Video Replay: Jon Meacham on Andrew Jackson

good evening I'm Rick Newman I prepared a an elegant introduction for for John but just before I arrived here a couple of things happened to me that caused me to ditch the introduction the first thing that happened is that I got an emergency email from my wife who told me that my 40 year old daughter who's a English former English major like yourself I was asking if she thought it would be a good idea to give me your book as a Christmas present actually my wife wrote back and and said actually Kristen that he's already got a copy of the book because he's gonna be with Jon Meacham that's paint tonight and she she wrote me she wrote me an email back that said dad that is so cool Jon Meacham is a genius oh and you married yes but so are you yeah we are we online and and then I was walking off of Pinz campus to get here and I bumped into another one of my history colleagues and I told him what I was doing and he said Rick I don't understand it how does this guy write so many books while he's doing all these other things in his very very busy life and in fact that was going to be basically the gist of my introduction I really do sit here with mixed feelings of awe and envy because Jon Meacham is a man of such astonishing creativity and productivity he's got a more than full time job as editor of Newsweek he is in we in the media that I watch omnipresent as a commentator on the current political scene and he's written for a terrific books and and more important he will be deferential about this and say well I'm just a journalist but I mean that is the great beauty of these books is that journalists actually do know how to write well so they're wonderfully elegantly written books he began with a collection of essays on the civil rights movement wrote a book on Franklin and Winston a study of binge of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill's wartime relationship American gospel God the founding fathers and the making of a nation which was a book that I found tremendously helpful as I considered the role of God and religion in the making of the Constitution and now American Lion Andrew Jackson in the White House the title of that book suggests that it's a study of Jackson's extraordinary presidency which of course it is but it is much more than that in addition to covering the most important events of Jackson's memorable terms in office John's book really does give us a fascinating description of Jackson's complex personality and I think even more important a genuinely novel portrait of some of the interesting and controversial individuals with whom Jackson surrounded himself during his eight years in the White House and there been a lot of books and biographies written about Jackson but this is really I think the first one which focuses on these fascinating relationships which were so important to him as a source of support and and an sustenance so I'd like to begin my line of questioning by quoting from a passage written by another Jackson our first one you know very well James Parton who described Jackson in his 1860 biography in in this manner I'm sure John knows this quote Andrew Jackson I'm given to understand was a patriot and a traitor he was one of the greatest of generals and wholly ignorant of the art of war a writer brilliant elegant eloquent and without being able to compose a correct sentence or spell words of four syllables the first of statesman he never devised he never framed a measure he was the most candid of men and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation a most law defying law obeying citizen a stickler for discipline he never hesitated to obey us a disobey a superior a democratic autocrat and urbane savage and atrocious Saint as in much of Parton's our writing there's a fair amount of viper below and not their craft but he was on to something and it clearly in your book you were similarly fascinated by those contradictory qualities in Jackson's characters so I wonder if you could begin by giving us some of what you see is the most important examples of the way these conflicting impulses affected Jackson's policy decisions and perhaps also talk a little bit about the ways in which we might reconcile these contradictions in his character I'd be delighted thank you thank you for having me I have had the good fortune of reading professor Beeman's book in galley it is excellent pre-order if possible you may do that my on amazon.com my daughter my daughter is four but otherwise I'm sure she would have called and said you're dining with Rick Beeman my four-year-old has a voice as though Carol Channing had just finished chain-smoking mr. Beeman I'm delighted to be here and I appreciate your kind words very very much I am a I am an interloper in the historical world but a happy and cheerful one and my answer to how I do all this is I married very very well and so I am very lucky there Jackson was all those things that partner said in the early 1860s my instinct and the reason I wanted to do this book is it was 2003 I just finished Franklin and Winston about Roosevelt and Churchill I had undertaken that book because I was interested in the idea of to what extent human personality affects diplomacy does it matter if allies like each other or not or his Kissinger right and it's all real politic my conclusion was it does matter and that was the period when I suspect our mutual friends David McCullough as was with John Adams out with Adams and Walter Isaacson was out with Benjamin Franklin and they're wonderful books and I'm sure virtually everyone here is read at least one of them for perhaps both my sense though as a tennessean was that of the early figures the man who is most like us for better and for worse is Jackson because he was capable of great good he was capable of expanding the promise of democracy of protecting the Union against all comers of asserting that the United States should be respected around the world while being an unrepentant slave holder the architect of the Indian Removal the really the mastermind de-facto mastermind of the Trail of Tears and an active opponent of abolition this is not an uncomplicated man but his sins were the nation's sins