- [Martin] He learned to fight in the Revolutionary War.
He used what he'd learned
to kill a man over a gambling debt.
He led the American Army
to the most surprising victory in its history,
but he also launched an unauthorized invasion of Florida.
He added vast regions of the South to the United States,
but it was land he brutally wrested from Native Americans.
He was the champion of the common white man,
but he owned over 100 black Americans.
He was the founder of the Democratic Party,
but his enemies accused him of being an American Napoleon.
His name was Andrew Jackson.
- [Announcer] Andrew Jackson is made possible by
a major grant
from The National Endowment for the Humanities,
democracy demands wisdom,
by The Ahmanson Foundation,
committed to the creative pursuit
of quality education in the arts,
by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
and by contributions to your PBS station
from viewers like you.
Thank you.
(piano music)
- [Martin] In 1859,
as America was rushing towards civil war,
James Parton,
the first historian
to attempt a biography of Andrew Jackson,
arrived at the Hermitage, Jackson's beloved home.
He was escorted through the mansion by Hannah Jackson,
who had been Andrew Jackson's slave
from the time she was 10 until Jackson died.
Parton knew that many Americans considered Andrew Jackson
the country's greatest leader since the Founding Fathers.
Parton wrote...
- [Parton] During the last 30 years of his life,
he was the idle of the American people.
Columbus had sailed, Washington fought,
Jefferson written.
50 years of Democratic government had passed,
and the result of it all
was that the people of the United States
honored Andrew Jackson before all over living men.
- Andrew Jackson, in my mind,
is one of the great presidents.
And it's not surprising that he was so loved.
In fact, it is said,
that when the Civil War broke out in 1861,
people wanted to vote for Andrew Jackson,
hoping he would come back and save the Union.
He was that beloved.
- For all of his flaws,
for all of his contradictions,
Andrew Jackson did more
than any other American of his generation
to enlarge the possibilities of American democracy.
In doing that, and seeing himself as president,
as the tribune of the people,
he did more than anyone to change,
to enlarge the possibilities of the American presidency.
- [Martin] But Jackson was also
one of the most controversial presidents
in American history.
His policies on issues like Indian removal and slavery
provoked fierce opposition,
not only in his lifetime, but beyond.
- Andrew Jackson, for African Americans,
is not the sort of figure as one holds very dear.
He wouldn't form part of the,
the ranks of the great men of American society,
because, never in his reign as president,
in his terms as president,
did he ever attempt to expand rights of people.
On the contrary, he did everything he could, it seems to me,
to constrict those rights, to limit those rights.
- People talk about Andrew Jackson's black moods,
people talk about Andrew Jackson's red hot temper,
but the color of this story is green,
and it's the green of envy,
and it's the green of coveting Indian lands.
- [Martin] At the Hermitage,
Parton discovered a portrait of Jackson
finished just before he died.
It was completely unlike
the many heroic portraits of the great man,
and the vulnerability it captured brought to life
Parton's most insightful description of Jackson.
- [Parton] He was a democratic autocrat,
an urbane savage,
an atrocious saint.
- Americans have always looked at Andrew Jackson
and seen themselves.
But, over the years, they've looked at Andrew Jackson
and seen different versions of themselves.
At one time they saw the frontiersman,
the poor boy made good,
the classic self-made man.
Today, some Americans look back at Jackson
and they see the slaveholder,
the Indian oppressor, even the Indian hater.
So, the debate about Andrew Jackson
is a very contemporary one.
He's an inescapable, quintessential American,
but of what kind?
Is he a man whom we should admire,
or is he a man whom we should despise?
Is he a man whom we should celebrate,
or is he a man for whom we should apologize?
- [Jefferson] Thomas Jefferson.
He could never speak
on account of the rashness of his feelings.
I have seen him attempt it repeatedly,
and as often choke with rage.
(folk music)
- [Martin] In the 1760s,
Andrew Jackson's parents traded desperate poverty in Ireland
for an equally hard life on the Carolina Frontier.
Andrew never met his father,
for he died when his wife was pregnant with Andrew,
leaving the boy and his two older brothers
to fend for themselves.
When the Revolutionary War began in 1775,
the Carolina Frontier became a dangerous place,
with one farmer siding with the patriots
and his next door neighbor with the British.
- It was a brawling, violent way to grow up.
You made a living with your hands and with your spirit,
your military spirit to defend yourself,
and your hands to pull something out of the soil.
So, you had a constant wariness
and a constant threat of violence,
and I think that's one of the many reasons
Jackson became a man who was so prone to violence,
he grew up with it, he didn't know anything else.
(tense music) (heavy breathing)
- [Martin] During the Revolution,
the fighting in the Carolinas
was the most vicious of the entire war.
(guns fire)
Both sides executed men they captured,
and committed atrocities against civilians.
Outnumbered and desperate,
the patriots relied on young boys
who knew every twist and turn in the woods
to carry orders to the battle lines.
One of them was Andrew Jackson.
- There's a famous story about young Andrew, 13 years old,
being commanded by the British officer who captured him
to clean his boots,
and Jackson refused to take such a servile job,
and the officer slashed him across the face with a sword,
and Jackson put his arm up to defend himself,
and he carried the scars all his life.
- [Martin] The war inflicted other,
even more horrible scars on Jackson.
One of his brothers died of heat stroke while in battle,
and his mother and other brother died of disease.
(guns fire)
In the boy's eyes,
it was the British who were to blame
for leaving him suddenly alone in the world.
- For Andrew Jackson,
the American Revolution was a formative psychic,
as well as political event.
For the rest of his life,
he would despise the British Empire,
he would grow up feeling as if he owed the British
a kind of repayment
for all the British had done to him personally,
and to his family.
(tense music)
- Andrew Jackson, with that kind of a background,
you would expect him to be a very angry
and frustrated young man, and he was.
And he made quite a reputation for himself
as a man who is getting into trouble,
causing all kinds of problems.
a fellow resident of the town of Salisbury
described the young troublemaker this way.
- [Resident] Andrew Jackson was the most roaring,
rollicking, horse-racing, card-playing,
mischievous fellow that ever lived in Salisbury.
- He got a small inheritance
from a grandfather back in Ireland.
And he went down to Charleston to collect it
and spent the whole thing in a week,
on horses and liquor and maybe some girls too,
but it was all gone pretty fast,
and he had to trudge back to the upcountry of South Carolina
to somehow pull his life together again.
There are a lot of 15 year olds who would not have made it,
and it wouldn't have surprised anybody
if Andrew Jackson just went down the tubes
and was forgotten at that point.
But all the people who knew him
when he was a boy and a young man,
said he had passion, fire, determination, audacity,
and a refusal to be crushed by the kinds of things
that might wipe out anybody else.
- [Martin] After apprenticing with a lawyer,
Jackson became a lawyer himself at the age of 20.
And when he was offered a job
as a prosecutor on the frontier,
he jumped at the opportunity
to join the waves of Americans heading west.
- When the revolution ends,
particularly for young men like Jackson,
with very little going for them in the East,
there is this huge expanse of territory,
Kentucky and Tennessee, to be precise,
that was the place you could start over.
One of the attractive features of this frontier experience
was that all of these new places were
in need of founding fathers, so to speak,
and, like a job placement,
new founding father needed for country in Tennessee,
and people like Jackson could apply.
And basically, you show up and say,
"I'm here to create a new community."
(folk music)
- [Martin] In 1788,
three months before George Washington was elected
the first president of the United States,
Andrew Jackson arrived at a new settlement
on the edge of the American West.
Its name was Nashville, Tennessee.
Besides practicing law,
Nashville's newest citizen bred horses, speculated in land,
and, most significantly, fell in love
with Rachel Donelson Robards,
daughter of one of Nashville's most prominent families.
Rachel returned Andrew's feelings,
but their relationship faced an insurmountable barrier.
Rachel was already married
to a man from Kentucky named Lewis Robards.
- When Jackson arrives, here's this wild kid,
and Rachel, you know, was sort of wild herself.
She should never have married Lewis Robards.
And she finds, I think, companionship
and a kind of kindred spirit in Jackson.
And they fall in love.
- [Martin] But in most of 1790s America,
Women literally belonged to their husbands.
