4 Andrew Jackson: Providentialist President

Should the uncircumcised philistines send forth their Golia[t]‌h to destroy the liberty of the people & compel them to worship Mamon [sic], they may find a David who trusts in the God of Abraham[,] Isaac and of Jacob, for when I fight, it is the battles of my country. I am calm & composed, trusting in the Lord of hosts, I believe him Just; and therefore look forward to a time when retributive Justice will take place.

to robert young hayne, July 9, 1827, Papers of Andrew Jackson 6:357

I trust in a kind providence that he will sustain me under my labours & other troubles, & carry me through the duties assigned to me to the glory of his kingdom, & the prosperity & happiness of our country.

to john coffee, September 21, 1829, Papers of Andrew Jackson 7:444

I hope god will relieve all those who trust in him in true faith and is worthy of his favours through the atonement of our Lord Jesus Christ our savior and redemer [sic] endorsement 1833?¹Close

in the fall of 1829, the daughter of Andrew Donelson, Andrew Jackson’s nephew who served as his personal secretary, and his wife Emily, was baptized in the East Room by the Chaplain of the House of Representatives before a congregation of congressmen, senators, military officers, diplomats, and family friends. Following the liturgy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, the minister asked the godparents, Vice President Martin Van Buren and his wife Cora, “Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all the covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?” Before the godparents could respond, the president who had helped arrange the ceremony but had no official role in it, exclaimed, “I do, sir, I renounce them all!”²Close Throughout his life, especially his teenage and young adult years, Jackson struggled mightily to vanquish the devil, defy sin, conquer his temper, and live a godly life. His childhood exposure to Presbyterianism, coupled with his frequent reading of the Bible and church attendance, helped shape “the way he thought, spoke, wrote, and saw the world.”³Close During his presidential and post-presidential years, his faith grew much stronger and deeply affected his worldview, relationships, and work.

Nicknamed the Old Hero, the Old Roman, the Old Lion, and Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson was one of America’s most colorful, charismatic, controversial, and popular presidents. Both adored and despised, Jackson achieved international fame for his military exploits, especially his numerous defeats of Indians and of the British at New Orleans during the War of 1812, and was the second of twelve generals to serve as the nation’s president. With little formal education, he rose from an obscure and impoverished background to occupy the country’s highest office. Jackson was born in 1767 in the backwoods of North Carolina to Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had arrived two years earlier. His father died before he was born, and his mother and brothers died during the Revolutionary War. The British captured Jackson in 1781 while he was serving a local militia as a courier. While Jackson was imprisoned, a British officer slashed his head after he refused to shine his boots, which began Old Hickory’s life-long hostility to the British. While there Jackson also contracted smallpox, the first of his many health problems.

Orphaned at age 14, Jackson was employed by a saddle maker, taught school, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1787. After working as a solicitor in two communities in Tennessee, he served briefly as the new state’s US congressman and then a senator. From 1798 to 1804, he was a judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court. In addition to his legal and political activities, Jackson acquired a plantation near Nashville and became a major slaveholder and tobacco producer. Appointed commander of the Tennessee militia in 1801, Jackson had a distinguished military career, highlighted by his stunning rout of a larger British force at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. Subsequent military campaigns against Indian tribes kept him in the limelight, and in 1822 he again served as one of Tennessee’s US senators. One of four candidates for president in 1824, Jackson decisively won the popular vote. However, when no candidate gained enough electoral votes to claim the presidency, the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams as the nation’s chief executive. Resigning from the Senate in October 1825, Jackson spent the next three years vigorously campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1828 by defeating Adams. Viewed as a representative of the common man, destroyer of Indian nations, temperamental statesman, wealthy planter and slave owner, and hero of New Orleans, his name is associated with his era in such terms as “Jacksonian America,” “Jacksonian Democracy,” and the “Age of Jackson.” A 2010 Broadway musical, Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, portrays him as a rock star who becomes president and “as a symbol of the flawed power of populism in an era dominated by vapid celebrity.”⁴Close

Jackson served as president during the final decade of the Second Great Awakening, a massive revival campaign that both sought to save souls and reform society. Led by Methodists and Baptists, Christians created dozens of organizations to spread the gospel and fight social evils. Through these parachurch organizations and the ministries of their congregations, Christians significantly shaped antebellum economic, social, cultural, and politic life. In many ways Jackson’s faith reflected the evangelicalism of the antebellum frontier. Although a Presbyterian, Jackson, like the Methodists, Disciples of Christ, and most Baptists who dominated the region, and by mid-century, the entire American religious landscape, rejected Calvinism, emphasized the virtue of the common people, and advocated personal spirituality, salvation by faith in Christ, and individual biblical interpretation.⁵Close

Like that of numerous other presidents, the nature of Jackson’s faith and its impact on his life is challenging to assess. His mother Elizabeth, a very pious and strong-willed woman who wanted him to become a minister, powerfully influenced young Andrew. Every week she took him and his brothers to the Presbyterian Church in Waxhaw, a village in south central North Carolina and required Andrew to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism.⁶Close For the first fourteen years of his life, Jackson spent three to four hours almost every Sunday singing hymns and listening to scriptural readings, sermons, and prayers. He learned that good and evil were battling in the world as he heard and read stories about Israel’s kings and prophets fighting against malevolent powers in God’s name and strength.⁷Close For a few years, Jackson also attended a school operated by Presbyterian pastor James Stephenson.⁸Close

This religious heritage, later bolstered by the fervent faith of his wife Rachel, gave Jackson a respect for Christianity and ministers, which he never abandoned, even during the years before 1820 when he sowed some wild oats and sometimes violated biblical moral standards. Frontier evangelist Peter Cartwright declared that Jackson “was, no doubt, in the prime of life, a very wicked man, but he always showed a great respect for the Christian religion” and “ministers of the Gospel.”⁹Close Because he was a “street brawler, duelist, gambler, and all-around ruffian,” Robert Remini argued, many contend that Jackson used religion purely for political purposes and dismiss the idea that he was truly a religious person “as absurd.” However, Remini maintained, Jackson “regarded himself as a practicing Christian,” others testified to his Christian commitment, and his faith was genuine.¹⁰Close Although he did not regularly attend Sunday worship for many years and did not join a Presbyterian congregation until seven years before his death, Jackson was associated with the Presbyterian Church his entire life. After age 40, he read the Bible daily, attended church faithfully, and frequently expressed robust religious convictions in letters to close friends and family. Jackson’s library at his house, the Hermitage, contained many books on theology, history, and biography, numerous collections of sermons (most of which belonged to Rachel), and quite a few works of English theologian and hymn writer Isaac Watts.¹¹Close

Although Jackson’s faith became stronger during his final years, it was an important part of his life for several decades. Throughout his life he depended on God’s providence and accepted suffering, sorrow, and death as part of God’s plan. The general frequently affirmed that to be saved people must repent of their sin and accept Christ’s atoning death on the cross.¹²Close During the last twenty-five years of his life, Jackson was “intensely religious”; he prayed often, regularly attended worship, and accepted everything that happened as the Lord’s will. Only by submitting to God’s will, the general argued, could people obtain earthly peace and eternal happiness.¹³Close As he began his presidency, Jackson thanked God that his health enabled him to perform his duties, and he trusted that God would enable him to fulfill his responsibilities “to the satisfaction of my country.”¹⁴Close One of his secretaries, Nicolas Trist, testified that the last thing the president did every night before retiring was to read from Rachel’s prayer book.¹⁵Close His admonition to a friend in 1833 illustrates Jackson’s religious views: “Rely on his [Christ’s] promises, they are faithful and true, and He will bless you in all your” ways. “Trust in his goodness and mercies” and “always be ready to say with heartfelt resignation, ‘may the Lord’s will be done.’”¹⁶Close Jackson also urged his relatives and friends to raise their children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”¹⁷Close

After his presidency, Jackson became very devout. In 1838 John Todd Edgar, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, preached a sermon on the role of Providence in human affairs at the Hermitage Church on Jackson’s plantation. Edgar sketched the hypothetical “career of a man, who, in addition to the ordinary dangers of human life, had encountered those of the wilderness, of war, and of keen political conflict; who had escaped the tomahawk of the savage, the attacks of his country’s enemies, the privations and fatigues of border warfare, and the aim of the assassin.” How could a man undergo such experiences unharmed and “not see the hand of God in his deliverance?”¹⁸Close Alone that night, Jackson seemed to have a conversion experience. After a sleepless night, in the morning, “light seemed to dawn upon his troubled soul, and a great peace fell upon him.” Soon thereafter, Jackson professed his faith publicly at the Hermitage Church.¹⁹Close

For the remainder of his life, the general led family worship each evening. He read a chapter from the Bible, distributed a hymn for everyone to sing, and offered a prayer.²⁰Close During his final days, Jackson declared, “I hope God will grant me patience to submit to his holy will. He does all things well, and blessed be his holy and merciful name.” He felt grateful “to a merciful Providence, that had always sustained him through all his struggles, and in the defense of the continued independence and prosperity of his beloved country.”²¹Close Jackson prayed that after he died “heaven would protect and prosper” “those to whom Providence has committed to his care.” He thanked God for supporting him “through a long life, and for the hope of eternal salvation through the merits of our blessed Redeemer.”²²Close

As noted, Rachel had a strong impact on her husband’s faith as evident in his correspondence and actions. “Her deep and abiding” religious commitment, “unquestioning acceptance of what she regarded as the divine will,” and numerous charitable works, argued Remini, had a “profound effect on her husband.”²³Close Her letters, actions, and friends testified to her fervent faith. By the early 1820s, Rachel was well known for her piety, good works, and enjoyment of attending church. Nothing, Remini asserted, thrilled her “more than a good, rip-roaring, fire and brimstone sermon.”²⁴Close Rachel liked living in Washington while her husband was a senator because she could go to prayer meetings twice a week and worship services twice each Sunday.²⁵Close Two letters she wrote in 1821 illustrate her Christian commitment. “St. Paul says ‘All things shall work together for good to them who are in Christ Jesus,’” she reminded Eliza Kingsley. “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that I am his by covenant promise.”²⁶Close “The Lord is my help,” she told her brother John; “in him will I trust & I praise him.”²⁷Close

Like her husband, Rachel was convinced that God controlled the universe. A month after the general was elected president in 1828, she declared, “I have resolved” to “try to forget” “all the endearments of home & prepare to live where it has pleased heaven to fix our destiny.”²⁸Close Two days later Rachel wrote to another friend: “Hitherto my Saviour has been my guide & support thro’ all my afflictions” and “I have no doubt” that “he will still aid and instruct me in my duties which I fear will be many and arduous.”²⁹Close

