by Jon Meacham
Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton had yet more lives to lead after her husband’s death. “We had been honored as the intimates of the grandest man who had ever sat in the chair of American President,” Margaret wrote in a memoir. “I bore the name of one who as United States Senator, Cabinet officer and minister plenipotentiary to a foreign court had lived and died in honor among his fellow men. But alas! Alas! For the perversity of human nature and my own frailty.” She married a third time—an Italian dancing master named Antonio Buchignani. She was fifty-nine; he was nineteen. They moved to New York City, settling in Gramercy Park, until the groom ran off with Margaret’s granddaughter. Margaret divorced Buchignani, returned to Washington. She had, a Washington observer recalled, “a carriage with four horses and liveried servants.… There was nothing in Washington to compare with her equipage, not even the president’s own.… I have never seen anyone so beautiful.” Margaret died at age seventy-nine on Sunday, November 9, 1879. President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes sent flowers to the funeral. She was buried next to John Eaton at Oak Hill Cemetery in an unmarked grave. “She belonged to the women of restless heart whose lives are always stormy, sometimes great, and rarely happy,” wrote a journalist who had known her.
Politically, John C. Calhoun never recovered from the Jackson years. His presidential ambitions, once so strong, were to lead nowhere. Thwarted in the cause of nullification, he grew more strident in his defense of slavery. With the exception of a year as secretary of state in John Tyler’s Cabinet (1844–45), Calhoun remained in the Senate, where he fought for the rights of slave owners. He died in Washington on Saturday, March 30, 1850. Floride was en route but arrived too late. Clay and Webster mourned him, as did much of the South. Clay saluted Calhoun’s oratorical gifts, recalling his “torrent of mighty rhetoric, which always won our admiration even if it did not bring conviction to our understandings.” Calhoun was buried in the churchyard of St. Philip’s in Charleston, not far from Fort Sumter.
Henry Clay served in the Senate until 1842, seeking the presidency again in 1844 (Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey was his running mate on the Whig ticket). Clay was defeated by James K. Polk, a Tennessean who was hailed as “Young Hickory.” The hostility between Clay and Jackson endured. In the spring of 1842, Van Buren visited the Hermitage and Ashland. Clay asked after Jackson’s health “respectfully and kindly,” but that was all. Jackson never relented in the slightest. On hearing of Polk’s victory over Clay in the 1844 race for the White House, Jackson wrote to Andrew Donelson: “The glorious result of the presidential election has rejoiced every democratic bosom in the United States, and as to myself I can say in the language of Simeon of old, ‘Let thy servant depart in peace, as I have seen the solution of the liberty of my country and the perpetuity of our Glorious Union.’ ” Clay returned to the Senate, where he created the Compromise of 1850, the complex legislative achievement that attempted to balance interests among slave states, free states, and territories, delaying war for a decade. A firm Unionist, Clay reconciled with Francis Preston Blair. “Tell Clay for me,” Van Buren wrote Blair, that the Compromise of 1850 was “more honorable and durable than his election to the Presidency could possibly have been.” Clay died on Tuesday, June 29, 1852, in Washington, where he was the first man to lie in state in the Capitol. He was buried in Lexington.
John Quincy Adams remained in the House of Representatives for three years after Jackson’s death. Adams carried on as he had set out, arguing for the rights of abolitionists to petition the Congress and becoming, through the years, what Henry Wise called “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.” Before the Supreme Court, he defended the African captives who had been arrested for rebellion aboard the Amistad, and won. Adams collapsed on the floor of the House on Monday, February 21, 1848, and died two days later. His casket was taken to Boston and then on to Quincy. Louisa survived him by four years, and ultimately they were interred beside Abigail and John Adams at the First Parish Church.
Andrew Jackson Donelson never came to “preside over the destinies” of America. After being considered for Van Buren’s Cabinet, he briefly weighed a bid for Congress from Nashville, but decided against it and, in 1844, accepted President Tyler’s appointment to Texas. Jackson died believing Donelson had done the job well, and that Texas would come into the Union: “All is safe and Donelson will have the honor of this important deed,” Jackson wrote President Polk, Tyler’s successor, as the shadows lengthened. From 1846 to 1849, Donelson served as the American envoy to Prussia, then returned to the United States and edited the Washington Union, the successor to Blair’s Globe, from 1851 to 1852. By 1856 he had swerved into anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic politics, and ran for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket (so called because of the air of secrecy around its membership). As the Civil War approached, Donelson’s woes compounded, both in politics and in farming.
Writing in the mid-1850s from Cleveland Hall, a Donelson family house near the Hermitage, Stockley’s daughter Laura recorded the slow but steady crumbling of the world Jackson had known. “A great change” was about to come to “our old neighborhood,” she wrote to a brother. “Cousin Andrew Jackson has sold the rest of the Hermitage and has purchased a large place in Mississippi, on the St. Louis Bay.… To hear Cousin Andrew’s description of this place—the magnolia and orange groves, fertile soil and balmy breezes—you would think it some enchanted spot.” One suspects Andrew junior’s effusiveness was in part intended to mask his unease about breaking up his father’s house, but he comforted himself, too, with the idea that the state, which bought the land, might be able to convince Washington to use it for a southern branch of West Point. But that was not to be. Always hapless in business affairs, Andrew junior killed himself in a hunting accident, shooting himself in the hand while climbing over a fence. The wound became infected, and he died of what was called lockjaw.
