As an outsider to Washington, save for a brief, unproductive stint in Congress, his qualifications came from the field of war, where his record sparked heated criticism. His ardent backers claimed him as the spiritual successor to the sainted General Washington, but Jackson’s origins lay far from the Potomac, beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Old Hickory had made his home in places where the population was thin and the law fungible. He was a slaveholding planter whose reputation situated him not in the halls of power but among the common stock. In the Tennessee backcountry, where settlement came much later than it did on the East Coast, landowning and class stations ostensibly had shallower roots. As one New England journalist wondered aloud during Jackson’s first run for president in 1824, who precisely were these “hardy sons of the West”?40
In the popular imagination, Jackson was inseparable from a wild and often violent landscape. After his celebrated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he was identified as a “green backwoodsman” who had bested the “invincible” British foe. To another, he was “Napoleon of the woods.” His political rise came through violence, having slaughtered the Red Stick faction of the Creek Nation in the swamps of Alabama in 1813–14, while leaving hundreds of British soldiers dead in the marshes of New Orleans in January 1815. Jackson bragged about the British death toll, as did American poets. One extolled, “Carnage stalks wide o’er all the ensanguin’ plain.” And it was no exaggeration. Bodies floated in rivers and streams, and bones of the vanquished were found by travelers decades later.41
Jackson did not look or act like a conventional politician, which was a fundamental part of his appeal. When Jackson arrived in Philadelphia from Tennessee to take his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1796, Pennsylvania congressman Albert Gallatin described a “tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks hanging over his face, and a queue down his back tied in eel skin.” In later years, the gaunt general struck observers as stiff in carriage, and weatherworn. Backwater diseases stalked him. Saying nothing of his external appearance, Thomas Jefferson perceived in Jackson a man of savage instincts. Once he observed him so overcome with anger that he was left speechless. (Speechlessness was the classic signifier of primitive man and untamed beast.)42
His fiery temper and lack of scholarly deportment permanently marked him. A sworn enemy put it best: “Boisterous in ordinary conversation, he makes up in oaths what he lacks in arguments.” Not known for his subtle reasoning, Jackson was blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him. Shouting curses put him in the company of both common soldiers and uncouth crackers. In “A Backwoodsman and a Squatter” (1821), one satirist captured such frontier types, folks known to “squale loose jaw and slam an angry oath.”43
Jackson’s aggressive style, his frequent resorting to duels and street fights, his angry acts of personal and political retaliation seemed to fit what one Frenchman with Jacksonian sympathies described as the westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.” By this code, independence came from clearing the land of potential threats. The threat could come from Native Americans, rival squatters, political adversaries, or what the corn cracker in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837 described as “eel-skin” easterners who used fancy words to get what they wanted. The cracker’s survivalist ethos invariably trumped legal niceties or polite decorum. It was these traits that shaded Jackson’s public image in the cracker mold.44
After New Orleans, Jackson led his army into Spanish Florida in 1818. He began by raising troops in Tennessee without waiting for the governor’s approval, then invaded East Florida under the guise of arresting a handful of Seminole Indians who were accused of attacking American settlers. When he attacked the fortified Spanish at Pensacola, what had begun as a foray to capture Indians quickly turned into a full-scale war and occupation.45
In Encounter Between a Corncracker and an Eelskin from Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, the backwoods squatter defends his gal from the slippery, seductive words of the trader from town.
Davy Crockett’s Almanack of 1837, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
Jackson went beyond squatting on Spanish soil. He violated his orders and ignored international law. After overtaking several Florida towns and arresting the Spanish governor, he executed two British citizens without real cause. The British press had a field day, calling the U.S. major general a “ferocious Yankee pirate with blood on his hands.” In a devastating caricature, Jackson appeared as a swarthy, swaggering bandit flanked by a corps of militiamen who were no more than ragged, shoeless brutes, beating drums with bones and wearing skulls instead of hats.46
The pirate who doubled as a backcountry cracker bruiser was unrestrained and unrestrainable. In the Florida invasion, he was reportedly aided by squatters dressed up as “white savages,” who may in fact have been the true catalyst behind Jackson’s controversial action. The Florida conflict had all the signs of a squatters’ war. Soldiers reported that Seminole warriors only attacked “cracker houses,” leaving those of British or northern settlers untouched.47
Prominent critics insisted on a congressional investigation. The powerful Speaker of the House, Henry Clay, demanded the rogue general’s censure. Jackson went to Washington, damned the established legal authorities, and told Secretary of State John Quincy Adams that the entire matter of Florida was between President Monroe and himself—and no one else. Confirmed rumors circulated that Jackson had threatened to cut off the ears of some senators because they had dared to investigate—and humiliate—him on the national stage.48
In Jackson’s crude lexicon, territorial disputes were to be settled by violent means, not by words alone. He explained his Indian policy as the right of “retaliatory vengeance” against “inhumane bloody barbarians.” In 1818, he was heralded in a laudatory biography as a kind of backcountry Moses, administering justice with biblical wrath. To those who protested his lack of regard for international law or constitutional details, defenders claimed that he was “too much a patriot in war, to suffer the scruples of a legal construction.” Yet even the most devoted fans of the general had to admit he had a fiery temper. In 1825, Henry Clay’s highly publicized comment that Jackson was a mere “military chieftain” suggested something tribal, primitive, and wholly unrepublican about him. When he sought the presidency in 1824 and 1828, the Seminole War remained front and center.49