Born Fighting Page 18
And most important, the Scots-Irish, along with their ethnic and historic kin from Scotland and the English border areas, were laying out this cultural tapestry on an empty slate, in frontier settlements devoid of civilization that had no conflicting tenets to be overcome. As David Hackett Fischer points out, “90 percent of the backsettlers were either English, Irish, or Scottish; and an actual majority came from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands, and the north of England.” He goes on to point out that, “These emigrants from North Britain established in the southern highlands a cultural hegemony that was even greater than their proportion in the population.” This vast area extended “800 miles south from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and several hundred miles west from the Piedmont plateau to the banks of the Mississippi.” Fischer indicates that “The borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment, which was well suited to their family system, their warrior ethic, their farming and herding economy, their attitudes toward land and wealth and their ideas of work and power. So well adapted was the border culture to this environment that other ethnic groups tended to copy it.”4
Thus began a trend that would repeat itself over the decades in many other parts of America, particularly among the working classes from a variety of nations that would later come into contact with the Scots-Irish and their converted “kin.” True to its Scottish and Irish roots, the culture that dominated this region was openly unafraid of higher authority, intent on personal honor, quick to defend itself against attack of any sort, and deeply patriotic. It was also oddly paradoxical, managing to be at the same time both intensely populist and yet indifferent to wealth. The measure of a man was not how much money he made or how much land he held, but whether he was bold—often to the point of recklessness—whether he would fight, and whether he could lead. Even from the outset it was expected that the Great Captains, just as the clan chieftains of old, would on the one hand own more land, but on the other would put themselves at immediate risk by providing leadership in times of wider crisis.
Physical courage fueled this culture, and an adamant independence marked its daily life. Success itself was usually defined in personal reputation rather than worldly goods. A survey of eight sample counties in Tennessee in 1850 “showed that more than half of all adult males (free and slave together) owned no land at all,” and even as recently as 1983 “the top 1 percent of landowners possessed half of the land in Appalachia. The top 5 percent owned nearly two-thirds.”5 One of this culture’s great strengths is that it persistently refuses to recognize human worth in terms of personal income and assets. But as the country grew more sophisticated and cosmopolitan, this strength at some level also became a tragic flaw as other individuals and cultures that measured power and influence through the ownership of property would devalue Scots-Irish contributions, and even take advantage of the simplicity of this view as it applied to business and politics.
This formula would also mutate rather harshly where it combined with the false aristocracy that evolved out of the eastern Virginia plantation system in the so-called Black Belt of lower Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, western Tennessee, and eastern Arkansas. In this sense, as later pages will address, the South writ large would continue to perpetuate a widely misunderstood but pervasive three-tiered class structure that in many ways still exists to this day. Suffice it to say that from the outset, “poor but proud” was an unapologetic and uncomplaining way of life. Nor, on the other side, did modern liberals invent the term “redneck,” although it is only in recent decades that the term has been uttered by American elitists with such an arrogant, condescending sneer. In truth “redneck” is an ethnic slur, however ignorant those who use it may be of that reality. The moniker was used to earmark the rough-hewn Scots-Irish Presbyterians as early as 1830 in North Carolina and had its roots in the north of Britain long before that. Similarly, the term “cracker” was used pejoratively by the English upper classes even before the Revolution in referring to the “lawless set of rascals on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and Georgia.”6
The difference between this culture and most others is that its members don’t particularly care what others think of them. To them, the joke has always been on those who utter the insult. As a country song happily puts it, “It’s alright to be a redneck.” In recent years, comedian Jeff Foxworthy has made a prosperous career out of inventing insulting “redneck” jokes aimed at an audience of his own people. Not long ago, during a debate in which Native Americans were denouncing the Washington Redskins for the supposedly demeaning nature of their team name, a listener from West Virginia called into a local radio station. “Screw this,” he said. “Let’s call them the Washington Rednecks and we’ll ALL come to the games.”
It was indeed alright to be a redneck, even from the beginning. A tremendous energy percolated inside these remote and fiercely independent communities. A hypnotic and emotionally powerful musical style evolved from its Celtic origins until “country music” became a uniquely American phenomenon. The famed Scottish talent for inventiveness and adaptability showed itself on the frontier regions again and again. Settlers had long studied the Indian ways, learning how to hunt, what to eat, and how to turn animal skins into clothes. They applied modern lessons as well—as one example, within a few miles of each other in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the early and mid-1800s, Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper, thereby revolutionizing American farming techniques, and James Gibbs invented the Willcox & Gibbs sewing machine. And the culture’s most important contributions during this early era came from the courage and innovative talents of its soldiers and pioneers as well as the evolution of an adamantly independent style of democracy that forever changed the face of American politics.