Rachel died in late December and never became first lady. Those who knew her well praised her Christian conviction, godly character, and charitable deeds. In his eulogy, a Nashville pastor lauded her steadfast faith and compassion.³⁰Close Congressman Edward Livingston consoled the bereaved president-elect: “religion holds out the certain hope of reunion in a better world with her who so faithfully performed its precepts in this.”³¹Close “A more exemplary . . . wife, friend, neighbor, relative, [and] mistress of slaves,” proclaimed Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, “never lived.”³²Close

Numerous ministers, editors, and politicians also testified to the sincerity, depth, and power of Andrew Jackson’s faith, especially during his presidency and post-presidential years. As the general prepared to begin his presidency, Charles Coffin, a Presbyterian minister and president of East Tennessee College, applauded his “respect for the institutions and ministers of religion.”³³Close Later that year, Philadelphia Presbyterian pastor Ezra Stiles Ely wrote the president: “you are a different being in relations to spiritual and eternal matters, from what you was in 1819.” Jackson had become a humble follower of Christ who was “more distinguished by any one Christian virtue, than by the Presidency over the happiest & most flourishing nation on the globe.”³⁴Close In The Duty of Christian Freemen, Ely lauded the general as a friend to Christianity.³⁵Close Jackson’s “deep-seated” piety, alleged Benton, was evident in his “reverence for divine worship, respect for ministers,” and firm belief “in the goodness of a superintending Providence.” Even in the “most desperate” circumstances, Benton “never saw him waver in the belief” that everything would work “out in the end.”³⁶Close Editor Francis Blair insisted that Jackson had great “faith in providence and the people.” “You have never found either to fail you,” he wrote the general, “through a most eventful life.”³⁷Close Jackson’s physician maintained that he departed this life “with full faith in the promises of salvation through a Redeemer.”³⁸Close

Jackson’s views of God, Christ, salvation, the Bible, human nature, providence, prayer, and life after death and his pattern of church attendance also confirm his Christian commitment. Jackson said little about the attributes of God. In an 1830 letter, he celebrated God’s “love, charity, & justice,” and he frequently emphasized God’s mercy.³⁹Close Jackson also often declared that God disciplined those whom He loved and that he had been “frequently visited by this chastening rod.”⁴⁰Close

On the other hand, Jackson, far more than any of his predecessors, mentioned Jesus in his private correspondence and conversations. He repeatedly referred to Jesus “our savior,” “our dear Savior,” “the redeemer,” “the only Savior,” and “the blessed Savior.”⁴¹Close Jackson also often asserted that Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the cross was the basis of human salvation. He counseled people to live a godly life “to be prepared for death when it comes” and asserted that the atonement of “our blessed savior on the cross” gave people “a reasonable hope of happiness hereafter.”⁴²Close Jackson hoped to meet “friends who have gone before me in the realms of bliss thro the mediation of a dear redeemer, Jesus Christ.”⁴³Close All who believe in Christ, he insisted would someday be reunited with their deceased loved ones in “realms above” through “the merits of our Savior, who shed his blood” to atone “for the sins of the world.”⁴⁴Close Rejecting the Reformed concept of election, Jackson asserted that “every man has a chance for his own salvation.”⁴⁵Close “Do you mean,” Jackson asked a Calvinist, “that when my Saviour said ‘Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden,’ he didn’t mean what he said?”⁴⁶Close

Jackson expressed respect for varied religious traditions and maintained that people’s conduct demonstrated their true beliefs. Although “I was brought up a rigid Presbeterian [sic], to which I have always adhered,” he proclaimed, charity was the “basis of all true religion, and charity says judge the tree by its fruit.” All true Christians believed “that by and through him [Christ] we must be saved.” Those “whose walk corresponds with their professions,” whether they were Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, or Roman Catholics, were “all good christians” and would go to heaven.⁴⁷Close

During his last days on earth, Jackson repeatedly professed his belief in Christ’s substitutionary atonement and urged others to do the same. A few weeks before his death, Jackson declared: “I am in the hands of a merciful God. I have full confidence in his goodness.” “The Bible is true,” he asserted. “Upon that sacred volume I rest my hope for eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”⁴⁸Close A week before he died, Jackson insisted that he was “ready to go whenever his divine master thought fit to take him.” “When I have suffered sufficiently,” he avowed, “the Lord will then take me to himself—but what are all my sufferings compared to those of the blessed Savior, who died upon that cursed tree for me.”⁴⁹Close Jackson also lectured his family and slaves on God’s plan of salvation and urged them to “look to Christ as their only Saviour.”⁵⁰Close Moments before he died on June 8, 1845, Jackson told them: “God will take care of you for me.” “I belong to Him.” He declared, “I want to meet you all, both white and black, in heaven.”⁵¹Close In his will, Jackson stated that he hoped for “a happy immortality through the atoning merits of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.”⁵²Close

These statements contradict H. W. Brands’s claim that Jackson was certain that Rachel was in heaven, but the general had “no such confidence that he merited heaven.” However, “he worried as little about his salvation as he worried about most” other things. Jackson “knew he was as sinful as the next man. But he believed that God gave credit for trying,” and he was convinced that his actions had been generally “honest and upright.” Brands offers no evidence to support this questionable assertion.⁵³Close

Jackson considered the Bible to be a “sacred Book,” usually read several chapters a day, knew its contents well, perused commentaries to help him better understand Scripture, and urged others to study God’s inspired Word.⁵⁴Close Numerous individuals testified that Jackson read the Bible every day and derived great benefit from doing so. For example, a visitor reported in 1831 that every morning the president read one of Rachel’s favorite biblical passages.⁵⁵Close During the last six years of his life, the Tennessean spent much of his leisure time reading Scripture and biblical commentaries. He particularly enjoyed “Scott’s Bible,” a compendium of the best commentaries of the antebellum years, which he read completely twice during this period.⁵⁶Close “Go read the Scriptures,” he instructed an army captain; “the joyful promises it contains will be a balsome [sic] to all your troubles and create for you a kind of heaven here on earth.”⁵⁷Close Shortly before he died, he exhorted all his grandchildren to “read the New Testament.”⁵⁸Close

As Jon Meacham argues, the Bible helped shape Jackson’s “habits of mind.” Throughout his life when he experienced stress, the general often recalled biblical stories and passages he had learned as a child and reread as an adult that either comforted or challenged him. Moreover, many of “his letters and speeches echo both the scripture and the question-and-answer style” of the Westminster Shorter Catechism.⁵⁹Close Jackson often quoted and alluded to the Bible. He especially cited the Golden Rule, the biblical injunction to judge a tree by its fruit, and Micah 3:9–12, which admonishes rulers to govern justly.⁶⁰Close In addition to other examples sprinkled throughout this chapter, after Henry Clay accepted an appointment as John Quincy Adams’s secretary of state in the so-called “corrupt bargain” that gave Adams the presidency in 1824, Jackson wrote, “the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive thirty pieces of silver—his end will be the same.”⁶¹Close

Jackson did not accept all the doctrines of Reformed theology. However, influenced by his personal experience, especially the many vicious political attacks he endured, and his study of Scripture, he did espouse the Calvinist concept of human depravity. He frequently complained about “the wickedness of the world and how prone many are to evil.”⁶²Close “I loath [sic] the corruption of human nature,” he told a minister in 1833.⁶³Close

Among American presidents, perhaps only George Washington referred to God’s providence as much as Jackson. Old Hickory repeatedly insisted that God controlled military battles, illness and death, natural disasters, and political developments. “I trust in a kind providence,” he asserted, “to direct me.”⁶⁴Close God, he added, “orders all things well.”⁶⁵Close “The will of providence,” which guided the affairs of humanity, must be “cheerfully submitted to.”⁶⁶Close Jackson strove to accept God’s will even when he did not understand it or it involved suffering for him or others he loved. He believed that God often permitted people to experience pain and anguish to get their attention, chasten them, and help them focus on spiritual matters. Jackson coped with numerous health problems throughout his adult years: bouts of dysentery, parasites, stomach and intestinal ailments, rheumatism, fevers, excruciating headaches, and lung problems caused by a bullet lodged in his chest as a result of a duel. He urged others to accept difficult circumstances as God’s will and to allow adversity to strengthen their faith.

Jackson gave God credit for safety in battle and military victories. He urged Rachel during the War of 1812 to trust “that superintending Being who has protected and saved me in the midst of so many dangers.”⁶⁷Close The Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 made Jackson an international celebrity as almost 300 British were killed, 1,200 were wounded, and hundreds more were captured while only 13 Americans died and 39 were wounded. Reflecting on this resounding triumph, he declared, “It appears that the unerring hand of providence shielded my men from the Powers of Balls, bombs, & Rocketts [sic].”⁶⁸Close “If ever there was an occasion on which Providence interfered, immediately, in the affairs of men,” Jackson avowed, “it seems to have been this. What but such an interposition could have saved this Country?”⁶⁹Close Writing to the administrator of the Catholic diocese of Louisiana shortly after the battle, the general exalted, “to have been instrumental in the deliverance” of my country “is the greatest blessing that heaven could confer.”⁷⁰Close

Jackson’s hardest trial was the sudden death of his beloved wife Rachel shortly after he was elected president in 1828. Their marriage had long “provided Jackson an emotional security he had never previously experienced. Fatherless since birth, motherless since his early teens, with neither surviving siblings nor close cousins, Jackson made Rachel the emotional center of his universe.”⁷¹Close He missed her tremendously and struggled mightily to cope with her absence. Despite his great grief and sense of loss, he yielded to God’s sovereign will. “It pleased God to take her from this world,” he wrote, and “to deprive me of my stay and solace whilst in it.” Nevertheless, “I bow to the decree, but feel in its afflictive power.” Thankfully, “divine Grace” enabled Christians to believe in the “hereafter where the good unite again, and the wicked ‘disturb not.’”⁷²Close God, he added, “knew what was best for her.” Accepting “God’s will,” he vowed to assume his “new and arduous duties” as president without her.⁷³Close “At the time I least . . . could least spare her, she was snatched from me, and I was left” with “all the turmoil of public life.”⁷⁴Close Jackson wanted “to unite with her in the realms above—But providence has otherwise ordered & to his will I must submit.”⁷⁵Close

