American Lion

by Jon Meacham

  When he put his mind and hand to it, Jackson could produce stirring rhetoric—but he did so usually in moments of clarity and purpose. His addresses to his troops in the field, his letters about the Union, and his calls for the triumph of the virtue of the people over the vices of the elite were occasions on which he knew what he wanted to say because he knew what he believed and what he wanted to accomplish.

  His first inaugural, however, was purposely vague. Gazing out on the admirers gathered at the foot of the Capitol steps, Jackson saw that he was the object of wide affection—but he was not yet certain of the depth of that affection. The people hailed him today but might not tomorrow. Better, then, to proceed with care, to be general rather than specific, universal rather than particular—for specificity and particularity would give his foes weapons to use against him. Many leaders would have been seduced by the roar of that crowd, lulled into thinking themselves infallible, or omnipotent, or secure in the love of their followers. But Jackson knew that politics, like emotion, is not static. There would be times when he would have to tell people what they did not want to hear, press a case they did not want to accept, point them in a direction they would prefer not to go. Best, then, to preserve capital to spend on those speeches and those battles.

  The rise of a nation with a large number of voters, living at great distances from one another, dependent for information and opinion on partisan newspapers, meant that a president had to project an image at once strong and simple. His ideas should be expressed clearly for the ordinary voter, who, consumed with the tasks and troubles of his own life, had only so much time and energy to devote to divining the details of a leader’s political creed. In a democracy like the one taking shape in America, the people considered both the content of a politician’s message and their impression of his character in deciding whether to support him. George Washington was the first and greatest such example, a man called to power not only because of his views but also for his reassuring bearing. He was a man with whom the people felt comfortable. Jackson’s political appeal came out of the same tradition—a tradition in which a leader creates a covenant of mutual confidence between himself and the broader public. If the people believe in the man, then the more likely they are to give him the benefit of the doubt on the details of governance. A Scottish visitor to Albany in the late 1820s noted an American love of what he called “the spirit of electioneering, which seems to enter as an essential ingredient into the composition of everything.” But it was a highly personal kind of electioneering: “The Americans, as it appears to me, are infinitely more occupied about bringing in a given candidate, than they are about the advancement of those measures of which he is conceived to be the supporter.”

  The transaction between a potential president and the people is often as much about the heart as it is about the mind. “The large masses act in politics pretty much as they do in religion,” a Democratic senator said in the Jackson years. “Every doctrine is with them, more or less, a matter of faith; received, principally, on account of their trust in the apostle.” And they trusted Jackson. They might not always agree with him, they might cringe at his excesses and his shortcomings, but at bottom they believed he was a man of strength who would set a course and follow it, who would fight their battles and crush their enemies. They believed, in short, in the Jackson who, on that journey home from Natchez in the War of 1812, had said that he would not leave a man behind—not a single one. It was a pledge he had kept then, and the people believed it was one he would keep in the White House.

  MORE STILTED THAN sonorous, the inaugural speech could be interpreted in almost any way a hearer chose to interpret it. Of the tariff, he said, “It would seem to me that the spirit of equity, caution, and compromise in which the Constitution was formed requires that the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored”—but he did not say he would lower the duties that had so enraged the South. Of the building of roads and canals—so crucial and yet so controversial, for there were disputes about whether Washington should help pay for them or leave the matter to the states—he said, “Internal improvement and the diffusion of knowledge, so far as they can be promoted by the constitutional acts of the Federal Government, are of high importance,” but did not specify what “acts” might be “constitutional.” Of all the points in the address, the sentence that resonated most in official Washington was a promise of “reform, which will require particularly the correction of … abuses” in the federal system.

  The significance of this pledge can be understood only when we remember that Jackson represented the first major transition in the White House in more than a generation—the first since Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, twenty-eight years before. Madison, Monroe, and Adams had been their own men, but had essentially left the federal government more or less in the same hands. Now Jackson was, from the start, calling those hands “unfaithful” and “incompetent”—particularly the ones who had served the second Adams.

  Jackson closed with a prayer—for order and for guidance, for himself and for the Union. As president, he said, he would depend “on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes,” and hoped “that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.” His mother would have been pleased. He was playing the role of national pastor—a minister at last, leading the largest possible flock.

  He bowed once more to the people, and the cheers rose again. Jackson then took the oath from Chief Justice John Marshall, kissed a Bible, and mounted a white horse to ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. “Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white” followed him, Mrs. Smith said, “carriages, wagons and carts all pursuing him to the President’s house.”

  WHEN THE PROCESSION arrived, the mansion was all his—and theirs. Angry with Adams for the attacks on Rachel during the campaign, Jackson had refused to call on his predecessor, and so President Adams had moved out the night before and made no public appearances on Inauguration Day. (He learned of the moment of the transfer of power when, riding his horse, he heard the Capitol cannon fire in the distance.) It is possible that Jackson’s failure to communicate directly with Adams helped lead to the disaster that followed, a legendary scene in American history that has forever linked Jackson with the image of a crowd trashing the White House. “No arrangements had been made,” Mrs. Smith noted, and “no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob.”