The power—and ultimately the attractiveness—of the Scots-Irish culture stemmed from its insistence on the dignity of the individual in the face of power, regardless of one’s place or rank in society. This infectious egalitarianism had bound its people together from the earliest days after the Romans built a different sort of nation on the southern side of Hadrian’s Wall. The ideas that fueled the concept had been adapted into its religious base through the Scottish Kirk and were then further refined in Ireland as the notions of nonconformity evolved, asserting that every individual had the moral right to resist any government that did not respect his beliefs. This was not a concept that had to be learned in a book or taught in a classroom. It emanated directly and viscerally from the daily functioning of the culture itself. In America, and particularly in the mountain South, this streak of independence transcended narrow definitions of ethnicity and religion, extending to concepts of individualism and then to political philosophies that provided the roots of a powerful and unrelenting populism.
To most of the American political elite of the early 1800s, the thought of empowering a mass of uneducated, seemingly half-wild backwoodsmen was not simply preposterous; the economic implications of watering down a system built on the privileges that attended the ownership of property were nothing short of alarming. The seeds of this political shift were sown in 1791 and 1792 when Vermont and Kentucky were granted statehood, both of them having eliminated the requirement that one own property or pay taxes in order to vote. But a true widening of the electorate and a fairer distribution of the benefits of government would not become a part of the American political process without the benefit of an unusual leader, one whose political instincts were adept enough to face down the entrenched political machines and whose leadership credentials were relevant enough to hold great sway with the common man.
There was, in truth, only one such leader. His name was Andrew Jackson. This combative, self-made lawyer and military commander, whose parents had emigrated from Ulster, became the first president who was neither a product of the landed English-American aristocracy of Virginia nor of the intellectual English-American elite of New England. “Irish Andy” changed the chemistry of American politics more profoundly than any other president. And—which is
difficult to even comprehend in this age of preening, blow-dried, self-important career politicians—he did so with no other motivation than a passion for the common good. The oft-overlooked Jackson was the quintessential “tribal chieftain” Scots-Irish leader, melding together the two ancient concepts of the warrior aristocracy and populist egalitarianism that had always earmarked Celtic culture as it had evolved in the north of Britain. And, more than any other president in American history, he was indeed a self-made man of the people.
2
Old Hickory
MODERN-DAY HISTORIANS and political scientists often minimize the Jackson presidency by claiming that there were no remarkable leaps forward—no Louisiana Purchases, no great statements equal to the intellect of Adams and Jefferson, no wars—while Jackson stoically marched the Indian tribes off to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears and the nation seemed obsessed with internal bickering. They neglect to consider that this very internal conflict and the changes it brought to the American political structure comprised one of the most fundamental shifts in the nation’s history, and also that Andrew Jackson rewrote the book on American political leaders just as surely as Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway remade the narrative form of the novel. Lots of people could write like Hemingway—although not as well—once he showed them how. And the same thing could be said for the political talent of Andrew Jackson: Lots of politicians could approach the voters in the homespun style of Andrew Jackson—although rarely as authentically—once he showed them how.
The Scots-Irish culture has to date produced at least a dozen other presidents, some of them pretty fine leaders, but Old Hickory remains in a class by himself. Andrew Jackson was an original, an unusual and fearless leader who dominated the American political process more fully than any president before or since. And he did so not through the tedious, secretly sneering Machiavellian half-truths that pervade so much of today’s carefully scripted American politics. Jackson gained power, and also governed, through the force of his personality, fueled by a directness that came from an entire lifetime of overcoming obstacles that most politicians either manage to evade or have been spared through the circumstances of their birth and upbringing.
By the age of fourteen, Andrew Jackson was an orphan in the wilderness of the Carolina mountains, having lost his entire family. He was also a scarred combat veteran.
His father, for whom he was named, died a month before he was born, having migrated from Ulster with enough money to purchase two hundred acres of farmland in the mountainous Waxhaws settlement where North and South Carolina came together. Both of his older brothers died as teenage soldiers in the Revolution, one from exhaustion after the Battle of Stono Ferry and the other from smallpox after being held as a prisoner of war. Captured along with his brother while serving as a thirteen-year-old soldier, Jackson also caught smallpox, somehow surviving a forty-mile journey on foot after a prisoner exchange and arriving home “a raving maniac” from the fever.7 Earlier, a British officer had slashed him with a sword deep on the hand and across his head when he refused to clean the man’s boots, leaving scars that would remind him for the remainder of his life that tyranny and human denigration were more than words. His mother, Elizabeth, a fiercely anti-British Presbyterian, had nursed many of the mangled survivors after the infamous Col. Banastre Tarleton massacred Buford’s surrendering regiment, and then left for Charleston to tend to American prisoners of war kept aboard ships in the city’s harbor. She herself caught cholera while on the ships and died there, to be buried in an unmarked grave.