Jackson faced many other problems during his presidency, and his belief in God’s providence helped him bear them with little complaint. His numerous physical ailments, he told a Virginia senator in 1830, compelled him to contemplate “the indulgence, wisdom, and mercy of Providence.”⁷⁶Close When Jackson learned that the Hermitage had been badly damaged by fire in October 1834, he wrote, “The Lords will be done.” God “gave me the means to build it,” he added, “and he has the right to destroy it, and blessed be his name.”⁷⁷Close

The general continually emphasized that God controlled the universe and urged people to thank Him for providing for, protecting, and preserving them. He told Emily Donelson that with the help of “a kind Providence, who holds our existence here in the hollow of His hand, I have so far recovered” from “a severe hemorrhage from the lungs.” The president also thanked God for “His kindness in restoring you to health again.”⁷⁸Close He rejoiced that “an overruling providence” had restored the health of his friend John Coffee’s wife. We should be grateful “to our savior,” he added, for His “daily preservation” and the blessings He bestowed.⁷⁹Close

Jackson counseled friends who had serious illnesses or had lost loved ones to submit to God’s will and rejoice in the promise of heaven. In 1833 the president wrote to a friend whose mother-in-law had recently been diagnosed with cancer, “If God chooses to end her earthly existence, I trust she will be resigned to his will” and be prepared to leave “this troublesome earthly tabernacle for an eternity of bliss, for which her present suffering is designed by her heavenly father to prepare her.”⁸⁰Close He emphasized that Christ taught believers not to repine but to rejoice when God takes our children from “this wicked world” to a place of “peace, happiness, and glory.” Let this “be a balm to your sorrow,” the president exhorted a minister whose young daughter had died.⁸¹Close When the firstborn child of his nephew and niece died in 1835, the president wrote, “I am truly happy to find that you both have met this severe bereavement” with “christian meekness & submission.” Their “great creator and benefactor” had given them “this charming babe.” They probably had doted “upon him too much” and neglected the Giver. God had taken him to remind them “that to him your first love is due, and by this chastisement, to bring you back” to the One to Whom “we owe all things.” God “giveth, and he has a right to take away, and we ought humbly to submit to his will.” In the midst of their “severe bereavement,” they could take comfort that their son was now with Christ “free from all the temptation, pains and evils of this world.”⁸²Close

Jackson also asserted that God directed the affairs of nations, often thanked Him for America’s political stability and economic prosperity, and exhorted others to do the same. His first inaugural address affirmed the president’s trust in God’s “overruling Providence.” God, who held “the destiny of nations” in His hands, would enable Americans “to steer, the Bark of Liberty, through every difficulty.” Jackson firmly relied “on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy, and has since upheld our liberties” and asked God to “continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.”⁸³Close In his 1829 message to Congress, he expressed his “devout thanks to a benign Providence, that we are at peace with all mankind.” The president urged citizens to seek “the guidance of Almighty God” and rely “on His merciful providence for the maintenance of our free institutions.” He hoped that other nations would obtain the blessings Americans enjoyed and advance in knowledge, freedom, and happiness.⁸⁴Close In a draft of this message Jackson implored “the almighty ruler of the universe” to give nations the “wisdom to discern, and united harmony to enact, all laws” that promoted “the prosperity of his Kingdom and the best interests of the union.”⁸⁵Close The president reiterated his faith in God’s direction of history and Americans’ responsibility to Him in his farewell address. “Providence has showered on this favored land blessings without number,” he asserted, and had chosen Americans to preserve freedom “for the benefit of the human race. May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations . . . enable you . . . to guard and defend” the “great charge He has committed to your keeping.”⁸⁶Close

Jackson also sometimes invoked God’s providence to justify his own political positions and preferences. Reflecting on the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, Jackson wrote, “Is this an omen that Divinity approbated the whole course of Mr. Jefferson and sent an angel down to take him from the earthly Tabernacle on this national Jubilee, at the same moment he had presented it to Congress—and is the death of Mr. Adams a confirmation of the approbation of Divinity also, or is it an omen that his political example as President and adopted by his son, shall destroy this holy fabric created by the virtuous Jefferson.”⁸⁷Close The general argued similarly that the sudden death of President William Henry Harrison one month after his inauguration in March 1841 was an “act of an overruling providence” “to preserve and perpetuate our happy system of republicanism and stay the corruption” of the clique Harrison represented. Harrison’s death prevented him, “under the dictation of the profligate demagogue, Henry Clay,” from overturning his and Van Buren’s many accomplishments. “The Lord ruleth,” Jackson concluded, “let our nation rejoice.”⁸⁸Close

God, Jackson averred, was actively involved in the world and answered prayer. Old Hickory insisted that prayer was beneficial and frequently promised people that he was praying for them. “I trust the god of Isaac and of Jacob will protect you and give you health,” he wrote to Rachel in 1823. “He alone” can “guide us through this troublesome world, and I am sure he will hear your prayers. We are told that the prayers of the righteous prevaileth much, and I add mine for your health and preservation.”⁸⁹Close Jackson assured numerous friends that he would constantly offer prayers for them “at the throne of grace.”⁹⁰Close He also often exhorted others to pray. He urged his daughter-in-law Sarah to earnestly pray that her daughter may become “a true deciple [sic] of her blessed savior.”⁹¹Close Jackson frequently wrote that he was praying for God’s “choicest blessing” to be bestowed on the recipient of his letters and their families.⁹²Close After his presidency, he used both printed and extemporaneous prayers when leading his family in daily worship.⁹³Close

Jackson also continually affirmed his belief in heaven. He often expressed his desire to go to heaven, primarily to be reunited with his wife and other family members and friends. The general beseeched people to prepare to die and comforted numerous friends by promising that their loved ones were with God. What “exquisite & pleasing sensations we must experience on meeting with our departed friends beyond the grave,” the president wrote in 1829. This “makes life now tolerable for me.”⁹⁴Close Jackson portrayed heaven as a place of incredible happiness where earth’s trials, tribulations, and sorrows were no more. After Rachel died, he told his friends and neighbors: “she is now in the bliss of heaven” and she “can suffer here no more on earth. That is enough for my consolation; my loss is her gain.”⁹⁵Close “I would like to spend” the remainder of my life, he added, “preparing to meet her in a happier and a better world.”⁹⁶Close Rachel’s virtues, piety, and Christian faith “ensured her that future happiness, which is promised” to Christ’s followers. He hoped “to unite with her in the realms above never to be seperated [sic].”⁹⁷Close

In other letters, Jackson accentuated the splendor of heaven to comfort the bereaved. The saints had gone to “mansions of bliss.”⁹⁸Close Trying to console a friend whose young daughter had died, the general wrote that she is “in the bosom of our savior enjoying that exquisite happiness.” Only this “cheering thought” made “life supportable to me under my afflictions.”⁹⁹Close Jackson rejoiced that his friend John Overton “is beyond, where the wicked cease to trouble, and where the weary are at rest.”¹⁰⁰Close On his death bed, he wrote to Amos Kendall, that he hoped to meet him someday “in a blissfull [sic] immortality.”¹⁰¹Close

In other letters, Jackson exhorted relatives and friends to be ready to meet God. Jackson urged his daughter-in-law Sarah “to be prepared to die well, and then,” when death came, “we will meet it without alarm.”¹⁰²Close He told Emily Donelson that illness reminds us “that we are mere tenants” on earth. People should “be prepared to die, for we know not when we may be called home.”¹⁰³Close When Emily, age 28, soon died, Jackson sought to console her husband: “we are commanded by our dear Saviour, not to mourn for the dead.” “She has changed a world of woe, for a world of eternal happiness, and we ought to prepare, as we too, must follow.”¹⁰⁴Close Jackson admonished John Donelson to “withdraw from the busy cares of this world, & put your house in order for the next, by laying hold ‘of the one thing needful’—go read the Scriptures, the Joyful promises it contains, will be a balsame [sic] to all your troubles, and create for you a kind of heaven here on earth.”¹⁰⁵Close Writing to the Coffee family to express his condolences after his son John died unexpectedly, Jackson asserted: it is “our duty to prepare” for our death. Coffee expressed regret as he lay dying that he had not joined the church and exhorted his family not to follow his example. Old Hickory urged them to heed his warning by relying on “our dear Savior” and “trusting in Christ’s mercy and goodness.”¹⁰⁶Close “I am prepared to die,” Jackson told a friend several months before his death. “When the angel of Death comes I shall say with pleasure—march on, I’ll follow.”¹⁰⁷Close On his death bed, Jackson told his family and slaves that “Christ has no respect to color.” “I hope to meet you all in Heaven.”¹⁰⁸Close

Between age 14 and his early fifties, Jackson attended church sporadically. Thereafter, he went to Sunday services very faithfully. While a member of the Senate, Jackson attended Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, which he enjoyed if the sermon was interesting.¹⁰⁹Close While president, he paid pew rents at both Second Presbyterian Church and St. John’s Episcopal Church and alternated attendance.¹¹⁰Close Margaret Bayard Smith, whose family pew was in front of Jackson’s at Second Presbyterian, recounted that in worship “his manner is humble and reverent and most attentive.”¹¹¹Close A foreign traveler reported in 1833 that his pew was not distinguished from that of other worshippers and that he freely mixed with other congregants without any air of presumption.¹¹²Close Jackson also frequently attended church when traveling during his presidential years.¹¹³Close

Jackson did not join a church until 1838, a year after he left the presidency. He attributed his failure to do so earlier to his demanding schedule and desire not to be accused of joining to gain political advantages. In 1823 he explained to his wife that if he joined the church now, “it would be said, all over the country that I had done it” for “political effect.” He promised her “that when once more I am clear of politics I will join the church.”¹¹⁴Close When Rachel’s niece joined the church in 1828, Jackson wrote: “It is what we all ought to do, but men in Public business” had “too much on their mind to conform to the rules of the church, which has prevented me hitherto.”¹¹⁵Close At a service at the Hermitage Church on July 15, 1838, Jackson declared his belief in Jesus as his savior, affirmed basic Presbyterian doctrines, promised to obey Christian precepts, and became a communicant member.¹¹⁶Close If he had joined the church during his political career, his opponents would have accused him of hypocrisy. Now, however, “no false imputations could be made that might be injurious to religion.”¹¹⁷Close On Sunday mornings after he left office, he told his numerous overnight guests, “Gentlemen, do what you please in my house,” but “I am going to church.”¹¹⁸Close