  The reception Jackson had planned turned chaotic, with his enthusiastic followers filling the house past capacity. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping” replaced it, said Mrs. Smith. “Here was the corpulent epicure grunting and sweating for breath,” reported the New York Spectator, “the dandy wishing he had no toes—the tight-laced Miss, fearing her person might receive some permanently deforming impulse—the miser hunting for his pocket-book—the courtier looking for his watch—and the office-seeker in an agony to reach the President.” The household staff’s attempts to serve the guests only made things worse. “Orange punch by barrels full was made, but as the waiters opened the door to bring it out, a rush would be made,” said a congressman from Pennsylvania, “the glasses broken, the pails of liquor upset, and the most painful confusion prevailed.”

  Standing in the mansion, Jackson was nearly crushed by the visitors. His aides formed a protective ring around the president and spirited him back to Gadsby’s. Mrs. Smith thought of the sacking of Versailles—an excessive allusion, for the worst damage she could detect, she admitted, was that “the carpets and the furniture are ruined.” The cost of the destruction was limited to a few thousand dollars, but the scene was further proof, if any were needed, that the armies of democracy were pitching their tents
in Andrew Jackson’s White House.

  THE MISTRESS OF the house, Emily Donelson, was apparently horrified. The melee was the kind of thing that embarrassed Emily, who, as a newcomer to the highest levels, was, like her uncle, sensitive to making a good appearance and leaving the rougher elements of frontier life—even life in the frontier aristocracy—where she believed they belonged: back on the frontier, not in Washington.

  In a long letter to her sister about the inaugural, Emily not only failed to mention the mob scene but cast the afternoon in a favorable, more genteel light—rearranging reality in order to make the family’s first moments at the pinnacle appear more polished than they had actually been.

  “After the inauguration Uncle and the rest of us repaired to the White House,” Emily said, “where every one visited him that wished to treat him with respect.” The only allusion—a heavily veiled one—to the chaos of the reception came in this fragment of a sentence: “The crowd,” Emily added, “was about as great here as it was at the Capitol.” Then she moved rapidly on, saying, “Uncle has scarcely had a moment to himself since he arrived and has been surrounded by visitors.… I hope [he] will now have time to rest himself and attend to his health, which has been very delicate.” In her mind, then, the early days of the administration were days of presidential affairs, callers who wished to salute Jackson “with respect,” and her warm concern about his well-being—not of what Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who was at the White House on Inauguration Day, called “the reign of King Mob.”

  Emily knew that the sight of a crowd climbing through the windows of the White House for cups of spiked punch was the last thing her family needed. The girl who had taken a maid with her to school in Nashville and who had relished her first days in capital society on her 1824–25 visit was self-conscious about the Jackson clan’s image. The public swirl of rumors about the Jacksons’ murky marriage probably made Emily even more sensitive than she would have been if all the world had not been reading of confused wedding dates, adultery, and bigamy.

  Emily began her life in national society in a curiously contradictory position. She owed her access to the grandeur of the White House to her family’s connection to Andrew Jackson, but it was precisely that connection that somewhat embarrassed her. Emily may have felt that she had to transcend, or at least obscure, some uncomfortable truths about Jackson and the world they all came from: the looser late-eighteenth-century morals that the Jacksons took advantage of in order to marry; the memories of crude violence, duels, and brawling that Jackson’s foes kept alive; even Jackson’s lack of formal education and intellectual polish.

  As she dressed in her room at Gadsby’s in the early evening hours of Wednesday, March 4, 1829, Emily already knew the circles in which she wanted to move. Adjusting her gown of amber satin—Jackson had bought new dresses for her and for Mary Eastin—she hoped to transcend her provincial origins.

  Emily was confident about her own capacity to build the life she wanted in Washington. Like many women on the frontier—women who ran plantations and complex households while their husbands or fathers were away at war or on business—she was accustomed to being independent. James A. Hamilton, a son of Alexander Hamilton, recalled being struck by Emily’s strength and self-reliance when, one day at the Hermitage, he watched her ride up to the house on horseback with one of her babies in her arms. “I was astonished to see a young and delicate lady and mother making a visit in this manner,” Hamilton said. As many others, including her uncle, soon learned, Emily was not afraid to ride alone.

  Which was one of the reasons Jackson adored her. He admired women—as well as men—of courage, and he was loyal to those he loved. He liked Emily’s spirit. It may have reminded him of the young Rachel’s, back in Nashville and in Natchez. Though Emily and Andrew sometimes resented and bridled at Jackson’s authority, as children do with fathers, they wanted, as children also do with fathers, his affection and his blessing.