- I think it's very hard for us to understand
that there was a time in the history of our country,
where it was virtually impossible for people to divorce.
The woman became a part of the husband,
and she had no separate legal rights whatsoever
from her husband.
So in the event a woman wanted to leave the household,
she had to leave her children behind,
because the children did not belong to her.
She had no legal ownership to children, to property.
A woman had no legal identity whatsoever,
except as a part of her husband.
- [Martin] Most unhappy couples lived in loveless marriages
rather than flout the law,
but Andrew and Rachel were not the kind of people
who let social convention stop them
from following their hearts.
- These two hapless people, up until this point,
find each other, and the opportunity and the desire
merge for a really extraordinary decision,
which is for the two to elope to Natchez.
- [Martin] The two young lovers headed south
along the Natchez Trace Trail.
Their goal was the wild and wooly town of Natchez,
on the Mississippi River, which was governed by Spain.
By running off with Andrew, Rachel was making it clear
that she was never going back to her husband,
no matter what the consequences.
- For a woman to choose to leave her husband,
especially one who came from Rachel Donelson's background,
was an extraordinarily courageous decision on her part,
because, in Rachel's case,
she knew that she was, essentially,
setting herself up to be condemned
by the society that she lived in.
And the shadow of this decision
would haunt them through the rest of their days.
- [Martin] In the beginning,
the couple's daring elopement was worth it,
for they made an ideal match.
- Where others could not tame him, she could.
There's one incident that occurred
when they were floating down the Mississippi River,
and there were some people that annoyed Jackson,
I don't recall exactly what it is they did,
and he took a rifle, and he starts shooting at them.
And right away,
they ran down into the cabin and told Rachel.
She said, "Please tell Mr. Jackson I would like to see him."
She could handle him, she was the right person for him.
- [Martin] With Nashville still a frontier town,
with few churches and fewer courts,
Rachel and Andrew were able to return home after six months
and be accepted by most of the community as man and wife.
But Rachel's husband was not so forgiving,
and he took his case against her to the state legislature,
where he won permission to sue for divorce
on the grounds of adultery.
In 1793, the courts granted Lewis the first divorce
in the history of the state of Kentucky.
Not long after,
Rachel and Andrew were quietly married in Nashville.
Rachel hoped
that if she and Andrew were loving and faithful,
the fact that she had been branded a scarlet woman
would soon be forgotten.
But her new husband was interested in politics,
and her adultery would one day be a central issue
in the race for president of the United States.
For all his wildness, the young Andrew Jackson
also had the determination, vision,
and charisma of a born leader, and in 1796,
the state of Tennessee sent him
as its lone representative to Congress.
But the learned statesmen who filled the nation's capitol
didn't quite know what to make of the fiery frontiersman.
- Jackson was so passionate
when he came to Congress in the 1790s,
that Thomas Jefferson remembered
that he would get on his feet
and become overwhelmed with his emotions,
literally choked with rage, could not get out a word,
and, red-faced, had to sit down again.
- [Martin] If the Washington elite
were unimpressed with the passionate Mr. Jackson,
the feeling was mutual.
- Congress was stifling for Jackson.
It was a place where people met in committees
and did backroom deals,
and Jackson despised backroom deals.
It was a place where people traded favors with one another
in order to get what they wanted,
and Jackson thought that was hideously corrupt.
- [Martin] After just over a year in congress,
Jackson resigned, declaring...
- [Jackson] I was born for the storm,
and a calm does not suit me.
- [Martin] Raising racehorses
now became his favorite pastime,
and betting enormous sums on those horses in match races
became his passion.
- Andrew Jackson loved horses, violence, whiskey,
he was also someone who,
if you were his friend, you were his friend forever.
If you were his enemy, God help you.
- [Martin] In 1805, Jackson won a huge sum of money
when his opponent's horse came up lame.
But a dispute over how the payoff was made,
led to an escalating series of insults
between Jackson and a young Tennessean
named Charles Dickinson.
- Later, his friends insisted
that Dickinson had said something about Rachel Jackson.
And here's something else
that Jackson is very sensitive about,
because his whole marriage to Rachel
had been under a cloud from the beginning,
and anybody, to raise that point,
in any direct or even indirect way,
would trigger a very violent response.
- [Martin] On May 30, 1806,
Charles Dickinson and Andrew Jackson
met on a dueling ground.
Dickinson was reputed to be the best shot in Tennessee,
and when the signal was given to fire, he fired first.
(gun fires)
But to his shock, he apparently missed.
Then, Andrew Jackson took careful aim
(gun fires)
and mortally wounded Dickinson.
Only then did Jackson's second notice that he was bleeding.
Jackson had, in fact, been shot in the chest,
with the bullet lodging next to his heart.
When his shocked second asked how
he could possibly have fired back accurately,
Jackson replied...
- [Jackson] I should have hit him
if he had shot me through the brain.
- [Martin] Jackson carried the bullet
for the rest of his life.
It was unmistakable evidence of how unsuited he was
to the give-and-take of politics,
but his future in a different arena
could not have been brighter.
- [Sam Houston] Sam Houston.
The reputation of General Jackson
will adorn the proudest, brightest pages
in the nation's history.
He wears the laurel wreath, which his own valor won.
(drums beat)
- [Martin] In 1812,
the United States declared war on Great Britain.
Andrew Jackson had been yearning since he was 13,
for another shot at the British,
and, having been voted commander of the Tennessee militia,
his dream had now come true.
To inspire fellow Tennesseans to join his army,
he declared...
- [Jackson] Who are we, and for what are we going to fight?
Are we the titled slaves of George III,
the military conscripts of Napoleon the Great,
or the frozen peasants of the Russian Tsar?
No, we are the free-born sons of America,
the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world,
and the only people on earth
who possess rights, liberties, and property
which they dare call their own.
- [Martin] But the mission
Jackson and his men were ultimately given
was far from glamorous, tramping and slogging
through the forests and swamps of the southeast
until they had found and defeated Creek Indian warriors
who were allied with the British.
- Well, Jackson is in an unenviable position.
He has one of four armies assigned to punish the Creeks,
he is poorly supplied,
his troops are very poorly trained,
they have very short enlistments,
and it's cold and wet, and they want to return home.
Things are not going well.
- [Martin] After months in the field,
Jackson's supply lines broke down.
Fearing starvation, some of his soldiers mutinied
and began to walk home to Tennessee.
But Andrew Jackson threatened to kill them
if they took another step.
It was not an idle threat,
for on two other occasions,
Jackson had men under his command executed.
(guns fire)
- I see, in Jackson's Indian campaigns,
a ruthlessness that is frightful to behold.
He seemed possessed, almost,
with a determination to go on no matter what.
- [Martin] Finally, in March of 1814,
Jackson cornered the main Creek force.
It was camped on a peninsula called Horseshoe Bend,
because it was protected on three sides
by the Tallapoosa River.
With the fourth side protected
by a mammoth breastwork of logs they had built,
the Creeks were convinced
that their position was impregnable.
But then, Cherokee warriors fighting with Jackson
swam across the river to the Creek village
and set it on fire.
Jackson saw his chance
and ordered his men to storm the barricade.
(guns fire)
(shouting)
(guns fire)
After brutal hand-to-hand fighting,
Jackson's forces took the barricade.
- From that point on, after the barricade was breached,
it's no longer a battle.
It is a search and destroy mission.
It is a slaughter.
- [Martin] Of the 1,000 Creek warriors, not one surrendered.
It was Andrew Jackson's first great triumph,
but to his friend Sam Houston, who fought beside him,
it was also a tragedy.
- [Sam Houston] The sun was going down,
and it set on the ruins of the Creek Nation.
Where but a few hours before,
a thousand brave warriors had scowled on their assailants,
there was nothing to be seen but volumes of dense smoke
rising heavily over the corpses of painted warriors,
the burning ruins of their fortifications.
- [Martin] More Native Americans were killed
in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend
than on any other day in the history of the United States.
- One of the American participants
who went down to the river that night to fill his canteen,
said it very, very nicely.
The Tallapoosa might very well be called a river of blood,
because, as the dead and dying made it to the river,
the Tallapoosa was turned red.