Jackson joined the freemasons, an organization to which Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Paul Revere, and other founders belonged, much earlier than he did the church (at least by 1798). He was attracted to the principles and fellowship of the masons.¹¹⁹Close An 1824 masonic manual accentuated the fraternal order’s ideals: masons should strive to acquire “the virtues of patience, meekness, self-denial, and forbearance” and to be “men of honor and honesty.”¹²⁰Close Freemasonry, Jackson declared, accentuated the “principles by which man in his pilgrimage below should be guided, and governed.” As did Harry Truman, Jackson served as the Grand Master of a state lodge, in his case the Masonic Grand Lodge of Tennessee from 1822 until 1824. The general encouraged his fellow masons to further their “great principles of benevolence and charity” to “shine amongst men” by serving as “a lamp to their path, and a light to their understanding.”¹²¹Close Although some evangelical Protestants were critical of the secrecy and religiously eclectic nature of this fraternal order, few criticized Jackson’s prominent role in the organization.¹²²Close

Evaluations of Jackson’s character both by his contemporaries and later scholars are very mixed. Jackson had many character flaws and engaged in some morally dubious behavior, especially in his teenage and young adult years. As a youth, he frequently used profanity and made violent threats.¹²³Close When Jackson resided in Salisbury, North Carolina, in the mid-1780s, one resident declared him to be “the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, mischievous fellow” who ever lived there.¹²⁴Close After moving to Tennessee, Jackson continued to gamble on horse races, cards, and cock fights and sometimes drank excessively.¹²⁵Close Moreover, Jackson used violence or intimidation eight times to settle quarrels, which included fighting several duels (the only man to become president who ever did so) and killing one man.¹²⁶Close These actions provided fodder for his opponents in his presidential campaigns. For example, Jess Benton’s 1824 pamphlet, An Address on the Presidential Question, denounced Jackson’s cursing, cockfighting, and gambling. Such attacks led Jackson to complain that many tried to present him as a man with “a savage disposition” who carried a “knife in one hand, and tomahawk in the other” to scalp anyone “who differed with me in opinion.”¹²⁷Close Despite this protestation, Jackson’s verbal assaults against his political foes were ferocious, and he consistently attributed “the conduct of his opponents to the lowest [imaginable] motives.”¹²⁸Close Strongly opinionated and stubborn, Jackson rarely compromised or bargained; instead, he usually strove to achieve a clear victory.¹²⁹Close

On the other hand, Jackson often displayed great kindness, compassion, and generosity. The general shared his bread with hungry soldiers, gave money to beggars, cared for sick slaves, and aided the oppressed.¹³⁰Close He and Rachel raised nephews as their own children, provided a home for the children of a neighboring planter who died prematurely, and adopted an Indian orphan when no one else was willing to do so.¹³¹Close In 1828 Jackson cared for a complete stranger in his home until he died of tuberculosis simply because he considered this his Christian duty.¹³²Close While president, he strongly supported the work of the Orphan Asylum in Washington and often visited its residents.¹³³Close Jackson was very munificent and hospitable, declared Thomas Hart Benton; “love of justice and love of country” were his ruling passions.¹³⁴Close Jackson strove to follow Christian principles and to exemplify integrity. “My first object is,” he declared, to “possess an approving conscience.”¹³⁵Close “An honest man,” he wrote, is “the noblest work of God” and “integrity of character” is essential.¹³⁶Close

Like Washington and Jefferson, Jackson was criticized for being a slaveholder. In 1820 Old Hickory owned forty-eight field and domestic slaves. He continued to buy slaves, and by 1829 had about a hundred, far fewer than large plantations in the Carolinas and the Gulf coast, but one of largest contingents in Tennessee. The general bought and sold slaves to suit the needs of his plantation; he sought to obtain high prices when selling and the lowest possible ones when purchasing. Jackson usually refused to sell young children away from their mothers both because it reduced productivity and “offended his sympathies.”¹³⁷Close The planter expected his slaves to obey, and those who did not were often harshly punished. “Subordination must be obtained first,” he explained, “and then good treatment.”¹³⁸Close Judged by contemporary standards, his slaves had decent housing and adequate food. Jackson, who was often absent from Hermitage because of his legal work, military service, and political responsibilities, frequently complained that his overseers failed to achieve “an appropriate balance” between disciplining them and treating them kindly.¹³⁹Close Jackson displayed significant concern about the condition of his slaves and required his overseer Graves Steele not to abuse them.¹⁴⁰Close “My negroes shall be treated humanely,” he wrote to his son. “When I employed Mr Steel, I charged him” to “treat them with great humanity, feed and cloath [sic] them well, and work them in moderation. If he has deviated from this rule, he must be discharged.”¹⁴¹Close Jackson’s concern for his reputation eventually led him to stop trafficking in slaves. When campaigning for president, Old Hickory understandably attempted to conceal his slave-trading past, but some publicized his profiting from this activity.¹⁴²Close

Unlike Washington, Jackson did not free any of his slaves in his will. For several reasons, the general bequeathed all of them to his son Andrew, Jr. Jackson saw slavery as essential to the southern economy and feared that assaults on it would shatter the Union.¹⁴³Close Like Jefferson, Jackson had a large debt when he died. Moreover, by the 1840s manumission was very difficult in Tennessee. Finally, despite his deep commitment to individual freedom, Jackson did not think it applied to blacks who he considered to be “largely ignorant,” “irresponsible and untrustworthy,” and ill-suited for freedom.¹⁴⁴Close Sadly, he accepted the cultural norms of his era and locale.¹⁴⁵Close

The question of Jackson’s character also played a major role in the presidential election of 1828, one of the most vicious campaigns in American history. Both Jackson and John Quincy Adams were accused of moral transgressions; most controversially, Jackson was condemned as a bigamist and adulterer because of the complicated and allegedly immoral circumstances of his marriage to Rachel. The election contributed to the emergence of the second party system in American politics (Democrats versus Whigs) and marked the beginning of greater political participation by ordinary Americans. The increase in newspapers and pamphlets, coupled with higher literacy rates, created an unprecedented hunger for sensationalism that the campaign fed.¹⁴⁶Close It was also the first election since 1800 in which religion played a major role.

His opponents charged Jackson with countless crimes, offenses, and improprieties; his “duels, fights and quarrels” were recounted in bloody detail and deplored as they had been in 1824.¹⁴⁷Close His duels were “embellished to show that he took liberties with the code of honor and therefore with the lives of his antagonists.”¹⁴⁸Close Cincinnati editor Charles Hammond denounced Jackson as a profligate, “reckless, volatile adventurer” who did not deserve the public trust.¹⁴⁹Close Jackson was also accused of slave trading, which was widely considered disreputable.¹⁵⁰Close

The general was also depicted as “a vindictive monster,” “a despot” who mistreated his soldiers. The most serious charge was that Jackson was responsible for the improper execution of six soldiers during the War of 1812. This alleged crime was popularized by a broadside titled “A Short Account of Some of the Bloody Deeds of GENERAL JACKSON,” featuring “silhouettes of six coffins, representing the six soldiers executed by Jackson’s order near the end of the southern campaign of the War of 1812.” They were part of a group of 200 soldiers who claimed that their three-month term of service had ended and that they, therefore, had the right to leave. Their officers countered that their term was six months, and nearly all the mutineers were fined and dishonorably discharged at the end of this period. However, the six leaders of the insurgency were sentenced to death, and Jackson, who was not present, approved of the verdict.¹⁵¹Close Jackson maintained that these militiamen deserved the death penalty because they had led a mutiny, stolen supplies, and deserted.¹⁵²Close

Most grievously, Adams loyalists indicted Jackson for stealing another man’s wife. They insisted that their version of events closely followed the court’s verdict that “the defendant, Rachel Robards, hath deserted the plaintiff, Lewis Robards [her first husband], and hath and doth still live in adultery with another man [Andrew Jackson].”¹⁵³Close They accused the general of seducing Rachel, breaking up her first marriage, and living with her in a state of long-term adultery. Rachel was portrayed “as a loose, impetuous, and immoral woman who willingly cast off her lawful husband for an arrogant and impassioned young suitor.”¹⁵⁴Close Some anti-Jackson newspapers denounced Rachel as a whore. The Commentator of Frankfort, Kentucky, compared her with a “dirty, black wench!” a remark that other newspapers reprinted.¹⁵⁵Close

The Jackson camp supplied a very different story. The Jacksons, supporters claimed, were “the innocent victims of a petty legal misunderstanding.” Believing Rachel to be divorced from her first husband, Jackson had married her in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1791. They later discovered that what they had thought was a formal divorce decree simply authorized Robards to sue for divorce in a civil court, which Robards did not do until 1793. After the divorce was finalized in 1794 and the couple learned that they were not legally married, they exchanged vows before a justice of the peace in Nashville.¹⁵⁶Close

In their conflicting narratives of the Jacksons’ relationship, the two camps appealed to Americans’ most deeply cherished beliefs “about manhood and womanhood, passion and restraint, and divorce and marriage.” In so doing, they delineated “competing marital codes.” Understandably, leaders of both parties crafted “their appeals to comport with the ethnic and religious stripes of their constituents.” The pro-Adams forces emphasized that marriage was a civil contract that undergirded society and the political order. In the emerging Whig worldview, shaped by the religious activism and moral crusades of the Second Great Awakening, the state had a responsibility to determine and control marital boundaries. To convince Americans to vote for the lackluster incumbent rather than his charismatic, more popular opponent, the Adamsites sought to expose Jackson’s sexual transgression and “to champion strict government control over domestic relations.”¹⁵⁷Close In newspaper articles and then a pamphlet titled View of General Jackson’s Domestic Relations, Hammond spread the story of the Jacksons’ purported bigamy and argued that as first lady Rachel would “offend” Washington society and negatively influence “public morals.”¹⁵⁸Close Adams’s supporters argued further that a man’s attitude toward the basic rules of marriage was “an acid test of his character,” which justified their focus on the Jacksons’ early relationship. By deciding to run for president, argued the Daily National Journal, the general “invited an investigation of his character.” The nation’s reputation, interest, and morals, an Adams loyalist asserted, “were all deeply involved” in this scandal, making it “a proper subject of public investigation and exposure.”¹⁵⁹Close Adamsites avowed that Jackson’s immoral liaison displayed his lack of sexual restraint. He “had played the serpentlike role” and seduced, or in other accounts, abducted, a married woman. “Such a man menaced the entire civic order”; “his callous disregard for the laws of marriage” threatened “institutional efforts to uphold virtue.” To vote for Jackson, Adamsites implied, was to endorse his sinful behavior.¹⁶⁰Close

