Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  I remember one of the great things he did was when they were having a meeting in Washington, a political dinner, and Jackson got up and made a toast, and it almost upset the apple cart because his toast was that the Federal Union must be preserved. That wasn’t what they expected from a southerner and a slaveholder, but it was typical of Jackson because he knew that the preservation of the United States was the most important thing for people from every part of the country, and he came right out and said it.

  It’s always been my opinion, in fact, that Maryland and West Virginia and Kentucky and Missouri refused to secede when the Civil War started because Jackson and his fellow Democrats worked hard at preventing them from going into the Confederacy. I can give you a concrete example of how hard that was to accomplish, since there was such a division of opinion even among family members who thought alike on most other subjects, and often the majority was on the Confederate side. If my memory serves me correctly, there were 96,000 Kentuckians in the Confederate army and 94,000 in the Union army. In Missouri, there were 118,000 in the Confederate army and 116,000 in the Federal army; those may not be the exact figures, but you get the general idea. Those were the states where so often families were against families. I also remember that there was one situation in Tennessee where there was a colonel in the Federal army who had two sons who were captains in the Confederate army. That didn’t happen only in the border states, either. But I feel certain that it was as a result of Jackson’s efforts to preserve the Union that those states stayed in, and of course the preservation of the Union was what Lincoln devoted his life to accomplishing a bit later on.

  The campaign between Adams and Jackson was the first personal and partisan campaign for the presidency, the first really bitter campaign, and some very nasty things were said. Most of these were said about Jackson; I don’t think there was so much said about Adams. You see, the times had become such that privileged people were in more complete control than ever under Adams and Henry Clay. They were both economic royalists, which is just a fancy phrase for rich people wanting to control everything and behave like kings. So Adams and other people on his side referred to Jackson as a man who was illiterate and uncouth, and said and wrote a great many other abusive things about him. And that same sort of slander was carried on against Jackson nearly all the time he was president of the United States, though they watched themselves and didn’t go over the line and get too personal because they knew the old man might shoot them if they got too personal.

  There are still books coming out which say that about Jackson, but he accomplished a lot of important things and had a number of important offices before he became president, and he was nothing like that picture some people have of him. He didn’t go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton or any of the Ivy League colleges; he was educated in Tennessee, and mostly by a couple of clergymen, Dr. William Humphries and the Reverend James White Stephenson, because his mother wanted him to become a Presbyterian minister before it became clear that he was too tough a citizen for that kind of thing. But he became a lawyer and a prosecutor for the western district of North Carolina, which was later separated away from the rest of the area and became the state of Tennessee, and he was very well thought of as an authority on law and legal procedure in that part of the country. He also became a plantation owner, just as the Virginians did when they first came to Virginia. He was a man of high standing in his community, and his advice was sought, and his help was sought, by all the people who were his neighbors. They all liked him; he was a good neighbor and a good man. And then he became a United States congressman and a senator and a superior court judge in Tennessee, so he was no ignoramus. He knew what he was doing all the time. (He was also a real authority on horses and knew how to pick a winning horse in a horse race, but that’s another matter entirely.)

  He didn’t spell very well, and his syntax was pretty bad. But the same was true of George Washington; he couldn’t spell, and his syntax also wasn’t very good. And I’ve just finished reading a book in which the writer laughs at Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, and calls him an uneducated man because “he couldn’t even spell.” Well, you could also say that about Chaucer; Chaucer couldn’t spell, either, though, of course, I’m only joking here and do realize that that was because spelling and other aspects of our language hadn’t yet become standardized. But people like that writer just ignore the fact that practically nobody understood how to spell the English language until old Noah Webster set up a dictionary so all of us could find out how to spell things, or at least so all of us could spell things in the same way.

  Jefferson was the only highly educated president in that period who understood English construction as well as we understand it today, but our other early presidents were also well-educated men who knew the history of government from start to finish. Some of us don’t know it today as well as Jackson and Van Buren did, and Jackson wasn’t any more uncouth than the rest of the people of that day.