in many ways and we have raised in this country the art of cognitive dissonance to new heights we are fully capable of holding in our minds opposing ideas not far from where we're sitting tonight in great comfort I'm sure there are children who need much better care than they can beget and they are being given where I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan they're even closer at hand probably I worry sometimes that my six-year-old or my four-year-old is gonna ask what exactly was it about health care not being a fundamental human right that you didn't understand one generations acknowledged fact is in other generations clear evil and so before one simply condemns and moves on from Jackson I wanted to condemn but stay awhile and try to learn about what it was that made him capable of great good and of great evil which frankly I don't want to get you all involved in this necessarily but I sure as hell am I would not want anyone writing about me at any point but I know that as a human matter and leaders as we know all too well perhaps from recent times are quite human and I with the Greek southern character as fate granted that Jackson's virtues and sins were the nation's and the people's sins but he was a larger-than-life figure he was a man of great passion he pursued his agendas with a passion well that was a very noble thing I just said a minute ago I it was a Noble it's also true that it's just fun to write a book about a man who tried to attack his own assassin so there's that he could not taking off his shoes at the airport wouldn't have done it for him because he had he had two bullets in him for most of his life he was sort of a lunatic but he was a lunatic with a purpose and I think that while he was a passionate man in the sense of our sins of the world would be temper temperamental I think he was a master of those passions and not a prisoner of them this is where I disagree with some relatively recent and wonderful objective Jacksonian scholarship Andrew Burstein who was very kind and generous to me in this but he believes Jackson was a little more out of control than I do my contention is as a human matter you do not go from being the orphaned son of South Carolina never knowing your father losing your brothers and your mother and the revolution with virtually no formal education the best guess I can make as to his intellectual furniture is that it came from the hours he spent in the Presbyterian Meeting House back in South Carolina that's the most sustained time he ever spent sitting in one place and so when he was under stress later in life he would revert to biblical imagery Henry Clay was not a terrible man Henry Clay was the Judas of the West and so this once he was so unnerved by a couple of things that were going on he said that he was weeping as David had for his son Jonathan David son's name was absolute so he he had sort of he mixed it up in his in his in his fury about it I think he was a more sophisticated figure than he's generally given credit for part of it came from being a student of Lord Chesterfield of the early manners Guide a little like Washington's Rules of Civility and conduct Chesterfield advised have apparent confidence in all real confidence in none and it was this idea of always having a mask to present to the world and I think Jackson always had a mask that was ready to be presented uh-huh this this may be a variation on that on the same theme but one of the other recurring themes in American lion is the way in which Jackson throughout his political career conflated the personal and the political as as one in the same could you talk a little bit about the occasions in which that conflation of the personal and political really has an impact on his decision-making and on his relationships with his his friends and his enemies yes take one step back because we get more gunfire that way very briefly he conflated the public and the personal at first he fought a number of duels because of his how to put it rather murky marital history he felt passionately in love with Rachel Donaldson Robards she in love with him there was a slight hitch there was a mr. Robards in the picture and so that took some time to clear out and later led to one of the great negative campaigns in American history I know we want Karl Rove to be responsible for negative campaigning and I know Karl wants us to think he's responsible for negative campaigning but it started way before he fought his most significant duel the one where he got a bullet where he let the last two stayed in him forever against a man who had insulted Rachel who over there murky marriage and he let the other man fire first took the bullet his boot is filling with blood and Jackson coolly levels the pistol and kills the man Jackson has Bill Freeling a wonderful historian of the road to civil war once pointed out always let other people take the first shot he always waited to fire the second shot and that's true that's true politically as well I think conflating the political and personal is it's a little a little trickier I think the central event of his political life was 1824 when he won the plurality of we won the popular vote did not get the necessary numbers in electoral college the election went to the House clay and Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams joined forces defeated him despite the fact that Kentucky wanted the Kentucky delegation to vote for Jackson and that radicalized Jackson in ways that shaped the rest of his life he went home getting angrier and angrier and angrier charging that there had been a corrupt bargain between clay and Adams and that personal defeat I will also say as a tennessee and i don't know what it is about Democratic nominees from Tennessee we have a very bad record there have been and then the other one got impeached so it's just been uncomfortable for a long time and then there's keep offer which is a whole different conversation he personalized it in the sense that it was clay and Adams his fault but he was fighting for a larger cause he was fighting he believed for as he put it the principle that the majority is to govern he quickly proposed abolishing the electoral college he was he asserted