Andrew Jackson, later seventh president of the United States, was involved in a series of altercations in his personal and professional life. Jackson killed a man, was shot in a duel (in 1806), was shot in a tavern brawl (in 1813), and was charged, in separate incidents, with assault and battery (convicted), and assault with intent to kill (acquitted). In multiple incidents over several decades Jackson and his underlings reportedly brandished or deployed a wide array of weapons against their opponents, including horsewhips, knives secreted in canes, canes used as melee weapons, clubs, axes, pistols, and rifles. [a]
According to historian J. M. Opal, "[Jackson's] willingness to kill, assault, or threaten people was a constant theme in his adult life and a central component of the reputation he cultivated." [1] : 70 One writer who investigated Jackson's brief residence circa 1788–89 in what is now East Tennessee reported, "He was recognized from the first as a man who 'would fight at the drop of a hat, and drop the hat himself.'" [2] Donald B. Cole wrote that Jackson's "violent personality emerged early and dominated his life." [3] Per biographer Robert V. Remini, Jackson had a "vicious temper that frequently exploded into ugly language and acts," [4] : 7 and such a temper tantrum, "so furious and startlingly sudden, intimidated his victims by its abruptness and its noisiness." [4] : 162 Horse trainer and Congressman Baylie Peyton wrote that "nobody ever 'jawed back' at Old Hickory when he was in one of his ways." [5]
One historian wrote of his pre-war years, "By his mingled tact and daring he soon became a power in the sparsely settled community. His temper was nothing less than volcanic. His oaths were varied, numerous, and highly effective. Yet after he reached middle life both were less frequently in evidence, and except upon extraordinary occasions were more moderate than in youth." [6] A Methodist chaplain—who correctly intuited Jackson's inability to live in egalitarian humility, or to admit to any fault whatsoever—wrote in his journal of the Natchez Expedition, "I find the Gen. cannot bare[ sic ] much opposition. He is a good General but a very incorrect divine." [7] In 1820 after British subjects in Upper Canada destroyed a wax effigy of Jackson to protest the executions of Ambrister and Arbuthnot, a wag reportedly commented, "It was well Old Hickory did not appear in the heat of the action or he would have made you know the difference between the man of whacks, and the man of wax." [8]
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Personal Military career 7th President of the United States
Tenure Presidential campaigns
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It has been hyperbolically claimed that Jackson "participated in more than 100 duels over his lifetime" but that is not correct. [9] That said, in 1828 a man named Dr. James L. Armstrong, who had been a surgeon in Jackson's militia in the War of 1812, [10] claimed that he had started making a list of altercations involving Jackson and the final list "accumulated to nearly ONE HUNDRED FIGHTS or violent and abusive quarrels." Armstrong's published index, issued under the title General Jackson's "juvenile indiscretions" between the ages of 23 and 60, listed 14 notable instances. [11] Shortly after the publication of this negative-campaign material, a Kentucky newspaper claimed that four men, including Archibald Yell and his law partner William Gilchrist, stopped by to "assassinate" (assault) Dr. Armstrong in Bedford County for writing anti-Jackson columns, chasing him down and clubbing him. A comment from another correspondent was appended to the report: "This is Jacksonism in its true colors such as the Hero in early times has often acted himself!" [12] Nashville papers claimed that the beating was because Armstrong had insulted Gilchrist's father by calling him a Tory, and reported that Malcolm Gilchrist beat Armstrong with a hickory stick, while Yell and another man, Jesse Taylor, did not strike Armstrong but did hold pistols at the ready. [13] (In 1831 President Jackson appointed Yell to be receiver of public moneys at the United States General Land Office in Little Rock, Arkansas Territory.) [13]
