Jackson, Andrew

1767–1845

American General and President

Andrew Jackson served as a role model for many nineteenth-century working men and small farmers by presenting a hypermasculine image of action, decisiveness, and determination. Rising from humble beginnings to become the hero of the War of 1812 and president of the United States (1829–37), Jackson became the first leader to exploit class-based resentment. His aggressive, sometimes violent style and his emphasis on independence appealed to the common man of the late 1820s and the 1830s.

Born on the western North Carolina frontier, Jackson endured a poverty-stricken childhood before studying law. Quick to anger, he reacted violently to anyone who threatened his masculinity, and he fought his first duel in 1788 against a rival attorney who had embarrassed him in court. He fought additional duels to preserve his standing in southern society, killing one man who had insulted his wife in 1806. Jackson's willingness, even eagerness, to resolve disputes through bloodshed would later make him a hero among working men who associated manhood with violent defense of personal honor.

Jackson moved to Tennessee in 1788 and soon sought military office to boost his status. He was appointed a major general in 1801. His 1814 victory against the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, brought him national fame, the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army, and command of the entire Gulf of Mexico region. He hoped that service in the War of 1812 would rescue his reputation from its harmful association with Aaron Burr, who had been tried for treason after he tried to establish a new republic in the southwest. His defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 made Jackson a national hero and helped to propel him into the White House.

In 1828, Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams (who had defeated him in the 1824 presidential election) in a presidential campaign that his supporters promoted as pitting the masculine working man against the effete intellectual. As president, Jackson asserted his manhood by patronizing others. His paternalism and taste for vengeful, punitive maneuvering informed his treatment of Native Americans—his Indian policy aimed to replace the autonomy of what he considered the primitive, childlike Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee with the fostering care of the federal government. Calling himself “your father the President” in communications with Native Americans, Jackson insisted that they evacuate their ancestral lands to avoid violence at the hands of whites, whose aspirations for independent land ownership—in accordance with Jeffersonian ideals of republican and agrarian manhood—he supported.

Issues and constructions of masculinity also shaped Jackson's approach to the other major controversy of his administration: the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson and his supporters claimed to be liberating the nation (particularly white men seeking independent property ownership) from dependence on an all-powerful motherlike bank and what he labeled the “effete aristocracy” who used the bank to undermine manly republican independence. His action was supported by working men and small farmers, who associated manhood with independence.

Fiercely independent, quick to violence, and domineering, Jackson became a model of mid-nineteenth-century southern and frontier manhood. His struggles against Native Americans' “primitive” manhood and his political opponents' effete, overcivilized manhood reflected the impulsively democratic beliefs of that era's working men. More importantly, he inspired male politicians to use images of masculinity for political purposes. Jackson's health failed soon after he left office in 1837 and he died at his home in Tennessee in 1845.

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