, proceeded to shoot at Tom Benton. The shot went wide, but Coffee scrambled to beat Benton with the gun when Benton crashed down a flight of stairs. A nephew of Rachel’s then arrived on the scene, wrestled Jesse Benton to the floor, and tried to kill him with a dirk knife.

  Everyone survived, but Jackson sustained the worst injuries in the melee. While being tended to by doctors, he bled through two mattresses. The physicians wanted to amputate Jackson’s left arm, but Jackson refused, and with enough force from his bloody bed to carry the point.

  “I’ll keep my arm,” he said simply.

  A month later, while Rachel was still nursing Jackson back to health, news arrived that Creek Indians under the leadership of Red Eagle had massacred white settlers at Fort Mims, a fortification about forty miles north of Mobile. Red Eagle (his father was Scottish, his mother Creek) had been influenced by Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who hoped to unite the Indians into a force that, armed and supplied by the British and the Spanish, would crush the white Americans who were usurping their land. “Let the white race perish!” Tecumseh said. “War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!”

  Men like Jackson had long been troubled by visions of Indians colluding with London and Madrid to check American expansion, threaten the Union, and possibly undo the Revolution. To Jackson it was a given that the Indians—in this case the Creeks—were in league with America’s European rivals.

  The Creek attack on Fort Mims had taken place on Monday, August 30, 1813. It was brutal; as a historian of Alabama described it, 250 whites, including women and children, “were butchered in the quickest manner, and blood and brains bespattered the whole earth. The children were seized by the legs, and killed by batting their heads against the stockading. The women were scalped, and those who were pregnant were opened, while they were alive, and the embryo infants let out of the womb.” Until then, the Creeks had been fighting a factional war; by assaulting Fort Mims, the tribe irrevocably widened the conflict. That the fort had provided protection for settlers who had themselves attacked Red Sticks—named for their red war clubs—made no difference to the whites in the region who panicked at reports of the massacre.

  They sent for Jackson. “Those distressed citizens of that frontier [have] … implored the brave Tennesseans for aid,” he said. “They must not ask in vain.” Forcing himself into battle—he was in terrible shape from the Benton brawl—Jackson won a bloody victory at Tallushatchee, a village filled with Red Sticks. “We shot them like dogs,” said David Crockett. Richard Keith Call, then a lieutenant under Jackson, was troubled by the toll Jackson’s men had exacted. “We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin,” Call said. “Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins.” The bloodshed was repulsive. “In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters,” Call said. “Heart-sick I turned from the revolting scene.”

  Jackson, however, believed justice had been done. “We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims,” he told the governor of Tennessee. Difficult months followed. Supplies were few, and the troops’ discontent tested Jackson’s hold over his men. (Matters turned so grim that Jackson ordered the executions of six militiamen.) Still, he triumphed, winning victories from Talladega to Horseshoe Bend. The Creek War ended in August 1814—nearly a year after Fort Mims—with Jackson’s winning the cession of twenty-three million acres of land to the United States (three fifths of modern-day Alabama and one fifth of Georgia).

  Jackson never rested. Though he had crushed the Creeks, he still believed the Indians a live threat, a willing tool in the hands of the British and the Spanish. To the south, he defended Mobile against a British attack and then struck to the east, at Spanish Florida, where he was convinced that Madrid (and London) was “arming the hostile Indians to butcher our women and children.” He threatened Pensacola, which prompted the Spanish authorities there to seek British protection; soon Jackson took the city’s major fort, and then turned back to the west, toward New Orleans. It was late November 1814.

  AT NEW ORLEANS, Jackson continued the work of a conqueror. On Wednesday, December 16, with the British close by, he imposed martial law on the city, defying a writ of habeas corpus and jailing the federal district judge who issued it. (Lincoln would cite Jackson when suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War.) For this he was fined, and one of the last efforts of his life was to press Congress to refund the penalty.

  However ruthless his rule, Jackson impressed the city. In the second week of December 1814, he was at a party when word came of the beginning of an engagement with the British. “The dancing was over, and in the greatest alarm everyone was for hastening to their homes; when the General in his elegant, persuading, convincing manner assured the company that only himself and staff need leave, that there was no danger, and he would feel greatly obliged if the dancing was resumed,” Mrs. Eliza Williams Chotard Gould, who was there, recalled in a private memoir. “Such were his powers of persuasion that the affrighted company became calm, and cheerfully took partners again.” It was a brief respite—the crowd did soon go home—but Jackson had proved himself a reassuring commander.

  On the eve of the battle, from a balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, Mrs. Gould and her family watched Jackson approach on horseback. Seeing the women in tears, Jackson “expressed his regret at our alarm, insisted that we were in no danger, that the American arms would be victorious and the British whipped back to their vessels,” Mrs. Gould recalled. “His confident manner and expressions … dissipated for a time our distress.” Jackson’s men, she said, “were the most splendid horsemen I ever saw.”