The moral code of the budding Democratic Party, by contrast, stressed the romantic and private and elevated “heartfelt sentiments over precise legal forms.” Jackson supporters included Catholics and freethinkers who had less enthusiasm for Protestant moral prescriptions on the verge of the Victorian era. Their defense of Jackson was also set within “a larger framework of political secularism, cultural pluralism, laissez-faire government, and broad-based egalitarianism, at least as it pertained to white men.” Marriage, they insisted, was an individual and local concern, not a public and national one. By spreading lurid stories, Adamsites were perpetuating a malicious conspiracy that could corrupt public morals. Democrats exhorted antebellum voters to recognize and repudiate these vicious tactics.¹⁶¹Close

Jackson’s supporters counterattacked by censuring Adams’s religious commitments and character. They denounced the president for being a Unitarian and accused him of Sabbath-breaking, religious bigotry, alcoholism, haughtiness, and extravagant expenditures.¹⁶²Close They also charged that Adams was hostile to Catholicism as demonstrated by a July 4th oration in which he called the Catholic Church a “portentous system of despotism and superstition.”¹⁶³Close Adams’s supporters responded that the president had appointed many Catholics to office and contributed generously to Catholic charities.¹⁶⁴Close They also issued a pamphlet that criticized Jackson for worshiping at a Catholic mass in New Orleans, which all good republicans and Christians could not “fail to regret.”¹⁶⁵Close

The editor of The United States Telegraph, the principal mouthpiece of Jackson’s backers, alleged that Adams was working secretly to “unite church and state after the manner of the English monarch.”¹⁶⁶Close In addition, Democrats claimed that Adams had procured a prostitute for Czar Alexander I while serving as the American minister in Russia in the early 1810s, but this canard had little plausibility.¹⁶⁷Close Those who had “scrutinized his private life,” declared one pro-Adams newspaper, “stood ashamed and rebuked at the brightness and holiness of that which they had intended to injure.”¹⁶⁸Close

Supporters portrayed Adams as a responsible, disciplined Christian, “a man of sincere piety, impeccable purity, and prodigious intelligence” who had worked “unstintingly” to advance a “progressive national vision.” Jackson loyalists, by contrast, accentuated the general’s courage and heroism on the battlefield, “his chivalry as the protector of endangered women,” his rugged individualism and closeness to nature as a frontier planter, and his “physical prowess and self-sufficiency,” attributes which were crucial to westward expansion. They stressed that Jackson adhered to “the frontier codes of Tennessee where honor, friendship, and loyalty counted for more than legal fine print.”¹⁶⁹Close

Early in the campaign, Jackson declined an invitation from a Nashville area chapter of the American Bible Society to address its anniversary meeting. If he were to give this address, Jackson reasoned, his political enemies might charge him with using “the sacred garb of religion” to win votes. While declining the offer to speak, the general assured those who invited him that he would do all he could “to prosper the great & good cause of christianity & the true religion of Jesus christ.”¹⁷⁰Close

In 1827 Presbyterian pastor Ezra Stiles Ely called for the organization of a “Christian Party in Politics.”¹⁷¹Close While such a party was not created, Ely argued in a sermon published in 1828, titled The Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect Christian Rulers, that Christians should join together to prevent pagans, Muslims, deists like Washington or Jefferson, or Unitarians like John Quincy Adams from obtaining elected offices. “Presidents,” he insisted, “are just as much bound as any other person in the United States, to be orthodox in their faith, and virtuous and religious in their whole deportment.” “Every ruler should be an avowed and a sincere friend of Christianity.”¹⁷²Close Ely saw Jackson as a natural leader of this Christian Party, and other ministers praised Jackson’s “far-reaching faith” and benevolence. Methodist Lorenzo Dow contended that “the hand of Providence” would use Old Hickory to save the nation.¹⁷³Close Jackson, meanwhile, reassured Americans of his Christian orthodoxy. In a letter that was published in part in the Nashville Republican in April 1828, Jackson professed that “one evidence of true religion is, when all those who believe in the atonement of our crucified Saviour are found in harmony and friendship together.” “My [religious] habits,” he added, “are too well fixed now to be altered.”¹⁷⁴Close

The widespread publication of the intimate and intricate details of Jackson’s relationship with Rachel contained enough “ammunition to kill a regiment of presidential candidates,” but Old Hickory survived, winning 56 percent of the popular vote.¹⁷⁵Close While this sexual scandal shocked the sensibilities of some Americans and raised serious questions in the minds of many others about Jackson’s character, his supporters’ forceful defense of his actions, his personal popularity and policies, and his reputation as “the child of the Revolution, imbued with its spirit of virtue, committed to high moral standards, and appalled by the corruption pervading the nation’s capital” enabled him to triumph.¹⁷⁶Close

Jackson, however, paid a huge price for his victory. He had “yielded to the call of his country” in running for the presidency and had endured “torrents of abuse” and “the vilest slanders.”¹⁷⁷Close Near the end of December, Rachel died of heart failure, exacerbated by the stress and strain of her husband’s campaign. The general blamed the despicable attacks of his opponents for her death, but he recognized that if he had retired to Hermitage as she wanted, she would have still been alive. Some of Jackson’s foes had argued that if he truly was a gallant protector of women as he claimed, he would not have run and subjected his wife to “the ribald taunts, and dark surmises of the profligate.”¹⁷⁸Close During the campaign Rachel protested that she had been cruelly treated by her husband’s enemies who had “dipt their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me.” Nevertheless, she echoed the words of the apostle Paul, “I C[an do all] things in Christ who strengthens me.”¹⁷⁹Close His “dear wife,” Jackson lamented, was “the victim of these fiends, & demons of slander and her life [was] shortened, by the many unjust attacks upon her.” At least, God had permitted her “to live to witness the triumph of virtue over the vilest slander” in his defeat of Adams.¹⁸⁰Close

From a contemporary perspective, this scandal seems ironic, given the sexual unfaithfulness of numerous presidents before and during their tenure in office. Few presidents or other Americans loved their wives more deeply than Jackson loved Rachel or enjoyed such an intimate relationship. As Brands argues, “no one questioned his utter faithfulness and devotion to Rachel.”¹⁸¹Close

Despite the numerous attacks on his character and moral conduct during the campaign, as president, Jackson generally enjoyed good relations with the nation’s religious communities. However, three issues caused some tension between Jackson and them during his tenure in office: his position on Sabbath observance, his refusal to declare a day of prayer and fasting to help stop the spread of an epidemic, and his Indian removal policy. The defeat of the campaign to stop Sunday mail service in the late 1820s strengthened the belief of many devout Americans that they must work together to save the nation from “infidelity and radicalism.” Concern about the nation’s failure to keep the Sabbath holy helped revive the religious community as a political interest group.¹⁸²Close Speaking for many evangelicals, Jeremiah Evarts declared: “We have always viewed” delivering mail and keeping post offices open on Sundays “as a national evil of great magnitude” that demanded “national repentance and reformation.”¹⁸³Close

Many Christians exhorted Jackson to observe the Lord’s Day conscientiously to help rescue it “from profanations which have mournfully abounded.” The Bible warned, Presbyterian minister Charles Coffin declared, that “the curse of God will afflict a Sabbath-breaking nation” while “his blessing will prosper a nation that hallows the day which he has set apart for his own honour and the spiritual welfare of mankind.” By refusing to receive congratulatory addresses, attend public dinners, travel, and accept political or civic honors on Sundays, Jackson could help “reform the morals and perpetuate the prosperity” of the American people.¹⁸⁴Close One way Jackson could be the best chief magistrate in American history, Ely averred, was by not journeying “on the Lord’s day, except in a case of mercy or necessity.” He pointed out that the press published the travels of public figures on the Sabbath without explaining why they traveled, even though some of their reasons might be “satisfactory to the strictest moralist.” He also urged the president to instruct government officials not to “set an ungodly example” by violating the Sabbath.¹⁸⁵Close

When Jackson made his “Grand Triumphal Tour” of the North in 1833, Democratic newspapers emphasized that he scheduled events to “avoid desecrating” the Sabbath, which other “distinguished men” had often done. The president honored “the institutions of heaven” by worshipping at Presbyterian, Episcopal, and Methodist church services and resting on Sundays, thereby setting “a helpful example” for millions.¹⁸⁶Close Nevertheless, some evangelicals complained that Jackson did not scrupulously observe the Sabbath and did not support legislative efforts to stop mail service and commerce on the Lord’s Day.

A few months before the 1832 election, Henry Clay asked Congress to declare a national day of prayer and fasting to beseech God to halt a cholera epidemic. Tens of thousands of Americans became sick, and several thousand eventually died.¹⁸⁷Close The Senate approved Clay’s resolution, but the House could not agree on the wording, and the bill died, prompting many religious groups to appeal directly to Jackson to issue a proclamation. Seeing the epidemic as a visitation from God occasioned by Americans’ pride, lack of charity, and intemperance, ministers and editors argued it could be abated only by corporate repentance and moral reform.¹⁸⁸Close Interpreting the First Amendment very strictly, the president refused to proclaim a fast day (which most of his predecessors had done) because he wanted to protect religion’s “complete separation” from the federal government. Jackson declared that he believed in the “efficacy of prayer” and hoped that Americans would be spared from further attacks of this pestilence, but he did not think the president had a constitutional right to promote any “period or mode” of religious activity. The states and churches should “recommend the mode by which the people may best attest their reliance on the protecting arm of the almighty in times of great public distress.”¹⁸⁹Close

Jackson planned to veto Clay’s proposal if Congress passed it. A draft of his veto message explained his position further. The Constitution “carefully separated sacred from civilian concerns.” Signing a resolution for a national day of prayer was “incompatible” with the president’s constitutional responsibilities. While Jackson urged Americans to seek God’s guidance and assistance in both prosperity and calamity, as president, he must “abstain from any act” that linked church and state in a way that was “perilous” to both of them.¹⁹⁰Close

Jackson’s stance disappointed most evangelicals. New Jersey Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, who played a prominent role in four major organizations of the Second Great Awakening and championed Protestant concerns in politics, led efforts to pass a national fast day proclamation and to prevent Indian removal. In An Inquiry into the Moral and Religious Character of the American Government, he traced the progress of “political irreligion” from Jefferson’s unwillingness to proclaim a day of humiliation and prayer in 1807 to Jackson’s in 1832. Frelinghuysen repudiated the reasoning of both presidents and strove to “establish the constitutional primacy of Christianity.”¹⁹¹Close Others, however, denounced Clay’s resolution as a blatant effort to improve his own popularity. “Could he gain votes by it,” declared one critic, “he would kiss the toe of the Pope and prostrate himself before the grand lama.”¹⁹²Close

A third issue caused little controversy because it received scant publicity, but it sheds further light on Jackson’s views. In 1831 the founders of an organization that worked to establish Sunday schools in the West requested an endorsement from Jackson who complied without carefully examining their project. When a constituent complained several weeks later that he was favoring some religious groups over others, the president responded that he thought this plan to disseminate the gospel, provide Bibles, educate the poor, and promote Sabbath observance was interdenominational. If this organization gave “preference to any sect or denomination over others,” then his understanding of the Constitution would not permit him to endorse it, because “freedom and an established religion are incompatible.” He was “a lover of the christian religion,” not a sectarian, he explained. “I do not believe, that any” who were “received to heaven thro the atonement of our blessed Saviour,” will be asked their denominational affiliation. “All true Christians, know they are such, because they love one another.”¹⁹³Close One of the “greatest blessings” the Constitution provided, Jackson added, “is the liberty of worshipping God as our conscience dictates.”¹⁹⁴Close

Despite such statements, some evangelicals doubted whether Jackson was truly a Christian. In 1831, while visiting the White House with thirty colleagues, a Methodist pastor from Baltimore prayed so loudly that the president would be converted that he could be heard a long distance away.¹⁹⁵Close Eventually, many evangelicals became dissatisfied with Jackson and some actively opposed him because of his failure to support strict Sabbath observance, his position on church–state separation, his Indian removal program, and his opposition to the antislavery movement.