- [Martin] Horseshoe Bend
was one of the only victories in a war
that was turning out to be a disaster for the United States.
- The British had captured Washington, DC
following the battle of Bladensburg,
which military historians have called
the worst disgrace in American military history.
When the American militia broke and ran,
hardly firing a shot,
the British then moved in,
burned the White House and the capitol.
So, the war had been going very badly.
- [Martin] With Britain threatening
to further humiliate America by conquering New Orleans,
the army was desperate to find a general
who could get his men to stand and fight.
The general finally chosen was incredibly tough on his men,
and yet his men were fiercely loyal to him,
a riddle explained by his nickname, Old Hickory.
- Andrew Jackson became Old Hickory
when he was coming back from the front down the Mississippi.
And he decided that he would walk while the wounded rode.
And, so, he walked all the way home.
And his men loved him for it.
It was an example of amazing spiritual leadership,
and they started calling him Old Hickory,
because they thought he was as tough as a hickory stick.
- [Martin] Old Hickory
had never had a day of formal military training in his life.
And yet, the Battle of New Orleans
would be depicted in song, story, and art
for the next 100 years,
for Andrew Jackson and his men
were about to shock the world.
To even out the odds with the British,
Jackson enlisted the aid of the French pirate Jean Lafitte,
Choctaw Indians, and the free blacks of New Orleans.
Then he mashed them beside his men
on a narrow stretch of ground
between a swamp and the Mississippi River.
On January 8, 1815,
a huge wave of battle-hardened British troops
swept down on Jackson's irregulars.
(guns fire)
Instead of turning and running,
as the British has watched American troops do
in numerous battles before,
Jackson and his men
marched into the pages of American history.
- They really thought that once these professionals
came marching towards these frontiersmen, they'd all run.
And to their surprise, they not only didn't run,
they stood and fired one volley after another
right into the faces of these poor oncoming British soldiers
and just mowed them down.
- [Martin] Jackson had proved that America
could stand up to the world's greatest military power
and win.
- The victory that he won was almost unbelievable.
The British lost hundreds of men dead on the battlefield.
Jackson's casualties in the main battle
were eight killed and 13 wounded.
It was astonishing. It's still astonishing.
- [Martin] As news of the victory spread across the country,
America was swept up in a wave of patriotism
unrivaled in its history.
- I think the whole character of the American people changed
after the War of 1812.
Prior to that time,
if you asked a person who or what they were,
they'd say, I'm a New Yorker.
I'm a Virginian.
I'm from Connecticut. I'm from Massachusetts.
After New Orleans, they said, "I am an American."
- [Martin] Americans pride in the victory
was stoked by a flood of images of the battle.
For a new invention, aquatint engraving,
enabled artists to make multiple color copies
of the same image must faster than ever before.
A delighted American public bought up thousands of pictures
of the glorious American victory at New Orleans.
And at the center of many of these new engravings
was the new American hero, Andrew Jackson.
- [Historian] Andrew Jackson was really one of the first
national celebrities.
Songs were written about him, clubs were founded for him.
January 8th, the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans,
towns would have Jackson dinners and banquets.
He was a cultural force before he was a political force.
- [Martin] The festivities were boisterous,
for Americans had more
than just the Battle of New Orleans to celebrate.
- After 1815, the Americans were very much free
to work out their own destiny
without interference from Europe.
This meant that they were enthused, excited.
They thought they could accomplish anything they wanted.
It also lent a sense of urgency.
They believed that if they didn't get it right now
they might not get another chance.
That this was the time, this was the place
on which a new world was going to be created.
They had to make sure that it was the right new world.
- [Martin] This turbulent age
would become the only period in American history
known by the name of a single man.
The Jacksonian Era.
Yet, as the era began,
Andrew Jackson was once again living on a farm in Tennessee
with no clear future in American politics.
For Rachel Jackson, having Andrew home was a break
from what was, in many ways, a lonely life.
She and Andrew had proven unable to have children,
and her dream of spending her life
surrounded by a loving husband and large family
had not come true.
- I think that when Rachel ran off with Andrew Jackson,
she thought that she was gonna get a husband
who was devoted to her, and that they would have this
warm circle around the family fire every night
with children running about,
very similar to the household she had grown up in.
But, instead, she's married a man
who's got tremendous ambition.
So, instead of having this quiet family home,
which, I think, was at the heart of Rachel's desires,
instead she's married to a very ambitious man
who pursues national politics,
becomes a military leader, and, in her own words,
spends less than a fourth of his nights
under his own roof.
- [Martin] As he waited to see
what avenue for his ambition might open next,
Andrew Jackson tended to his farm and his horses
and became a wealthy man.
His admirers were soon touting the political appeal
of a penniless orphan
who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.
But the real story of how Andrew Jackson
became a wealthy man was more complicated.
- [Frederick Douglass] Frederick Douglass.
General Jackson has to own
that he owes his farm on the banks of the Mobile
to the strong arm of the negro.
(folk music)
- [Martin] For millions of poor, white Americans,
many of whom had come from Europe seeking a better life,
the ideal America was one in which they could prosper.
To give them that opportunity,
General Andrew Jackson had forced the Creek Nation
to cede vast amounts of land in what would become
Alabama and Mississippi to the United States.
The treasured myth was that this was a place
where white Americans could improve their lot
by relying solely on their own hard labor.
The harsh reality was that it was black Americans
who were often doing much of the labor.
Jackson himself founded a plantation in Northern Alabama,
on land from which he had just driven the Creeks.
To work the land, he brought in slaves.
- Jackson firmly believed
that slaves were put on this earth to labor,
and whites are here to rule and to govern
and to lead society,
and they are on the top of the pecking order,
they are at the top of the social order,
they are at the top of the political order,
and, therefore, they are the ones who rule.
Superior whites lead, inferior blacks follow.
- [Martin] Jackson named his biggest parcel of land
near Nashville the Hermitage.
At the height of its operation,
well over 100 slaves at the Hermitage
called Andrew Jackson Master.
- He would've been a very paternalistic person,
and he would've made the slaves think
he was their mother and father and God all wrapped into one.
But to enslave another person, another human being,
you can't be a good person.
You have to be a pretty tough, vicious, mean person
to hold another person, or 140 people, in slavery
for all of their lives.
- [Martin] When one of Jackson's slaves escaped,
he offered a reward to anyone
who would give the man 300 lashes.
- 300 lashes could kill a man,
because of the infection from 300 lashes on his back.
Perhaps they would put some grease into the wound,
some ointment into the wound.
They may pour some whiskey on it, you know,
which would make the man go into shock.
But, he could die from those wounds.
He certainly would be ill for a long time.
And that would remind all the other slaves
here's what you're gonna get
if you try to run away from this place.
- [Martin] Though a few white Americans
were starting to question the morality of enslaving blacks,
the fact was that slavery was vital to American prosperity.
And men like Andrew Jackson
could not envision a world without it.
- Human slavery was the powerhouse
of the early American economy.
Slave-grown products were the most valuable exports
that the United States produced.
Slave grown cotton, slave grown rice,
slave grown tobacco
spilled out of the plantations of the South,
crowded onto boats,
enriched the harbors of New York and Boston,
and then fed an appetite of a hungry and shivering world.
And that's where the money came from.
So, the people who owned the slaves,
and the people who bought and sold
the produce that the slaves made
were the richest people in the country.
And it was the desire to get more of those riches
that drove Americans
into the best cotton country in the world,
the country that was possessed
by the Creek, and the Choctaw, and the Cherokee,
and the Chickasaw Indians.
- [Martin] The relentless demand for Indian land
on which to grow cotton,
created intense conflict with Native Americans.
Some of the bloodiest fighting was in southern Georgia,
where white settlers were battling Seminoles and Creeks
who were staging cross border raids from Florida.
With Florida still owned by Spain,
president James Monroe called up a man
he knew he could depend on to defend America's borders.
But, General Jackson had even bigger plans.
- Jackson really wasn't simply concerned with
Indian insurgency in Florida.
He was really concerned about the growing numbers
of free and escaped blacks who were there,
free and escaped slaves who were there,
who were armed and potentially dangerous
and a magnet for other slaves.
It's a threat to the plantation economy.