  Jackson engaged the enemy in a climactic battle on Sunday, January 8, 1815, winning a victory reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Agincourt. Though the battle came after the war had ended—ne
ws of the treaty signed in Ghent on Christmas Eve would not reach New Orleans for several weeks—the victory was stunning. The British lost nearly three hundred men, with another twelve hundred wounded and hundreds more taken prisoner or missing. Only thirteen Americans died, with thirty-nine more suffering wounds. “It appears that the unerring hand of providence shielded my men from the powers of balls, bombs, and rockets, when every ball and bomb from our guns carried with them the mission of death,” Jackson said. Gazing across the battlefield as the cannon smoke lifted, John Coffee thought “the slaughter was shocking,” and soon living British soldiers who had hidden beneath their fallen comrades’ red coats rose from the heaps of corpses. “I never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection as on that day,” Jackson recalled.

  He was now a national, in fact international, figure of renown. In the city on Monday, January 23, 1815, the city’s ranking Roman Catholic priest thanked God for Jackson: “It is Him we intend to praise, when considering you, general, as the man of His right hand.… Immortal thanks be to His Supreme Majesty, for sending us such an instrument of His bountiful designs!”

  New Orleans made him, and he was becoming a player on a larger stage—a prospect that provoked anxieties on Rachel’s part and insecurities on Jackson’s. Worried that her husband’s head would be turned by his popularity—among American figures to that date, only Washington enjoyed a reputation of comparable scope—Rachel cautioned him against valuing glory above family. “The attention and honors paid to the General far excel a recital by my pen,” Rachel wrote a friend after ceremonies celebrating Jackson in New Orleans in 1821. “They conducted him to the Grand Theater; his box was decorated with elegant hangings. At his appearance the theater rang with loud acclamations, Vive Jackson. Songs of praise were sung by ladies, and in the midst they crowned him with a crown of laurel.” But Rachel was thinking of things greater than earthly grandeur. “The Lord has promised his humble followers a crown that fadeth not away; the present one is already withered, the leaves are falling off.… Oh, for Zion! I wept when I saw this idolatry.”

  Her husband, however, loved it. “I wish your carriage well repaired or exchanged for a new one,” Jackson wrote Rachel after New Orleans. “You must recollect that you are now a Major General’s lady, in the service of the U.S., and as such you must appear elegant and plain, not extravagant, but in such style as strangers expect to see you.” Louise Livingston, the wife of Jackson’s friend Edward Livingston, arranged Rachel’s wardrobe. Jackson wanted to look his part, too. “Bring with you my sash,” he told Rachel as she set out to come to New Orleans.

  She was uncomfortable with splendor; he enjoyed the great life. She hated traveling; he spent much of his time on the road. She disliked the cut-and-thrust of politics; he adored maneuvering and governing. She was drawn to the pew, the plantation, and the fireside; he was, despite many protestations to the contrary, a thoroughly social creature, delighted by crowds and parties and the risks and rewards of the public stage.

  During the turmoil of the 1824 presidential campaign, she complained that Jackson had failed to heed her counsel to avoid the political arena. “I knew from the first how wrong it was, but my advice was nothing,” Rachel confided to a friend. “His health is not good, and a continual uneasy mind keeps him unwell. I saw from the first it was wrong for him to fatigue himself with such an important office.” Yet within eight months of his losing the White House to John Quincy Adams in the election of 1824, the campaign of 1828 was under way. Rachel was Jackson’s shelter from the storm, and he loved her for that. Sadly for her, he also loved the storm, and so she had less of him than she would have liked.

  CHILDREN MIGHT HAVE made the rough edges smoother, but the Jacksons did not have any of their own. Watching her husband playing with a relative’s baby—“This little pig went to market; this little pig stayed home; this little pig went squeak, squeak!” said the Hero of New Orleans—Rachel, according to a family story, cried: “Oh, husband! How I wish we had a child!” With grace, Jackson said, “Darling, God knows what to give, what to withhold; let’s not murmur against Him.”

  Rachel would recount this scene, adding: “He would have given his life for a child; but knowing how disappointed I was at never being a mother, he, pitying me, tried to console me by saying: God denies us offspring that we may help those who have large families and no means to support them.” She recalled, too, that “once, returning from a child’s funeral, the bereaved mother’s frantic grief almost unmanning us, he said, ‘Your heart, my love, will never be pierced by that cruel knife.’ ”

  There were consolations. Andrew Donelson, who grew up to serve as his private secretary, was one. A nephew of Rachel’s, born in 1799, Andrew Jackson Donelson could not remember a time when he was not part of the Jackson world; the Jacksons had taken charge of his care and education after his father died in 1804. Jackson, it seemed, was the only one who could fill his father’s role: when a well-off planter courted his mother, Andrew Donelson cut the man’s saddle stirrups. In 1808 Rachel’s brother Severn Donelson’s wife had twin boys and offered to allow the Jacksons to adopt one of the infants. They accepted, christening the child Andrew Jackson, Jr. “The sensibility of our beloved son has charmed me, I have no doubt, from the sweetness of his disposition,” Rachel wrote Jackson in 1813.