ultimately that the president was the direct representative of the American people now a quite obvious thought but revolutionary then but he was driven by these so he was driven by these important issues that were political and he would personalize them in terms of who he had to take out to make that go come to be and Henry Clay was Henry Clay and John C Calhoun were the most with the unluckiest ones time to do that clay he later said he later said that his only regrets in public life for Jackson's were was that he had not hung clay and shot Calhoun it is not exactly the era of Obama kumbaya didn't didn't reach across the aisle and shot it from the III mentioned to John before we started that the one little piece of the book that bothered me a little bit with I thought he was a little hard on to play which is to say that he intended to be taking Jackson's aside but actually took to push this a little bit further Jackson's war and his hatred of the Bank of the United States also was one of those areas it seems to me where his ideological convictions went over to the personal they did I'd argue that that's not unsurprising in in political terms that he was against central banks he was against the bank in the United States and then Biddle made it a lot worse it's hard to imagine two Americans more different in 1832 than Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson Jackson who'd read about too little had written more books than Jackson had read in sort of the quick way and certainly more poetry so what Jackson was very lucky in though is that none of these people were particularly good politicians Biddle was a lousy politician remember he had the bank veto message printed up and distributed around the country because he thought it would help the bank's case it would be like McCain giving his last few dollars to put more Obama ads on the air and claim is judge Jackson at every turn literally at every turn which is one of the reasons I Clay's a just a distant kinsman of mine actually and so this was painful but not that painful I think he was just a terrible we had terrible political judgment ultimately for a man who's supposed to be the great compromiser in the sense that he couldn't he just couldn't accept that this rough-hewn barbarian who could barely spell his name than John Quincy Adams his phrase could possibly have defeated and defeated him again and again and again but the bank war was about an idea as well and ID'd the idea preceded the personality I guess would be my argument and with Jackson did he embarked on an entirely personal vendetta that was divorced from a reasonable political goal that he wanted to undertake and accept in his private dueling life I would argue no I'd like to feel that I could defend Biddle being Philadelphia's most prominent citizen at the time but he actually is pretty difficult person to defend he let his sense of superiority around him well he we have a there's a small personal connection showing the brevity of American history my my six-year-old son was in the same class as Nicholas Biddle's great-great-great great-great granddaughter whatever that would be and so when I was doing the bank war and we would be a drop off there would be difficult intense moments and my son who is sort of annoying like his father would say you know my daddy thinks you're a great guy granddaddy was terrible I was staying with sort of personal and public there there's there's another another man on Jackson's enemies list now here we are Andrew Jackson born in South Carolina a southerner a strict constructionist a slave owner came to detest and that maybe too weak a word his own vice president john c calhoun another southern strict constructionist a slave owner an indeed was prepared to march federal troops into Calhoun's South Carolina when the state nullified the tariff of 1832 what's going on there two things I think one was Calhoun Calhoun wanted to be President of the United States he did not want to be the president of the Confederacy and that's an important thing to remember he was deeply ambitious he wanted to succeed Jackson as president so did Martin Van Buren so did Henry Clay it was sort of like our own time there was no shortage of people who were interested in the job there were two things early on one was a social scandal that fundamentally shaped the presidential secession very quickly it was the eaton affair dudes in a capsule which is sort of tricky mark margaret eaton was the daughter of a washington tavern keeper who was probably not all she could have been in the sexual morality department but we don't know but that's what they thought then her first husband was a navy purser who slit his own throat at sea it was said out of despair over her infidelities some of which seemed to have perhaps unfolded with John Henry Eden who was very close to Jackson Tennessee and longtime Tennessee lawmaker who became the Secretary of War Eaton marries Margaret on New Year's Day 1829 during the transition the it immediately becomes a litmus test of bright-line whatever your metaphor would be in Washington if you received mrs. Eaton and were on good terms with her you were considered probe Jackson if you snubbed her you were considered an enemy of Jackson's and mrs. Calhoun was the first person not to receive mrs. Eaton not only did she not receive her she fled the city went to South Carolina John Quincy Adams who I know I know we're supposed to remember him as this great advocate of great things he was a hell of a good his Diaries are terrific on these things Jackson believed at this point that Calhoun couldn't be trusted you wouldn't go with him on this issue what else could he trust him on there was much talk in the capital of the time that the Calhoun party in the capital was trying to use this to weaken Jackson to get the War Department in their own hands that was Louisa Catherine Adams as John Quincy Adams his wife's verdict on it and so Jackson was immediately on his guard he was also on his guard because of the substantive question of nullification and secession and they were already on separate paths I think at the inauguration in March of 1829 at first Jackson blamed clay clay and his minions for the Eaton trouble