The combination of an Indian-Slave alliance
had haunted Americans from the 18th century onward,
and this was something that concerned Jackson terribly.
- [Martin] Without orders from Washington,
Jackson launched an invasion of Florida and conquered it.
During the invasion, he captured two British men
who he believed were inciting attacks on Americans.
Ignoring the ruling of his own military tribunal,
he had both men executed.
When news of the unauthorized invasion reached Washington,
the Speaker of the House, Henry Clay,
declared that Jackson
had the makings of an American Napoleon.
He called on Congress to censure Jackson.
Being censured would have disgraced Jackson,
but his conquest of Florida
was enormously popular with most Americans,
and Congress refused to censure the great war hero.
- [Henry Clay] Henry Clay.
I fail to see how the killing
of 2,000 English persons at New Orleans
qualifies a person for the difficult
and complicated duties of the presidency.
- [Martin] In 1824, James Monroe was retiring
after two terms as president.
Andrew Jackson thought he was an excellent candidate
to be the next occupant of the White House,
but he was not the only one with his eye on the job.
John Quincy Adams was the son of John Adams,
America's second president.
He had spent much of his childhood
in Europe with his father,
and was now Secretary of State.
His worldview was as different from Jackson's
as his upbringing.
- He was a politician with imagination.
He imagined an America
that was much more economically developed.
He imagined an America
with much broader educational opportunities for everybody.
He imagined an America
in which the rights of Indians and black people
and women were actually respected.
- [Martin] Treasury secretary William Crawford,
and Speaker of the House Henry Clay
were also candidates for president.
As in every previous election,
the candidates did not campaign.
And, in some states,
residents did not even get to vote for president.
Instead, the state legislature
chose that state's members of the electoral college.
- In the early years of the republic,
voters were not called on
to choose the president of the United States.
Choosing the president was,
quite honestly and quite deliberately, an elitist operation.
The people who were thought to be
the insiders in state government
became the presidential electors,
and they chose the president
based on which set of Washington insiders
they thought was the best.
And the people were basically expected
to accept that decision without complaint.
- [Martin] In an election controlled
by Washington politicians,
the frontiersman from Tennessee
seemed certain to finish last.
- When Andrew Jackson's name was first floated about
as a candidate for the presidency,
all kinds of leading politicians were aghast.
They understood him to be a wild eyes military chieftain,
a hot-tempered individual
who had executed a couple of Brits down in Florida
without authority or apparent reason.
And, as Jefferson said,
he was the most unfit man imaginable
for the office of the presidency.
- [Martin] To counter the view
that Jackson was unfit to be president,
one of his advisors, John Eaton,
published a series of letters
that proposed an entirely new rationale
for what was important in a president.
- [Eaton] In the selection
of a chief magistrate of this Union,
it is not necessary that we should look exclusively
to the mental qualifications of a candidate.
It is strength of character,
a perseverance and steadiness of purpose
that makes the distinguished man.
- What John Eaton does in the Letters of Wyoming
is simply stand on its head, the conventional understanding
of the qualifications of a president.
The very qualities that made a candidate before,
John Quincy Adams being the ideal,
experience in courts of Europe,
experience in diplomacy,
experience as his father's secretary
in various offices of government,
all of this is proof of corruption,
proof of insider status,
proof of being out of touch with the people,
whereas Jackson's complete absence of a resume
becomes his primary qualification for office.
- [Martin] When the votes were counted in 1824,
the Washington establishment was stunned to discover
that Andrew Jackson had won
both the most popular and electoral votes.
But with four men dividing up the electoral vote,
Jackson did not win a majority,
and the election was thrown
into the House of Representatives.
Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, had finished last
and was out of the running.
But he had enough support to play kingmaker.
Clay believed with all of his heart
that Andrew Jackson was unfit to be president.
So he threw his support to John Quincy Adams,
and, with it, Adams was elected president.
Adams them immediately offered Clay
the job of Secretary of State.
Outraged Jackson supporters
began railing against what they were convinced was
a corrupt bargain between Washington insiders
to steal the presidency from Andrew Jackson.
One newspaper which had endorsed Jackson, declared...
- [Man] Expired at Washington,
on the 9th of February, 1825,
the virtue, liberty, and independence of the United States,
caused by poison
administered by the assassin hand
of John Quincy Adams, the usurper, and Henry Clay.
- What they were absolutely convinced of
was the popular will had been thwarted,
the election had been stolen,
Washington insiders had cooked up the whole thing,
and they had to make sure it didn't happen again.
- [Martin] By 1828, when Andrew Jackson
ran against John Quincy Adams a second time,
the Jacksonians were ready to launch
the first true political campaign in American history.
Their strategy was driven by the fact that most states
had finally given the vote to all white males.
To inspire those men
to get out and vote for the first time in their lives,
Jackson's campaign took advantage
of the latest media revolution, lithography,
to flood America with lithographs
of the hero of the Battle of New Orleans.
- If you're going to elect the president
by appealing to the people as a whole,
you change the ground rules completely,
because you have to win the popular vote
down there at the grassroots, at the militia grounds,
in the taverns, in the fairs, in the streets
all across the country.
So, somehow you have to be able to reach those people.
You've got to fire them up.
(parade music)
- [Martin] The Jacksonians' plan
was to rally average Americans around a new idea,
that they should choose the president of the United States.
- So, they organized all kinds of popular demonstrations,
rallies, conventions, assemblies of people
who would get together and hurrah for Jackson.
They would pass a set of resolutions
and then they would all have a barbecue,
and they would all have a drink,
and they would start to cheer,
and, pretty soon, you'd get the sense
that everybody in this precinct is for Jackson,
and they'd send the results of that to the newspaper
and try to publicize it as much as they could.
And this was the kind of tactic
that didn't require finagling behind closed doors.
It could take place in the boondocks.
It could happen in rural Tennessee, rural Alabama,
rural New York.
And this kind of stirring up popular vote
and giving the people the notion
that they should choose the president,
and not the caucus members in Washington,
that revolutionized American politics.
The people have not been willing to give up
the choice of president ever since.
- [Martin] The revolutionary new style of campaigning
soon made Jackson into the heavy favorite.
But, then his opponents discovered the skeleton
inside Andrew and Rachel's closet.
The man behind the mischief was a confidant of Henry Clay's,
who edited a Cincinnati newspaper.
He uncovered and printed the court record
of Rachel Jackson's divorce proceedings,
which revealed that Rachel had lived with Andrew
while she was married to another man.
The story of Rachel's adultery was soon on the front pages
of newspapers across the country.
- Jackson is called the western bluebeard.
Rachel is the American jezebel.
And, it's said, the touch of a profligate women like Rachel
is going to pollute anyone.
How could someone like this be put in the White House
and over the women in Washington society?
- [Martin] Jackson blamed Henry Clay
for the attacks on Rachel,
and he would later say
that it was one of the great regrets of his life,
that he did not shoot Clay.
Instead, Jackson's campaign fired back with the charge
that, while Adams was US envoy to Russia,
he had procured an American whore for the Russian Tsar.
- This and other stories they told about Adams were lies,
whereas the story that the Adams people
were telling about Jackson was true.
But, taken together,
they all made the campaign of 1828 quite possibly
the dirtiest campaign in all American history.
(somber music)
- [Martin] The viciousness of the campaign
would have consequences no one could have foreseen.
Rachel was now 57, and had become deeply religious.
She found it impossible to accept that people across America
were now publicly calling her a whore and worse,
just because she had fallen in love with Andrew Jackson
so many years ago.
To a friend, she wrote...
- [Rachel] Who has been so cruelly tried as I have?
Our enemies have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gull
and sped them at me.
Almighty God, was there every anything to equal it?
To think that 30 years have passed.
- I've come to see Rachel Jackson's life
as the plot of a grand opera.
You have a young woman
who makes a mistake in her first marriage,
and then chooses to escape that
with a very courageous protector.
But, by doing that,
she's made, perhaps, the biggest mistake of her life,
because this whole story of Rachel as a fallen woman
explodes on the scene again,
and becomes the moral wedge issue of the 1820 campaigns.
- [Martin] When the election of 1828 was over
and the votes were counted,
Andrew Jackson, the war hero
who had dramatically expanded America,
was elected president in a landslide.