Meanwhile, Andrew Donelson’s luck continued to deteriorate as he journeyed by river between Mississippi and Tennessee. “Uncle Andrew met with quite a loss on his way early one morning,” Laura wrote. “The boat stopped for freight, Uncle Andrew left his berth for a few moments and in the meantime some daring robber stole his watch and chain which he valued at $250…. He is offering his place [now called Tulip Grove] for sale. If he sells, he will move to Memphis.”
The decision to go west did not turn out well. In a letter from one Donelson relative to another in 1859, the family lamented Andrew Donelson’s troubles: “Uncle Andrew [Donelson] was up here about three weeks since. He is in lower spirits than I ever saw him. His place in Bolivar County is all under water, so that he will make another failure this year, and a hurricane blew the roof of his house off in Memphis. He is decidedly unfortunate.” During the war, like many Tennesseans, he moved from support for the Union to sympathy for the Confederacy, and was trusted by neither. He died on Monday, June 26, 1871, at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, and was buried in that city’s Elmwood Cemetery—far from Emily, and far from Jackson.
EPILOGUE: HE STILL LIVES
IN LATE JANUARY 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was at home in wintry Springfield, Illinois, contemplating his course. The South was seceding, the Union in danger of dying. In search of a quiet place to work on his inaugural address, Lincoln walked through streets of mud and ice to his brother-in-law’s brick general store, Yates and Smith, near the corner of Sixth and Adams. Lincoln had told his friend and law partner William Herndon that he would need some “works” to consult. “I looked for a long list, but when he went over it I was greatly surprised,” Herndon recalled. In the course of drafting his inaugural, Lincoln asked for a copy of the Constitution, Henry Clay’s speech on the Compromise of 1850, Webster’s second reply to Hayne—and Jackson’s Proclamation to the People of South Carolina.
Reading Jackson’s words in the small, sparsely furnished upper room, Lincoln found what he needed: the example of Andrew Jackson, a president who had fought secession and
chaos, rescuing the Union from an armed clash with a hostile South twenty-eight winters before. Now, three decades on, in a time of even greater trial, Lincoln looked to Jackson to arm himself against disunion and despair.
“The right of a state to secede is not an open or debatable question,” Lincoln had said at the end of 1860. “It was fully discussed in Jackson’s time, and denied … by him.… It is the duty of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government. He cannot entertain any proposition for dissolution or dismemberment. He was not elected for any such purpose.” For Jackson the will of the people was majestic, even magical, and Lincoln agreed. “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments,” Lincoln wrote, “is the only true sovereign of a free people.” For Lincoln as for Jackson, a majority was neither always right nor always wrong. The right would depend on the circumstances. But the president’s duty was constant: to preserve the Union, for without the Union no progress was possible.
JACKSON HAS INSPIRED some of the greatest men who have followed him in the White House—presidents who have sought to emulate his courage, to match his strength, and to wage and win the kinds of battles he waged and won. Running at the head of a national party, fighting for a mandate from the people to govern in particular ways on particular issues, depending on a circle of insiders and advisers, mastering the media of the age to transmit a consistent message at a constant pace, and using the veto as a political, not just a constitutional, weapon, in a Washington that is at once politically and personally charged are all features of the modern presidency that flowered in Jackson’s White House.
He also proved the principle that the character of the president matters enormously. Politics is about more than personality; the affairs of a great people are shaped by complex and messy forces that transcend the purely biographical. Those affairs, however, are also fundamentally affected by the complex and messy individuals who marshal and wield power in a given era. Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably. But he gave his most imaginative successors the means to do things they thought right.
“Jackson had many faults,” said Theodore Roosevelt, “but he was devotedly attached to the Union, and he had no thought of fear when it came to defending his country.… With the exception of Washington and Lincoln, no man has left a deeper mark on American history; and though there is much in his career to condemn, yet all true lovers of America can unite in paying hearty respect to the memory of a man who was emphatically a true American, who served his country valiantly on the field of battle against a foreign foe, and who upheld with the most staunch devotion the cause of the great Federal Union.” Roosevelt approved of Jackson’s “ ‘instinct for the jugular’ ” and capacity to “recognize his real foe and strike savagely at the point where danger threatens.”
A man of strength, TR admired Jackson’s. “The course I followed, of regarding the executive as subject only to the people … was substantially the course followed by both Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln,” Roosevelt said. “Other honorable and well-meaning presidents, such as James Buchanan, took the opposite, and, as it seems to me, narrowly legalistic view that the President is the servant of Congress rather than of the people, and can do nothing, no matter how necessary it be to act, unless the Constitution explicitly commands the action.” For Jackson and for TR, the presidency, in this light, was not an arm of government but its heart, beating vitally.
President Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin was also fascinated by Jackson. On a visit to the Hermitage on Saturday, November 17, 1934, the paralyzed FDR was helped out of his car in front of the house, and, with locked steel braces on his legs, he forced himself forward balanced by the arm of an aide on one side and a cane on the other. Greeted at the door by the sound of “Hail to the Chief” being played on Jackson’s old pianoforte, Roosevelt, one witness said, “bowed gallantly” to Mrs. Emily Walton, a descendant of Rachel’s who had known Jackson in his old age—a living link from Jackson, the nineteenth-century founder of the Democratic Party, to Roosevelt, its greatest twentieth-century champion. Though ramps had been installed to smooth the way for Roosevelt’s wheelchair, he chose to stay on his feet, sitting only for a grand Southern breakfast in the dining room. Walking was awkward and painful for Roosevelt, but some occasions were so important to him that he eschewed his chair. Paying tribute to Jackson was such an occasion.
IN 1941, BEFORE America entered World War II, FDR equated his coming task with Jackson’s battle to save the Union. “Responsibility lay heavily upon the shoulders of Andrew Jackson,” FDR told the nation that spring. “In his day the threat to the Federal Union came from within.… In our own day the threat to our Union and our democracy is not a sectional one. It comes from a great part of the world which surrounds us, and which draws more tightly around us, day by day.” Jackson had met the challenge of the hour and rescued the Union with a “rugged, courageous spirit”—and Roosevelt found comfort in the thought that a revival of that spirit, with himself taking over Jackson’s role as savior president, would see the country through.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was so absorbed by Jackson that Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s partner in a failed haberdashery, once recalled that the future president was always off in a corner reading books about Jackson rather than tending to the few customers who did come in.
Truman, who had spent his childhood soaking up heroic stories about Jackson, commissioned a statue of Old Hickory to sit outside the Kansas City Courthouse (as the presiding judge of Jackson County, he traveled to the Hermitage in 1931 to record the dimensions of Jackson’s clothing in order to get the memorial exactly right), and, in 1945, put a small bronze of the Jackson statue on a table in the Oval Office. In a more substantive vein, Truman drew on Jacksonian imagery to build on the New Deal and secure America’s place in a new global order—tasks not unlike the ones Jackson had faced when he broadened democracy and fought to establish the United States’ place in the family of nations a century before.
“He wanted sincerely to look after the little fellow who had no pull,” Truman said of Jackson, “and that’s what a president is supposed to do.” Looking abroad, Truman, like Jackson, spoke bluntly about America’s role. It was Jackson, Truman said, who “helped once again to make it clear … that we were becoming a stronger and stronger country and wouldn’t always be a weak, upstart little nation that had to kowtow to the big European powers.”
When Truman lit the National Community Christmas Tree on a snow-covered South Lawn in 1945, the first Christmas Eve ceremony after four years of world war, the new president was facing a new and frightening age. Summoning the heroes of the Republic, Truman spoke of the Washington Monument, of the memorials on the Mall to Lincoln and to Jefferson, and of the statue of Jackson in Lafayette Square. “It is well in this solemn hour that we bow to Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln as we face our destiny with its hopes and fears—its burdens and its responsibilities,” Truman said. “Out of the past shall we gather wisdom and inspiration to chart our future course.”
JACKSON’S REMAINS LIE next to Rachel’s in the garden grave near the winding Cumberland, the river that took him so often to and from Washington. His tombstone reads only:
GENERAL
ANDREW JACKSON,
MARCH 15, 1767–
JUNE 8, 1845.
The modesty of the inscription seems fitting, for all one needs to do to see his legacy is look up from the slab and breathe in the light of a united nation, a country that has emerged from the fires of conflict both at home and abroad stronger and freer. The Hermitage’s slave quarters are near Jackson’s tomb, a rebuke to the generations of white Americans who limited crusades for life and liberty to their own kind, and a reminder that evil can appear perfectly normal to even the best men and wo
men of a given time.
“The victor in a hundred battles has at last fallen,” Levi Woodbury, whose bust the president kept in the Hermitage, said in a eulogy to Jackson. “The pilot, who weathered the storm in the fiercest hurricanes of political strife, looks no longer to the compass or the clouds to guide us; and the Christian as well as the sage and patriot of the Hermitage—who still prayed for his country, after the power to do aught else had ceased—has gone to his great and glorious reward, while we linger a little longer to … try to profit by his bright example.”
We profit, too, from a leader’s dim example. The great often teach by their failures and derelictions. The tragedy of Jackson’s life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift. The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections and promises to all—belatedly, it is true, but by saving the Union, Jackson kept the possibility of progress alive, a possibility that would have died had secession and separation carried the day.
Speaking of Jackson in death, alluding to the crisis with South Carolina in 1832–33, George Bancroft said: “The moral of the great events of those days is this: that the people can discern right, and will make their way to a knowledge of right; that the whole human mind, and therefore with it the mind of the nation, has a continuous, ever improving existence; that the appeal from the unjust legislation of to-day must be made quietly, earnestly, perseveringly, to the more enlightened collective reason of to-morrow; that submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people, when in error, will amend their doings; that in a popular government, injustice is neither to be established by force, nor to be resisted by force; in a word, that the Union which is constituted by consent, must be preserved by love.”