  But there’s no doubt that he was subjected to a lot of snobbery during his lifetime, and it makes me mad sometimes to see that it’s still going on in some books and in some magazine and newspaper articles and speeches where Jackson is mentioned. Fortunately, it didn’t bother him very much because he was of the opinion that he was as good as anybody else, and he made it stand up. I suppose that’s one of the reasons that the Easterners didn’t like him, although Harvard finally had to give him a degree because it came to the point where it was absolutely necessary to recognize him as a man who knew what he was doing and where he was going. His papers, though, still haven’t received the attention, to this day, that they should have received. They’re in the Capitol Building at Nashville, Tennessee, and I don’t think they’ve been completely and thoroughly edited or completely gone over and indexed as they should be. The only plan for all of those papers is under a law that has been passed by the Congress to index and microfilm all presidential papers. That’s in the mill right now, but it will take a long time to get it done. Meanwhile, his papers and everything else he wrote have never been published or edited by one of those New England historians, that whole army of New England historians. That’s what the difficulty is. All the rest of the papers that have been published have been edited by one of those men, and they were all papers by presidents from the East. If I sound irritated, and even prejudiced, in this regard - well, I guess I am.

  Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, the same year as John Quincy Adams. There’s always been an argument over whether he was born in North Carolina or South Carolina because his father, a Scots-Irish farmer and linen-draper who was also named Andrew Jackson and came to this country in 1765, was hurt when a big log fell on him and died a few days before Andy was born, and his mother, Betty Hutchinson Jackson, a red-haired, blue-eyed, self-reliant woman, decided to go and live with her sister, Jane Crawford, in Lancaster County, South Carolina, and have her baby there. Some books say she got to Lancaster County and had her baby, and Jackson always said he was born in South Carolina, but other books say that she made a stop to see another sister, Margaret McCamie, in Union County, North Carolina, and gave birth to Andy Jackson earlier than expected there. I can’t see where it makes any serious difference either way, but I know that North Carolina certainly claims him, because I once dedicated a statue in North Carolina to the three presidents who are supposed to have been born there, and Jackson was one of them.

  The one thing that’s certain is that Jackson wasn’t born with a silver spoon and had a hard life as a child. His family was so poor that, when his father died, the family couldn’t afford to put a headstone on his grave. He had two older brothers. Hugh and Robert, both of whom were born in Ireland before the Jacksons came to this country, but then the Revolutionary War came along, and both young men died as a result of the war. Hugh died of heat exhaustion following a battle in 1779, and Robert came down with smallpox while a prisoner of the British and died shortly after being freed in a prisoner exchange in April 1781. Jackson
lost his mother as a result of the Revolutionary War, too; she worked as a nurse during the war, taking care of American soldiers on British prison ships, and got cholera herself and died when Jackson was fourteen.

  Jackson was a soldier in the Continental Army himself, even though he was only thirteen when he joined up in 1780. His uncle, Major Robert Crawford, was commander of a militia company in South Carolina, and Andy and his brother Robert became part of that company. The following April, however, the two boys were captured by the British and held prisoner for a couple of weeks, during which time they both got the smallpox from which Robert soon died.

  Jackson recovered from the disease, but one thing happened while he was a prisoner that he never forgot, and that, in a way, shaped the rest of his life. Some British officer tried to make the Jackson kids shine his shoes, and they absolutely refused to do it, and the officer went at them with his saber. He hit Andy over the head with the saber, not with the sharp edge of the saber, and cut his head only a little bit but also cut his pride. After that, Jackson hated any person who was trying to press down on the rights and privileges of the ordinary citizen. I think that’s what gave him his principle of equality for everybody. (I don’t want to make it sound like that British officer gave the boys a couple of love taps, or that the British behaved like gentlemen during the couple of weeks in which the Jacksons were prisoner. One of the whacks of that saber cut one of Jackson’s hands right to the bone, and then the British soldiers marched the boys, still bleeding and given no medical care, to a prison camp forty miles away. And they were fed nothing but stale bread and dirty water until they were let go, which is probably why they both came down with smallpox. But it was the blow to his boyish pride that Jackson talked about the rest of his life.)

