ANDREW JACKSON: A Quiet Presbyterianby George M. Apperson “If the will of every man were free,” Leo Tolstoy surmises in War and Peace, “that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.” + + + Despite his meager background and his disadvantaged
youth, Andrew Jackson became one of the great men of his age. Of the
Presidents of the United States in the nineteenth century whose contributions
continue to be a living part of the fabric of American life in the twenty-first,
three ought to be remembered as towering above the others: Jefferson,
Jackson and Lincoln. Each was a complex personality whose intellectual
and political sagacity still challenges the historian and biographer.
Jefferson and Lincoln have their splendid memorials in Washington and
their monumental images grace Mt. Rushmore; but Jackson is missing.
Perhaps it is because he epitomized the heroic potential of the average
man and the average Jackson appears as uniquely American, having been baptized in the blood of revolution and educated in the militant ethic of the frontier. Harvard-educated John Quincy Adams thought he was a barbarian. Rather he was revolutionary in style and his tenure of office marks a shift from the aristocratic stance of the men before him to a more democratic presidential posture. Under him, as Dumas Malone observed, “The presidency attained unexampled popularity and was a notably representative institution . . . The plain people rejoiced that they had found a champion and they trusted him.” In an overview of American history it can be argued that the daunting task of defining basic American freedoms as voiced by Jefferson was redirected by Jackson. The continuing social revolution he initiated brought a new birth of freedom in our bloody Civil War under Lincoln. Jackson is the logical link between Jefferson’s ideal that all men are created equal and Lincoln’s dictum that no nation can exist half slave and half free. When Jackson proposed his toast in 1830, “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved,” it might well have been repeated by Lincoln in 1861 when Fort Sumter was under siege. Jackson adamantly opposed disunion and his word to those who nursed the possibility was, “that if a single drop of blood shall be shed . . . in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on engaged in such treasonable conduct.” When the debate on preserving the Union was transmuted into a struggle over slavery, the blood that was spilled concerned “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” in a nation united. Washington’s humbling of British pretensions at Yorktown was not completed by the Treaty of Paris of 1783. British hostility confronted the nation on the high seas and the western frontier for decades after. Jackson’s brilliant destruction of British military power at the battle of New Orleans in 1815 was a triumph greater than Yorktown. When African slavery sank its roots deeper into the body politic, Jackson’s concerns for the cause of the common man matured into confrontation in the Civil War, bringing emancipation and the preservation of the Union. The common man believes that he is endowed “with certain unalienable rights” and this was finally extended to African Americans. Whatever may have been the tangled political and military details of American History from 1776 to 1865, Jackson can be credited with initiating an end to the old order and proposing a new direction in the evolution of the nation. Not every challenge was met, nor every problem solved, but one might reflect on the fact that we still have difficulty in finding a perfect man for our Chief Executive.
ANDREW JACKSON, c. 1815 — Attributed to Ralph E.W. Earl — Courtesy of Historic Camden — Camden, South Carolina + + + It is hard to imagine a child born in the primitive Carolina backcountry after the death of his father, poorly educated, sometimes reckless and sometimes prone to mischief, would stand in the vanguard of those Americans who fixed the destiny of our nation. One is tempted to reflect with Hamlet, There’s a divinity that shapes
our ends, Andrew’s parents were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who emigrated to America, escaping the demeaning pressures of British rule in Ireland. They found a haven with fellow-Presbyterians in the Waxhaws, on the border of North and South Carolina, where the central feature of the settlement was the Waxhaw Meeting House. William Richardson, a scholarly graduate of the College of New Jersey, was the minister. Richardson’s brother-in-law, Thomas B. Craighead, arrived in Nashville in 1785, invited by its founder, James Robertson. Andrew knew him as a child when he and his mother took refuge with relatives in 1780 where Craighead was minister of the Sugaw Creek Presbyterian Church near Charlotte. Craighead’s Davidson Academy, with Robertson and Jackson among the trustees, later became the University of Nashville. Craighead and Jackson were friends, borrowing books from each other, and when the church suspended Craighead for suspected Pelagian views, Jackson appealed to its leaders for reconsideration. Finally, this brilliant, often troubled man found a resting place in the Hermitage churchyard near the Jackson home. The minister of the Waxhaw congregation brought his nephew and adopted son, William Richardson Davie to Carolina and educated him at Princeton. He was one of Jackson’s youthful ideals and after valiant service in the Revolution, became governor of North Carolina and the principal founder of its University. Lacking adequate formal education himself, Jackson emulated those who had achieved it and much of his intellectual discipline was self-attained. His judgment was widely respected and although not then a church member, the 1825 General Assembly asked Jackson to help choose a site for the Western Theological Seminary. Obadiah Jennings, also on the committee, in effect became Jackson’s minister when he came to the Presbyterian Church in Nashville in 1828 and remained Jackson’s friend to the end of his life. Andrew’s brothers were teenage soldiers in the American Revolution. Hugh, the elder, was killed at the battle of Stono in 1779, where Colonel William R. Davie was critically wounded. In 1780 Andrew, his mother and second brother came face-to-face with the shock of war when the British officer Banistre Tarlton and his dragoons massacred Americans fighting under Colonel Abraham Buford, despite their plea for quarter. The dead were buried where they fell and the wounded were taken to the Waxhaw Presbyterian Church. There lay Colonel John Stokes with twenty-three wounds; his right hand severed, saber cuts across his face and arms, and bayonet thrusts through his body. Tarlton did not shun atrocities because the area was “more hostile to England than any other part of America.” Elizabeth Jackson was one of the nurses in the Meeting House and young Andrew “first saw wounds and the carnage of War.” continued on next page
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