A Man of the People
Some artistic representations of Jackson made between 1822 and 1827 mark his transition from military commander to civilian statesman, though he was still very much the Hero of New Orleans. In 1821, a few years after the First Seminole War (1817–18), Jackson resigned his commission as a major general and briefly served as the governor of Florida, newly acquired from Spain. Soon after his return to Tennessee, the legislature nominated him as a candidate for the 1824 presidential election.
The 1824 race in Louisiana was notable for the creative means used by Jackson’s supporters to tilt the odds away from Henry Clay, who was predicted to carry the state. While one would expect the Hero of New Orleans to be the favored candidate, many French-speaking Louisianans harbored hard feelings over Jackson’s heavy-handedness during the crisis of 1814–15. Jackson’s supporters used strategically timed horse races and other diversions to distract and delay pro-Clay delegates from reaching the legislative session in New Orleans, where the state’s electors would be chosen. Several pro-Clay legislators fell to temptation and failed to appear, thus splitting Louisiana’s electoral votes between Jackson and John Quincy Adams, and possibly costing Clay the presidency.
Jackson went on to win the popular vote in the national election, but without the necessary margin to enable him to take office. Aghast that Jackson might win, Henry Clay wrote a letter that was widely published in newspapers, expressing disbelief “that killing 2500 Englishmen at N. Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.” In the end, the US House of Representatives awarded the presidency to John Quincy Adams, who chose Henry Clay as his secretary of state, provoking cries of “Bargains and Corruption” among Jackson’s supporters.
After Jackson's retirement from the military in 1821 and before his 1824 presidential campaign, images of Jackson in civilian attire began to show his transition from soldier to statesman.
The South Carolina-born artist James Akin (ca. 1773–1846) was a Philadelphia engraver, painter, and caricaturist. Here Akin denounces the press's treatment of Andrew Jackson during the 1824 presidential campaign and lampoons the politics of the caucus system of nominating candidates for public office.
This official letter from Louisiana's electors to the US Senate splits the state's five electoral votes in the 1824 election between presidential candidates Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. Jackson won the popular vote in most states but fell short of the majority needed for a decisive victory. The US House of Representatives decided the election in favor of Adams, outraging Jackson's supporters.
Portrayals of Andrew Jackson as a champion of the common man appeared through the 1824 election campaign. His image was used to promote benevolent societies and local Democratic Party committees across the country.
Andrew and Rachel
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Andrew Jackson remained devoted to his wife, Rachel, and wrote to her often when he was on active service. They are said to have shared a love for tobacco and to have often smoked their pipes together when he was at home.
Jackson sends his regards to his wife and son, Andrew Jr., and asks that they "take good care of little Lyncoya," the orphaned Creek Indian boy that Jackson had sent to his Tennessee home, the Hermitage, during the Creek War.
The 1828 Presidential Election
The second contest between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson was one of the nastiest, most vituperative political races in American history. Confronted with the popularity of the Hero of New Orleans, Adams’s supporters attempted to tarnish Jackson’s military reputation by turning it against him. They criticized the general’s declaration of martial law in New Orleans in 1814–15 and focused attention on another wartime incident concerning the court-martial of six Tennessee militiamen in Mobile for mutiny in December 1814. Jackson had upheld their death sentence from New Orleans, hoping this severe example would prevent mass desertions and preserve the security of the region. The executions were carried out on February 21, 1815.
The six dead men were eulogized in 1828 in a series of so-called coffin broadsides from pro-Adams publishers who accused Jackson of being a murderer. These episodes and others from the First Seminole War and Jackson’s civilian life were used to paint the Hero of New Orleans as a tyrannical “Military Chieftain” who could not be trusted with the power of the presidency.
The 1828 election fundamentally hinged on the personalities and pasts of both candidates, rather than their political philosophies. In the end, Jackson’s huge popularity in the South and West could not be denied, and he won the election in a landslide, carrying all but a handful of New England states. His jubilant supporters decorated their homes and places of business with souvenir objects—some manufactured in England—commemorating Jackson as “the People’s President.”