he came to believe that it was Calhoun Martin Van Buren did everything he could to help him along in that in that conviction and so he had a face Jackson had a face of nullification and the threat to the Union in calhoun that crystallised for him the stakes of the conflict and the nature of the conflict let me just say quickly as you're you rightly characterized it there was a lot about nullification I believe that you'd have a hard time convincing me that Jackson wouldn't have been for under some circumstances Jefferson as we know though they later spun it in different ways had at one point been approving of it of course Jefferson is like the Bible you can quote him on either side of any issue and quite convincingly what Jackson was driven by I'm convinced is an emotional and passionate devotion to the Union partly because his whole family had died for it and I'm gonna use this language very carefully he really believed that his family's blood had consecrated the Union had set it apart had made it something that a transcendent reality that was to be defended at all costs and he was gonna do it against South Carolina he was ready to fight a civil war of extermination as he put it and yet and yet all the while he was rattling his saber he had put into motion the political compromise that would defuse the crisis this is my point about Andrew Jackson as a more sophisticated political figure than simply the Wildman of the saber rattling I'm gonna I'm gonna ask what sounds like a sort of technical political question but I eventually want to maneuver this around to be a conversation about sex a good many historians have written about Jackson and his kitchen cabinet that group of personal friends and political associates with whom he surrounded himself and whom he appointed to high office truly one of the wonderful aspects of this book that John has written is the way in which he allows a reader to understand that Jackson's appointment policies were not simply aimed at rewarding friends or political allies but really as a means of surrounding himself with people whom he genuinely loved and trusted real as an extension really of his own personality and persona could you talk a little bit about those people who made a difference to Jackson during his presidency and and I just want to say I won't let you stop talking until you say something about Emily Donaldson the the very young wife of Jackson's trusted friend and advisor Andrew Donaldson and this was this was actually pretty much news to me as I really read your book yeah so I've just really fascinated by it when you score on the pin professor that's a good thing I'm just a boy from Suwannee good news school I went to as a combination of Brideshead Revisited and deliverance so let me start with Emily Emily the aptly named Emily Tennessee Donaldson was the 11th child of the son of one of the founders of Nashville Tennessee one of the great pioneers stories the Donaldson's were the leading family in the state in the care in the country as they would say then Jackson that had been part of I suspect the reason Jackson was attracted to Rachel is that she was part of this expansive network of kith and kin that was exactly what he had always been missing in his own life and his wife Rachel whom he talked about died on the 22nd of November 1828 about exactly halfway through the transition she had it was the cumin Jackson believed it was the cumulative stress of the attacks of the 1828 campaign in which Rachel was assaulted as a bigamist and a her mother his mother was said to have been a prostitute it was a very vicious campaign and Jackson believed that that had killed her he came to Emily 21 years old the wife as Rick of Andrew Jackson Donelson by the way the Donaldson family's a little like the Roosevelts in that it is absolutely impossible to figure out the incestuous cousin lines and the names so everybody has the same name and everyone marries everyone else I would say it was a southern thing if the if we hadn't learned it from the Roosevelts so that's an important point the he came to her and said would you be the hostess in the White House would you be the functional First Lady and she was thrilled her portrait still hangs in the Queen's bedroom on the second floor of the White in the room in which Winston Churchill stayed when he was there she was playing a longer game than simply uncle Jackson as they called him uncle Jackson's administration Jackson believed that his nephew her husband who was really I think the first White House chief of staff in the way we would recognize that was going to one day be President that Jackson had told him that one day you will preside over the destinies of America and so when the Eaton scandal comes up when the question of receiving margaret eaten or not becomes the central question of the administration and for those of you who may be skeptical about how does this political how does the sexual affair have such an effect on politics I submit the Trojan War and Eliot I mean this does happen a good bit and so Emily decides that she's gonna go against her uncle and she wants to side with what we would now call the cave dwellers in Washington because she thought she was going to be living in Washington for the next 40 or 50 years and she did not want to be in any way on the wrong side of the permanent Washington establishment it caused Jackson great pain he ultimately banishes her to Tennessee immediately regrets it feels sorry for himself like all great presidents is enormous Lee capable of vast self-pity he says I've been left to sup alone at one point and Emily comes back and takes ultimately takes care of things she she is the one who in a letter I got from the family which I believe I'm the first person outside the family to see certainly the first person to write about it she notes that in April of 1829 John Henry Eaton had offered to resign now if in fact Eden had resigned that early taking the scandal with his wife with him it's very difficult to see how the president's presidential secession would have laid out exactly as it did now Martin Van Buren might have found a way to outmaneuver Calhoun but he would have had to have found a different way and James