In January of 1829, he boarded a steamboat
to begin his journey from Nashville to Washington, DC.
At many stops along the way,
the townsfolk planned joyous celebrations
to honor the first man of humble origins
to become president.
But, Andrew Jackson declined
every single invitation he received.
For he was too bowed down with grief.
Just after the election,
Rachel Jackson had died of a heart attack.
- [Historian] Jackson was devastated by Rachel's death.
From that day forward, he carried her miniature
and would speak to Rachel every night
before he went to sleep,
whether he was at the Hermitage or in Washington.
And when he was home at the Hermitage,
each evening he would go and visit Rachel's grave.
- [Martin] And yet, Rachel's death was seen by some
as a political godsend for Jackson.
- Everyone around Jackson knows
Rachel is going to be a problem in the White House
because the women in Washington
will not accept her socially.
And, Rachel choosing, shall we say, to die at that moment,
frees him to focus on all the challenges
he'll have in the White House.
And, in many ways, she's like Madame Butterfly,
who realizes it's only through her death
that she'll be able to give her lover what he needs.
- [Martin] But that was not how Andrew Jackson saw it.
In his eyes,
his enemies had made an unforgivable attack on his wife.
- He blames John Quincy Adams for not putting a stop to it.
And he blamed Henry Clay for initiating it.
Jackson actually believed that they killed her,
and, so, as far as he was concerned,
they were her murderers.
- [Martin] Over the next eight years,
Jackson's anger at his enemies
would combine with his passionate personality
and strong convictions
to produce one of the most turbulent presidencies
America has ever experienced.
- [Webster] Daniel Webster.
When General Jackson comes,
he will bring a breeze with him.
Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.
- [Martin] On March 4th, 1829,
thousands of farmers and tradesmen,
who had never been to Washington, DC before,
poured into the White House.
They had come to celebrate
the inauguration of the first president
who's life story they could identify with.
Andrew Jackson.
- His whole family is wiped out in the revolution.
He's an orphan,
he's angry,
but he decides to make something of himself.
And he becomes the president of the United States.
It's an extraordinary career.
It's what America, we like to think is all about.
- [Martin] To Jackson's working class supporters,
their presence at the inauguration celebration was proof
that America was entering a far more democratic age.
And that was precisely what worried the Washington elite.
Prominent socialite Margaret Bayard Smith
described how the inauguration party turned into a riot.
- [Margaret] What a scene we did witness.
The majesty of the people disappeared,
and a rabble, a mob, was scrambling, fighting, romping.
Cut glass and china,
to the amount of several thousand dollars,
was broken in the struggle to get the punch.
Ladies fainted, men were to be seen with bloody noses,
and such a scene of confusion took place
as is impossible to describe.
Those who got in could not get out by the door again,
but had to scramble out of windows.
The president, after having been nearly pressed to death,
and almost suffocated by the people
and their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hickory,
had to retreat through the back way.
- [Martin] The riot deeply alarmed
the Washington establishment.
As men like Henry Clay saw it,
Jackson's motley supporters
had demonstrated why the Founding Fathers
had not trusted the masses to choose the president.
Now, Clay and his allies worried that Jackson,
a man famous for his dictatorial disposition,
would use the support of this same mindless mob
to turn himself into America's first imperial president.
- It's hard for us to imagine
how much that generation worried
that a republic could so easily be taken over
by a strong man, by a military chieftain, by an emperor.
Napoleon, of course, had just recently done that in France.
Henry Clay was convinced that King Andrew
was the farthest thing from the deliberative statesman
that a republic required,
that he was, in fact, a dangerous, egomaniacal,
potential emperor.
- [Martin] President Jackson's plans
would only stoke Clay's fears,
for, over the next eight years,
he would attempt to do nothing less
than reinvent the presidency.
- Jackson as president was not unlike Jackson as a general.
He was the leader.
He thought of himself as a leader.
He understood the separation of powers
under the Constitution,
but, nevertheless, he thought that the president
had a very particular role
as the man that had been elected by all of the people
to lead government in a way
that no previous president could have even thought of
let alone execute.
- [Martin] Jackson's first assault
on the Washington establishment
was to fire dozens of federal employees,
including 13 district attorneys,
charging that they were either incompetent or corrupt,
or both.
- Most of these high level government bureaucrats
were regarded as untouchable.
Some of them had been there since George Washington's day.
Jackson, within a few weeks, fired a number of them.
He removed more government officials
than all of his predecessors put together.
(folk music)
- [Martin] But, while the president claimed
pure motives for the firings, his opponents took one look
at the replacements Jackson hired
and proclaimed it the work of the Devil.
- Some of these people were personally unsavory.
Some of them had scandals in their backgrounds.
And, as his opponents,
and even some of Jackson's own supporters thought,
he was undercutting the competency
and efficiency of government by nakedly rewarding
people for no virtue other than
being willing to say and do anything to get him elected.
And, so, he was turning the United States government
into his own personal political machine.
- [Martin] But, just as Andrew Jackson
was starting to look invincible,
the Washington elite
snared his administration in a sex scandal.
(classical music)
Jackson's friend and Secretary of War, John Eaton,
had long been friendly with a woman named Peggy O'Neal.
Peggy was married to an officer in the navy,
but it was whispered among the ladies in Washington
that she was not entirely faithful.
In 1829, news arrived that Peggy's husband
had died on board a navy ship.
Instead of going into mourning,
Peggy almost immediately married John Eaton.
And that was when the rumor began racing through the capital
that the naval officer had committed suicide
after finding out that the Secretary of War
was having an affair with Peggy.
To the ladies of Washington,
it was proof that Jackson's depraved rabble
was going to sully the cabinet
just as it had defiled the White House.
- Problem with Peggy Eaton,
part courtesan, part common tart,
is she had a scandalous sexual past.
And, whenever you see women and sex in this period,
you know it's about fear.
And, there was a lot of fear in Washington,
and anxiety about the coming of democracy.
The ladies of Washington maybe couldn't do much about that,
but they could do something about Margaret Eaton,
and they decided to close their doors to her.
- [Martin] It was a decision
with stunning political consequences.
In the capitol's early years, the social gatherings,
hosted by politicians' wives,
were a key venue for Washington's movers and shakers
to discuss politics and form alliances.
But, now, prominent Washington wives,
including those of other Jackson cabinet secretaries,
began demanding that their husbands boycott all gatherings
to which Peggy Eaton was invited.
Suddenly, it became almost impossible
to conduct politics in Washington,
supposedly because of a single scarlet woman.
- If you read the press,
you would imagine that Margaret Eaton was some
Cleopatra or Madame Pompadour.
They called Peggy Eaton the Doom of the Republic,
and they imputed all kinds of power to her
that she really didn't have.
But what was behind not so much fact
as this terrible anxiety and fear
about this man who could abuse power.
And, somehow, Peggy Eaton symbolized that fear.
- [Martin] The simplest way
for the president to get Washington functioning again
was to tell John Eaton to accept Peggy's social isolation.
But for Jackson, the attacks on Peggy
were painfully reminiscent
of the mud-slinging against Rachel.
The president's wounds from the loss of his wife
were still raw.
Each night he read from her prayer book,
and then went to sleep thinking about her.
And the more he thought about Rachel,
the more determined he became
to stop the same thing from happening to Peggy.
And, so, for two years,
the president spent more of his time defending Peggy Eaton
than on any other matter.
- For us today,
the Eaton affair can only be compared to Monica Lewinsky.
But, actually, it was even more serious,
because, in the end, of course,
President Clinton did not lose his office,
but, as a result of, not Margaret Eaton herself,
but what she symbolized, the cabinet broke up,
which was the first time this had ever happened
in the United States History, and the last.
- [Martin] To put an end to the scandal, John Eaton,
and the other members of Jackson's cabinet, resigned,
enabling the president to replace them
with men not caught up in the feud.
The press lampooned the cabinet secretaries
as rats fleeing Jackson's sinking ship.
- [Andrew Jackson] Andrew Jackson.
Disunion by armed force is treason.
Are you ready to incur its guilt?
- [Martin] If the Eaton affair had an air of melodrama,
it was also a sign that tragedy was waiting in the wings.
