What was the secret of Jackson’s power? Whence came the attraction that drew men to him as the magnet draws the needle? It is not difficult to find the secret of his popularity with the pioneers. He appealed to them through his devotion to the “sport of kings,” for no man loved a fast horse or would risk more upon its prowess than he, and he led the sport in which the people most delighted. And then he stood first in all the feats of daring to which frontiersmen were addicted—a perfect shot, swift of foot, a mighty wrestler, capping it all off with a spirit of chivalrous gallantry and a gentlemanly bearing that rendered him superb. But what drew the sage of Monticello to him? What gave him such mastery in statecraft and charmed men to his standard? It was his inherent, unswerving love of human liberty, his tense loyalty and stern faith in the institutions of his country, his immaculate conception of right and duty, and the superb fearlessness that possessed him, that made the man convincing.
It is said that Jackson has more biographers than any other national character. His career was so replete with incidents inviting interpretation that writers are drawn to it like flies about the sugar-bowl. Of no other man can historians resort to panegyric in substitute of statement and be justified by public criticism. There are perhaps more anecdotes told of him than any other public man, and never one that does not denote courage and power and strength. Indicative of his intuitive powers of quick decision is the story that when the subject of a site for a new treasury building to replace that burned by the British was broached one day, he was walking on Pennsylvania Avenue. With instant emphasis, he struck his stick upon the ground and said: “Put it here!” And there it stands to-day.
No man has lived who had a simpler human way of loving his friends and hating those who hurt him than Andrew Jackson. His fiercest wrath, however, was reserved for those who dared traduce his wife. In his Florida campaign, when supplies failed the army, he set the example of eating nuts and roots and berries. One of his friends at the other end of a long table at a barbecue became involved in a difficulty, which Jackson no sooner perceived than he cried, “I’m coming!” and, mounting the table, strode its full length to the rescue. He was singularly tender to little folks. How touching is the picture of this grim warrior, the seasoned duelist, the fierce hater, tenderly wrapping a sugar-rag for a ragged papoose found in a Creek village after a battle, and nursing it until he could send it to a friendly woman in Montgomery! Such was his hold upon the affections of his people that a certain traveler, reaching a Tennessee town the day after he was elected President, found the populace engaged in applying tar and feathers to two reckless burghers who had dared to vote against the General! And there is still a happy valley somewhere in remote Arcadia, we are told, where the old men hobble to the polls quadrennially in November and cast a loyal vote for “Andy Jackson.”
His faculty for remembering faces and names was marvelous. In 1832, returning from Washington to Nashville, he was tendered a reception at Cincinnati. A rough-looking fellow was seen trying to make his way past the reception committee. The General’s keen eye spied him and at once he darted forward. “Hello, Ned!” was his hearty greeting, and, turning to his bewildered committee, he explained: “One of my old boys in the Fourth Infantry, gentlemen—had to release him from the guard-house once or twice for fighting or stealing chickens, but he was a good soldier, gentlemen.” “How long since you have seen him, General?” asked one of the committee. “Oh,” was the matter-of-course answer, “it’s about twelve years. I saw him on guard at the Governor’s house the day I left Pensacola.”
Early in the spring of 1845, after his arduous campaign in Polk’s behalf, General Jackson’s health began to fail. He met the idea of death with that same fortitude which nerved him when a lad of thirteen to suffer a sabre cut rather than black a British officer’s boots.
His career, which had been like the blaze of the sun in the fierceness of its glory, melted into a passing away as tranquil as a summer evening. The majestic energy of an indomitable will gave way to the gentleness of a heart rich in the tenderest affections. No man in private life more completely possessed the hearts of all around him; no man ever retired from public life with more complete mastery of the affections of the people. No man was more truly and typically American in his ideas; no man expressed them more boldly or more sincerely. He was always, under all circumstances, wholly sincere and true. I cannot do better, in closing, than to quote from George Bancroft, the historian.
“Up to the last,” he says, “he dared do anything that it was right to do. He united personal and moral courage beyond any man of whom history keeps the record.
“Before the nation, before the world, before coming ages, he stands forth the representative, for his generation, of the American mind. And the secret of his greatness is this; by intuitive conception he shared and possessed all the creative ideas of his country and his time; he expressed them with dauntless intrepidity; he enforced them with an immovable will; he executed them with an electric power that attracted and swayed the American people. The nation, in his time, had not one thought of which he was not the boldest and clearest expositor.
“Not danger, not an army in battle array, not wounds, not widespread clamor, not age, not the anguish of disease, could impair in the least degree the vigor of his steadfast mind. The heroes of antiquity would have contemplated with awe the unmatched hardihood of his character; and Napoleon, had he possessed his disinterested will, could never have been vanquished. He conquered the wilderness; he conquered the savage; he conquered the bravest veterans trained on the battlefields of Europe; he conquered everywhere in statesmanship; and when death came to get the mastery over him, he turned the last enemy aside as tranquilly as he had done the feeblest of his adversaries, and passed from earth in the triumphant consciousness of immortality.”
Notwithstanding the fact of his incomparable successes at the bar, on the bench, in Congress and on the field of battle, which demonstrate his sense and genius, and although his state papers compare well with those of any President, there are yet those living who believe him to have been illiterate. If Colonel Colyar’s masterly “Life and Times of Andrew Jackson” had naught else to commend it, it would deserve the commendation of the American people in its complete refutation of the charge of illiteracy, all-sufficient and incontestable.[2]