Friday, 15 November 2019
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| today's route |
The Hermitage
A visitor can pay for any of several tours of the facilities there, but I didn't want to visit the mansion or any of the other buildings. All I was interested in was the Visitor Center and its exhibits that I thought would help explain to me the kind of president he'd been. But they have no admission fee that would cover just a visit to the exhibits. To see them I had to buy one of the tours, the cheapest of which was $19 for a senior ticket. To someone on a limited budget like myself - and especially to someone who didn't have a very high opinion of what I knew of Jackson - this seems like the elitism Jackson scorned.
I thought about it for a while but finally decided to pay it.
The primary reason for my low opinion of Jackson has for years been his treatment of Native Americans and his role in their displacement. Added to that his approval of slavery and ownership of a number of enslaved people, and I came in prepared to dislike this man.
The Visitor Center tried to deal with this attitude head-on - apparently I'm by no means the only person who feels this way. They do it by admitting these two attitudes are stains on his character and by concluding that he represents both the best of us and the worst of us. They say so often. They say nobody's perfect and he did a lot of good for the country. You can make that same case for Richard Nixon, and I can agree with that, but I will still never find anything admirable in Richard Nixon's character. And that's about what my conclusion of Andrew Jackson is.
Early life
They make a lot of his early hardships because he was the first president to rise from such a humble background - he was our 7th president. (Before him were Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and JQ Adams.)
His father died before he was born. Not long after his birth, the Revolutionary War began. Before his 15th birthday, one of his brothers was killed in battle; Andrew and his other brother enlisted, were captured and, as prisoners of war, contracted smallpox, which killed his brother; his mother died in a cholera epidemic. So yes he did indeed have a rough start in life.
He studied law, was admitted to the North Carolina Bar, moved to Tennessee (still North Carolina then) and served as Prosecutor in Nashville. Here he met and fell in love with Rachel, a married woman separated from her husband. After a few years, they traveled to Natchez and came back saying they'd been married there. No record has ever been found of this marriage, and she was still married to her first husband anyway. She sued for divorce from the first husband (a little slow about this) who claimed adultery (accurately), and then she legally married Jackson. This little episode, while maybe not unusual on the western frontier, came to haunt them because of his later political career.
Military career
Jackson was first appointed colonel and then elected major general of the Tennessee Militia. In the run-up to the War of 1812, this militia was put on alert that the British might try to take the port of New Orleans to control the Mississippi River. When the threat dissipated and the order was given to disband and let the troops find their own way back home through hostile Indian territory, Jackson earned the nickname Old Hickory by refusing to abandon them and by escorting them back, even letting the sick ride his horse.
And then, at the tail end of the War of 1812, there was the Battle of New Orleans.
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| Jackson and his militia actually got to in New Orleans in December 1814. |
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| the American situation |
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| the British situation |
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| the battle |
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| the result |
The irony was that the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812 had been signed Christmas Eve 1814. But because both nations needed to ratify it, the war wouldn't be technically over until February. Even if it had been in full force, communications were so slow at this time that nobody had heard the news.
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| Jackson was a national hero. |
Political Career
Jackson had served in both the US House and the Senate much earlier, but with his newly earned celebrity, the Tennessee Legislature selected him for the US Senate again in 1822. This time he was paid attention to, and the powerful folks realized he wasn't just an uneducated hick but instead a force to be reckoned with.
He was one of 4 who ran for the presidency in 1824 - up against Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Secretary of Treasury William Crawford. Jackson won a plurality of both the popular votes and the electoral college votes, but a plurality isn't enough. A lack of a majority threw the election to the House of Representatives (ain't our Constitution interesting?).
Clay was the lowest votegetter but as speaker was able to influence the house. Adams was elected. Shortly afterward he chose Clay as his Secretary of State. Many believed a "corrupt bargain" had been struck and that the people's choice had been denied.
Jackson was convinced the country was being governed by elites who were getting rich from their time in power. He believed they were governing for themselves and not for the regular folks. He was by no means alone in these beliefs, which actually contributed to Adams's undoing.
The 1828 presidential campaign, which started almost before Adams was inaugurated in 1825, was nasty. Adams criticized Jackson's military career (aside from The Battle) as showing he was willing to revoke people's rights; and he especially criticized Jackson's morals as shown by the irregularities in his marriage, calling Rachel a bigamist. Jackson railed against the corruption in Adams's administration and the elitism in Adams's aristocratic appearance. Probably everybody was right, but public opinion favored Jackson. He won in a landslide.
Three weeks later, Rachel had a heart attack and died. The inauguration, for Jackson who was in mourning, was not a time for celebration. But his supporters flooded the city to witness the event.
His presidency
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| starting off with a bang |
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| a new kind of presidential philosophy |
The exhibits seemed to me to have some significant gaps, and they said little about Jackson's first term. However, there were several crises that came to a head in 1832, which is when he was running for his second term.
The first regarded the Bank of the United States.
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| Withdrawing the US's money from the bank in 1833 earned him a censure from the Senate |
A second crisis arose about the same time. South Carolina started talking about states rights and secession long before the 1850s. This time the talk was led by Jackson's own vice president John C. Calhoun who laid out a blueprint for secession.
But this exhibit leaves out the most incendiary part, according to Wikipedia. There it says Jackson sent US warships to Charleston harbor and threatened to hang anybody who worked toward nullification or secession. (link supplied farther down) Jackson thought splitting up the Union dishonored the deaths of his relatives during the Revolutionary War.
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| a much blander explanation |
Subsequent presidents have cited Jackson's stand on keeping the Union together above all as of critical importance. He set a precedent for Lincoln to resist secession. In fact, Lincoln said he considered that question as having already been settled by Jackson.
While all this drama was going on, in 1832 Jackson defeated Henry Clay again for the presidency.
This museum is, of course, primarily interested in burnishing Jackson's reputation, but they couldn't ignore public opinion regarding Jackson's treatment of Native Americans. However, these exhibits are all I found about it.
As you can see, they leave out a few details.
In general, the museum seems to cover this issue by saying over and over that his treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans remains controversial to this day, and that he was actually embodying some of the worst of America, where his other actions embodied some of America's best.
They really do say this over and over. And I mean "say." They've got lots of videos all over the place and everybody on the various videos says this at some point or another.
My summary
I suppose they're right in that, like all human beings, he did good things and he did bad things. It's just that his bad things were, to me, so spectacularly bad. On the other hand, he was the product of his time and his upbringing, as we all are, and it looks like he didn't question many of the assumptions he was raised with. His ownership of slaves made him a rich man, because of all the extra cotton they farmed for him. So maybe he couldn't afford to look very closely at the system that brought him wealth. That certainly seemed to hold true for many others in the South.
I ended where I began: as with Richard Nixon, the truly admirable things Jackson accomplished as president aren't enough for me to overlook the truly abominable things he did. But I am glad to know there were some admirable things. For a much more detailed account (and less biased than the museum's), here's the Wikipedia link. https://en.wikipedia.org/Andrew-Jackson
Laundry
I did get clean clothes. The laundromat I found not far from The Hermitage overcharged just about as much as The Hermitage did. But their machines worked and my clothes got clean.
From there we went back to Lebanon, this time to a state park.
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