Jackson's apparent propensity for physical violence was very much an issue for the anti-Jacksonians in the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections. During the 1824 presidential election, Jesse Benton, brother of U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton (and very much an interested party in questions of Jacksonian violence, as he was the one who shot Jackson in 1813), published a pamphlet that stated, "...it is a notorious fact, that he was scarce ever known to leave a [horse racing] round without having participated in an affray or riot, or at least a quarrel." [14] News reports about Jackson's history of violence seem to have at least caught the attention of the voting public. In Natchez, Mississippi, which was at times the center of "an almost blind hero-worship" of Jackson, "based more on his many local acquaintances and his military record than on his position in national politics," a group of nabobs published an anti-Jackson broadside in 1828. The signatories, including Stephen Duncan, Francis Surget, Alvarez Fisk, Felix Huston, and Adam L. Bingaman, indicated that they supported Adams, attesting that they dreaded Jackson's election "as much (if possible) on account of the violence of his many adherents, as of his own peculiar unfitness for the station." [15] One Delaware voter wrote his local newspaper to this effect: [16]
They do not deny, that Andrew Jackson has often been engaged in the most disgraceful broils and riots in the streets and taverns of Nashville, shooting with pistols and stabbing with dirks on all hands of him. But they tell you that we have no right to investigate his private character, and that his quarrels, duels, adulteries and murders, furnish no arguments against his fitness for an office, where patience, ability and virtuous principles are indispensable requisites to the continuance of the good Government and liberties of our country. [16]
Similarly, Thomas E. Waggaman of Washington, D.C. wrote Felix Robertson in November 1828 that he had received a letter from a "corresponding committee in Harrisburg Pa. requesting me to give them a history of the Genl's 'trading in negroes cutting off ears' and other acts of violence ascribed to him by the tools of corruption." [17] Jackson was an interstate slave trader active for 20–25 years (c. 1789–c. 1814); [18] whether or not he ever cut off anyone's ears is unrecorded by history, although he repeatedly threatened it. In 1827 an anti-Jacksonian pamphleteer nodded to the ear-cropping hearsay when he wrote, "Andrew Jackson, and John Quincy Adams, have placed themselves before a court of enquiry, the nation is the tribunal, every citizen is a member of the court, I am one of them. I will speak therefore, although I jeopardize my ears, or my life." [19] In the United States this practice, called ear cropping, was one of a number of livestock-management practices—including branding, castration, chaining, and whipping —that were used against the enslaved. [20] Ear cropping, toe removal, and castration were amongst the most extreme measures used to enforce subservience. [21] [22] The intent behind ear-cropping specifically was permanent, visible mutilation, and thus implied ongoing shaming and contempt of the person so mutilated. [23] Evidence that Tennessee slave owners practiced ear-cropping appears first in an issue of the Knoxville Gazette from 1796. [24] As summarized by the editors of American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses in 1839, slavery entailed a veritable panoply of violence: "The slaves are often branded with hot irons, pursued with fire arms and shot, hunted with dogs and torn by them, shockingly maimed with knives, dirks, &c.; have their ears cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones dislocated and broken with bludgeons, their fingers and toes cut off, their faces and other parts of their persons disfigured with scars and gashes, besides those made with the lash." [25]
In addition to threatening to cut off peoples' ears, Jackson also repeatedly menaced peoples' houses with fire: he wrote a U.S. Senator that "the wrath and indignation of our citizens will...involve Silas Dinsmore in the flames of his agency house." [26] According to the slave narrative of "James Roberts," following the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson spoke to his soldiers and hundreds of slaves had been impressed to dig earthworks and declared (in part), "Before a slave of mine should go free, I would put him in a barn and burn him alive..." [27] During Indian removal he told Secretary of War Eaton to tell the Chicksaw agent to tell squatters on Chickasaw land that their houses would be burned down if they did not wait to claim land until the U.S. government signaled it was time. [28]
