The Hero in Twilight
President Jackson bade farewell to the country at the conclusion of his second term in 1837 and returned to Tennessee to live out his days at the Hermitage, surrounded by family and friends. Even in retirement, the old general—he is said to have preferred that title to president—remained a potent symbol in national politics, and his name and image were often invoked by Democrats against Whig opponents.
Statesmen and foreign dignitaries journeyed to the Hermitage to pay their respects. Yet Jackson’s otherwise quiet retirement was troubled by financial crises and failing health. The failure of his cotton crop in 1841 obliged Jackson to rely on the generosity of his old friends, including Jean Baptiste Plauché, who had served with the general at New Orleans.
After the cotton crop failed at Jackson's plantation in Mississippi, he found himself on the brink of financial ruin. Only a timely loan of $6,000 from his old Louisiana friend Jean Baptiste Plauché, who served with Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans, saved the former president from bankruptcy. The loan would amount to about $150,000 in today's currency.
The retired general and president is shown on the grounds of his plantation home, the Hermitage, perhaps contemplating his legacy. Jackson remained a popular subject for artists even after his retirement from public life.
Andrew Jackson was the second American president to be photographed. John Quincy Adams was the first. This image was captured at the Hermitage in Jackson's last months. Weakened by chronic illness, Old Hickory had to be propped upright by pillows.
This small print is based on an 1830 original portrait of Jackson by Ralph E. W. Earl that was first copied and printed by John H. Bufford in Boston in 1833 and again by J. F. E. Prud'homme circa 1839. This version is different from Bufford's and Prud'homme's in some details.
This political cartoon depicts President Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, trapped by a log cabin jail representing the public preference for the more popular Whig candidate William Henry Harrison. Jackson strains to free Van Buren using a "hickory" lever and a cotton bale labeled "New Orleans," but the cabin is wedged in place by a mound of clay, representing Henry Clay.
Jackson’s Return to New Orleans (1840)
In spite of his delicate health, the seventy-three-year-old former general and president returned to the Crescent City on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. According to the Daily Picayune, "an immense throng assembled at the wharf to welcome him, and the steamboats, vessels in the river, and house-tops were alive with people waving their hats and handkerchiefs as he approached." Feted throughout the city, Jackson was the focal point of parades, orations at the cathedral and Place d'Armes, and a performance at the St. Charles Theater. The general briefly visited the site of the battlefield and somehow found time to sit for portraits by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans and Jean Baptiste Adolphe La Fosse before boarding the riverboat that would carry him home to Nashville via Natchez.
Jules Lion (1810–1866), a French-born painter, lithographer, and daguerreotypist active in New Orleans from 1837 to 1866, created three lithographic portraits of Jackson, none drawn from life, and all printed in Paris. The January 16, 1840, Louisiana Courier announced this variant as a good likeness, playfully adding that "the Old Hero has been taken by a lion."
Jackson's souvenir autograph from his January 1840 visit to New Orleans provides a variation of a famous April 1816 after-dinner toast by the naval hero Stephen Decatur: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong."
Jacques Amans (1801–1888), a French portrait painter working in New Orleans, approached Jackson at the urging of local citizens to request a sitting. "If this favor should be granted by you," Amans wrote on January 10, "my intention is to present the portrait to the city of New-Orleans." Jackson complied and sat for Amans, possibly in multiple one-hour sessions, in a room at the St. Louis Hotel. The elderly, bespectacled Jackson appears to be fatigued, possibly due to the whirlwind of activities surrounding his visit to the city.
United States v. Andrew Jackson (1815)
General Jackson's arrival in New Orleans in 1814 was preceded by weeks of urgent correspondence from Governor William C. C. Claiborne questioning the loyalty of Louisianans to the United States. After having read a proclamation to the "Natives of Louisiana" from a British officer and seeing firsthand the panic and disorder preceding the British landing, Jackson declared martial law on December 16, 1814, suspending the free movement of citizens and placing everyone under his military authority. It was an unprecedented move for an American general, one that would have lasting ramifications for Jackson and the country at large.
Soon after the decisive defeat of the British army at Chalmette and the subsequent departure of its surviving troops, locals implored Jackson to heed reports of a peace treaty and lift the military curfews and restrictions that had become a hardship. Jackson would not do so while the British army remained in the Gulf region and without official word from Washington. When a newspaper editorial criticized the general's heavy-handedness with the local French population, Jackson had the writer, a state senator, arrested for inciting mutiny. A federal judge who attempted to intervene was also arrested and subsequently banished from Jackson's military jurisdiction. Official news of the war's end reached Jackson’s headquarters in mid-March, and he immediately lifted martial law. Within days he received a summons from the judge he had arrested, Dominick A. Hall of the District Court of Louisiana. Hall ultimately fined the general $1,000 for contempt of court. Jackson quietly paid the hefty fine before his departure, but he also obtained statements from fellow officers in support of his use of martial law during the crisis.
