FACTION JACKSON
David S. Brown places Andrew Jackson in the partisan politics of his time
“THE FIRST POPULIST: THE DEFIANT LIFE OF ANDREW JACKSON” by David S. Brown (Scribner, 432 pages, $30).
Donald Trump loves Andrew Jackson. While president, Trump tweeted about “Old Hickory,” laid a wreath on his grave, hung his portrait in the Oval Office and even proclaimed that Jackson could have stopped the Civil War. Somewhat like Trump, Jackson was a populist hero who drew accusations of bigotry and tyranny.
Yet as David S. Brown reminds us in his impressive new biography, “The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson,” the seventh president of the United States operated in the specific context of the first half of the 19th century, when he reflected and shaped the tensions that defined American politics.
Brown is a professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books on American politics and culture, including biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Adams and Richard Hofstadter. He answered questions via email from Chapter 16.
Q Why do you call Jackson “the first populist”? How did his policies and persona shape the politics of the early American nation?
A: Jackson was the country’s first chief executive to come from neither Virginia nor Massachusetts — the traditional locus of political power. As the nation’s first populist president, he embodied the aspirations of a growing number of trans-Appalachian Americans, many of whom were actively participating in politics for the first time. They often held views on a range of issues — including economic development, Indian removal and judicial authority — that were often at odds with East Coast pols. Jackson’s agrarian sympathies were part of a long era (1800-1860) in which Southern statesmen held the upper hand in Washington, an ascendancy only to end with the Civil War. His strongman mien — as a duelist, a conquering general at the Battle of New Orleans and a president who vetoed more legislation than all his predecessors combined — was a defining feature of the man and part of his undeniable political charisma.
Q There are many biographies of Jackson. What compelled you to undertake this project? What did you seek to add to the historical conversation?
A: Certain links between Jackson’s times and our own drew me to this topic. Deep divisions over questions of race, regionalism and economic development tremored through America in the 1810s and 1820s, paving the way for Jackson’s presidency. In recent decades we have experienced a similar rising discontent. Jackson’s insistence on restoring the republic to its “true” constitutional principles, for example, might find contemporary pairing with the slogan, “Make America Great Again” — both cases bear evidence of a desire, not free from nostalgia, to deliver the country from presumed decline.
Q As a biographer, you probe personal histories to explain stories of larger significance. What elements in Jackson’s background served to define him? How did his personality shape his politics?
A: In the final year of the American Revolutionary War, a 14-year-old Andrew Jackson was taken prisoner by invading British forces in South Carolina’s Waxhaws region. One of the fine-suited officers ordered young Andy to clean his mud-crusted jackboots. Insisting upon his right to be treated as a prisoner of war, Jackson refused, prompting the incensed officer to draw his sword and bring it down in the vicinity of the boy’s head — a blow Jackson deflected with his left hand, for which he received a serious wound resulting in a permanent scar. This unique incident — Jackson is the only president to be a POW — anticipated the confrontational style that so clearly defined his public career.
Q As president, Jackson claimed to act as the voice of the American people, and he disdained the power of elites. Yet he also built a stronger federal government and claimed more executive authority. How can we explain this apparent paradox?
A: Jackson insisted that, more so than congressmen and senators, as president he represented “the people,” and this justified his steep expansion of executive power — evoking for his critics the image of “King Andrew I.” States’ rights Southerners were concerned with the idea of a strong central government. In response to Jackson’s threat to deploy the U.S. Army to South Carolina if it failed to pay its share of the federal tariff (known as the Nullification Crisis), one North Carolina Democrat, speaking for many in his section, contended that “General Jackson’s proclamation will not satisfy the South.” But Jackson, the Tennessee slaveholder, knew that despite such concerns Dixie Democrats — drawn to the man who did so much to carve out a Southern cotton kingdom — would remain electorally loyal.
To read an uncut version of this interview — and more local book coverage — visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.