Though left motherless, fatherless, and without siblings, the young boy-man still carried with him the social status of his family. His grandfather was a reasonably well-to-do weaver and merchant in Carrickfergus, on the northern Irish coast just outside Belfast. His father had held a good piece of property near the town of Castlereagh and had been the leader of a large group of Presbyterians who migrated to the Carolinas in 1765.8 This family status, while not one of great wealth, was still significant in the backwoods communities and would open doors for him during his early life. At the same time he was a wild daredevil who in his youth loved “gambling, drinking, cockfighting and horse racing—mostly horse racing, a sport he could never resist,” and at the age of fifteen blew a three- or four-hundred-pound inheritance from his grandfather in one wild and glorious spree.9
Scarcely schooled, Jackson worked odd jobs while living with different aunts, uncles, and cousins, until at the age of seventeen a lawyer in Salisbury, North Carolina, named Spruce McCay hired him so that he might “read the law” and become an attorney. After two years with McCay, he moved on to study under Col. John Stokes, a powerful attorney who had lost a hand at Tarleton’s massacre and no doubt already knew of the young Jackson’s wartime service as well as his family heritage. Six months later he was admitted to the North Carolina bar. A year after that, in the spring of 1788, he and a few friends set out for the wild unknown of middle Tennessee. “Each man was equipped with a horse, a few belongings, a gun, and a wallet containing letters from distinguished citizens of the old community to the settlers of the new.”10
He was heading for Nashville, and the letters were probably more important than the horse or even the gun since they allowed Jackson to transfer his social status to the new frontier. And a raw frontier it was. At this time “the Nashville community consisted of a courthouse, two stores, two taverns, a distillery, and a number of cabins, tents, houses, and other nondescript shelters.”11 Arriving in Nashville in 1788, he was immediately taken in as a boarder by the widow of Col. John Donelson, who eight years before had led a group of about 120 settlers to this remote outpost, including his wife and eleven children. Donelson, a patriarch of the settlement, had recently been murdered, either by a white robber or an Indian. Most of his children were now grown, although his youngest daughter, Rachel, now twenty-one, was living at home. Rachel had married a prominent Kentuckian, but the couple was having continuing marital difficulties. Three years later Jackson would marry Rachel, under the false impression that her first husband had obtained a divorce in Virginia. He had not, and their legal maneuverings, which required them to remarry a few years later, would haunt the honor of his wife for the rest of her life.
Jackson’s energies, his legal profession, and his affiliation with the leading families of the new territory allowed him to move quickly to the forefront of Tennessee’s still-emerging political establishment. He was a delegate to the state’s first constitutional convention, became Tennessee’s first congressman in 1796, and soon thereafter moved to the U.S. Senate after William Blount was expelled for misconduct. But by 1798 he had grown tired of Washington and resigned from the Senate in order to serve as a judge on Tennessee’s Superior Court. Then in 1802, at the age of thirty-five, he achieved a long-held goal by winning election as major general of the Tennessee militia.
Jackson had made his way to the top of Tennessee’s often-raucous political hierarchy not only through shrewdness, but also by a reputation for audacious conduct. Naturally combative, he also knew that his frequent acts of boldness were the coin of the realm in American frontier society, the surest way to gain him entrance into the ruling circle, just as centuries before they would have earmarked him as a future tribal chief. Andrew Jackson knew the game, both viscerally and from having studied it. He was well read on the ways of the ancient Scottish chieftains and also required his subordinates to study those histories.12
But one cannot simply invent courage for political gain. Jackson was a true fighter, and not merely on the battlefield. He fought his first duel at the age of twenty-one. While seeking election to head the militia, he gained a reputation for unshakable boldness when he physically faced down Tennessee’s most famous war hero, John Sevier, who had been one of the commanders at the Battle of King’s Mountain. A few years later he took a bullet in the chest that he would carry for the rest of his life, said to be too close to his heart for any doctor to extract. This bullet was the result of a duel with
Charles Dickinson, the best shot in Tennessee. Ostensibly over an argument about a horse race, the dislike ran far deeper, as Dickinson had repeatedly implied that Jackson’s wife, Rachel, was a bigamist. Dickinson fared worse. After taking the hit, in very ungentlemanly fashion Jackson had coldly and deliberately shot Dickinson dead. He took another slug in the shoulder in 1813 at the age of forty-six, nearly losing his arm, from the brother of a much younger man he was busily caning for having publicly insulted him. Within a few months he was out of his sickbed, leading a war party against the Creek Indians. The bullet would not be extracted until 1832. The man he caned, Thomas Benton, found it necessary to hurriedly leave Nashville after the incident, later resurfacing as an influential senator from Missouri and becoming one of Jackson’s staunchest political allies.
On the battlefield he was unbeatable, making up for his lack of formal military training through audacity and personal example. He had a leadership style that combined praise and discipline in order to get the most out of every soldier, an ability to out-think his enemies, and a ruthless ferocity once combat began. His toughness was matched by the special kind of humility before his troops that would impress any modern-day soldier or Marine. In the tradition of the great warrior chieftains from William Wallace forward, Jackson made no distinction between himself and his men other than the authority that came from command. At one point early in 1813, he ordered his officers to give their horses to sick soldiers, turning over all three of his own in order to march alongside his men. It was his soldiers who first began calling him by the famous sobriquet Old Hickory, because of the unbreakable resoluteness of their far-older general.