In the elections of 1824 and 1828, Jackson’s political opponents lambasted his trampling of the Constitution, but Jackson never apologized for his decision, stating that he would "under similar circumstances not refrain from a course equally bold." After Jackson's retirement from the presidency, his friends mounted a campaign to have the 1815 fine refunded to the general, with interest. A heated national debate in the early 1840s led to resolutions supporting Jackson in various state legislatures. Early in 1844, President John Tyler signed the joint congressional resolution refunding the fine with interest. Even so, because of its constitutional implications, the episode remains controversial to this day. As the historian James Parton observed, "the maintaining of martial law in New Orleans two months too long, we may condemn, and, I think, should condemn; yet most of the citizens of the United States will concur in the wish, that when next a [foreign] army lands upon American soil, there may be a Jackson to meet them at the landing-place."
General Jackson published an address to calm public panic following reports of a British victory against American gunboats on Lake Borgne. On the following day, December 16, 1814, he declared martial law in the city, suspending the free speech and movement of its citizens and making everyone subject to his military authority.
Around the time of his departure from New Orleans, General Jackson requested a statement in support of his use of martial law from the ranking US naval officer in New Orleans, Captain Daniel Todd Patterson (1786–1839).
This broadside from an unknown publisher offers a scathing account of the March 1815 arrest of Louis Louaillier, a member of the Louisiana legislature who had written a newspaper editorial critical of General Jackson's policy of banning French volunteers from New Orleans after they had helped to defend the city, and the subsequent arrest of US District Court Judge Dominick A. Hall, who had sought Louaillier's release. Louaillier's name is misspelled "Louallier" throughout.
C. J. Hedenberg, a well-to-do Philadelphia shoe merchant and Jackson supporter, commissioned artist Christian Schussele (1824–1879) to depict Old Hickory's trial before Judge Dominick Hall in 1815. Many of Jackson's military and civilian allies appear in Schussele's rendering and are identified in this pamphlet published soon after the painting's completion in 1859. The original painting is now in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum.
Years after his arrest by Andrew Jackson and as the former general campaigned for the presidency, Louis Louaillier presented a written defense of his own conduct in 1815 and an attack on Jackson's character.
Official government reports concerning the circumstances of General Jackson's trial and fine in 1815 were printed in Washington and elsewhere in the early 1840s to inform the spirited public debate over the question of a possible refund.
Charles Jared Ingersoll (1782–1862), an attorney and Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, published a history of the War of 1812 in four volumes (1845–52). Several of Ingersoll's speeches on the conflict and its origins had appeared in pamphlets and newspapers during the war.
Louisiana's bilingual legislative resolution "to procure the passage of a [federal] law to restore to General Andrew Jackson One Thousand Dollars . . ." was signed on behalf of Charles Derbigny, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Felix Garcia, president of the Senate, and Alexandre Mouton, governor of Louisiana.
The national resolution to restore Jackson's fine was taken up in December 1843 and approved the following February. The final document was signed on behalf of the Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate and signed by President Tyler.
The Glorious Eighth of January
The anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans was long celebrated as a national holiday, an occasion for chest-thumping speeches, music, parades, and banquets. These observances were often tied to Jackson’s political rise and his association with the Democratic Party. Yet, as Jackson’s biographer James Parton observed, "not even the party celebrations of the eighth of January ought to hide from us or obscure the genuine merit of those who, in the darkest hour this republic has ever known, enabled it to believe again in its invincibility, by closing a war of disaster in a blaze of triumph."
This political cartoon from Harper's Weekly pokes fun at the Tammany Hall scandals that had tarnished the Democratic Party political machine in New York City. A calendar on the wall behind Jackson calls January 8 "St. Hickory Day."
This newspaper illustration shows a large performance hall with ornate balconies and crowds of people watching a theatrical tableau on January 8, 1858, the forty-third anniversary of the famous battle. A semicircle chorus of women and mock "troops" stands in the background, in front of the stage.
Military and civilian balls were common commemorations of the 1815 victory at New Orleans. This invitation for an 1829 ball lists some prominent New Yorkers, including Major General William Paulding Jr., a war hero, a former congressman, and, at that time, the mayor of New York.
Prominent Democratic Party leaders commemorated January 8 with patriotic speeches. The author of this example, the attorney and statesman Henry Dilworth Gilpin (1801–1860), served as solicitor of the US Treasury and later as US attorney general in the Van Buren administration.
The anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans was celebrated as a national holiday in many places throughout the country. It was seen as a patriotic occasion very much on a par with the Fourth of July.
This advertisement from a Philadelphia theater seeks two hundred extras to portray soldiers in an 1829 play commemorating the Battle of New Orleans, titled "The Eighth of January," by Richard Penn Smith.
Many January 8 celebrations were organized by local Democratic Party committees, as a way to keep their party's leading candidate in the public eye. The practice continued well after Jackson's death. This 1879 souvenir was produced in Smithfield, New Jersey.
Mary Emily Donelson Wilcox (1829–1905) was the daughter of Andrew Jackson's nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson and his wife, Emily Donelson. In this letter Mary shares childhood memories of how the anniversaries of the Battle of New Orleans were observed at the Hermitage. She recalls that Jackson himself played a major role in these events.