  The day of the inaugural was no different. “Tired as he was that night,” wrote a family chronicler, “Jackson viewed with interest and pride Emily Donelson and Mary Eastin, who came into his room, seeking his approval of their appearance in the new gowns he had given them, as they started for the Inaugural Ball.” Still in mourning, Jackson was not going. He limited his celebrations to a small dinner. Calhoun was one of his companions at the table; afterward, the vice president went from Gadsby’s to the ball.

  There he and Mrs. Calhoun joined Emily and Andrew to form the most brilliant circle of the evening. Mrs. Donelson and Mrs. Calhoun were the ranking women at Carusi’s, the assembly hall at C and Eleventh streets. In the absence of President Jackson, Vice President Calhoun was the central figure of the night. For Emily and Andrew, the mix of power, excitement, and glamor was intoxicating, and they loved the company they were in.

  As the Donelsons danced and dined at Carusi’s, Emily was thinking beyond this single night out, beyond this season in Washington, beyond, even, the Jackson presidency. She was ambitious for her husband. Both Donelsons had reason to expect that Uncle Jackson’s wishes for Andrew to lead his own national political career might come to pass. Andrew Donelson was twenty-nine years old and, as secretary to the president, was in a unique position to master the mechanics of national and international politics. Emily kept watch over her husband’s prospects, protecting his interests in the great game of who was to be close to Jackson. At the same time, however, she was attached to Jackson himself, loved him, and took seriously her duty to make him comfortable amid the tumult of the presidency.

  SHE DID IT well. Family life was crucial to Jackson, who had known so little of it growing up, and Emily ensured that the White House was a sanctuary for him. The Jackson circle soon moved from Gadsby’s to the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, and Emily, who was about three months pregnant with her second child, quickly settled in. When she brought him a question about social life in the White House—and there was really no such thing as a small question about social life in the president’s home, for society and politics were linked in etiquette, precedence, and seating—Jackson would say: “You know best, my dear. Do as you please.”

  He trusted her and her husband as he trusted few people. An intimate of the Hermitage for so long, Emily knew what Jackson wanted and needed. He found comfort in the intimacy of a family gathered around a fireside. Looking back, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, remembered Emily Donelson’s White House as a place where Jackson sat in a rocking chair near the hearth as light poured in through the big windows. Jessie’s senator father would confer with the president, who liked to “keep me by him, his hand on my head—forgetting me of course in the interest of discussion—so that sometimes, his long, bony fingers took an unconscious grip” and Jackson “twisted his fingers a little too tightly in my curls.” Little Jessie would endure the inadvertently inflicted presidential pain, then hope to be excused to the Donelson nursery down the hall.

  A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.

  Jackson also liked his family to shine socially, and Emily was happy to accommodate him. “Madam, you dance with the grace of a Parisian,” a foreign minister once told her at a party in Washington. “I can hardly realize you were educated in Tennessee.”

  “Count, you forget that grace is a cosmopolite,” Emily said, “and like a wild flower is much oftener found in the woods than in the streets of a city.” It was a perfect reply: tough but charming, pointed but graci
ous—like Emily herself, or, for that matter, Jackson himself. On close inspection, they had much in common, perhaps most significantly a tendency to be stubborn yet mask willfulness with charm and geniality. In just one person, that was a formidable combination of characteristics; to have two people in the same house with that capacity made for a complex and quietly charged emotional universe—one that, given the psychological arsenals at both Jackson’s and Emily’s disposal, was at perpetual risk of becoming a battlefield instead of a home.

  THERE WERE THINGS to fight about from the start. Though the Donelsons, with one child and another on the way, formed the core of the president’s world, his old quartermaster and political aide, Major William B. Lewis, was a constant factor. Lewis had made something of a show of wanting to leave Washington after the inauguration. A trusted operative, Lewis was useful to Jackson, but, like many who live and work in the orbit of the great, he was needy, and wanted reassurance about his role and relevance to Jackson. By announcing his planned departure to Tennessee, Lewis drew forth the words he longed to hear:

  “Why, Major,” Jackson said, “you are not going to leave me here alone, after doing more than any other man to bring me here?” Watching, Emily scoffed at Lewis’s maneuver. Emily’s hostility suggests that she worried about her Andrew’s place within the government. Lewis was a rival for Jackson’s attention, positioned in equal proximity to the president, with a daughter, Mary Lewis, there to be one of the women around Jackson providing him with company and comfort.

  There was another likely reason for Emily’s coolness toward Lewis. He was allied with a wing of Jackson’s universe that could mean trouble for her and for Andrew: that of John Henry Eaton, the new secretary of war.

  Handsome, energetic, and devoted to Jackson, Eaton was as close to the president as anyone, and closer than most. “Eaton was altogether a personal appointment,” Amos Kendall wrote Francis Preston Blair, reporting that Jackson “said to a friend who told me that left alone as he was in the world, he desired to have near him a personal and confidential friend to whom he could unbosom himself on all subjects.”