Despite Jackson's presence in the Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War, close association with American commanders of the Cherokee–American wars, and leadership of militia in the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the Seminole War, historians have found that "there is no explicit account of his actually firing at an enemy in standard battle." [31] As one Indigenous historian, Albert Bender, wrote in 2021, "Jackson moved to Nashville in 1788, at a time when battles between white settlers and allied Cherokees and Creeks were raging in the area. But there is no record of his having fought any Indians at all during this period. This seems somewhat odd in light of his later advocacy." [32] Nonetheless, the violence of military personnel under his command (not currently included on this list) "was considerable." [33] : 30 Jackson's use of violence against other wealthy White men may also be informative about his use of violence against slaves: "Jackson [had] rage to spare as he considered dueling Thomas Hart Benton, John Sevier, Henry Clay and others whom society viewed as his equals. It is difficult to believe that he would interact with an insolent enslaved man or woman on better terms than he would these esteemed gentlemen. It is also inconceivable that he would allow anyone to beat any of the horses he owned 300 times." [34] Smithsonian magazine wrote of American dueling in 2004, "Formal dueling, by and large, was an indulgence of the South's upper classes, who saw themselves as above the law—or at least some of the laws—that governed their social inferiors...Dueling was...an expression of caste—the ruling gentry deigned to fight only its social near-equals" (and thus duelling eventually died with the defeat of the South in the Civil War as "the caste whose conceits it had spoken to had been fatally injured by the disastrous war it had chosen.") [35]
Jackson was packaged as a little-d democrat, supposedly speaking and acting on behalf of the average working white man, but in point of fact was one of the largest slaveholders in Tennessee and the south, which meant he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. [36] According to the scholarship of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Jackson was acutely self-conscious of the role of violence in creating both his public identity and position in an under-construction national class and race hierarchy, and thus acutely sensitive to overt acts that questioned his status. [37] His intense focus on the political–symbolic use of violence is evidenced by a remark he made about his perceived enemy Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing that Jefferson had toasted Jackson's victory at New Orleans: "I am glad the old gentleman has plucked up courage enough to at least attend a banquet in honor of a battle." [38] : 26
Jackson's nickname Old Hickory, or Ol' Hickory, may have been a play on words hinting at his predilection for violence. The Oxford English Dictionary definition for hickory oil (sense 2) is "U.S. figurative corporal punishment using a hickory switch or similar instrument, viewed as a treatment for bad behaviour (now rare); During the first half of the nineteenth cent., the phrase was also used to refer to the administration of U.S. President Andrew Jackson, nicknamed Old Hickory (see Old Hickory n.), which may have influenced the development of sense (b)." [39] The "hickory oil" treatment was sarcastically "celebrated for its efficacy in removing idleness." [40] In November 1815, Jackson's adjutant Robert Butler wrote him with an update about the enslaved community at the Hermitage: "Your wenches as usual commenced open war and they have been brought to order by Hickory oil." [41] A banquet toast made in Pennsylvania during the 1828 election saluted, "Hickory oil, an infallible remedy for the Quincy epidemic." [42] There are no known accounts of Jackson himself dispensing "hickory oil," but Rev. William Leftwich, grandson of Jabez Leftwich, was given to his uncle as a young boy and put to work in the cotton fields of northern Alabama, and the 1830s he wrote a testimony to the American Anti-Slavery Society that mentioned "hickory" as a weapon: "My uncle was his own overseer. For punishing in the field, he preferred a large hickory stick; and wo to him whose work was not done to please him, for the hickory was used upon our heads as remorselessly as if we had been mad dogs. I was often the object of his fury, and shall bear the marks of it on my body till I die. Such was my suffering and degradation, that at the end of five years, I hardly dared to say I was free. When thinning cotton, we went mostly on our knees. One day, while thus engaged, my uncle found my row behind; and, by way of admonition, gave me a few blows with his hickory, the marks of which I carried for weeks." [43]
Threats included on this list should be specific, targeted, and potentially actionable. Rhetorical and figurative flourishes alluding to violence are not currently included. An example of the latter would be Jackson writing about Aaron Burr in January 1807: "If he is a traitor, he is the basest that ever did commit treason, and being tore to pieces, and scattered to the four winds of heaven, would be too good for him." [38] : 21 See below for a related counter example, a seemingly specific, targeted and potentially actionable threat against Secretary of War Henry Dearborn.
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