This pro-Jackson broadside from the 1828 presidential election contrasts the heroic general's fitness for office with Adams's dubious use of treasury funds and his unpatriotic criticism of US armed forces while on diplomatic duty abroad.
A pro-Adams handbill highlights an 1813 brawl between Andrew Jackson and Thomas Hart Benton and others in Nashville, asking if those opposed to "the principal actor in this bloody outrage" would be safe if Jackson was elected president and accusing him of planning "military rule."
Household objects commemorating Jackson as a presidential candidate became enormously popular in the 1820s. This pitcher was likely manufactured in Staffordshire, England. The portrait appears to be based on an 1824 engraving by James Barton Longacre (1794–1869) or a similar 1825 example by Peter Maverick (1780–1831); both engravings were in turn derived from an original 1824 miniature watercolor by Joseph Wood (1778–1830), now lost.
John Binns (1772–1860), an Irish-born Philadelphia journalist and publisher, opposed Jackson's presidential candidacy in 1824 and again in 1828. He produced the first of the so-called coffin broadsides, based on an incident from Jackson's wartime oversight of troops, to sway voters and undercut Jackson's formidable reputation as a military hero.
The coffin broadsides produced by Jackson's opponents in 1828 eulogized six Tennessee militiamen found guilty of desertion from their post in Mobile in the waning days of the War of 1812. Jackson upheld their death sentence from New Orleans. This example gives an eyewitness account of the executions. An inset woodcut shows Jackson attacking another man with a cane.
This unusual variant appears to be a British parody of other coffin broadsides: 184 black coffins of varying sizes surround a central coffin-shaped cartouche with a text lamenting the loss of General Edward Pakenham and other British soldiers who had come to New Orleans in 1815 to teach Americans "the blessings of a Monarchy."
Individual coffin broadsides varied in their details, but most featured the trappings of death announcements, including woodcut coffins and mourning borders. In addition to descriptions of the executed Tennessee militiamen, this example includes a caricature of Jackson caning another man, an account portraying the Battle of Horseshoe Bend as a massacre of an Indian village, and a letter describing a brawl between Jackson and others in Nashville.
President Jackson (1829–1837)
Andrew Jackson’s presidency coincided with what one historian described as “the full flowering of American democracy.” His election particularly reflected the will and aspirations of thousands of Americans intent on pushing the boundaries of their country ever farther south and west. Not only Old Hickory was their champion, but he was also one of them. His inauguration set the tone: the doors of the White House were thrown open, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, to “immense crowds of all sorts of people, from the highest and most polished down to the most vulgar and gross in the nation.”
The political historian Alexis de Tocqueville dismissed President Jackson as “a man of violent character and middling capacities”—an opinion no doubt colored by the Frenchman’s association with East Coast elites who were horrified by Jackson’s popularity. On the other hand, Josiah Quincy Jr., a prominent Bostonian charged with escorting President Jackson during a visit, found him to be “vigorously a gentleman in his high sense of honor and in the natural straightforward courtesies.” Quincy added that he was “not prepared to be favorably impressed with a man who was simply intolerable to the Brahmin caste of my native state.”
The popular and uncompromising former general served two turbulent terms as president. His firm stance against South Carolina’s 1832 attempt to avoid federally mandated tariffs, as well as his willingness to fight France over its failure to fulfill treaty obligations, earned the respect of friends and foes alike, but other policies overshadowed his successes. Old Hickory’s dismantling of the Second United States Bank, which he saw as elitist and unconstitutional, led to a split among his cabinet advisors and ultimately to congressional censure for alleged abuse of executive power. President Jackson’s attempts at federal reform, including streamlining government departments and replacing key administrators, ushered in a long tradition of political patronage that persists to this day.
