By Clyde Edgerton | Dec 08/Jan 09 | 

The Lion in the White House

How Andrew Jackson came up from the Carolinas and went down in history

In 1829, at age sixty-one, Andrew Jackson, the first “common man” president, took office for the first of two terms. He stood six feet one and weighed 140 pounds, wet—a famous soldier who’d fought Indians and the British. And he was a Southerner, born on the border of North and South Carolina in 1767. Shortly thereafter he became an orphan.

Skinny, often sick, sometimes fatherly, Jackson could be ferocious. In a duel, before becoming president, he was shot in the chest. (He let the other man take the first shot.) Then he shot and killed his opponent. In another street fight, he was shot in the arm. Once in office, he seems to have had an unusual ability to use his anger wisely.

The best-known picture of Jackson is on the face of a twenty-dollar bill. Something you won’t have if you’ve bought gas lately.

At the beginning of Jackson’s second term, the nation stood on shaky legs. Independence was only a few decades old. Civil war threatened. South Carolina, specifically rebellious Charleston, was a big problem for Jackson. A confounding question: Could a state secede? Jackson insisted it couldn’t.

On a more personal level, Jackson created a scandal by marrying Rachel Robards before she was divorced. And Washington insiders considered the wife of Jackson’s secretary of war a “loose woman.” Jackson defended her, which probably hurt him politically. A powerful group of Christians were calling for “a Christian party in politics.” Jackson was against that. Thank God. He shared Jefferson’s understanding that for freedom of religion to survive, religion had to stay formally clear of politics.

Some Huey Longishness was afoot too. Henry Clay, afraid of Jackson’s wildness and popularity, saw an “elective monarchy” on the way. Jackson wanted to abolish the Second Bank of the United States and give the money to the states, money that according to Jackson was stolen from “the people” by the “wealthy and professional” classes. No small fight there. Jackson won but was censured by Congress. The Senate later had the censuring proclamation withdrawn.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Random House) takes you smack-dab into the middle of all this fun, riveting, and scary stuff. Meacham has used significant newly released material in this important book—and it reads like a novel.

We see Jackson as a complicated leader, and contradictory. He rescued an Indian orphan and raised him, but he also removed Indians from their ancestral homes. An unrepentant slaveholder, he proclaimed from his deathbed (in a room crowded with friends, family, and slaves): “Christ has no respect to color.”