  He spent the rest of his boyhood being shuttled between relatives, but he was a bright young man who learned to read pretty much on his own by the time he was five years old, and got to be so good at it that, since most of the adults in the community couldn’t read at all, he was given a regular assignment of reading newspapers aloud to residents whenever papers arrived in the area. He also never forgot being asked, when he was nine, to read the Declaration of Independence aloud to the local citizens when a copy came to them in 1776. And in time, as I’ve described, he became a lawyer and a judge, member of the House of Representatives, and a senator twice. (Though he later said that he didn’t like the Senate very much, particularly the first time he served in the Senate. It didn’t move fast enough for him, and he resigned after only five months.) He was six feet one inch tall as an adult, and thin, weighing about 140 pounds, and with red hair and blue eyes like his mother.

  He was always a prideful man, and sometimes too much so. When he was twenty years old and just beginning to practice law, he decided that an attorney on the opposite side had insulted him and challenged the man to a duel. Fortunately, the seconds on both sides calmed down Jackson and his opponent, and both men fired into the air. Then, in 1803, while he was a judge, he challenged the governor of Tennessee, John Sevier, to a duel because he heard that Sevier had made an insulting comment about Mrs. Jackson, but again neither man was injured. Later on, however, in 1806, Jackson fought still another duel with another lawyer, Charles Dickinson, who was also supposed to have said something insulting about Mrs. Jackson, and Dickinson wasn’t as lucky. The two men fought their duel in a forest in Harrison’s Mill, Kentucky, standing only eight feet apart. Dickinson had the reputation of being the most skillful man with a pistol in Tennessee, a fact that didn’t stop Jackson from challenging him the minute he heard about Dickinson’s remarks, and Dickinson fired the first shot. It was a clear and visible hit, and the seconds actually saw dust fly out of Jackson’s coat as the bullet entered his chest. But Jackson remained erect, and his second insisted that Dickinson return to his position, where Jackson fired and killed him. Dickinson’s bullet remained in Jackson’s chest all of his life because the bullet was too close to his heart to be removed.

  And in 1813, he got into another situation that left bullets inside him for a long time. He served as second for a friend who was dueling with a man named Jesse Benton, and Benton’s brother, Thomas Hart Benton, the fellow who later became a senator from Missouri, made some nasty remark about Jackson. Jackson immediately promised to horsewhip both men if they ever showed up in his vicinity, and when he learned that the Bentons were in Nashville, he went right over to the hotel at which they were staying. He spotted Thomas Hart Benton first and went after him, but he didn’t see Jesse Benton standing in back of him, and Jesse Benton fired a bullet right into him. Then, as Jackson lay on the ground, Thomas Hart Benton fired more bullets into him. Doctors insisted that Jackson’s left arm had to come off, but he refused to permit them to amputate, and he carried bullets in that arm for nineteen years before an operation removed them. He was a tough man, all right, and he regained full use of his arm not too long after he was shot. I guess that’s one of the reasons I admire him.

  Those were pretty wild times in our country, and all I can say about those terrible events is that it’s a good thing that people eventually became smart enough to stop fighting duels and just limited themselves to calling SOBs SOBs. But these things established Jackson’s reputation as a hard-nosed fellow who was afraid of absolutely nothing, and certainly softened, to some extent at least, the things the press and his political enemies said about him when he entered politics.

  The reason that Sevier and Dickinson and other people said those insulting things about Mrs. Jackson, and the reason many of the ugliest things said about Jackson during his presidential campaign were in connection with his wife and his marriage, were because his early relationship with the lady and their eventual marriage were unusual, to say the least. Mrs. Jackson, the former Rachel Donelson Robards, was already married to another man, Lewis Robards, but was living apart from him at a boardinghouse run by her parents near Nashville. Robards, a citizen of Kentucky, married Rachel when she was seventeen, at which time the Donelsons were living in that state, but Robards was pathologically jealous and kept accusing his wife of having affairs with other men.