  At war with the Creek Indian Nation in November 1813, Jackson’s interpreter found a small boy, Lyncoya, on the battlefield. The boy’s family was dead—“destroyed,” as Jackson put it to Rachel, at the hands of Jackson and his men—and Jackson saw himself and his own plight during the Revolution in the child’s eyes. With a combination of charity and condescension, he adopted Lyncoya on the spot and sent him to the Hermitage “for” Andrew junior as a playmate. “Keep Lyncoya in the house,” Jackson wrote Rachel. “He is a savage but one that fortune has thrown in my hands.… I therefore want him well taken care of, he may have been given to me for some valuable purpose. In fact, when I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him.” Lyncoya lived at the Hermitage for the next fifteen years, dying of illness in 1828.

  Andrew junior and the numerous Donelson cousins filled the Jacksons’ lives and house; taken together, the Donelson-Jackson clan was one of the most important in the state. General Daniel Smith, Andrew Donelson’s mother’s father (Jackson had helped her elope with Samuel Donelson, so in a way Andrew Donelson even owed Jackson his very life), served in the U.S. Senate, and the interlocking families owned large tracts of land around Nashville and beyond. Jackson and the Donelsons moved with the mightiest men in Tennessee—generals, governors, and planters. They may have been cash-poor but they were property-rich (in acres and slaves), and they were absolutely certain of their place in the universe, which is one definition of aristocracy. General Smith built a house named Rock Castle, which was, a relative recalled, “reputed to be the handsomest south of the Ohio or west of the Alleghenies.”

  AFTER NEW ORLEANS Jackson continued his battles against the Indian tribes in the South and West, and between 1816 and 1820 signed treaties giving the United States tens of millions of acres (this was in addition to his vast Creek acquisition). In the spring of 1816 his obsession with securing the nation’s borders—and thus ensuring the safety of the country—led him to write Mauricio de Zuniga, the commandant of Pensacola. Florida remained in Spanish hands, and Jackson’s incursion before the Battle of New Orleans had only provisionally taken care of the problem of having a foreign foe in such proximity. The occasion for the letter to Zuniga: fugitive American slaves were escaping to a fort occupied by blacks along the Apalachicola River. Allowing slaves to seek shelter at what he called the “negro fort,” Jackson told Zuniga that the situation “will not be tolerated by our government, and if not put down by Spanish Authority will compel us in self-defense to destroy them.” Within months, another American general, Edmund Pendleton Gaines, did exactly that, destroying the fort (and the 270 people inside it).

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p; But the Spanish remained, and by 1817 Jackson was able to direct his fire toward two of his great nemeses—Spain and the Indians—at once. The Seminoles declined to leave their lands north of the Florida border—they were supposed to under the terms of Jackson’s agreement with the Creeks—and instead fought back, trading bloodbath for bloodbath with the Americans, with the Seminoles escaping to Spanish-held Florida for safety.

  President Monroe, in a letter dated Sunday, December 28, 1817, authorized Jackson to quell the Seminole threat—and suggested that a broader victory would not be unwelcome. “This is not a time for you to think of repose,” Monroe wrote Jackson. “Great interests are at issue, and until our course is carried through triumphantly … you ought not to withdraw your active support from it.” Was Monroe only interested in subduing the Seminoles? Or was he hinting, and perhaps hoping, that Jackson might go further, seizing Florida and driving out the Spanish?

  Whatever Monroe meant—and the letter is diplomatically oblique—Jackson moved against both the Seminoles and the Spanish and conquered Florida. In the course of the invasion he ordered the executions of two British subjects, provoking a crisis with England. Jackson claimed he had authorization from Monroe for the seizure of Florida, but no evidence of such permission (beyond the December 28 letter) ever came to light. Jackson’s adventure roiled Washington. In Monroe’s Cabinet, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and Treasury Secretary William Crawford denounced the seizure; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who believed in the virtues of American control of the continent, defended Jackson. In the House of Representatives, Speaker Henry Clay—like Calhoun and Crawford, a man with presidential ambitions—denounced Jackson, arguing that to allow Jackson’s actions to stand uncensored would mark “a triumph of the military over the civil authority … a triumph over the constitution of the land.”