Jackson’s faith strongly affected how he viewed the events of his own life and his nation, and his letters are peppered with religious language and scriptural quotations and allusions. The Democrat insisted that God ruled the universe, that humans should advance His purposes, and that His justice would ultimately prevail. Jackson repeatedly stressed that he sought God’s guidance in devising policies and making political decisions. The president argued that South Carolina’s nullification of the 1832 tariff subverted America’s “sacred Union” and “happy Constitution,” which “by the favor of Heaven” had brought it unparalleled prosperity and international acclaim. Jackson beseeched “the Great Ruler of Nations” to “grant that the signal blessings with which He has favored” the United States not be lost as a result of “the madness of party or personal ambition.” He hoped that God’s “wise providence” would enable those who had “produced this crisis” to see their folly to prevent the nation from experiencing the “misery of civil strife.” God was using the Union to accomplish His purposes.¹⁹⁶Close If people judged God’s “future designs” by how He had displayed “His past favors,” Jackson declared on another occasion, “our national prosperity” depended on preserving our liberties, America’s power depended on its unity, and individual happiness depended on maintaining “State rights and wise institutions.”¹⁹⁷Close God was sovereign, Jackson warned France in 1834, so if its government did not pay the debts owed to American citizens, it might experience “the retributive judgments of Heaven.”¹⁹⁸Close

While Jackson rarely connected his religious convictions directly with either his overarching political principles or with his analysis of particular policy issues, his emphasis on promoting justice, the common good, virtue, and republican ideals and eradicating corruption are consistent with biblical norms. Guided by a “relatively coherent set of ideas,” Jackson sought to ensure the survival of the Union and preserve liberty in the face of the immense challenges posed by governmental corruption and sectional and elite interests. He repeatedly censured concentrated authority, aristocracy, standing armies, and established churches as inimical to freedom and commended “public and private virtue, internal unity, and social stability.” While deploring “special privilege, monopoly, and excessive government power,” the Democrat applauded “limited government, individual initiative, and moral constraint.”¹⁹⁹Close

During the antebellum years, many events and forces threatened to destroy the Union. The Aaron Burr conspiracy of 1805–6, the War of 1812, the Hartford Convention of 1814–15, and the nullification crisis of 1832 were all poignant reminders that domestic and foreign enemies menaced national unity.²⁰⁰Close His administration’s primary accomplishment, Jackson claimed in 1836, was defeating “the multiplied schemes” “ambitious and factious spirits” had “devised to dissolve” “our glorious Union” and produce anarchy.²⁰¹Close Experience, he proclaimed in his farewell address had proved that “the union of these States” provided “a sure foundation for the brightest hopes of freedom and for the happiness of the people.” Various forces, he warned, were trying to break this great republic into “a multitude of petty states.” “At every hazard, and by every sacrifice, this Union must be preserved.” Only a government that rested upon the “affections of the people,” secured their willing obedience to its laws, protected their life, liberty, and property, and quashed all unlawful resistance could achieve this.²⁰²Close

Jackson continually asserted that the people must govern. Republican citizens were “the sovereigns of our glorious Union.”²⁰³Close The government must implement the will of the majority.²⁰⁴Close To accomplish this, Jackson sought to abolish the Electoral College, reduce the checks and balances established by the Constitution, and prohibit the Supreme Court from being the final interpreter of the Constitution. He also wanted to give the people control over all offices, elected and appointed, through the direct election of senators (which was not implemented until 1913) and the rotation of officeholders.²⁰⁵Close Despite his professed belief in human depravity, Jackson had tremendous confidence in the ability of ordinary Americans, especially farmers, mechanics, and laborers, to make wise political choices. “The great laboring and producing classes,” he averred, constituted “the bone and sinew of our confederacy.”²⁰⁶Close Given the proper opportunity, they would “decide well” and ensure the safety “of our happy republican system.”²⁰⁷Close The virtue of common citizens was the only sound basis for republican government.²⁰⁸Close For Jackson, individual morality was the glue that held society together.²⁰⁹Close “As long as the government heeds the popular will,” he declared, “the republic is safe” because the majority of Americans supported “its main pillars—virtue, religion and morality.”²¹⁰Close

Jackson frequently professed his commitment to promoting the public good. “The rich and powerful,” he lamented often bent “the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Because individuals had different amounts of talent, education, and wealth, social distinctions would occur under all forms of government. Nevertheless, the government must provide equal protection and opportunity for all citizens and not increase the advantages and privileges of the upper classes. As God did with the rain, the government must “shower its favors alike on the high and the low.”²¹¹Close “As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people,” he declared in his first inaugural address, as long as it guaranteed “the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.”²¹²Close “It is my steady object,” he declared, to “advance the good of the country.” “Should Providence enable me to succeed,” “I shall be amply rewarded for the cares and labours [my position] imposes upon me.”²¹³Close To accomplish this end, Jackson strove to prevent the “money power,” aided by corrupt and covetous politicians, from furthering their own interests at the expense of the masses.²¹⁴Close The moneyed aristocracy, he protested, was “daily gaining strength” and perverting elections and legislation.²¹⁵Close To counter this, Congress must make advancing the “public good” its “sole end & aim.”²¹⁶Close

These guiding principles led Jackson to oppose all measures he thought would weaken the Union, including burdensome taxes, large government expenditures, monopolies, paper-money banking, speculation, and nullification. Some of them concentrated money into a few hands, and all of them eroded virtue, undermined republican institutions, and threatened liberty. High tariffs encroached on states’ rights, benefited special interests, and hurt consumers.²¹⁷Close Although some of his policies facilitated speculation in stocks and land, Jackson protested that this practice damaged “our virtuous Government.” Speculation provided “a thousand ways of robbing honest labour of its earnings to make knaves rich, powerful and dangerous—whatever demoralises the people” tended “to destroy Institutions founded solely upon their virtue.”²¹⁸Close

His foundational political commitments also prompted Jackson to oppose a national bank and some internal improvement projects, denounce nullification and abolitionism, and promote Indian removal. The bank of the United States “was a morally suspect institution” and the “embodiment of unfair privilege.”²¹⁹Close It was, he declared, one of the “fruits of a system” that distrusted “the popular will as a safe regulator of political power.” The bank’s “ultimate object” was to consolidate all power in the central government.²²⁰Close Because he wanted to keep federal spending at a low level and regarded a national debt as a danger to liberty, Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road and opposed the funding of some other projects.²²¹Close Moreover, he argued that internal improvement projects—canals, roads, and railroads—were a major source of corruption because “individual states and private companies resorted to congressional logrolling and pork-barrel tactics to win federal grants.”²²²Close The president condemned nullification as a conspiracy of “unprincipled men” who sought to “destroy the union, and form a southern confederacy.”²²³Close The “wickedness, madness and folly of its leaders,” he protested, was unparalleled in world history.²²⁴Close Jackson censured abolitionists as malcontents who sought to discredit democracy and demolish the Union. To him and like-minded Democrats, abolitionism violated the law, threatened property rights, and assaulted liberty.²²⁵Close

Given both the strong opposition of some religious groups and its horrific results, Jackson’s Indian removal policy may seem to be a strange choice to illustrate how his faith affected his policies as president. However, this issue was very important to Jackson and he based his argument for removal largely on humanitarian and moral grounds. Old Hickory expended substantial time, energy, and political capital in devising and implementing this policy, and he retained as much personal control as possible over removal by asking friends, especially William Carroll and John Coffee, to negotiate with Indians and sometimes even directly talking with them himself.²²⁶Close

Jackson had more encounters with Indians than any president before or after him. His view of Indians was shaped by his frontier and military experiences, paternalism, ethnocentrism, humanitarianism, position on states’ rights, concern for national security, expansionist dreams, and religious convictions.²²⁷Close Jackson saw removal as imperative both to protecting “the liberty and security of the American people” and ensuring the survival of Indians.²²⁸CloseIn 1817 Jackson wrote to President James Monroe that if the federal government limited Indians’ lands, gave them “the utensils of husbandry,” protected them, and forced them to obey “laws provided for their benefit, they would soon “be civilized.” Doing this would ensure justice for American citizens, the nation’s “interest and security,” and “the peace and happiness of the Indians.”²²⁹Close

As president, Jackson asserted that the US government had as much right to legislate for Native Americans as it did for settlers in the territories. Fourteen years before the Supreme Court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that the Cherokees had no right to sue in the Supreme Court because they were not a “foreign state” but a “domestic dependent nation,” Jackson argued that Indians were not independent nations that enjoyed the right of sovereignty. The land they occupied had been given to them by the benevolence of the United States.²³⁰Close

While most historians strongly criticize Jackson’s Indian policy, they generally agree that the Democrat was convinced that it was “just and humane.”²³¹Close Because of the greed of whites, cultural misunderstanding, and the inability of the two groups to live together, Jackson argued, Indians who remained in the East were likely to be degraded and destroyed. “Humanity and national honor,” he declared in an 1829 address to Congress, demand that every effort “be made to avert so great a calamity.” He sought to devise a policy consistent “with the rights of the States, to preserve this much-injured race.”²³²Close