Parton was quoted earlier in one of the great historical double entendre ever says that writing in 1860 that the ensuing three decades of American political history were shaped at the moment mr. Van Buren put his soft hand on mrs. Eden's knocker by calling on her of course this is a line that I use every year on the survey course so that's Emily Emily was driven by a combination of piety and social ambition like all of us or many of us she was insecure around the South Carolinians because South Carolinian South Carolinians silver was a little older the portraits a little nicer and I think she the last thing she wanted was to be reminded of her provincial origins her letter about the great inaugural scene when the White House is essentially trashed you know it's animal house meets advise and consent the Jackson inaugural never mentions the mob she just talks about the great crowd because the last thing she wanted to acknowledge was that perhaps the coming of jacksonian democracy signaled a shift in the class of the presidency downward the other folks very quickly on in the kitchen cabinet Amos Kendall and early James Carville's sort of David Axelrod figure he was a great party builder he was educated at Dartmouth but came to fame as a newspaper editor and activist in Kentucky he came and was a earned his salary as the forth auditor of the Treasury did his work as Jackson's political man and ultimately sort of his communications director as we would call him now he brought Frances Preston Blair to the Capitol the eponymous Blair House is where he lived he would Blair would take a bucket of milk over to Jackson every morning there were cows then in Lafayette Square for to keep the first family loaded up with fresh milk they Jackson edited copy for the newspaper he had founded he felt when he'd fallen out with Calhoun he had fallen out with his Duff Duff Greene his editor then partisan editor in Washington and in a move as though President Bush founded Fox News he founded his own paper the Washington globe which was sort of his own website is another way of looking at Roger tawny later the infamous author of the Dred Scott decision was a Jacksonian Democrat very good on the bank veto very bad the rest of his life last thing just quickly which I find interesting in terms of jackson's sense of modernity in his sense of communication with the public he kept a portrait painter on staff living in the White House so if you like having a videographer following you around Jackson the reality show moving to a slightly different topics certainly Jackson the American lion fits in the category of one of America's strong presidents chief executive whose terms as president served to increase the powers inherent in that office I can't resist moving a little bit from the past he's very good yeah but I wonder if you would talk a little bit about his conception of the presidency and the way it's shaped and maybe do a little a comparing of Jackson with some of our other strong presidents Jackson expand Jefferson had done a some of this but had come up a little short Jackson was the first great Democratic leader to be lowercase D he understood the people wanted to be engaged in narrative he understood communication he understood that he had a mystical connection with a number of people who really believed that if he walked across the Potomac he would only get his feet wet see Senator Obama and many of his supporters but he wanted presidential power and he believed as I said before that the president was the direct representative of the American people and that therefore he was the interpreter and an actor of the will of the people he used the veto as a weapon of policy if he simply disagreed with a bill he would veto it he took liberties with military power in dispatching naval forces mainly to deal with with piracy he sensed that if he did something and let it stand it would be hard to knock down and most notably did that in 1833 when after he had vetoed the recharter of the Bank of the United States nearby he simply removed the deposits from the bank and spread them out to different pet banks as they were called when his secretary of the Treasury also from Philadelphia William Duane refused to do it he fired him it was a Saturday night massacre was sort of Roger tawny is Robert Bork as that's not my joke someone else told me that recently I wish I could credit them that led the Senate to censure him and that ultimately created a an epic battle for Jackson at the end of his presidency trying to erase that censure for overreaching his his authority now usually the next question is why is this so great given the last eight years my argument is yes you get Nixon and you get George W Bush with this presidential model you also get Abraham Lincoln theater Roosevelt Franklin Roosevelt Harry Truman John Kennedy Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan you get presidents who have the means to exert power and do it in a democratic culture of which Jackson is the architect in which there are ultimately checks and balances Jackson always believed as did Lincoln in his first inaugural that know-nothing was so terrible that the people could not fix it in the next election either in the correct congressional election or presidential election you can argue with that but I'd submit that people who would say would disagree with things that President Bush has done in the last eight years probably have a slightly different view of what FDR did during the New Deal or Harry Truman did during the steel crisis or Theodore Roosevelt did as he built the progressive movement and that one man's imperial presidency is another man's noble use of presidential powers to advance the public good it just I think it depends on where you stand and we very rarely see a power that is delineated and used that has then voluntarily surrendered I'll be very interested to see as I'm sure all of you will be to see what President Obama does with some of the powers that have been flushed out and/or invented by the Vice brother the president you're listening good that was a test and I I don't want to be flip about this because I think it's hugely important because I think he was the first modern president