(1767–1845)
When the British attempted to invade New Orleans shortly before Christmas in 1814, Andrew Jackson supposedly bellowed: “I will smash them, so help me God!” Which he did (soundly repulsing the British on January 8, 1815) and his battlefield heroics eventually helped him become the seventh president of the United States (1829–1837).
Jackson’s election dismayed his political rivals, including Henry Clay of Kentucky, who snidely said: “I cannot believe that the killing of 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies a person for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.”
Despite being a slave-owner, President Jackson was a strong Unionist and famously faced down John C. Calhoun and South Carolina on the issue of Nullification (the notion that a state has the right to nullify, or invalidate, any federal law that that state has deemed unconstitutional).
Like more than a few general-presidents, Jackson was more skillful on the battlefield than he was in addressing complex economic or banking issues. Some historians believe that the ineptness of Jackson’s policies helped create the Panic of 1837 (which occurred on Van Buren’s watch and probably cost him a second term)—a severe downturn that featured numerous bank failures and a depression that lasted for several years.
Like George Washington, Andrew Jackson enjoyed the profits from a whiskey-making still—both at his historic homestead, the Hermitage, and also, prior to that, at his lesser-known Hunter’s Hill Farm.
Jackson’s letters and account books include more than a few references to whiskey, and it is obvious that he often used the powerful liquor made of rye and corn in place of hard money to pay for various items and debts. He also sold it at some small stores that he owned in the Nashville area. In September 1799, the man who would become famous for defending New Orleans against the British invasion wrote this letter to Robert Hays.
Dear Sir—This morning your Pistols was handed to me by Mr. Brawley together with your letter for which I thank you. The whiskey you can have at any time in such quantities as you may think proper, or as you may require. . . .
That the brace of pistols were greatly valued by Jackson should not be a surprise; he fought in several serious duels, brawls, and donnybrooks in his lifetime.
TRASHING THE EXECUTIVE MANSION
Jackson supporters would say their hero was—first and foremost—a “man of the people.” But Jackson’s detractors were equally insistent when they dubbed Old Hickory’s most loyal followers “rabble.”
In the wild aftermath of Jackson’s first inauguration in 1829, it was difficult to argue with the latter assessment. After the new president was sworn in, thousands (crowd estimates ranged from ten thousand to thirty thousand) swarmed after Jackson’s carriage as he made his way to the President’s House.
Supreme Court associate justice Joseph Story remarked that the overflow included the “highest and most polished . . . down to the most vulgar and gross in the nation.” He further exclaimed, “I never saw such a mixture. The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”
The situation became increasingly precarious once the president was in the Executive Mansion. Rough men, their boots caked with street slop, stood on once-dainty chairs to get a view of the Hero of New Orleans. The unwashed and uneducated pressed forward to offer Jackson their congratulations—had his back not already been against the wall, surely they would have slapped him hard between the shoulder blades. At one point, Jackson’s men needed to form a protective scrum around the president to prevent him from being crushed by the surging masses.
Liquor played a role in this chaotic scenario. Thousands of Jackson’s followers had been drinking toasts at his inauguration earlier in the day, and then they were offered—at the Executive Mansion nonetheless—buckets of spiked orange punch and wine to continue the celebration.
In the end, the rowdy crowd was coaxed outside only after the buckets of punch and wine were dispersed around the Executive Mansion grounds. Old Hickory’s supporters climbed out windows to get to the liquor to sooth their throats, most raspy from the repetitive shouts of “Huzzah!” from the hours of jubilation.
In the words of Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington socialite of the era:
But what a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros [sic], women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity! What a pity! No arrangements had been made no police officers placed on duty and the whole house had been inundated.
The President, after having been literally nearly pressed to death and almost suffocated and torn to pieces by the people in their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hickory, had retreated through the back way or south front and had escaped to his lodgings at Gadsby’s [tavern].
Cut glass and china to the amount of several thousand dollars had been broken in the struggle to get to the refreshments, punch and other articles had been carried out in tubs and buckets, but had it been in hogsheads it would have been insufficient . . . for 20,000 people, for it is said that number was there, tho’ I think the number exaggerated.”
Andrew Jackson was sixty-one years old by the time he reached the Executive Mansion. His hard drinking days were long behind him. He was, in fact, in serious grief over the recent death of his beloved wife Rachel. Even his infamous temper was less easily triggered. The duels he had fought—including one that left bullets embedded in his body—had also taken a physical toll on his health. He was less than robust—except in the political arena, where he was still a formidable force.
His earliest biographers found ample evidence that the young Andy Jackson—who grew up hardscrabble poor in North Carolina and suffered punishment from the Redcoats during the Revolution—had raised his fair share of hell and hijinks.
Jackson biographer James Parton quoted a Salisbury, North Carolina, resident who remembered the young man of Scotch-Irish stock in this way: “Andrew Jackson was the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, mischievous fellow that ever lived in Salisbury.”
Parton (who talked to Salisbury residents for a book on Jackson that was published just prior to the Civil War) landed this gem from a woman, recalling her incredulous reaction when she’d heard Jackson was a candidate for the highest office in the land:
“What! Jackson up for President? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury? Why, when he was here, he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house!” (Then she paused and eased up slightly.) “It is true, he might have taken him out to the stable to weigh horses for a race, and might drink a glass of whiskey with him there. Well, if Andrew Jackson can be President, anybody can!”
Even after Jackson began to ascend the ladder of success (he was already a lawyer at age twenty-one and a congressman by twenty-nine), he never gave up his love of horseracing, cockfighting, billiards, and cards. With such rakish pursuits as his major entertainments, his biographer Parton—with something of a written “wink” to his readers—noted of Jackson’s early adulthood:
Betting in all its varieties was carried on continually. . . . The whisky bottle—could that be wanting?