The Indian Removal Act, signed into law in May 1830, authorized the president to negotiate with the southeastern tribes to arrange their relocation to land west of the Mississippi River. When he learned that fall that the Choctaws had agreed to move beyond the Mississippi, Jackson rejoiced that “Providence appears to smile” on his administration’s effort “to preserve these people from annihilation as tribes” and “to thwart the machinations of ours and their worst enemies.”²³³Close Defending his policy, Jackson asserted in an address to Congress in December that “a speedy removal” was “important to the United States, individual states, and Indians.” It would end conflict between the federal government and the states over Indians rights. Indian removal would enable “a dense and civilized population” to control “large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters.” By “incalculably strengthen[ing] the southwestern frontier,” it would help the United States “to repel future invasions.” The policy would enable Mississippi and Alabama “to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power,” separate Indians from close contact with white settlements, “free them from the power of the States,” and permit “them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions.” With government protection and wise counsel, they could hopefully “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.” No one, Jackson claimed, had a friendlier attitude toward “the aborigines of the country” than he did or was willing to do more to “reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.” “What good man,” the president asked, “would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”²³⁴Close

Despite the difficulties and tragic results of removal, Jackson continued to defend his policy as prudent, just, and beneficial. In an 1835 message to Congress, the president argued that history demonstrated that Indians could not “live in contact with a civilized community and prosper.” The government was fulfilling its “moral duty” to protect, preserve, and perpetuate “the scattered remnants of this race.”²³⁵Close In his Farewell Address, Jackson proclaimed that his removal policy would enable “this unhappy race” to “share in the blessings of civilization and be saved from that degradation and destruction” they were experiencing in the East. Philanthropists should rejoice that Indians had been “placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression” under “the paternal care” of the federal government.²³⁶Close

Jackson’s Indian Removal Act evoked substantial opposition primarily from religious groups. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, comprised chiefly of Presbyterians and Congregationalists, led the fight of evangelicals to defeat its passage. Committed to helping convert and civilize Indians, this organization employed many legal, moral, religious, and humanitarian arguments against removal and had significant support in the North. Its corresponding secretary Jeremiah Evarts, the William Lloyd Garrison of the Indian rights movement, led its efforts. He had numerous Indian friends, had visited many Indian communities, and had carefully studied their legal claims and history. In numerous essays widely printed in newspapers, Evarts denounced removal as a great sin that would bring God’s judgment on the nation and sought to provoke moral outrage in the religious community.²³⁷Close He also led a campaign to submit petitions to Congress opposing the Indian Removal Bill. Isolated on western reservations, thousands of innocent Indians, Evarts argued, would no longer benefit from the East’s civilizing influences. Moreover, interactions with unscrupulous whites and savage western Indians would further degrade them. The core issue, he insisted, was moral: would the United States honor its treaties, recognize the land claims of the Cherokees and other groups, and protect them against the illegal acts of Georgia and other states.²³⁸Close Many missionaries and political opponents of Jackson agreed that southern Indians had a moral right to own and govern the land they occupied because of treaties they had made with the United States. They argued that the tribes could legally and practically maintain their independence while being surrounded by whites.²³⁹Close Opponents also denounced Indian removal as coercive and censured the mercenary motives of whites who coveted Indian land. Moreover, incipient Whigs complained, this policy was designed to strengthen Jackson’s support in the South and West.²⁴⁰Close

Frelinghuysen led the fight against the bill in the Senate. Their racial prejudice and greed, the New Jersey senator argued, led Georgians to refuse to give Cherokees their civil rights.²⁴¹Close The pleas of political expediency, he declared, must not trump “unchangeable principles of eternal justice.” The desire of whites for more land could not negate “the political maxim, that, where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be” and to freely practice “his own modes of thought, government, and conduct.” “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?” Whites did not have the prerogatives to “disregard the dictates of moral principles” when interacting with Indians, Frelinghuysen thundered.²⁴²Close

In the debate in the House over removal in April 1830, Representative Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia castigated the churches for creating a “religious party in politics” and harshly condemning Georgian whites. “These canting fanatics,” he bellowed, had unfairly denounced Georgians as “atheists, deists, infidels, and Sabbath-breakers laboring under the curse of slavery.” He and many other southerners also feared that their support for Indians’ rights would prompt northern evangelicals to adopt a more fervent abolitionist stance.²⁴³Close

Proponents of removal also used the cultural mandate of Genesis to justify dispossessing the Indians. “The Creator,” insisted Michigan Governor Lewis Cass, intended that the earth “be reclaimed from a state of nature and cultivated,” which Indians failed to do.²⁴⁴Close “Whites had a superior claim to the land,” avowed Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, because they “used it according to the intentions of the CREATOR.”²⁴⁵Close Georgia Governor George Gilmer argued that “treaties were expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without bloodshed to yield up what civilized people had a right to possess by virtue of that command of the Creator” to “be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”²⁴⁶Close

Jackson instructed Thomas McKenney, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to try to persuade the nation’s religious leaders that his removal policy was virtuous and to support it. McKenney solicited the help of Episcopalians and Dutch Reformed ministers and laypeople to establish the New York Board for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America. His arguments and the board’s activities helped counter protests against removal. The board petitioned Congress in 1829 to pass the Indian Removal Act. Southern and southwestern Baptists, led by pastor Isaac McCoy, also strongly supported Jackson’s removal policy.²⁴⁷Close

Advocates of removal also argued that it would require a large number of troops to protect Native Americans from white aggression and whites from Indian attacks. Moreover, allowing Indian enclaves to remain would hinder economic development, increase federal–state conflict, and threaten the nation’s security and unity. Many authors, educators, and politicians insisted that both Providence and progress required the removal of Indians who were inhibiting the nation’s advancement. Ethnographers reinforced the widely held assumption that Indians were an “inferior race.” Although some, including Frelinghuysen, Garrison, and Lydia Maria Child, denounced removal as a racist policy, many leading historians, scientists, and literary figures justified removal as the best policy for preventing conflict and guaranteeing Indians’ survival.²⁴⁸Close

After the passage of the removal bill, for a while the protest against this policy grew even stronger. Evarts published a collection of key congressional speeches opposing the bill, wrote essays condemning removal, and organized another petition campaign. Although Quakers, Methodists, and Congregationalists also submitted their own memorials, after Evarts died in May 1831, the religious crusade against removal substantially declined.²⁴⁹Close Ultimately, the desire of both southern and northern whites to obtain more territory triumphed over the moral arguments of humanitarians and missionaries that Native Americans had intrinsic rights to continue to occupy the land where they had long resided.²⁵⁰Close

However, Jackson did arouse the ire of the religious community by refusing to intercede to release two missionaries—Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler—from jail who had been arrested in Georgia for disobeying a law that prohibited whites from living in Cherokee Territory without obtaining a state license. Worchester and Butler appealed their conviction, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the justices ruled that the federal government had jurisdiction in Cherokee territory and the laws of Georgia had “no force.” Chief Justice John Marshall ordered the Georgia court to reverse its decision. However, Georgia refused to do so, Jackson declined to intervene, and the missionaries remained in prison for more than a year. Over thirty years later, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley recalled hearing that Jackson had proclaimed “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” It is very unlikely that the president actually said this, but it did convey his attitude and reinforced the image of a conceited, defiant Jackson. Vice President Van Buren worked quietly to get the missionaries released, which occurred in January 1833.²⁵¹Close

The results of Indian removal were catastrophic. Beginning with the Choctaws in the winter of 1831–32, Jackson’s administration oversaw the removal of almost 46,000 Native Americans to Oklahoma territory. The president was wrong that even “religious enthusiasts” would “not find fault” with the liberal and just treaties his administration was negotiating with Indians.²⁵²Close Many Indians were forced to comply with treaties they never approved and coerced or bribed to leave their ancestral homes; the Creeks and Seminoles fought federal troops to try to prevent their removal. Fraud, intimidation, and speculation were all employed to expropriate Indian land, usually at prices well below market value. The army strove to treat Indians humanely while transporting them, but its leaders lacked the resources to deal with the scope of the operation. Although whites’ acquisition of 100 million acres significantly increased America’s cotton crop, the cost of removal contributed substantially to federal government expenditures more than doubling between 1828 and 1836.²⁵³Close The greatest tragedy occurred in 1838 after Jackson left office. In the Trial of Tears, 4,000 of the 18,000 Cherokees who were forcibly expelled from Georgia died as a result of illness or harsh treatment during their capture, detention in stockades, or the westward trek. The former president was deeply distressed by the suffering the Cherokees endured.²⁵⁴Close

Because of its racist assumptions, exploitative methods, and disastrous consequences, Indian removal, for many historians, is “the great moral stain on the Jacksonian legacy, much as it was to Christian humanitarian reformers” during the 1830s. However, Jackson was more paternalistic and benevolent than some of his major political rivals, most notably Henry Clay who argued that Indians’ annihilation would be “no great loss to the world.” Although “Jackson’s removal policy was not overly malevolent,” argued Sean Wilentz, “it was insidious—and for Indians, it was ruinous.”²⁵⁵Close Jackson, protested Donald Cole, allowed “the white majority to exploit a nonwhite minority.” His administration “used bribery and intimidation,” “took advantage of tribal divisions to divide and conquer,” and “withheld military protection.” The president allowed white speculators to use “fraud and deceit” to acquire Indian allotments.²⁵⁶Close Jackson’s rhetoric emphasized “philanthropic ideals,” Richard Latner averred, but his program involved considerable manipulation and coercion. In Michael Rogin’s judgment, Jackson was primarily responsible for the destruction of Indians in antebellum America. “He won battles, signed treaties, and forced removal not simply over Indian resistance, but often over the recalcitrance of his own troops and the timidity of settlers and civilian politicians.” Jackson gave Indians two choices to avoid extinction: they could adopt Christianity, civilization, and agriculture and intermarry with whites and merge into white society or they could move west of the Mississippi; both options required Indians to give up their traditional communal ways of life and enabled whites to expropriate Indian lands. “There was nothing redemptive about Jackson’s Indian policy,” asserted Jon Meacham; at no time did he do “the right and brave thing.”²⁵⁷Close