and I think he was the first great Democratic leader and one of the ways I judged this was how did his successors that we admire look at Jackson and you eluded this a minute ago but TR said that he no man had left a deeper mark on American history than Washington and Jackson and that he TR had exercised power in the Jackson Lincoln school not the Buchanan school Lincoln himself in January of 1861 in Springfield called for for documents when he was writing his first inaugural Claes speech on the compromise of 1850 the Constitution Webster's second reply to Haines and Andrew Jackson's proclamation of December 10th 1832 to the people of North people of South Carolina in which Jackson had said I call upon you in the language of a father to retrace your steps and a passionate state document that he had written so rapidly a witness saw that the ink was still glistening on the paper as he came into gathered them up so FDR of course have idolized Jackson to the point of having the Hermitage replicated as his inaugural stand in 1937 on Pennsylvania Avenue Truman said leave it at this Truman said that Jackson was a president who looked after the little fellow who had no pull and that's what a president is supposed to do I'm about to ask I think an unfair question because it's one that fascinates me but it might not fascinate John which of these other strong presidents do you think Jackson was most like temperamental II I mean granted that they were all they all vigorously exercised executive power although my sense of Jackson as some of this is a function of his decisive passionate temperament I don't think there's any doubt that his Truman the difference being Jackson would have punched the music critic at the post more than a stake okay I think Teddy Roosevelt might have also had some of that yeah what I love the the counter-argument would be Roosevelt was very well educated in a more formal way Truman came from the same kind of background as Jackson didn't and was very self-taught you know Eddie Jacobson Truman's partner and the fame the most famous failed haberdashery in world history said the reason they failed was that truman was always off in a corner reading a book about jackson instead of we're about to open this up i think right to to you folks to come down front and ask some questions while you think about whether you want to do that perhaps I could close with one final but multi-part a question if you could just very quickly this the kind of thing you asked in a blue book exam I'm afraid uh what do you think are Jackson's greatest accomplishments what do you think are his greatest failures if any and a final question which I just can't resist asking a biographer do you like him okay we'll start the top jackson's greatest achievement was the preservation of the union for an additional thirty years that gave lincoln's mystic chords of memory more time to form to repeat myself he had a great at a moment of great crisis he stood strong we were only a half century old and as a states rights plain republican slaveholding southwestern planter someone for whom almost every other interest would have pushed him toward South Carolina's side he said we are one country we are one great family we are one Union and we must remain that way and he could easily have said something different the second great accomplishment I think is that he turned a republic into a democracy and you can argue with that and Lord knows when things don't go our way we do when they do go our way we recognize the majesty of the people all depends doesn't it but it is quite possible if John Quincy Adams had had a second term if Henry Clay had succeeded him as secretaries of state tended to do you can see the first eight nine presidents all being of a Republican character in which the people would have had a truncated role and Jackson was dedicated as no other figure of the time was to the idea that the majority should govern with adequate safeguards and that the virtue and wisdom of the people would ultimately correct its successes after there's someone want to read it finished his faults I don't know if we have enough time for it he was an unrepentant slave holder who thwarted the forces of abolition he removed the American Indians from their native lands with no regard for the word of the United States government or the dictates of simple charity he was a bloody-minded warrior who whose conduct in combat is something that we find reprehensible even reading about it centuries on I think he he could demagogue but I think that's an acceptable price for the expansion of democracy he was a racist of the worst kind and his vision of the common man was as long as they were a man and they were white he was for you the reason I called this book American lion was not to lionize him but I was trying to think of an image that captured the contradiction that if you were in his pride if you were someone he wanted to protect you were there were no better pause to be in there were no better hands to be in if you were his prey if he was a predator and you were the quarry god help you and lions are not docile noble creatures lions are dangerous creatures and so was Jackson I wanted to read one thing if I may just quickly it took us you'll appreciate this it took a historian to say it better than anybody I think George Bancroft the historian statesman in a eulogy for Jackson in I guess the summer of 1845 the context for this remark was Bancroft talking about the the crisis with South Carolina and to me this sums up says better what I was just trying to say is what Bancroft said the moral of the great events of those days the South Carolina days is this that the people can discern right and will make their way to a knowledge of right that the whole human mind and therefore with it the mind of the nation has a continuous ever improving existence that the appeal from the unjust legislation of today must be made quietly earnestly perseveringly to the more enlightened collective reason of tomorrow that submission is due to the popular will in the confidence that the people when in error will amend their doings that in a popular government injustice is neither to be established by force nor to be resisted