Old Hickory’s War - Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire
In the years following the War of 1812, Battle of New Orleans hero General Andrew Jackson became a power unto himself. He had earlier gained national acclaim and a military promotion upon successfully leading the West Tennessee militia in the Creek War of 1813–1814, Jackson furthered his fame in the First Seminole War in 1818, which led to his invasion of Spanish West Florida without presidential or congressional authorization and to the execution of two British subjects. In Old Hickory’s War, David and Jeanne Heidler present an iconoclastic interpretation of the political, military, and ethnic complexities of Jackson’s involvement in those two historic episodes. Their exciting narrative shows how the general’s unpredictable behavior and determination to achieve his goals, combined with a timid administration headed by James Monroe, brought the United States to the brink of an international crisis in 1818 and sparked the longest congressional debate of the period.
"A compelling case against [Jackson] for his leadership in the First Seminole War. . . . A vivid description of little-known details of the period." —Journal of the Early Republic
"Ruthless self-interest and contempt for the weak drove Jackson and the United States on the Florida frontier in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Heidler and Heidler tell the story in great detail, and they tell it well. They do not try to dress it up with romantic visions of honor or selfless devotion to the protection of dependents. The southeastern frontier was not a pretty place, and the bold and defiant types who inhabited it, like Andrew Jackson, were worshiped for their success, not the sometimes ugly means they used to attain it." —Journal of American History
Excerpts
Andrew Jackson Described
Some have suggested that Jackson did not hate Indians. Instead he hated the British, whose pawns he believed Indians to be. After all, following the massacre at Tallushatchee, he adopted the infant Lyncoya, orphaned by the battle and friendless among his own people. This interpretation sees Jackson concentrating his actions against Indians to vanquish their British manipulators and achieve American security.
Others, however, have speculated that Jackson's violent frontier days in young Tennessee planted in him a rigid opinion of Indians as savage and untrustworthy. "Why do we attempt," Jackson wrote in 1793, "to Treat with Savage Tribe [sic] that will neither adhere to Treaties, nor the law of Nations.
He still felt that way in 1813 when Tennessee Governor Willie Blount called him to lead the Tennessee militia against the Red Stick nativists. By then Jackson was forty-six years old, propertied and prominent. He owned a large estate near Nashville and had won eminence in political and legal venues. Yet, mature deliberation and rational thought were always brittle facets of this man's turbulent personality. His marriage to already married Rachel Donelson Robards provided grist for the mills of scandal most of his adult life, and Jackson reacted to the chronic gossip with gestures that were frequently undignified. When Governor John Sevier suggested impropriety in Jackson's courtship of Rachel, Jackson tried to force the governor to a duel; on another occasion young Charles Dickinson, a Nashville attorney, reportedly maligned Rachel's virtue. Dickinson claimed he was drunk, had meant no harm, and apologized; nevertheless, he and Jackson continued to quarrel over other matters until Jackson shot Dickinson dead in a duel. Of course, such behavior only muted sniggering talk about Rachel while spreading it farther; moreover, such behavior portrayed Jackson as a murderous bully.
Jackson took a bullet in his chest in the Dickinson duel, a painful wound that would plague him for the rest of his life, but it was only one of a growing list of corporeal injuries that matched his spiritual scars. His involvement in politics saw him using physical intimidation almost as often as persuasive debate, and he numbered his enemies in the dozens, making certain that they knew where he and they stood and what fate might await them should they risk a chance encounter.
Meanwhile, the man who insisted upon scrupulous patriotism in others could not resist the sordid scheme of Aaron Burr. The former vice president told Jackson that his plan to detach Mexico from Spain was secretly approved by the United States government, when in fact the wily Burr was probably planning to detach a discontented West from the United States. The whole episode revealed Jackson's apparent belief that he was a law unto himself and his willingness to engage in dubious activities if they promised to advance a program of which he personally approved.
From the conspirators' den to the campaign stump to the dueling field, Jackson moved as a tempest, a force capable of killing everything but the odious talk and the vicious rumors. All of it, after all, was sprinkled with fine, ghastly grains of truth. In spite of defenses mounted and explanations made by admirers then and since, nothing can alter the evidence that Andrew Jackson was an angry young man who became an angry old man. He might have contrived for effect the rages that peppered his life, as some suggest, but the quieter tantrums sprang from his insides and sculpted his defining, exterior character. His mother had died of cholera during the American Revolution, making young Andy an orphan at fourteen. As far as he could reckon, the British had done that, had created the hardships of pestilence and destruction that killed his mother, his brothers, and the gentler edges of his nature. He had been duped into Aaron Burr's half-baked plot because he detested swaggering Spaniards—"greasers" as Jackson called them—whose contempt for the United States Jackson brooded over and fulminated against. He would destroy them and any of their friends. He would take their land, dash the standards of His Most Catholic Majesty to the ground, crush the British Lion and Unicorn; he would stand before their red allies as he had before young Dickinson, even after taking the bullet, his absurdly narrow shoulders drawn back, his long head tilted down to stress the snarl, to shade his blue eyes from the sun. He would carefully draw aim. He would kill them all.
From Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire (1996)