To assuage their consciences and justify their actions, proponents of Indian removal employed religious and paternalistic rhetoric, Meacham insists. Jackson frequently called himself the Indians’ “Great Father,” and he truly believed that he knew what was best for them and that his policy would benefit both them and whites.²⁵⁸Close On the other hand, Ronald Satz, Robert Remini, Francis Prucha, and H. W. Brands defend Jackson’s policy. Jackson, Satz argues, was not a “merciless Indian-hater” as many historians portray him. As governor of Florida, he treated Native Americans paternalistically, approved of Indian–white marriages, adopted an Indian as a son, and considered numerous Indians to be friends; his major goal was to ensure the nation’s development, harmony, and safety. The general repeatedly declared that he sought to further “the interest and security of the United States, and the peace and happiness of the Indians.” Remini maintains that Jackson should not be blamed for the “monstrous deed” of Indian removal. His objective was to save Indians from extinction, not destroy their life and culture. “He struggled to prevent fraud and corruption,” and he promised not to force Indians to accept his removal plan. However, Jackson did warn tribal leaders that “he would abandon them to the mercy of the states if they did not agree to migrate west,” and much coercion did occur. Prucha argues that Jackson was “genuinely concerned for the well-being of the Indians” and their way of life and that the missionaries who opposed removal had political motivations. Jackson’s only other alternatives were to let Indians be annihilated or to defend them in enclaves in the East, neither of which was feasible. “Given the racist realities of the time,” Brands avows, Jackson correctly contended that if the Cherokees remained in Georgia, they risked extinction. While Jackson cared about the welfare of Indians, his primary concern was to guarantee America’s security and safety. To be militarily prepared to defend its territory against the British, French, and Spanish, who had often threatened, preyed on, or attacked the United States, whites must reside in these southern states.²⁵⁹Close For Jackson, preserving the union trumped all other issues, including the moral rights of Indians, which made him reluctant to oppose the claims of states.²⁶⁰Close

Although they criticize Jackson’s approach to this complex moral and political issue, many historians maintain that given the racist attitudes of the era, whites’ demand for land and lack of understanding for or appreciation of Indian culture, the nation’s security concerns, and the cost of protecting Indians if they remained in the East, removal, while deplorable and disastrous, was probably inevitable. Others counter that Jackson had other more humane choices and could have handled matters more justly and compassionately. Old Hickory, they contend, contributed to the problems in Georgia by not strongly opposing the state’s actions. Had he endorsed the Cherokees’ position in 1829 and 1830, the outcome might have been different. Instead, his attitude and actions stiffened Georgia’s resolve to expropriate their land. Moreover, Jackson could have supported Indians who wanted to remain in small settlements like the 5,000 Iroquois who continued to reside in upstate New York. Most importantly, he should have guaranteed that Indians were relocated in a more just and humane way.²⁶¹Close

The United States experienced immense changes and substantial turmoil during Jackson’s eight years in office. Industrial, market, and transportation revolutions were transforming the nation. Jackson came to Washington in 1829 in a carriage and left on a train in 1837. Manufacturing, westward migration, political participation, and hostility over slavery (as evident in the response to the Nat Turner insurrection, anti-abolitionist riots in the North, and the Gag Rule Controversy in Congress) all increased significantly. During Jackson’s presidency the standard of living improved substantially for many Americans. However, “poverty, urban crime and violence, blatant and vulgar materialism,” the disparity in wealth and privilege, and racial and religious bigotry also increased.²⁶²Close At least 100 riots occurred between 1834 and 1837, the greatest wave of violence since the American Revolution. Low wages, poor working conditions, and ethnic animosities sparked labor riots; nativist riots erupted against the Irish in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia; and blacks were attacked in the North. Jackson received threatening notes, heard rumors of insurrection, and survived an assassination attempt (the first one in American history) by an unemployed house painter in January 1835 whose two pistols misfired from eight feet away. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, Americans created numerous organizations that sought to improve working conditions and education, end slavery, reform prisons and mental institutions, and curb intemperance to combat these ills.²⁶³Close

Jackson was an immensely popular president. Today’s young children, predicted the Chicago Democrat, would someday proudly proclaim that they had been “born in the Age of Jackson.”²⁶⁴Close Numerous admirers asked Old Hickory for a lock of his hair, and he sometimes complied. Many others, including Princess Victoria of England, requested his autograph. Virginia Senator Richard Parker commended Jackson for preserving the Union, fairly adjusting the tariff, making beneficial internal improvements, and settling the Indian issue “upon just and liberal principles.”²⁶⁵Close

Many eulogists praised Jackson profusely. In a memorial oration in Washington, DC, prominent historian George Bancroft hailed Jackson as “the servant of the people.” “In a just resolution inflexible, he was full of the gentlest affections, ever ready to solace the distressed, and to relieve the needy, faithful to his friends, [and] fervid for his country.”²⁶⁶Close To Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, Jackson possessed “dauntless courage, vigor, and perseverance.”²⁶⁷Close Linking the general with Washington and Jefferson, a pastor in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, predicted that his tomb would become a “modern Mecca” many would visit.²⁶⁸Close

Jackson’s impact was tremendous. He increased the power of the presidency and created a new presidential style, which his supporters argued, “embodied the popular will.” Jackson made the president the “head of state and leader of the nation.” He strengthened the United States by preventing nullification, paying off the national debt, reorganizing the bureaucracy, reducing political corruption, expanding democracy, improving its status, and preserving peace. “More than any other single individual,” by “his charisma, popularity, and accomplishments,” the general helped the United States become a modern democracy.²⁶⁹Close In his farewell address, Jackson argued that the nation had a “rich and flourishing commerce” and was growing in numbers, wealth, and knowledge. No other people, he claimed, had ever “enjoyed so much freedom and happiness” as did Americans.²⁷⁰Close

Convinced that he “represented the people against aristocracy and privilege,” Jackson labored to end corruption in Washington. The Democrat saw himself as Hercules who had come to clean out “the Augean Stable.” He strove to halt the federal government’s “long period of sustained official corruption,” especially to stop federal bureaucrats from using public funds to influence others and enhance their political power.²⁷¹Close The president expected all his appointees to “conform to a strict moral code” “to help restore virtue” to the federal government. Their fidelity and honesty would “elevate the character of the government and purify the morals of the country.”²⁷²Close

While many praised Jackson’s accomplishments, others criticized his character and policies. Whigs derided Jackson as “King Andrew I,” “a dangerous military chieftain who usurped military and presidential power.” His foes lampooned his meager education and poor spelling. In his eulogy, Bancroft called Jackson “the unlettered man of the West” who was “little versed in books” and “unconnected by science with the traditions of the past.”²⁷³Close During the 1828 campaign, an anonymous pamphleteer asked what would the English periodicals that had “defamed even the best writings of our countrymen, say of a people who want a man to govern them who cannot spell more than about one word in four?”²⁷⁴Close John Quincy Adams was even more brutal. When Harvard decided to award Jackson an honorary degree in 1833, Adams complained: “I could not be present to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a degree upon a barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name.”²⁷⁵Close

Numerous contemporaries and later scholars complained that Jackson’s political philosophy was deeply flawed and that his policies produced poor results. To his enemies, Jackson was a “cult leader” who deceived the “lost and vulnerable.” “Jacksonian democracy,” they argued, “was a misnomer” because the general “was a tyrant.”²⁷⁶Close William Seward accused Jackson of creating a spoils system that furthered corruption and dishonesty rather than patriotism and public service.²⁷⁷Close A Whig newspaper exulted that Jackson’s farewell address was “the last humbug” which “this illiterate, violent, vain, and iron-willed soldier can impose upon a confiding and credulous people.”²⁷⁸Close Unlike his father and Jefferson, who had also been bitter political rivals, John Quincy Adams and Jackson never reconciled in their later years, undoubtedly in part because Adams continued to serve in Congress and did not respect Jackson as his intellectual equal. Adams denounced Jackson’s administration as “the reign of subaltern knaves, fattening upon land jobs and money jobs.”²⁷⁹Close If Adams was not insane, Jackson wrote in 1838, he was “the most reckless and depraved man living.”²⁸⁰Close This “vindictive” man, Jackson declared in 1844, was “reckless with the truth.”²⁸¹Close After Jackson died, Adams labeled him a “murderer” and an “adulterer.”²⁸²Close

Contemporary historians also claim that Jackson had major character flaws and adopted misguided policies that had detrimental consequences. Remini maintains that Jackson made many bad appointments, sometimes did not effectively guide Congress, and ruthlessly expelled southeastern Indians from their ancestral lands.²⁸³Close Jackson, Sean Wilentz argues, “often acted on the basis of fierce personal loyalties (and hatred), and took positions that seemed at odds with his stated principles.”²⁸⁴Close Rather than basing his understanding of justice on transcendent principles, Andrew Burstein asserts, Jackson’s view of justice reaffirmed “his own impulses” and validated “his own life experience.” Moreover, Jackson defended American manifest destiny as divinely mandated.²⁸⁵Close His argument that western expansion was God’s providential plan helped justify the acquisitiveness of many of his contemporaries.²⁸⁶Close

It is ironic, avows Lynn Hudson Parsons, that a “slaveholder with an autocratic personality” who owned a large plantation that depended on the labor of scores of slaves was considered “the icon of American democracy for much of the nineteenth century.” The personal lifestyle of Jackson’s political nemesis John Quincy Adams “was far more republican.”²⁸⁷Close In addition, Jackson did little to help blacks, Native Americans, or white women because he did not recognize them as equals or see their potential to contribute to American life. The general wanted to “preserve an idealized world of white yeomen gentrification,” thereby “replicating his own path to respectability.”²⁸⁸Close Numerous incongruities are evident in Jackson’s character and life. As Wilentz claims, it is challenging to “make sense of his paradoxes and contradictions without slighting either his defects or his achievements.”²⁸⁹Close As his first biographer wrote, he was “a democratic autocrat,” “an urbane savage,” and “an atrocious saint.”²⁹⁰Close

Although his faith grew stronger and more meaningful during the last twenty-five years of his life, Jackson continued to espouse attitudes and engage in actions that clashed with Christian norms. The general’s “extraordinary rage,” strong desire for revenge, and great difficulty in forgiving his political and personal enemies violated his professed faith.²⁹¹Close Jackson’s “complexity of character,” Bertram Wyatt-Brown insisted, was “truly astonishing,” and he was “deeply committed to white Southern customs, convictions, and prejudices” about race, gender, and honor.²⁹²Close Jackson argued that “the principles and statutes” of the Bible “have been the rule of my life.”²⁹³Close However, powerfully influenced by the spirit and values of his locale and era, like most other statesmen and ordinary Americans, he used his understanding of biblical teaching and God’s will to justify his own personal preferences and defend policies he thought benefited the public good without carefully analyzing whether his preferences and policies accorded with sound biblical interpretation, political prudence, and the lessons of history. His personality, life experiences, and limited education all contributed to this. Nevertheless, Jackson strove valiantly to base his life and work as president on Christian principles, and in some ways, he succeeded admirably.