by force in a word that the Union which is constituted by consent must be preserved by love thank you I like him but an evening with him would not be undertaken lightly I think we'll start over here and then to the other side you've described a man a leader with great passion looking through his life did you find an issue which the position he took either evolved or he actually reversed himself did he reverse himself he did he did a good bet he I guess the the example that comes immediately to mind is he first exerted the veto power in a significant policy oriented way in the something called the Maysville Road case it was an internal improvement issue in which the poor Maysville Road it had the colossal misfortune of being a road entirely in Kentucky the home state of Henry Clay there was no more chance of that road getting built under Andrew Jackson then we would have gone to the moon in that era so he vetoed the internal improvements bill on complicated tangled constitutional grounds but then we ended up spending more money on internal improvements in the Jackson administration than in all of American history combined beforehand he would make principled stands and then do practical things and so I think I would say internal improvements is probably the best one he was a man who learned I mean that if that's the part of your question he he had this great showdown with France late in his term France agree there's always a France some things never change they had refused to pay debts they owed us he was ready to send the Navy in and he was thundering round and terrifying this poor French diplomat in Washington Davy was gonna get him but ultimately arranged for the mediation that resolved the crisis again it says the thing he always fired the second shot one one year after after rejection the government issued a new Treasury note and it declares a depth of the Weibull uncollectible I wonder if that was good or bad and if it was good is there anything that we could learn promet oh and they also have a question about the American gospel if you allowed sure I have a hard enough time figuring out how to work an ATM machine so trying to figure out what Andrew Jackson would do about this crisis is a tricky one Jackson's Jackson's war on the bank and the species circular helped destabilize the currency in a way that clearly led to the great panic of 1837 he left his this is this is an echo he left his successor with a financial disaster and then moved south and worried about Texas pull Assange so his his monitor Andrew Jackson's monetary policies to a complete mister not industry to me because I understand I understand them but they just he had these strange ideas about money and it had to do with some personal business as a personal as well some personal early losses he nearly been ruined by dad but they did so it actually sort of subprime thing come to think of it someone had bought his note he had signed and then called it on it and so my sense with what Jackson would do right now or a Jacksonian way of looking at this would be he would probably be for bailing out some of these places as long as there was much more specific oversight about how the money was spent I think the what the Brits did about their banks I think would be far more likely to be a Jackson thing where you got you got seats on the board and that sort of thing and you did quite about religion yes American gospel wonderful book like you mentioned how Jefferson was trying to liberate Christianity from any influence protection for the founding father Christianity was absolute dedication to peace and virtue we give our words our sacred honor everything we have for our faith Bob Benedict lately he said he was talking about the dehumanization of Christianity opening the door for the organization and also the celebration of Christianity even from the anglo-dutch influence over Christianity isn't did you see any similarity between what Pope Benedict was trying to do and the founding father was trying to do Oh Lord a big question perhaps the equation for the holy by the Holy Father dislikes it what I speak I like speaking forums I like trying to tell Germans what to do I figured that's part of my birthright I had a grandfather in the Third Army let's talk afterward thank you yes sir yes I was going to ask you about the years after the 1824 election which is when John Quincy Adams presidency took coal there's been a lot written about those years and the real sort of ability for Jackson and actually not being present to be able to exert some significant influence in the Congress to really sort of stymie any sort of legislation progressive education legislation coming through the you know Adams administration particularly you know you alluded to the you know internal improvements but you know Adams was really sort of an individual who was a very affirmative government individual which really viewed a real role for government in people's lives and you know we talked about Andrew Jackson as the people's president yet you know policy and sort of you know for his sort of politics sort of mix in that but can you you know speak about how he was able to exert that influence from that distance and sort of make you know really sort of destroy the ability for Adams to have a second term well he certainly tried and it ended up working you're right about Adams John Quincy Adams gets a it's a bum rap I think a lot of what Adams represented and advocated makes very good sense you know the American system of you would have tariffs that would fund internal improvements there'd be a national university there would be a Observatory something they'd say it's a very as you say it's a very modern vision of government but Jackson Jackson County and of course Adams is vice-president who also ends up being Jackson's vice president was still at that point in conversations ongoing negotiations with Martin Van Buren to build the coalition in Van Buren's phrase that would unite the planters of the South with the plane Republicans of the north and so you really had Van Buren on the one hand Jackson in the West who had an interest as you say in the failure of the Adams administration now that's a lot to hang on Jackson I mean