Vice President John C. Calhoun,
who's wife had battled Jackson over Peggy Eaton,
was simultaneously involved in another crisis,
one that threatened to bring the nation to civil war.
- John C. Calhoun, from about 1830 on,
was obsessed for the remainder of his life
with one fundamental problem.
And that was the problem of protecting slavery
in a nation where slaveholders were becoming a minority.
How could slavery be perpetuated
in the face of an indifferent or even hostile North?
- [Martin] The crisis was triggered, not by slavery,
but taxes.
Congress, eager to protect Northern factories,
had passed a law which imposed a high tax
on the cheap imported cloth
used by Southern plantation owners to clothe their slaves.
Determined to eliminate the tax and protect slavery,
Calhoun began promoting nullification,
under which every state had the right to disregard,
within its borders, any law it considered unconstitutional.
- Nullification appealed to Calhoun
and other South Carolinians
because it was a way of asserting states' rights.
And, clearly, that was a fundamental threat
to the entire idea of a federal system.
And it went straight to the heart of
the fundamental American question of who was sovereign.
Was the federal government sovereign?
Were the states sovereign?
Were the people sovereign?
These were all incredibly complicated questions
that consumed the Jackson White House
and Jackson's Washington.
- [Martin] Nullification's fiercest supporters
were congressmen from South Carolina.
It's bitterest opponents were Northern congressmen
who were convinced it would lead
to the breakup of the Union.
And then there were those who's positions were unknown,
including President Andrew Jackson.
On April 13th, 1830, all three factions
were represented at a dinner in Washinton DC
in honor of Thomas Jefferson's birthday.
John C. Calhoun and the nullifiers
had been plotting for months to use the event
to convert those sitting on the fence to their cause,
and, in their eyes, Jackson, a fellow slave owner,
was a natural ally.
But, Andrew Jackson had his own plans for the dinner,
and, as he arrived, he felt the same thrill
he had always felt before a battle.
As the evening began,
the nullifiers endeavored to build support
by making toast after toast
to the importance of states' rights.
Then, suddenly, President Jackson raised his glass.
Looking John C. Calhoun straight in the eye,
he made his toast.
- [Jackson] Our federal union, it must be preserved.
- [Martin] Those seven words
sent shock waves through Washington,
for all now knew where Andrew Jackson stood.
He would not tear apart the nation he had helped build.
For Vice President Calhoun,
Jackson's opposition to nullification was intolerable.
The two men soon stopped speaking.
Then, in November of 1832,
the state of South Carolina formally nullified the tax,
and added, that if the federal government
challenged its right to do so,
South Carolina would withdraw from the Union.
- It's hard for us to understand
how serious nullification was.
It nearly led to civil war.
Troops in South Carolina were marching.
Jackson himself
wanted to lead the federal army into South Carolina.
They were fortifying forts in Charleston Harbor.
This was very close to an all out civil war,
and it was Andrew Jackson's duty to stop that.
- [Martin] Instead of reacting in anger,
as he had so often before,
Jackson issued a presidential proclamation
in which he appealed to the people of South Carolina.
- [Jackson] Seduced, as you have been, my fellow countrymen,
by ambitious, deluded, and designing men,
I call upon you in the language of truth,
and with the feelings of a father,
to retrace your steps.
Say, we, too, are citizens of America.
Carolina is one of these proud states.
Her best blood has cemented this happy union.
And then add, if you can, without horror and remorse,
this happy union we will dissolve.
This picture of peace and prosperity, we will deface.
These fertile fields, we will deluge with blood.
Disunion by armed force is treason.
Are you ready to incur its guilt?
- And that's when he said the Union is perpetual,
it's not a union of states, it is a union of people,
and, once you're in that union, you can't get out,
and, I ask the chief executive,
have sworn to enforce the laws.
Both those ideas
are adopted by Abraham Lincoln in his inaugural.
The whole thing is set up by Jackson.
- [Martin] With both sides preparing for civil war,
the most skilled negotiator in Congress, Henry Clay,
succeeded in winning passage of a compromise bill
that dramatically lowered the tariff.
Jackson signed it, South Carolina agreed to abide by it,
and war was averted.
For Andrew Jackson,
the story of nullification contained a dire warning.
If Americans kept arguing about slavery,
a civil war was inevitable.
And, so, the president began appealing to Northerners
to stop agitating against slavery.
But that was not what the abolition movement had in mind.
In 1835, the New York abolitionist, Lewis and Arthur Tappan,
realized that the steam powered printing press
made something brand new in American politics possible,
a mass mailing.
And so they sent pamphlets
to thousands of influential people in the South,
such as ministers,
to try and convince them to speak out against slavery.
The first batch of pamphlets arrived
in Charleston, South Carolina.
But the postmaster never delivered them to the addressees.
Instead, they were taken to the town square and burned.
- Jackson and the Jacksonians' paranoia about slavery,
as is seen in this whole incident about
abolitionist literature being sent into the South,
like all paranoia, has some foundation in reality.
Their fear is that the word would get out
to the slave population,
and would incite slaves to revolt.
And this is a concern that they all have in this period,
particularly as you get into the early 1830s,
in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion.
Anytime rebellions have taken place,
slave holders have become increasingly paranoid,
and their instinct is to squash
the articulation of these sorts of expressions
as quickly as is possible.
- [Martin] Tampering with the mail
was a serious federal crime.
But, President Jackson tacitly encouraged postmasters
to destroy the pamphlets.
And he demanded that Congress outlaw mailing them,
saying they were incendiary.
- The Tappan Fliers provide an interesting insight
into what we could say
is the Jacksonians' view of democracy,
because, of all things, the ability to petition,
the ability to get word out about your position,
is a fundamental tenant of all democratic societies.
So, in that sense, then, Jackson and his people
are attempting to squash a clear democratic voice
in this period.
- [Elias] Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee Nation.
What sort of hope have we,
from a president who has an inclination
to disregard laws and treaties?
We have nothing to expect from such a president.
(folk music)
- [Martin] Like Thomas Jefferson,
Andrew Jackson fervently believed
that it was small, self employed farmers
who had made America great.
And, he believed that the key to keeping it great
was to continue expanding West,
so that each new generation could have farms of their own.
- In Jefferson's vision,
the frontier was the place that each generation
would replicate the ideal republican community.
The problem, of course,
is that the native people are already living out there,
and, with one eye, Americans managed to not notice them,
but, with the other eye, they couldn't fail to notice them.
Because, as soon as you got there
you were in conflict with them.
And that creates the fundamental tension
that becomes the story of Indian removal.
- [Martin] In 1830, Jackson won approval from Congress
of an Indian Removal Act
that appropriated half a million dollars,
so that Native Americans living east of the Mississippi
could be removed to land west of the Mississippi.
In support of the act, Jackson said...
- [Jackson] What good man
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,
occupied by more than 12 million happy people,
and filled with all the blessings of liberty,
civilization, and religion?
- [Martin] But Native American tribes, such as the Cherokee,
had an entirely different view than white men
of how to relate to the land.
- The Cherokee way is to share.
It is to be harmonious.
They really were a spiritual people.
They had a way of life
that would perhaps put most Christians to shame.
They exercised that way of life daily.
Every morning, the whole village would go to the water
for a blessing.
And, at this going to water ritual,
this old man sung this song.
(sings in Cherokee)
So, when I sang that song, it would have been the same sound
that you would have heard in the 1700s.
So, that was all disturbed
because of the contact with the whites.
- [Martin] Soon after the creation of the United States,
many in the Cherokee tribe
decided that their one hope of saving their land
was to take Thomas Jefferson's advice
and embrace the white man's way of life.
- The Cherokees, in fact,
took exactly the advice that Jefferson offered.
They settled down, they put on European clothing,
they developed an alphabet, they learned to read and write,
they set up town meetings, and a mayor,
and a city council and all those things,
and they still had to go.
Because the problem was they were sitting in Georgia,
and Georgia was to be ours, not theirs.
They could not coexist.
- [Martin] With Georgia preparing to expel the Cherokee,
two Christian missionaries
brought a case to the Supreme Court
that challenged Georgia's jurisdiction
over the Cherokee Nation.