For many people today, the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to reservations west of the Mississippi remains Jackson’s most troubling presidential legacy. To be fair, the plan predated his administration by decades. Thomas Jefferson proposed essentially the same policy in 1803; it was one of his rationales for the Louisiana Purchase. But Jackson carried the plan into effect, and his close involvement in the removal is well documented in letters and documents of the era. Old Hickory did not necessarily hate Indians, as some historians have alleged, but he certainly saw their presence within the southern states as incompatible with a secure American empire.
Jackson's fame by the time of his first election as president may even have eclipsed that of George Washington. This wallpaper print, likely produced in France, places Jackson in the pantheon of American presidents, but he is very much the central figure.
Jackson firmly opposed South Carolina's argument that federal tariff laws with which they disagreed were null and void within the state's boundaries. As tensions grew to the point where secession was openly discussed, he pledged to keep the state in line by armed force if necessary. A compromise was eventually reached, but the so-called Nullification Crisis exposed deep divisions that presaged the eventual Civil War.
This campaign song to promote Jackson's reelection in 1832 was intended to be sung to the tune of an older song called "Moll Brook Is Gone to the War." The Irish-born publisher John Kenedy had compiled The American Songster, a selection of 150 popular modern songs, in 1829; he produced subsequent editions in the 1830s.
Jackson's administration removed federal protections for the Cherokee living in Georgia as part of an effort to force them to migrate west, beyond the Mississippi River. In the end, the Cherokee and Creek nations were pushed out of their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama via the infamous "Trail of Tears."
European colonial powers began the tradition of issuing peace medals to Native American allies, and George Washington and later US presidents continued the practice until the late nineteenth century. These tokens were usually presented to chiefs or prominent tribal leaders on special occasions.
This printed view depicts a diplomatic rupture between the United States and France concerning multimillion-dollar claims against France for American ships seized during the Napoleonic Wars. A uniformed President Jackson holds the 1831 treaty obligating French payments, while the French king Louis Philippe holds a paper representing the amount owed, as other massive debts spill out of the overturned money chest behind him.
Personal Pieces of History: Crafted Versions of Andrew Jackson
Jackson's enormous fame through much of the nineteenth century sustained a cottage industry among artists and craftsmen who produced souvenirs and folk art renderings for sale and home display. For some, the ubiquity of Old Hickory's likeness was too much of a good thing. "We have Jackson hats, and Jackson coats and Jackson jackets, and Jackson trousers, and Jackson boots, and Jackson slippers," complained one anonymous editorialist in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette in 1834. "From our public squares to the country taverns, from the Hall of State to our modest homes, all is Jackson, Jackson, Jackson."
Magdalena Hostetter, born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1793, copied a circa-1815 aquatint engraving by William Strickland (1788–1854). People all over the country—professionally trained and self-taught artists—were creating images of the famous General Jackson for the public and for their own homes.
This folk art portrait of the famous general unaccountably misspells his name as "Jaqson." The unknown artist possibly copied an 1860 engraving by Henry B. Hall (1808–1884) that was in turn based on an 1819–20 original painting by John Vanderlyn (1775–1852).
The interior panels of this leather wallet are embossed with two identical tooled portraits of General Jackson in uniform, with small block-letter inscriptions reading "NEW ORLEANS / JANUARY 8TH 1815." It may have been crafted as a souvenir of the 1824 or 1828 presidential election.
This is one of a pair of dolls, created by an unknown maker, that may have been inspired by the film The Buccaneer. A famous and possibly apocryphal meeting between General Jackson and the pirate Jean Laffite is said to have taken place in late 1814, shortly before the Battle of New Orleans.
Souvenir walking sticks made of hickory from the Hermitage were popular long after Jackson's death, at least as late as the 1880s. Once in hand, the sticks could be finished and decorated according to the tastes of each owner.
Inexpensive pasteboard boxes for the storage of household articles were common features of mid-nineteenth-century American closets. They were often covered with colorful printed paper, and some designs commemorated popular political figures such as presidents Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison.
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