The most common reminder of Andrew Jackson today is his picture on the $20 Federal Reserve note. The irony could hardly be greater: Jackson destroyed the national banking system of his own day and did not believe in paper money. Nevertheless his face has graced the Twenty since 1929, when it replaced Grover Cleveland's. His engraved image on the bill has evolved over time, recently in the direction of portraying a kinder, gentler Jackson. Historians' images of the seventh president have changed too, as succeeding generations have reinterpreted him, usually but not always with an eye to sustaining his stature as a national hero or as a partisan symbol. To trace these changing images over time is to see a remarkable succession of different Andrew Jacksons.
From the start his public image generated controversy. When first running for president in 1824, he campaigned as a military leader and as a man of the people, an outsider who would redeem the nation's virtue from a self-perpetuating clique of elitists (for so his campaign depicted the James Monroe Administration and the rival candidates). Jackson's opponents saw him as a violent, undisciplined, uncouth brute, ill-suited to supreme responsibility in a republican government. During the 185 years since, rival groups have continued to portray contrasting images of Jackson.
The Democratic Party has always maintained a certain proprietary interest in his image, commemorating him as its founder in "Jackson Day" dinners—traditionally held on January 8, the anniversary of his victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815. Frankin D. Roosevelt, an admirer of Thomas Jefferson (perhaps a more appropriate hero for a patrician), changed the name of these events to "Jefferson-Jackson Day" dinners. Tennessee and Louisiana Democrats, however, have continued to observe an undiluted Jackson Day. In recent years such dinners no longer recur on any fixed schedule. A Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 10, 2007, drew both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Uncovering Jackson
In our own day, even as the political use of Jackson continues, we are also fortunate to have at least one small group of scholars conscientiously dedicated to uncovering and preserving the most authentic knowledge of him possible, independent of all stereotypes: the Andrew Jackson Papers project at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, currently under the able direction of Daniel Feller, a professor in the history department. The project started in the 1970s, and is now working on volumes 7 and 8. These volumes cover 1829 and 1830, the first two of Jackson's eight years in the White House. Feller expects the project will total 16 volumes and take until about 2030 to complete.
As they go along, Feller and his assistant editors make startling discoveries. In January 1825, John Quincy Adams received an anonymous letter threatening civil war if he did not withdraw from the presidential race rather than allow it to be decided as the Constitution provides by the House of Representatives (no candidate had received an absolute majority of the electoral votes in the 1824 election). Applying handwriting analysis, assistant editor Tom Coens traced the letter to William B. Lewis, a confidante of Andrew Jackson, Adams's leading rival. Amazingly, Lewis also may have penned an anonymous letter to Jackson himself in 1830, warning the then president of assassination if he stood for reelection. The editors suspect that Lewis wanted Jackson to seek another term and knew that nothing was more likely to prompt the Old Hero to take that decision than such a threat!
I asked each of the three editors, so familiar with the documentary sources of Jackson's life, which of the many Jackson biographies was their favorite. All picked the same one: Life of Andrew Jackson by James Parton, published in three volumes between 1859 and 1861.
Parton wrote a number of biographies, bestsellers in their time, but Jackson's has remained his best known. He relied closely on documentary evidence, which he sometimes quoted at length and supplemented by interviewing surviving participants. Every later biographer has relied considerably upon him. Parton was critical of Jackson's presidency, especially the "spoils system," instituted by wholesale removals of federal employees down to the level of local postmasters, whom Jackson replaced with his own followers. Parton called this practice "an evil so great and so difficult to remedy, that if all his other public acts had been perfectly wise and right, this single feature of his administration would suffice to render it deplorable." Later in the 19th century, legislation would create the tenured civil service to prevent wholesale partisan removals of the kind Jackson practiced, and more meritorious kinds of removals as well.
Writing at a time when Jackson's memory was still vivid, Parton took account of Old Hickory's "invincible popularity" with multitudes of Americans, particularly Democrats. "What we lovingly admire," Parton declared, "that, to some extent, we are." He concluded that Jackson—military leader, frontier Indian fighter, and self-described champion of the common man—was the "representative man" of what he termed "the combative-rebellious period of American history." Parton's choice of words implied an expectation that America would evolve away from an identification with Andrew Jackson. Nevertheless, Jackson's political admirers have contrived to keep his image before us, even as we move away from his times. (How they have done so is worth investigating.)
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