OLD HICKORY

Andrew Jackson was a hugely popular two-term president, who attracted 56% of the vote in his first-term victory in 1828, and a 54.2% in 1832, for his second term. He came into the office with a dreadful baggage of personal scandals and skeletons crawling out of his wide-open closets. He was accused of being the son of a prostitute from an even more questionable father, and his marriage, too, was put under question, when it was found out that his wife had not been divorced from her previous husband. These accusations for sure would have spelled the political death of any of his old-guard predecessors and contemporaries, but for him, General Jackson, “the man of the people,” “people’s General,” they spelled a popular triumph.

The nickname Old Hickory went back to his heroic exploits as commander of the American defense of New Orleans in the British War of 1812-1815. He was said to be “tough as old hickory,” referring to local wood, and the name stuck to him. As another curiosity, his detractors called him a “Jackass,” making a pun on his name. Instead of fighting back, Jackson embraced “the jackass,” and made him a symbol of his campaign. It so happened that he represented the new fledgling Democratic Party, built upon the broken pieces of the old Democratic-Republican Party, raised, along the Anti-Federalist lines, by Jefferson and Madison. (The other offshoot of that now-defunct party were Jackson’s opponents the Whigs who lasted as the main alternative to the Democrats until they were later superseded by Lincoln Republicans.) As a result of Jackson’s bold acceptance of the jackass as his campaign symbol, the donkey would become the symbol of the Democratic Party ever since.

His first-term victory over John Quincy Adams was already quite impressive: those 56% translated into 178 electoral votes, as compared to Adams’s 83. In the second-term campaign, which was a four-way election, his 54.2% absolute majority of popular vote translated into an even more impressive packet of 219 electoral votes, with just 144 needed for hands-down victory.

The following is a nice capsulation of the Andrew Jackson phenomenon by the American popular historian Kenneth C. Davis, from his good book, shockingly titled Don’t Know Much About [American] History. This book is a part of his Don’t Know Much About series, but I still warmly recommend it to the reader before he (or she) takes offense at the admittedly disparaging title.---

"That a new American era was born became apparent with Jackson’s victory and inaugural; a large crowd of Old Hickory’s supporters, mostly rough-hewn western frontiersmen with little regard for niceties, crowded into Washington, flush with the excitement of defeating what they saw as the aristocratic power brokers of the Northeast.

When Jackson finished his inaugural address, hundreds of well-wishers stormed into the White House, where tables had been laid with cakes, ice cream, and punch. Jackson was hustled out of the mansion for his own protection, and the muddy-booted mob overturned chairs and left a chaotic mess. All of the Adamsite fears of rule by “King Mob” seemed to be coming true.

This was the beginning of the so-called ‘Jacksonian democracy.’ Part of this new order came with reformed voting rules in the western states, where property ownership was no longer a qualification to vote. Unlike the earlier “Jeffersonian democracy,” which was a carefully articulated political agenda voiced by Jefferson himself, this new democracy was, in modern political language, a” grassroots” movement. Jackson was no political theorist, and hardly a spokesman for the changing order, but he was its symbol.

Orphan, frontiersman, horseracing man, Indian fighter, war hero and land speculator, Jackson embodied the new American spirit, and became the idol of the ambitious, jingoistic younger men now calling themselves “Democrats.” At its best, Jacksonian democracy meant an opening of the political process to more people. (Although blacks, women, and Indians still remained political nonentities.)

The flip side was that it represented a new level of militant, land-frenzied, slavery-condoning, Indian-killing greed."

The awful treatment of the native Indian population on the American territories from east to west has been a signal blotch on the otherwise little-distinguished Jackson Administration. Had it not been distinguished by the rise of the “mob,” it might have entered history as one of the worst. (Unlike President Polk’s heroics of territorial expansionism at the expense of Mexico in the Southwest and of Britain in the Northwest, there was little patriotic excitement generated by the forcible eviction of the Indians from their historical domains which had been seen as de facto American lands already.) Yet, it was Jackson’s low-bar populism, and all it entailed, that saved the day for him and boosted his rankings far beyond his actual merit, making him today one of the most recognizable faces in America, as the face on the twenty-dollar bill.