In all these sports—the innocent and the less innocent—Andrew Jackson was an occasional participant. He played billiards and cards, and both for money. He ran horses and bet on the horses of others. He was occasionally hilarious over his whisky or his wine, when he came to Nashville on Saturdays. At the cock-pit no man more eager than he. There are gentlemen of the first respectability now living at Nashville who remember seeing him often at the cock-pit in the public square adjoining the old Nashville inn, cheering on his favorite birds with loudest vociferation.
Like many “gentlemen” of his era, Andrew Jackson had a keen “sense of honor”—which is to say, he did not take an insult, real or perceived, lightly. Jackson also had a quick-to-the-boil temper. The combination led to several duels and brawls and dozens of other encounters that almost came to ignition.
In 1806, Jackson found himself mano a mano with a deadly skilled marksman—Charles Dickinson—in a pistol duel at a mere eight paces (about twenty-four feet) apart. Not surprisingly, some debts due Jackson from a horserace helped spark the argument, further fueled by an alleged insult to Jackson’s wife, Rachel, that eventually escalated into the duel. Wagers around Nashville had Dickinson as the pre-duel favorite, but Jackson—who dressed in a loose frock coat over his tall-but-wiry frame—failed to fall when his enemy’s projectile caught him in the ribs, about a half-inch from his heart. In fact, Dickinson was wide-eyed with the assumption (a wrong one, as it turned out) that he had missed Jackson completely. But Jackson lined up his stunned adversary and coolly aimed his dueling pistol. Then, in the words of James Parton:
The pistol neither snapped nor went off. He looked at the trigger, and discovered that it had stopped at half cock. He drew it back to its place and took aim a second time. He fired. Dickinson’s face blanched; he reeled; his friends rushed toward him, caught him in their arms, and gently seated him on the ground. . . . The blood was rushing from his side in a torrent. . . .
Jackson walked to a nearby house to get his own wound attended to. But in the aftermath, he sent a bottle of wine to Dickinson’s doctor to be used in the treatment of the man who had just tried to kill him on the so-called “field of honor.” The gesture may have been gallant, but—wine or no wine—the doomed Dickinson died an agonizing death.
Before Jackson ascended to the presidency, his detractors assumed that he was an ill-tempered and inarticulate woodsman from a state—Tennessee—barely beyond the stages of frontier. The post-inauguration party—and the damage inflicted on the Executive Mansion in its presentation—only enhanced those impressions and prejudices.
But Jackson’s entertaining at the Executive Mansion soon proved to be a wonderful surprise for even non-supporters who visited. Some of the credit had to go to Jackson’s niece, Emily Donelson, who helped Executive Mansion events run smoothly. The dinners were lavish and the libations complementing the copious amounts of food equally impressive.
Jackson would sometimes bring out whiskey for Executive Mansion visitors, occasionally sipping a glass himself. His wine cellar at the Executive Mansion was superb, and like most of the presidents before him, it included the best French wines, red and white, champagne, port, and Madeira.
When Jackson was president, John C. Calhoun (his vice president at that time) was pushing the “states’ rights” agenda. At the Thomas Jefferson Day dinner on April 13, 1830—a major affair for the Democrats—the ever-flinty Jackson showed up and proposed a toast: “Our Union!” he emphatically stated, lifting his glass. “It must be preserved!” Then Jackson, his point made, sat down.
This was not what the Nullification wing, mostly Southerners, wanted to hear. Calhoun—the South Carolinian—attempted to counter-toast with: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear. May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States. . . .”
Some accounts claim that Calhoun’s hand shook when he made his toast, spilling some wine.
Although Jackson was quite familiar with alcohol consumption, he didn’t see its use as an excuse to tarnish someone’s honor—specifically his own—without expecting some consequences.
Samuel Southard, New Jersey senator and the secretary of the navy under John Quincy Adams (himself an anti-Jackson man), made the mistake of bad-mouthing Old Hickory at an 1826 dinner gathering—one in which some wine also was consumed. Essentially, the senator suggested that Jackson’s heroics at New Orleans in January 1815 had been exaggerated, and that James Monroe (then secretary of war) deserved the lion’s share of the credit for ordering an army into the field to defeat the British in the first place.
Other than insulting his wife, nothing brought Jackson’s Scotch-Irish temper to hard-boil faster than any insinuation that his military record had anything less than a spit-polish shine to it. When word of Southard’s remarks got back to him, an infuriated Jackson quickly dashed off a letter to his offender, outlining the facts (as Jackson saw them) concerning his defense of New Orleans.
Jackson—with his demonstrated willingness to participate in duels of honor—always had to be regarded as a loose cannon. The Princeton-educated Southard would have been well aware of this and he soon sent back a letter with an “I-can’t-recall-exactly-what-was-said” tone to it. Jackson’s return letter continued to admonish Southard (and restate his own accomplishments at New Orleans), and, at one point, the general wrote:
I have therefore to request when on your electioneering tours, or at your wine drinkings hereafter, you will not fail to recollect these historical facts, which indeed you ought long since have known. . . .
Jackson eventually let the controversy fade away and Southard (who became governor of New Jersey) thereby managed to avoid the full force of the future president’s infamous wrath. Southard, in fact, might have dodged a bullet—literally.
Jackson’s adopted son, Andrew Jackson Jr., lost most of his father’s fortune due to reckless high stakes gambling, drinking, and bad business decisions. When Jackson’s beloved Hermitage caught fire in 1834, Old Hickory was quick to lament: “I suppose all the wines in the cellar have been destroyed?” In the 1950s, Old Crow launched a series of advertisements promoting its bourbon. The ads depicted famous political figures from the nineteenth century, and Andrew Jackson was featured prominently in some of them.