Death and Immortality
Andrew Jackson died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845, and was buried two days later in a garden tomb next to his wife, Rachel. As news of his death spread via mounted couriers, riverboats, and newspapers, communities around the country spontaneously organized funeral processions, eulogies, and other solemnities to mark the former president’s passing. In New York City, businesses closed and four hundred thousand people paid their respects as a five-mile-long funeral procession wound its way through the streets; some spectators climbed trees for a better view. The national outpouring of grief for a fallen hero provided an occasion for new artistic interpretations of Jackson on memorial ribbons, prints, and other objects.
Clark Mills and the Jackson Equestrian Statue (1853–1856)
The American sculptor Clark Mills (1810–1883) had never personally seen Andrew Jackson or an equestrian statue when he designed and built his famous monument to Old Hickory. Employing his self-taught metallurgy and engineering skills, Mills was able to create a statue in which Jackson’s horse stood balanced on its hind legs without toppling—an unprecedented artistic feat at the time. Twenty thousand people came to see the unveiling of Mills’s Jackson statue on January 8, 1853, in Washington, DC’s Lafayette Square. Senator Stephen A. Douglas addressed the crowd, and Mills pulled himself up on the horse’s forelegs to demonstrate the sturdiness of his design.
In 1856 a second version of Mills’s famous statue was erected in New Orleans’s historic Place d’ Armes, which had been renamed Jackson Square in anticipation of the monument. The finished statue’s inauguration drew thousands of onlookers to the very place where General Jackson had reviewed his troops in 1814. More than one hundred and sixty years later, the famous statue still salutes visitors to Jackson Square and is one of New Orleans’s most enduring and recognizable landmarks.
The figure enclosed in a cusped arch and decorative floral filigrees is based on Clark Mills's statue of Andrew Jackson, the first equestrian statue created in the United States. A raised half-inch L foundry mark appears on the reverse of the panel; the maker has not yet been identified.
The American sculptor Clark Mills had never personally seen Andrew Jackson or an equestrian statue when he designed and built his famous monument to Old Hickory. Mills may have been inspired by any of a number of popular prints depicting the Hero of New Orleans.
Clark Mills commissioned as many as two dozen statuettes from a Philadelphia foundry, perhaps as gifts for persons financing the full-scale bronze statues in Washington and New Orleans. Over twenty separately cast sections were joined with lead-tin solder and then painted. The center support on this example was added to reduce stress on the horse's legs while the object is exhibited.
The newspaper artist responsible for this view copied architectural details from an 1842 lithograph by Jules Lion. By the time of the 1856 unveiling of the Jackson statue, the St. Louis Cathedral had received a new facade and towers designed by Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly (1805–1875).
“The Union Must and Shall be Preserved” (1855–1865)
At an 1830 dinner, Andrew Jackson famously rebuked John C. Calhoun and other pro-nullification officials with the toast: “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved!” Jackson’s words were inscribed at the base of Clark Mills’s equestrian statue in Washington. As the country drifted toward civil war in the 1850s, other artistic evocations of the late president as a unifying hero began to appear.
Despite its resemblance to many 1845 memorials to Jackson, this is a Civil War–era broadside that evokes Jackson's unyielding defense of the Union. Sherman's poem pointedly references the Nullification Crisis of 1832, wherein South Carolina had threatened to secede during Jackson's first term.
Andrew Jackson's popularity as a subject at midcentury may have been a cultural response to the looming division between North and South, as artists sought to evoke images of American unity.
An unusual mid-nineteenth-century print produced in New Orleans shows Old Hickory wearing a top hat instead of the cocked hat or chapeau bras that he is generally thought to have worn in 1815.
Jackson’s Imprint on the Crescent City
Whatever their opinion of Jackson, Louisianans through the nineteenth century enthusiastically or begrudgingly commemorated the Hero of New Orleans in pamphlets, banknotes, and local landmarks. To this day, Jackson’s name and image live on in some of the Crescent City’s most beloved places, brands, and customs.
The 150th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans inspired this design for a carnival souvenir doubloon. Mardi Gras parade floats in subsequent years have, from time to time, included representations of the famous general or his statue in Jackson Square.
Some members of New Orleans's French-speaking population bitterly resented Jackson's suspicions of their loyalty in 1814 and 1815. The locally famous Creole legislator Bernard Marigny argued that he and his fellow French-speaking Louisianans stood by the general and deserved a share of his famous victory.
Jackson Brewing Company was founded on the upriver corner of Jackson Square in 1891 and subsequently operated by the Fabacher family, whose range of brews included a beer called Fabacher. The brewery purchased the rights to the "JAX" beer name from a Jacksonville, Florida, company in 1956, and it soon became the leading beer in the local market. The company closed in 1974.
The so-called Jackson House at 619 St. Peter Street occupies part of the site of the colonial guardhouse and prison demolished in 1837. The house was built as a residential structure two years after Jackson last visited New Orleans in January of 1840. It is now part of the Louisiana State Museum.
The Andrew Jackson restaurant opened in the French Quarter on June 26, 1964. Prominent on the front cover is a photograph of a life-sized Enrique Alferez statue of Jackson that was displayed at the restaurant; the back cover includes a brief essay on Jackson by local author Harnett T. Kane (1910–1984).
Traces of Old Hickory: Andrew Jackson in the Popular Consciousness
Although he is long gone, Andrew Jackson is certainly not forgotten, and his image continues to be a part of American life and memory. In advertisements, comic strips, movies, popular songs, and twenty-dollar bills, Old Hickory remains one of our country’s most recognizable historical figures.
The actor Charlton Heston portrayed General Andrew Jackson opposite Yul Brynner as Jean Laffite in the 1959 remake of The Buccaneer. Heston had already portrayed Old Hickory in a 1953 film, The President's Lady, which dramatized Jackson's marriage to Rachel Donelson Robards.
The American Adventure comic strip by Bradford Smith and Dan Heilman ran in newspapers from 1949 to 1951. This installment dramatizes the contribution of Jean Laffite's Baratarian pirates to Jackson's defense of New Orleans. Heilman went on in 1952 to become the first artist of the long-running Judge Parker comic strip.
Many Americans first learned about the Battle of New Orleans from this popular song written and arranged by Jimmy Driftwood and sung by Johnny Horton. The tune can still be heard on riverboats making the excursion from downtown New Orleans to the Chalmette National Battlefield.
Small glass paperweights with inlaid portraits were produced in France, England, and the United States in the nineteenth century. This twentieth-century example comes from Baccarat, a producer of crystal glass in the Lorraine region of eastern France.
President Truman refers to the story of Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliot presenting President Jackson with an ancient Roman sarcophagus with the declaration that the famous general should eventually rest in "an Emperor's coffin." Jackson politely refused, noting that such funerary magnificence was out of step with "the simplicity of our republican institutions, and the plainness of our republican citizens, who are the sovereigns of our glorious Union."
This modern print is perhaps based on an 1852 engraving by Thomas B. Welch (1814–1874) that was in turn based on an original circa-1824 painting by Thomas Sully (1783–1872). Most Americans will recognize it as the prototype for the portrait featured on the twenty-dollar bill. Jackson has graced that banknote since 1928, when his portrait replaced that of Grover Cleveland.
James Flora (1914–1998) was a book and magazine illustrator who is best known for the album covers he designed for Columbia and RCA Victor in the 1940s and 1950s. His impressionistic portrait of Andrew Jackson surrounds the general with martial imagery and conveys a stern, resolute nature.
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