Few of Jackson’s critics were buying the chivalrous portrait his defenders presented. He was not protecting women and children so much as opening up Florida lands to squatters and roughs and other uncivilized whites. But unlike Crockett, Jackson was never a champion of squatters’ rights. When ordered to remove them, he used the military to do the job. Yet at the same time he favored white possession of the land in the same way squatters had always defended their claims: those who cleared and improved the land were worthy occupants. Jackson’s thinking shaped his Indian removal policy as president. He argued that Indians should not be treated as sovereign nations with special claims on the public domain, but as a dependent class. Like squatters, if Indians failed to assimilate or proved incapable of improving the land and securing land titles, they could be forcibly removed. As president, he was more than willing to use force to remove poor trespassers. Only when squatters resisted removal, as they did in Alabama in 1833, and state officials supported them, was President Jackson willing to back down and negotiate more favorable terms for white settlers.50
It was almost too easy for Jackson critics to publicize a counternarrative to the official campaign biography. In 1806, he had shot and killed a young lawyer named Charles Dickinson in a duel, which left him with a bullet next to his heart. While the victim’s body was still warm, he made an ungentlemanly fuss when financial assistance was extended to Dickinson’s widow: in his mind, the scoundrel’s identity had to be permanently erased. According to the retelling of this episode in 1824, Jackson had withheld his shot, stood and watched the offending lawyer tremble, called him a “damn coward,” aimed calmly, and shot him dead at close range. Another incident followed in 1813, when Jackson was party to an impromptu “O.K. Corral” gunfight with his former aide Thomas Hart Benton and his brother Jesse at the Nashville Hotel. In the election year 1828, Thomas Benton made news when he published an account about the near-fatal encounter.51
But nothing looked worse on Jackson’s rap sheet than the so-called Coffin Handbill. He stood accused of executing six of his own men during the Creek War in 1813; six black coffins adorned the 1828 circular. Thus it was not just Indian and English blood that marked him. It was not just the dandyish lawyer Dickinson who met death at Jackson’s hands. In another illustration on the same handbill, Jackson was seen in a down-and-dirty street fight, stabbing a man in the back with a sword hidden inside his cane. Like the cracker fighter who might bite, kick, and lash out indiscriminately, and hide a weapon under his coat, Jackson was seen as thoroughly ruthless—the antithesis of that studied republican gentility meant to define a sober statesman.52
Jackson was perturbed by the caricatures even before the Coffin Handbill made its rounds, writing to a friend in 1824, “Great pains had been taken to represent me as having a savage disposition; who allways [sic] carried a Scalping Knife in one hand & a tomahawk in the other; allways ready to knock down, & scalp, any & every person who differed with me in opinion.” While denying the caricature, he could not deny his violent streak.53
A more appealing, sanitized version of the backwoodsman candidate surfaced in the early 1820s. It portrayed him as an outsider, a man of natural talents drawn from the “native forests,” who was capable of cleaning up the corruption in Washington. His nomination provoked “sneers and derision from the myrmidons of power at Washington,” wrote one avid Jackson man, who decried the “degeneracy of American feeling in that city.” Jackson wasn’t a government minion or a pampered courtier, and thus his unpolished and unstatesmanlike ways were an advantage.54
In 1819, in a speech before Congress, David Walker of Kentucky used this kind of imagery to reproach members of the House for investigating Jackson’s activities in the Seminole War. Walker emphasized the class as well as cultural divide separating representatives in the capital from Americans living on a distant Florida frontier. Jackson’s long experience as the “hardy and weather beaten General” had instilled in him a better sense of judging the conditions of a frontier war. He understood firsthand the suffering and hardships of besieged families. Could the members of the investigation committees fully appreciate the difficulties while sitting at home, their families safe from harm? The men censuring Jackson, whom the Kentucky congressman mocked as the “young sweet-smelling and powdered beau of the town,” were out of their league. With this clever turn of phrase, he recast Jackson’s foes as beaus and dandies, the classic enemies of crackers and squatters.55
Walker had tapped into a dominant class motif of cracker democracy, dating back at least to 1790, when the cracker-versus-beau plotline began to take shape. In its earliest literary form, the cracker buck is lured into town, plied with liquor, and swindled, after which he learns the painful lesson that his dreary cabin in the woods is “where contentment and plenty ever dwell.” A similar story in 1812 told of a backwoodsman curtly dismissing a supercilious lawyer and a capering dancing master who had stood at the door of his cabin. In 1821, clergyman and backcountry historian Joseph Doddridge of western Virginia embellished these stock characters in his play Dialogue of the Backwoodsman and the Dandy. He summed up the peculiar virtues of rough-hewn men:
A Backwoodsman is a queer sort of fellow. . . . If he’s not a man of larnin, he had plain good sense. If his dress is not fine, his inside works are good and his heart is sound. If he is not rich or great, he knows that he is the father of his country. . . . You little dandies, and other big folk may freely enjoy the fruits of our hardships; you may feast, where we had to starve; and frolic, where we had to fight; but at peril of all of you, give the Backwoodsman none of your slack-jaw.56
All of this explains Congressman Walker’s point-counterpoint in distinguishing General Jackson from the congressional investigators. The beau was an effete snob, and his ridicule an uncalled-for taunt. The real men of America were Jacksonian, the hearty native sons of Tennessee and Kentucky. They fought the wars. They opened up the frontier through their sacrifice and hardship. They fathered the next generation of courageous settlers. Defensive westerners thus attached to Jackson their dreams and made him a viable presidential candidate.57
Another way to promote their cracker president was through humorous exaggeration. As the different coffin handbills made the rounds in 1828, Jackson’s men used Crockett-like humor to defend him, claiming that the general was really guilty of having eaten the six militiamen, “swallowing them all, coffins and all.” When John Quincy Adams supporters circulated a note written by Jackson filled with misspellings and bad grammar, Jacksonians praised him as “self-taught.” If his lack of diplomatic experience made him “homebred,” this meant that he was less contaminated than the former diplomat Adams by foreign ideas or courtly pomp. The class comparison could not be ignored: Adams had been a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, while his Tennessee challenger was “sprung from a common family,” and had written nothing to brag about. Instinctive action was privileged over unproductive thought.58
Given that his initial support in the 1824 campaign came from Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, Jackson was derided for having cornered the cracker vote. A humorous piece in a southern newspaper described a Georgia cracker in Crockett prose, “half alligator, half man,” giving a hurrah for Jackson. By 1828, his Indiana constituency was presented as “The Backwoods Alive with Old Hickory.”59