The Supreme Court ruled in the Cherokee's favor.
But Andrew Jackson declared...
- [Jackson] The decision of the Supreme Court
has fell, stillborn.
- [Martin] Jackson encouraged Georgia to ignore the verdict
on the grounds that the Cherokee were not really a nation.
A writer to the Cherokee newspaper, the Phoenix,
remembering that warriors from the Cherokee Nation
had played a key role in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend
that had launched Jackson on his road to fame,
had this request.
- [Cherokee Writer] Ask of General Jackson,
when the thunders of his cannon
were heard in the Southern Forest,
and he will say, "They are a nation."
These unfortunate people,
who flocked to the standard
of the brave commander at Horseshoe, and nobly fought,
are now repaid with ingratitude and oppression.
- [Martin] Solely on the basis of the color of their skin,
thousands of Cherokee families
were evicted from their homes by American soldiers
and forced onto what became known as The Trail of Tears.
One of the Christian missionaries
who traveled with them, wrote...
- [Missionary] I have no language to express the emotions
which rend our hearts to witness
this season of cruel oppression.
In Georgia, multitudes were not allowed
to take anything with them but the clothes they had on.
Well-furnished houses were left to prey to plunderers,
who, like hungry wolves, follow the progress of the captors
and rifle the houses, and strip the helpless.
For what crime, then, was this whole nation doomed
to this almost unheard of suffering?
- The period of Indian removal
really is a black mark on American history.
America, which started out as a shining city on a hill,
sinks to the bottom of the darkest depths in Indian removal.
Andrew Jackson, and other Americans,
were willing to do what it took
to separate Indians from their land.
If it meant ignoring treaties,
if it meant ignoring principles of international law,
if it meant ignoring common decency and a sense of justice,
then it was done.
- [Martin] With smallpox and cholera rampant
on the Trail of Tears, more than 2,000 Cherokees died.
Andrew Jackson had tried to convince Native Americans
that he was their great white father.
But the Cherokee now had a different name for him.
- They called him Jacksena,
and, other Cherokee people hearing me say that would laugh.
Jackson the Devil.
Jacksena. He's devilized.
(dramatic music)
- [Jackson] Andrew Jackson.
Unless you become more watchful,
you will find that the most important powers of government
have passed into the hands of the corporations.
(folk music)
- [Martin] When it came to Indian removal and slavery,
President Jackson's views
mirrored those of many other Americans.
But there was one issue where he was truly a visionary
in his concern for how average Americans would fare
as the economy became ever more industrialized.
- The world we know was taking shape in those years.
And the questions that were so urgent then
continue to be urgent.
It was the nature of capitalism.
It was how people were gonna make their livings.
And there's nothing scarier,
nothing more fundamental to people,
then how they're going to feed themselves
and clothe their families and make their way in the world.
- [Martin] For centuries,
learning a craft, such a shoe making,
had enabled workers to make a decent living.
But, across the country, artisans like shoe makers
were suddenly losing their jobs to factories.
- All of a sudden,
it's a job that can be done by a child, by a woman,
by an unskilled man for pennies.
But, think what happens to the shoe maker,
the shoe maker who has spent all of his life
learning the skills of making a whole shoe,
his skills have become worthless.
And, as a result, he feels worthless.
And, if you look at how much money he's got in his pocket,
he may be worthless that way also.
He's broke.
(fiddle music)
- [Martin] In the early years
of Andrew Jackson's presidency,
these working class Americans created a new way
of giving voice to their concerns.
The minstrel show.
On the surface, it was simply an expression of racism
and proof of how little white Americans
really knew about black Americans.
But the hidden secret of the minstrel show
was that it was not just about how whites saw blacks,
but also about how they saw themselves.
- Of course you're putting on that mask
to make fun of African Americans,
but, by virtue of putting on that mask,
you also enable yourself to speak of yourself.
The songs of the theater at the time reveal that
the audience is feeling squeezed by a new America.
It's being squeezed by an America
that seems to be coming more and more for the rich
instead of the common people.
So, we can look to the stage
and we can find a place in American society
where that working class could express,
in a powerful and gripping way,
what it felt about what this world
was doing to them our there.
- [Martin] For a working class white American,
putting on the mask of a slave was a way of saying
I feel like a slave.
The minstrels also talked about the man
they hoped would free them.
They sang, there's some who at our party rail,
call us the ragtag and bobtail,
but we have sung within our pale,
who we are will never fail to vote for General Jackson.
For Andrew Jackson, the central question of his presidency
was what he could do to prevent these average Americans
from being exploited by the rich and powerful.
The answer Jackson hit upon
was to destroy an institution that he thought
was giving the wealthy an unfair advantage.
It's real title was the Second Bank of the United States.
But, Jackson supporters called it the Monster Bank.
- Andrew Jackson dislikes all banks, he said at one point,
but he particularly disliked the Bank of the United States
as established by Congress after the War of 1812.
The reason was simple, it had too much power
outside of any kind of public accountability.
The bank was an enormous economic institution.
It could really control credit,
and therefore control the American economy itself.
For Jackson, that meant that the American economy
was being run by people who were not elected.
That these unelected bankers
had their hands on the levers of power,
and could control people's lives, their destinies,
and indeed could control the political system itself.
- [Martin] To Jackson, one of the Monster Bank's worst sins
was that it was funding new style businesses
that were beginning to wrap their tentacles
around both the economy and the government.
These new businesses were called corporations.
- The problem with corporations
as far as Jackson was concerned
was they had no body to be kicked or soul to be damned.
They were faceless, anonymous machines
that were motivated only by
making profit for their shareholders,
and, as a result, they could grow much, much larger
than the average consumer, the average worker,
the average citizen.
- [Martin] But Jackson's opponents thought corporations
would help America become more prosperous.
And they thought his plan to blow up the bank
verged on insanity,
for it was the bank that guaranteed
that the paper dollars in Americans' wallets
were worth something.
- Jackson took a kind of fundamentalist view
of money and credit.
Gold and silver dollars were real money.
Paper was, in some sense, fake.
Those who were perhaps more astute economists than Jackson
thought that this position was just short of neanderthal.
The United States had been built on credit,
as Henry Clay said in the Senate,
"We have always been a paper money people.
"We won the revolution on paper money."
- [Martin] Clay and his allies in Congress
decided to put some heat on Old Hickory.
Near the end of Jackson's first term,
they passed a bill extending the bank's charter.
Clay calculated that the president would have no choice
but to sign the bill,
because a veto would be seen by the American public
as so irresponsible, it would cost Jackson reelection.
But Clay had made a fundamental miscalculation
about the character of Andrew Jackson.
A character that was exemplified by an event
that took place in the midst of the battle over the bank.
At the president's request,
a navy surgeon was brought to the White House
to operate on a painful shoulder.
The problem was a simple one.
There was a bullet in it.
20 years before, during the War of 1812,
Major General Jackson became embroiled in a feud
between one of his officers
and a prominent Nashville family.
Instead of mediating the dispute,
as might have been expected of a man of his stature,
General Jackson took part in a full scale gun battle.
During it, he was shot at point blank range and almost died.
This saga defined the character of Andrew Jackson.
He could not pass up a fight.
And, when he fought, he was willing to risk everything.
Of the bank, he declared...
- [Jackson] The bank is trying to kill me,
but I will kill it.
- [Martin] On July 10th, 1832,
Jackson vetoed the bill reauthorizing the bank.
The president's address in defense of the veto
was perhaps the most important of his life,
for he had to explain to the American people,
not with bombast, but with words from his heart,
why he so fervently opposed the bank.
- Jackson] It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful
too often bend the acts of government
to their selfish purposes.
When the laws on the take to make the rich richer
and the potent more powerful,
the humble members of society,
the farmers, the mechanics, and laborers,
who have neither the time nor the means
of securing like favors to themselves,
have a right to complain
of the injustice of their government.
We can at least take a stand
against any prostitution of our government
to the advancement of the few at the expense of the many.
(parade music)
- [Martin] To help rally support
for Jackson's reelection campaign in 1832,
the president and his closest advisor, Martin Van Buren,
came up with one of the boldest strokes
in American political history.
They founded the Democratic Party.
