Final Years and Death

In 1837, Jackson retired to the Hermitage outside of Nashville, but he remained an influence in national politics. He abandoned his caution regarding Texas to become a vocal advocate for its annexation and was instrumental in persuading fellow Tennessean James K. Polk to run for president in 1844. Jackson lived to see both Texas come into the Union and Polk win the presidency.

Not long after these events, Jackson’s already frail health declined. He developed severe edema (“dropsy” in the parlance of the day), a symptom of congestive heart failure. He died at the Hermitage on June 8, 1845, at age 78.

Legacy and Controversy

Andrew Jackson was a departure from the passive presidents who came before him. His predecessors routinely bowed to the legislative superiority the Framers had envisioned and at most reacted to congressional agendas rather than proactively setting up opposing ones. Jackson’s dominating personality changed this tradition, but scholars continue to debate the level and depth of the transformation that Jackson brought to the presidency as an institution. Even his unprecedented use of the veto has defenders who describe it as a protective effort to set the executive on a co-equal level with the Supreme Court rather than an attempt to elevate it above the judiciary and the legislature.

These kinds of quandaries point to the paradox that although Andrew Jackson is frequently described as having been frank and straightforward, he remains a riddle that can either inspire admiration or provoke scorn. Those gravitating to the Jeffersonian Republican vision point to Jackson’s singular achievements that include venerating the Union by fighting Nullification; promoting fiscal prudence by limiting the scope of internal improvements; encouraging free trade by cutting tariffs; and restoring a balance between privileged elites and ordinary citizens by dismantling the BUS. Critics, on the other hand, cite Jackson’s executive overreach in the removal of government deposits from the BUS and the demands for the Force Act during the Nullification crisis; the corruption of the spoils system disguised as rotation in office; and the appalling treatment of Indians with deceitful treaties and coerced removal.

During his life, Jackson’s enemies saw him as motivated by his personal preferences rather than principles. Georgian William H. Crawford, who for many years endured Jackson’s enmity, claimed that Jackson’s ideas “upon all subjects are the result of his resentments, and of his vindictive passions.” Echoing this sentiment, the first historians who assessed Jackson deplored his habit of personalizing everything, a facet of his character that these early critics thought made him especially unsuitable for the presidency. Dismayed by the Jacksonian spoils system, they were repelled by the substitution of blind loyalty for objective merit in awarding government posts. Beloved by the people, Old Hickory was belittled by many intellectuals for his deficiencies and the demagoguery of his opportunistic supporters. His was a cult of personality for a man who did not warrant it.

As the antebellum sectional crisis became dire and finally erupted into civil war, many remembered Jackson’s defense of the Union, especially when he had stared down South Carolina during the Nullification crisis. But Jackson’s reputation was to reach a new zenith at the end of the nineteenth century when the celebration of democracy among followers of Frederick Jackson Turner and the advent of the Progressive school of history gave rise to new interpretations in which Jackson became a champion of the old Jeffersonian agrarian ideal. In 1941, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s groundbreaking study The Age of Jackson took the historical explanation of Jackson and his movement in another direction by asserting that eastern labor movements, not western agrarians, were the critical elements of the Jacksonian coalition. Other historians who criticized Schlesinger’s labor thesis established the so-called Columbia University dissent that emphasized venture capitalists as the most active promoters of Jacksonian Democracy.

Through it all, Jackson retained his luster as a symbol of the American character for the scholarly world. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s work, researched and written during the New Deal, was clearly colored by an implicit sense that Franklin Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson shared the same sense of mission for their respective times, even if their modes of fulfilling those missions were so patently different. Over the course of a long career, Robert V. Remini wrote many books related to or bearing directly on Jackson, including a mostly laudatory three-volume biography. In a concise statement of his view of the man, Remini noted in one of his later works that Jackson was “a towering hero who became a symbol of what was best in American society.” In a similar vein, John William Ward saw Jackson’s influence and image as stemming from popular perceptions of a man blessed with natural talent, thus to appeal even to the transcendentalists of his time who glorified intuition over rationality. Providence also played its part as God made Jackson a prime mover both against Britain at New Orleans and against Nicholas Biddle at the Bank of the United States, both of whom, said Ward, could have otherwise destroyed the republic in the absence of a man like Jackson. For Ward, Jackson exemplified raw will, a feature of his personality that liberated him from the opinions of others and thus assured their high opinion of him.

From such evolving perspectives, critics and defenders in the twenty-first century continue the passionate argument about Jackson’s influence on politics and culture. Commentators have leveled harsh judgments of his behavior, and activists have launched campaigns to diminish his presence in American memory. The argument over the twenty-dollar bill is one example. Jackson’s image was used on state bank notes for years and appeared on some Confederate currency in 1861. The United States government in 1863 issued his likeness on a two-cent postage stamp, the famous “Black-Jack,” and in 1869 it placed Thomas Sully’s portrait of him on the five-dollar bill. The same portrait graced the ten-thousand dollar bill in 1878, the ten-dollar bill in the early twentieth century, and from 1928 to the present, the twenty-dollar bill now under scrutiny. In 2016, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that by 2020 Andrew Jackson’s image would be moved to the back of the twenty-dollar bill and replaced with one of Harriet Tubman on its front. By the following year, however, that decision was being reconsidered.

On January 8, 1853, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, the first equestrian statue in the United States was unveiled in Washington, DC. It still sits in Lafayette Square across from the White House, a bronze Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse atop a massive marble pedestal. Its sculptor Clark Mills made two copies of the statue, one for Jackson Square in New Orleans (erected in February 1856) and the other for the Tennessee state capitol, delayed by insufficient funds until May 1880. In the meantime, villages and towns across the country and throughout the period, either named themselves after Jackson or dubbed prominent thoroughfares Jackson Street. Patriotic tableaus included Old Hickory in the pantheon of immortals with Washington and Lincoln.

Mirroring the controversy over his image on money, however, the popular celebration of his name and achievements has waned. Except for the equestrian statue, the nation’s capital does not have a Jackson Memorial to match George Washington’s obelisk or the columned edifice that houses the gigantic, seated Abraham Lincoln or the stately structure enshrining Thomas Jefferson’s memory. In the 1920s, when Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum chose his subjects, he imagined in the isolated, imposing Dakota rock face four American presidents who would commemorate the founding, preservation, and expansion of the American Union, but Andrew Jackson was not among them.

All controversy and argument aside, it cannot be discounted that Andrew Jackson was a self-made icon of the American spirit, a force of nature for whom an entire age was named, and a central figure around whom an enduring political party was formed. Americans continue to grapple with weighing his strengths while understanding his flaws. It is a way, in part, of understanding themselves.

Annotated Bibliography