I turn out in this hallowed rank to fight for the dear honor of Andrew Jackson and his presidency. My intervention is necessitated because a grumpy colleague, and friend, wrote a evaluation of John Meacham's redesigned biography, American Lion, in which my pal dismissed Jackson as a bully, racist and chief of an Indian holocaust. As witnesses for the defense I identify the American people, who elected him three times (one was stolen), and the then-young historian, Arthur Schles-inger Jr., who in 1945 won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson. And finally, a flabbergast witness: the Pulitzer Board, which this week awarded the superlative for curriculum vitae to Meacham, architect of Lion and writer of Newsweek.
I put one's feet up my case; now let's pivot to the story… Jackson is fascinating because he was a transformative president during a transformative epoch in the subsistence of a brood nation, which wasn't fully convinced that it positively wanted to be a nation. His times were boiling with disagreement and potential. The 1830s adage the beginning of the industrial revolution, which with the the world and growing control of corporations changed fiscal relationships from offensive to impersonal.
No longer was mercantilism a credulous business with the global cache owner, who knew when and from whom to allow a dozen eggs for payment. Railroads in the 1830s were beginning to non-professional down ribbons of steel, which by 1890 would fasten the polity together from east to west. The chairman of a railroad corporation had midget familiarity of his employees, whether their wives and children were well provided for or not. In the daytime of the village boring goods store, Jefferson's theory was right; that guidance is best which governs least.
But those days were disappearing, and for the usual citizen, disturbing experimental and formal forces were at oeuvre over which he had no con-trol and young understanding. Here's how Schlesinger byword the need for governmental activity: When there is "growing ineffectiveness of undisclosed judgement as a means of social control," intervention is necessary. "With unofficial conscience powerless, the only choice to tyranny or anarchy was the cultivation of the public conscience … the egalitarian government.
" Arrayed against the growing tenderness for change were the forces of the status quo: banking and investor classes undisturbed by the unbiased world of their dealings, as fancy as they were making money, and the "nullifiers" led by John C. Calhoun, who did not inclination to belong to a realm with which they didn't agree. The times called for a etched leader, an apologist for the average citizen against strong economic interests and the centrifugal forces of disunity led by Calhoun and his South Carolina hotheads. Such a retainer was Andrew Jackson, toughened by a harshly life.
He was orphaned as a callow wretch during the Revolutionary War; conflict, struggle, disorder and misery tested him throughout his rare life. Tragedy bracketed his presidency. His adored wife, Rachel, died the blackness of his presidential conquest celebration in Nashville, and his niece and White House hostess died his terminal year in office.
He was in some ways a solitary man, craving benevolent female attention, but he could be alternately stern, pig-headed, shrewd, steadfast and decisive. His repute was made by his crushing over the British in New Orleans in 1812, and in the wars against the Creeks, which swept through northeast Alabama, and with the Seminoles in Florida, a testify we boa from Spain, square and square. The Indian wars were motivated by no national antagonism but were at the operation of President Monroe who, match other presidents, faced a dilemma: If a president cannot respect overseas nations within the nation, what then does he do? In the Creek War, new tribes fought each other, and Jackson adopted an orphan Creek stripling to invigorate as his own son. He did not, however, communicate with the pure levelling off of Washington, who freed his slaves. Jackson never did.
But the titanic struggles of his presidency were against rooted trade power, represented by the Second Bank of the United States, and the forces of disunion guided or rather chafing by Calhoun's theory that states could "nullify" any proposition they didn't like. The maneuvering and machinations of such storied and robust men as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, who were supporters of the Bank and enemies of Jackson, incite Meacham's book. The Bank wasn't anything liking for today's Federal Reserve. It was a personal institution, which made folding money from the government's spinach deposited there, a direction given only a nugatory minority of the Bank's directors.
Jackson vetoed the recharter of the Bank after insuring that states could effectively hilt regulation deposits, and he made the nix stick. Proving that he had the stretch to output with foes on principle, Jackson allied with Clay and Webster to overcome Calhoun and the nullifiers. Imperfect in many ways, ripsnorting and irritating, a doting uncle and unsparing ruler of his household, he was by all accounts a tribune of the mobile vulgus who created the oldest efficacious presidency, centering ambition in the executive.
Then, as now, when hermitic fairness has been dulled by search of timely riches, the times bid for the intervention of a intensified leader.
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