I Can't Stress Enough How Distracted I Was...

I am trying to branch out beyond my little corner of the world and demonstrate some intellectual curiosity.  But mostly I just got distracted when I saw this picture online.  What could possibly make this man so unhappy? I was flabbergasted to learn that this wizened old gentleman was our 7th President — Andrew Jackson.  I certainly did not think that Jackson had survived to the age of photography, and this photo supports the idea that he was not particularly happy to have made it.

Details of Jackson as a President were a bit hazy for me, however, and his picture wasn’t really helping my memory.  I am the original B-Minus Time Traveler and thus could only recall something about the Bank of the United States, a duel and a big block of cheese.  I don’t think all three things were in play at the same time, but it might have been more interesting if they were.   In any case, I decided that I had to know more, but again I was mostly distracted.

As luck would have it, there was a relatively new book by John Meacham about Jackson that had won the Pulitzer Prize.  I have always wanted to be the kind of person that reads Pulitzer Prize winning books so I immediately ordered it.  I admit that I carried this book around for a long time before I finally read it.  Which is to say that I read the first three pages.  It turns out that while I want to be the kind of person who reads Pulitzer Prize winning books, I don’t actually want to do the work.

I headed to Wikipedia, thinking I would get the abbreviated version but actually it was really long and used lots of words I didn’t understand like Whig, Tariff of 1824, and North Carolina.  Did you know there was something called the Battle of New Orleans?  Who the heck were we fighting?  Who won?

Anyway, it was clear pretty quick that I was not going to make it through Wikipedia either, which is a new low even for me.  I had pretty much decided that it was all pretty much hopeless and that Jackson would have to be another black hole in my education (like parts of the multiplication table and the metric system) until I happened upon the perfect tome at a used book store:   a copy of the Jackson volume from the Encyclopedia of Presidents.  At 50 cents marked down from $1, I thought it was a steal, though apparently if I had held out I could have gotten a copy from Amazon for one cent.  Published by “The Children’s Press” this volume was clearly intended for the well-meaning but muddled sixth grader that I had once been and had exactly the right idea:  large pictures with a text than included no multisyllabic words.   Double spaced!!!  This shall hereafter be known as THE BOOK.

Armed with THE BOOK, I was finally ready to truly make some progress with acquiring Jacksonian knowledge.  Mostly I was just distracted.  So what was the duel about?  Well it turns out that the women he married was not super-duper divorced from her first husband when they tied the knot.  Moreover, it appears that Jackson was sensitive his entire life about this oversight and on one occasion entered into a duel over the matter.  In one of those little ironies that make like livable, neither man was harmed but – because they both had such bad aim – an onlooker was struck.  Collateral damage.

We think of duels as just another part of those times but apparently it was considered an anachronism even then.  Clearly, Jackson was a hot-head which is not something one typically seeks in a President.

It turns out that the Battle of New Orleans was the last battle of the War of 1812 and Jackson led troops valiantly in a skirmish that lasted all but two hours.  The outcome of the battle was that the war ended and Jackson was a hero.

Yada, Yada, Yada.  Jackson was defeated by John Quincy Adams in the Election of 1824 but prevailed in a rematch four years later. THE BOOK reports that the campaign of 1828 was one of the dirtiest in American history.  Apparently all the smear tactics we see today are nothing as compared to what these two men heaped on each other:

“They attacked him as a murderer for executing mutinous soldiers during the war against the Creek Indians.  This called his mother a prostitute. They attacked [his wife] as a bigamist and Jackson as an adulterer…”

Jackson could give as well as he got and accused Adams of being un-American because he had served in Europe as as diplomat!  Good times.

But the hero of New Orleans prevailed despite the fact that even in 1828 no one could exactly explain what the War of 1812 was about.  Apparently he was perceived very much as a man of the people and was carried into Washington on a wave of populist support.

So that Bank business.  THE BOOK handles this with such simplistic patois that even I was able to master it.  Ok, so The Bank of the United States was established to manage the money supply in the US; it also was opposed by many because it had little government oversight.  My little sixth grade primer tells me:

“The Bank of the United States had many enemies.  They claimed it was dangerous to the interest of common men and women, especially farmers and other rural people in the south and west.  Because it was a private corporation, it was not responsible to the people or to lawmakers.”

Jackson opposed the bank as a monopoly but also because it was run by many of his sworn enemies.  Jackson could really hold a grudge and by this point in his life he was no longer up to fighting duels.  When the Bank of the US charter was brought up for renewal, Jackson vetoed it.  In so doing, he apparently made one of the strongest veto arguments in the history of the presidency setting an immense precedent for a strong presidency.  Anyway, lots of hijinks ensued such that when his enemies were in position to do so they had Congress censure him over the issue.   Apparently, the mean spiritedness of this was apparent to all because his censure was expunged before he left the White House.

Oh, and that block of cheese.  It turns out that was a gift he received of aged cheddar that weighed 1400 pounds.  It is hard to imagine the social complications that would result from having that hanging around the house.  In any case, he simply invited the public in to cut off a wedge and before long it was gone.  Though forever to be a metaphor for something which eludes me.

Jackson was clearly a strong and forceful person but not an exemplar.  He loved the United States and spent his entire adult life fighting to keep it as one.  But he was also a slaveholder and instigated all sorts of heinous treaties on Native Americans.  He’s no Lincoln.  But he’s no Warren Harding either.  Just a very interesting man with a strong will.  What is super amazing about Jackson is that he lived during the Revolutionary War (he served in the militia as a teen) and yet survived into the era of photography.  It is difficult for me to connect these two concepts.

You know who else survived into the age of the camera?  Dolley Madison.  All that’s coming to mind here is a painting of George Washington and cupcakes.  Again, I don’t think they’re connected.  If anyone has the comic book version of her life, kindly forward.