  Despite the fact that Rachel and everyone else made it clear that his fears were entirely imaginary, he finally sent her to Tennessee to live with her parents until he called for her, and it was then that Jackson came there as a boarder and the two young people, both aged twenty-four, met and fell in love. Robards soon heard that, this time, he had a real problem and insisted that his wife return to him in Kentucky, and she went. But, again, he began to behave irrationally and accuse her of having affairs with everyone in the area, and Jackson heard about that and went to Kentucky and took her away. Robards got the Kentucky legislature to allow him to sue for divorce, and Jackson misunderstood and thought a divorce had actually been granted - or at least he said he did; I’m sort of on the fence about that one - and married Rachel in 1791.

  But there hadn’t been a divorce, and as soon as Jackson and Rachel Robards started living together, Robards brought his action for divorce and was now able to do so on the grounds of adultery. The divorce was granted in September 1793, and Jackson, calling it a remarriage, married Rachel again early in 1794. He remained deeply in love with her for the rest of their lives, even though her youthful beauty soon left her, and even though she was sometimes embarrassing and backwoodsy, smoking a corncob pipe and insisting that the Old World was spelled Urope, while Jackson, despite that stuff about uncouthness, became sort of sophisticated and was known in time as one of the best-dressed men in Washington. But Jackson’s political enemies kept raking up the charge of adultery and that meaningless first marriage ceremony, and some historians believe that the agony caused by these revelations finally brought about Rachel’s death at the age of sixty-one. She developed heart trouble, and though Jackson tried to keep newspapers that contained the stories away from her, she learned about them and became increasingly ill and died on December 28, 1828, just weeks after Jackson’s election as president. And
Jackson said bitterly at her graveside, “I can and do forgive all my enemies. But those vile wretches who’ve slandered her must look to God for mercy.”

  It was as a soldier again, this time in the War of 1812, that Jackson established his reputation and became one of the most popular men in the country. He was appointed as a major general in the Tennessee Volunteers by Governor William Blount and offered to start out with the 2,070 other volunteers under his command and take Quebec away from the British. He probably could have done it, too; I’m sure it’s clear by this time that Jackson was a pretty aggressive fellow, and so were the young Tennesseans who volunteered to serve under him. They were what you might call the squirrel hunters; they liked to fight, and if they couldn’t fight someone else, they liked to fight among themselves. But Jackson was in some political trouble at that point, and his suggestion was turned down. This was the time when Aaron Burr was setting out to start his own country, and Jackson made the mistake of believing Burr when Burr said that he was working under government orders to stop an invasion by the Spaniards; Jackson gave Burr a couple of boats and a lot of military information, which infuriated President Madison, even though Jackson backed off the minute he knew the truth.

  Then, when the British moved down from Canada and captured Detroit, Jackson offered to take his men there and recapture it, and this, too, was refused. Instead, he was told to move his men to Natchez, Mississippi, and wait there for a possible move into Florida. And when he got there, marching his men through a winter as bitter as the one Washington encountered at Valley Forge, he was told by the general in charge, that old scoundrel James Wilkinson, that they weren’t needed and he could disband his outfit and tell his men to head on home by themselves. Jackson wouldn’t do that exactly as ordered. He led his men back to Tennessee in the same orderly fashion in which they’d traveled to Mississippi, taking no special privileges and suffering through the still-icy winter along with them. It was the march to Mississippi and back, incidentally, that got Jackson his famous nickname; one of his men remarked that the old man was as hard as a hickory tree - he was forty-five at the time, which made him an old man to the boys he was commanding - and the name stuck and he became known as Hickory Jackson, and then, when his red hair turned grayer, as Old Hickory.