The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815-1848

21. The Legacy

294 21 The Legacy Tyranny is a disregard of the law and the substitution of individual will for legal restraint. National Intelligencer I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations , its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress. Alexis de Tocqueville If the Union is once severed, the line of separation will grow wider and wider, and the controversies which are now debated and settled in the halls of legislation will then be tried in the fields of battle and determined by the sword. Andrew Jackson What makes an age? A key challenge, value, leader, or some mélange may distinguish an expanse of years. Leaders loom large in how Americans understand their past and present. Not surprisingly, American history is marked by a series of ages named after dominant men. The Legacy 295 Historians debate how vital Andrew Jackson’s role was in the age named after him. Would an age of Jackson have existed without its namesake? The author of this era’s most exhaustive overview dissents from the notion of an age of Jackson. Daniel Walker Howe tries to “avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonism describes America as a whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people.”¹ But this, of course, is the essential argument for an age of Jackson. It was not merely a man who overshadowed those thirty-three years of American history but a political philosophy that the man epitomized and countless others fervently emulated or just as fervently opposed. The age of Jackson appropriately begins and ends with American victories, one military and the other diplomatic, in controversial wars. Andrew Jackson presided over both victories, in the first as the commanding general and in the second by personifying the ideology that drove the nation into the Mexican War as well as the earlier War of 1812. The United States declared war against Britain in June 1812 largely by the War Hawks’ power to politically stampede most senators and representatives along with a weak-willed president with wild-eyed rhetoric that at once provoked overweening fear, pride, and greed. The result was an utter disaster for American power, wealth, and security. Rather than swiftly rout the redcoats, conquer Canada, and force the British to cede to Washington’s demands, the American armies suffered one humiliating defeat after another, while the body count and national debt soared. The Treaty of Ghent ended the war with a draw. Yet Jackson obscured much of this in the popular imagination by his crushing victory over a British army at New Orleans on January 8, 1815, which tragically took place after the peace treaty had been signed. Three decades later, similar passions carried the United States into war with Mexico but with far different results. American forces routed their foes in nearly every battle. An army led by Gen. Winfield Scott trod in the footsteps of the conquistador Hernando Cortez all the way to the Halls of Montezuma and captured Mexico’s capital. Under the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, Mexico recognized America’s earlier acquisition of Texas and yielded New Mexico and California in return for $18.25 million. Although Andrew Jackson was no longer alive to celebrate that national triumph, his The Legacy 296 aggressive, expansionist spirit lived on through his protégé President James Polk. The many reasons that explain the very different results of the War of 1812 and Mexican War are ultimately rooted in the art of power. American leaders proved as inept in wielding that art in the first war as they were skilled in the latter war. Over the intervening expanse of decades, how far did Andrew Jackson and his political philosophy transform America’s art of power? The age of Jackson is best known as the era in which the last restraints were removed so that all white men could vote and run for office. Jackson did not initiate that development. What he did do was skillfully personify and lead the democratizing political, economic, and social changes to take and wield national power as president. Jackson’s populism was real. He championed universal white male suffrage and the “common man” against such “evils” as “moneyed...