John Quincy Adams was many things a charismatic leader of a growing democracy is not one of them right in that he was he had this unfortunately shortcomings of his father I think while the observing incredibly brilliant devoted Adams the son in particular very good on ultimately on moral questions including abolition but as president he was I think out of phase frankly with a country for whom the suffrage was expanding more people were engaged than ever and I think they were looking for a kind of popular leadership that critics of Jackson like clay would say was akin to military despotism I think it was more akin to strong Democratic leadership and so I think Adams had a kind of fatal set of enemies frankly who did not help in his in his term and then he went on a course to have the great the much better career as a congressman then as a president yes sir thank you I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about Jackson celebrity during his own lifetime as a result of the war of 1812 that's a great question he was really I would argue the first great national celebrity aside from Washington January 8th was a day for Jackson dinners and parades and banquets his image was one of the one most reproduced the most widely disseminated he authorized any number of biographies Obama wrote his Jackson just authorized he was a figure of popular songs were written about it the Washington family itself thought of him as the second father of his country after the deliverance of the country of New Orleans gave him a lot of artifacts as an orphan he was obsessed with tombs anniversaries artifacts he had Washington's spyglass he had Lafayette dueling pistols they were much used and so he was a he was very much a figure in the life of the country from the middle of 1815 until for 30 years until he died in 1845 when he died Sam Houston raced back from Texas with his son a young son and they got there too late and Jackson was lying in state and Houston said to his son son always remember that you have looked on the face of Andrew Jackson he was that kind of figure I think this will be our last question good evening on a day when bloomberg reports that the Fed guarantees are now up into the multiple trillions of dollars and knowing what you know about the arguments and counter-arguments made by advocates of a national bank and detractors of a national bank do you ultimately think that Jackson was right about a National Bank that's a great question always beware of people wearing bowties yeah I know it's trouble my father who was a business executive said never hire anybody who wore a bowtie Archibald Cox is a young lawyer wearing a bowtie and if the opposing counsel says never trust a lawyer wearing a clip-on bow tie and stood up untied it tied it back and sat down I hope that story is true it's like the Gospels it's probably true but not accurate the Pope Benedict guys doing yeah I think he was right for these reasons leaving his I think it's are you a lawyer yes after I thought it's a very clever as you might have surmised that's a very clever quite so you say you lead with the news and then ask me of contemporary questions that would that was very clever so let's leave Bloomberg out of this Mike would not like that but let's leave him at it for a second I think he was right because the kind of institution the second bank of the United States was not the Federal Reserve it was not a central bank in the way we think of it as you know it was all of our money in the bank throwing off profit for private shareholders now that's happening again now you know if you're a Citigroup or whatever but that is a that is the exception and not the rule it would have been the rule there been a constant second bank of unit of the United States I'm convinced that he believed rightly due respect to Philadelphia that this would that the bank would have been a self-perpetuating aristocratic elite which would have intended to corrupt in a classic Republican sense the country and as we know now it's hard to nut is it's corrupt enough with a largely you know with a 90% private sector as opposed to what would have been only a 10% private so ultimately yes I I do think so should he have done it perhaps with a little more planning yes he was like the big three hue sort shows up there's my plane where's my money so I would see that they do it for security because of the UAW after that sorry sorry my day job had just came back on I do think he was right and I think that and I don't think Jackson was right about everything by any means but I think that he believed he did have a coherent understand I think belief that intermediary institutions tended to corrupt and the bank was one ministers were one to answer the religion question around it that way Andrew Jackson whom you would think would be this radical sort of palin-esque church and state altogether kind of guy actually was a Jeffersonian on the wall of separation he resisted calls for the formation of a Christian party in politics he did not want to join the church officially the Presbyterian Church while he was in politics because he believed that it would be seen as craven and political and he didn't he liked for religious people he didn't like ministers because he thought that ministers were more corruptible he did like any interest group that he was not which i think is a pathway to apt if it in eloquently but happen like John I want to thank you so much for taking time out of an extraordinarily busy and you are done I want to thank all of you for coming tonight and for supporting the center and please a hearty well I already thanked you for a Rick Beeman i wonderful moderator tonight playing something man just a reminder there are signed copies of mr. Meacham's new book in the lobby so we hope you will treat yourself to one happy thanksgiving we hope to see you back in December Thanks March March for professor Beeman's book thank you this is my kind of guy you

Channel: National Constitution Center

Views: 36,760

Rating: 4.6183205 out of 5

Keywords: Jon Meacham (Author), Andrew Jackson (US President), Politics (TV Genre)

Id: P4Wdct2_xIw

Length: 66min 46sec (4006 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2015