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.