- Jackson thought of The Democracy, as it was called,
it wasn't called the Democratic Party,
it was called The Democracy,
thought of it as the association of
the vast majority of Americans,
the majority that should govern,
to make sure that they would govern.
There were all sorts of ways
in which ordinary people can participate.
Jackson thinks that's important,
because the ordinary people have to associate more
because they don't have the resources
that the rich and the well born do.
- [Martin] For years,
Jackson's opponents had lampooned his frontier roots
by portraying him as a jackass.
To their shock, the Jacksonians began embracing the symbol.
- Well, the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party
started out as a satire,
as an attack on the rubish,
sort of Beverly Hillbillies nature of
Jackson's Democratic Party.
But, interesting that people like Henry Clay and others
didn't quite understand that
in urban settings, the donkey may have been a figure of fun,
but for people in rural America,
which was most of America at the time,
the donkey was essential to daily life,
and it was someone you could rely on.
And Jackson and the Democrats were presenting themselves
as people you could rely on.
- [Martin] A second party
quickly arose to oppose the Democrats.
Called The National Republicans,
they chose Jackson's fiercest rival, Henry Clay,
to run against him for president.
- Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson hated each other.
Clay saw himself as a great American statesman,
and couldn't quite understand
how this rube from the Carolina back country
who had never gone to school,
who'd never read a book, in Clay's view,
could possibly be so powerful
and have such a hold over the people.
Thereby ensuring that Clay himself would never do that.
Because he didn't appreciate, I think,
Jackson's gifts of both charisma
and the power of his personality.
- [Martin] During the election campaign,
Jackson and his advisors again demonstrated complete mastery
of the media tools available to them.
- This man was sitting for his portrait
again and again and again.
Jackson had a sense
that I want the American people to know me,
and to know what I look like.
And, I think that says something about his political sense.
He's a first in many ways,
and he's the first president that I know
who had a desire to use the media
to communicate with the American people.
- [Martin] On election day,
voters flocked to the polls in record numbers.
And, thanks to Jackson's reputation as a military hero,
and his continuing expansion of America,
they gave Old Hickory a landslide victory.
But what Andrew Jackson read into the victory
was that he now had a mandate
to destroy The Bank of the United States.
And so the president ordered the government's money
removed from the bank.
But even some in his own cabinet
thought such a step was illegal.
And Jackson had to replace two treasury secretaries
before finding a third who would obey him.
- Nothing like this would happen again
until Richard Nixon, during the Watergate Crisis,
had to go through three attorneys' general
to find one who would fire Archibald Cox
as special prosecutor.
- [Martin] On the floor of the US Senate,
Henry Clay asserted that nothing less
than the future of American Democracy was at stake.
- [Clay] We are in the midst of a revolution,
hitherto bloodless,
but rapidly tending toward the concentration of all power
in the hands of one man.
- [Martin] For the only time in American history,
the Senate censured the president.
People throughout the nation began calling it The Bank War.
It was a war
in which reason and economics were the casualties,
and the chief combatants
were Jackson and the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle.
- The confrontation between Andrew Jackson
and The Bank of the United States
escalated, you might almost say,
beyond the bounds of sanity.
From the point of view of Nicholas Biddle,
president of The Bank of the United States,
this maniac president
was going to destroy the American economy.
And both sides got so wrapped up in it
that they did reckless things.
Nicholas Biddle,
in an effort to procure a recharter,
actually triggered what was called a panic in those days,
of a stock market crash and a brief depression,
not realizing that, in doing this,
he was proving every point Jackson made
about the reckless power that The Bank of the United States
held over ordinary Americans' lives.
- [Martin] Finally, in 1836, the bank's charter expired
and its doors were closed.
And Andrew Jackson, once again,
emerged from a battle victorious.
- An historian has written
that every once in a while in American history
it becomes necessary to save American capitalism
from the capitalists.
That, left to their own devices,
they will so accrete power
that they will end up ruining the economy.
Well, Jackson in some ways saw that
was the beginning of that process,
as American capitalism was just beginning to develop.
He saw that, to keep the system going
in a democratic fashion, as he saw it,
it was necessary that accountability
had to be there in the system
in a way that it did not seem to be as of 1832.
(tense music)
- [Martin] Jackson's battles
during his second term in office were not just political.
One afternoon, as the president was leaving the capitol,
a mentally ill man,
who believed that Jackson had killed his father
approached him.
(tense music)
(gun fires)
The explosion of the pistol's percussion cap
convinced bystanders that the president had been shot.
But the gunpowder inside the pistol failed to ignite.
The assailant then drew a second pistol
and fired point blank into the president's chest.
(gun fires)
Miraculously, the powder inside the second gun
also failed to ignite.
As a result, Andrew Jackson survived
the first assassination attempt ever
against an American president.
Then, in the presidential election of 1836,
Jackson's hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren,
rode Old Hickory's coat tails to victory.
(folk music)
On March 4th, 1837,
Andrew Jackson's tumultuous presidency came to an end.
In a sign of the remarkable changes
that had taken place during his years in office,
he left Washington, not in a carriage pulled by horses,
as he had arrived eight years before,
but on a train car pulled by a steam powered locomotive.
To a reporter, Jackson said...
- [Jackson] After eight years as president,
I have only two regrets.
That I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun.
- [Martin] The legacy Andrew Jackson left behind him
was a complicated one.
But, if there was one key feature
that would allow future generations to make sense of it all,
it was the way in which Jackson's fight
for the rights of the average white man
pointed the way for others to seek rights of their own.
- Jacksonian democracy had no room in it for black people,
it was not willing to free the slaves,
it had utter contempt
for the political aspirations of women,
and everybody knows it was
utterly violent and merciless to the Indians.
But, look how the victims of Jacksonian democracy
defended themselves.
They didn't go out and become monarchists.
Instead, what they did
was to take the principles of Jacksonian democracy
and demand that they be applied to them too.
When you look at the feminists,
they used the Declaration of Independence
to demand the right to vote.
When you look at the abolitionists,
they said the demand for human equality
is good for the slaves as well.
When the Indians wanted to
defend themselves against white encroachment,
the Cherokees created a written constitution
and a democratic government of their own.
So that the abolitionists, the feminists, the Indians,
all responded to this aggressive Jacksonian democracy,
not by becoming monarchists,
but by saying, "We have to have some too."
- [Martin] Jackson spent the remaining years of his life
at his beloved Hermitage.
Though others would one day see a connection
between his quest for opportunity for white men
and the ideal of opportunity for all,
Andrew Jackson himself never did.
He continued to own dozens of slaves,
never worrying that they toiled from sunrise to midnight
with no hope of a better life,
or giving any thought to what their opinion was of him.
- Sometimes, when they had a funeral for a fellow slave,
like at The Hermitage, they would say,
"One day, your head must bow as low as ours."
As they sang this funeral march to the grave.
One day, your head must bow as low as ours.
When they sang that song, they're looking at Andrew Jackson,
the master, as they march along.
The whites think that they're just singin' a
great, melodious song.
But it had a deep meaning,
and, what it meant it, one day you must die too.
One thing that makes all men equal is death.
All men must die equally.
One day your head must bow as low as ours.
- [Martin] On June 8th, 1845, Andrew Jackson died.
America's seventh president
was laid to rest beside his beloved wife, Rachel,
in the garden at The Hermitage.
14 years later, Jackson's first biographer, James Parton,
visited the grave.
The historian had already spent many months
reading what hundreds of Jackson's contemporaries
had to say about him.
But the writer still found it nearly impossible
to sum up Old Hickory.
- [Parton] If anyone, at the end of a year even,
had asked what I discovered respecting General Jackson,
I might have answered thus.
Andrew Jackson, I am given to understand,
was a patriot and a traitor.
He was one of the greatest generals,
and wholly ignorant of the art of war.
A stickler for discipline,
he never hesitated to disobey his superior.
The first of statesmen,
he never devised or framed a measure.
He was the most candid of men,
and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation.
He was a democratic autocrat,
an urbane savage,
an atrocious saint.
- [Announcer] Discover more about Andrew Jackson,
explore the history of the imperial presidency,
and watch debates about Indian removal, slavery,
and other controversies from the Jacksonian era at PBS.org.
(folk music)