American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

Always take all the time to reflect that circumstances permit, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking. (Andrew Jackson)

He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.

politics is brutal because it engages the most fundamental human impulses for affection, honor, power, and fame. Great principles and grand visions are ennobling, but at its best politics is an imperfect means to an altruistic end.

Jackson was a transformative president in part because he had a transcendent personality; other presidents who followed him were not transformative, and served unremarkably.

Or, as Jackson would have said: The people, sir-the people will set things right.

Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.

With a writer's eye, Irving detected Jackson's depths. "As his admirers say, he is truly an old Roman-to which I would add, with a little dash of the Greek; for I suspect he is as knowing as I believe he is honest.

I believe after a series of years that no government that has the power to collect taxes and declare war, can be restrained but by a display of sufficient power to break it up,” Pickens said.

A contemporary recalled that when Emily’s children and, later, those of Sarah Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Jr.’s wife, were infants and became “restless and fretful at night, the President, hearing the mother moving about with her little one, would often rise, dress himself, and insist upon having the child, with whom he would walk the floor by the hour, soothing it in his strong, tender arms, while he urged the tired mother to get some rest.” At White House meals, Jackson wanted the family’s youngsters to dine at the table with him: they were not to be kept in the kitchen or nursery, but at the center of the household.

Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.

Parents in the Northeast sometimes invoked the name of Andrew Jackson to frighten misbehaving children.

You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you.

Six days later, the president named a postmaster for New Salem, Illinois, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer who had lost a race for the state legislature. He was a Clay man, but the post was hardly major, and Abraham Lincoln was happy to accept the appointment.

His larger argument was that a president should not simply defer to the will and wishes of the Congress or the judiciary. Instead, Jackson was saying, the president ought to take his own stand on important issues, giving voice as best he could to the interests of the people at large.

the people are intelligent, the people are just, and in time these characteristics must have an effect on their Representatives.

when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

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Far, indeed, in my wishes, very far distant be the day, when our associated and fraternal stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which we have risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and be seen sinking, star after star, into obscurity and night!

Whether I am ever to return or not is for time to reveal, as none but that providence, who rules the destiny of all, now knows,” Jackson said.

Under its president, Timothy Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the college was suffused with the idea of Christian service. “In whatever sphere of life you are placed, employ all your powers and all your means of doing good, as diligently and vigorously as you can,” Dwight preached in a sermon entitled “On Personal Happiness.” For Dwight and, ultimately, for Evarts, faith was about not only personal conversion but social transformation and the health of the nation. In their minds, and in the minds of thousands of American believers, there was a direct connection between the godliness of the people and the fate of the country.

There is too much at stake to allow pride or passion to influence your decision, he later said. "Never for a moment believe that the great body of the citizens of any States or States can deliberately intend to do wrong. They may, under the influence of temporary excitement or misguided opinions, commit mistakes; they may be misled for a time by they suggestions of self-interest; but in a community so enlightened and patriotic as the people of the United States argument will soon make them sensible of their errors, and when convinced they will be ready to repair them.

Jackson was a politician, not a philosopher, and politicians generally value power over strict intellectual consistency, which leads a president's supporters to nod sagely at their leader's creative flexibility and drives his opponents to sputter furiously about their nemesis's hypocrisy.

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people, no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another," he said in the message. "Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right.

There is nothing that I shudder at more than the idea of a separation of the Union." Jackson wrote James Hamilton, Jr., of South Carolina in June 1828. " Should such an event ever happen, which I fervently pray God to avert, from that date I view our liberty gone - It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built that must prolong our liberty. The moment it separates, it is gone.

Jackson liked to think of himself as first and foremost a republican - a man who believed the best government was the one that meddled least in the affairs of the governed.

While religion was important in his private life ("Gentlemen, do what you please in my house," Jackson would tell guests, but "I am going to church"), he believed in keeping religion and politics, as well as church and state, as separate as one reasonably could. Despite his lifelong commitment to Presbyterianism, Jackson had never taken the public step of what was known as "joining the church" - that is, making a public confession of faith in a particular congregation, which in turn enabled one to receive Holy Communion.

Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, who had circuit authority over the state, rule the law unconstitutional, but South Carolina continued to jail the sailors. The state was motivated by a fundamental fear: slave violence. According to the state senate, the "duty to guard against insubordination or insurrection" was "paramount to all laws, all treaties, all constitutions." Washington decided not to force matters - and South Carolina this overrode federal authority.