Volume 20 of the Chronicles of America Series ∴ Allen Johnson, Editor Assistant Editors Gerhard R. Lomer Charles W. Jefferys Textbook Edition Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co. New York: United States Publishers Association, Inc. Copyright, 1919 by Yale University Press Printed in the United States of America The Reign of Andrew Jackson...

Among the thousands of stout-hearted British subjects who decided to try their fortune in the Western World after the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 was one Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian of the tenant class, sprung from a family long resident in or near the quaint town of Carrickfergus, on the northern coast of Ireland, close by the newer and more progressive city of Belfast. With Jackson went his wife and two infant sons, a brother-in-law, and two neighbors with their famil

Every schoolboy knows and loves the story of the midnight ride of Paul Revere. But hardly anybody has heard of the twenty-day, fifteen-hundred-mile ride of “Billy” Phillips, the President’s express courier, who in 1812 carried to the Southwest the news that the people of the United States had entered upon a second war with their British kinsmen. William Phillips was a young, lithe Tennesseean whom Senator Campbell took to Washington in 1811 as secretary. When not more than sixteen years old he h

The victory at New Orleans made Jackson not only the most popular man in the United States but a figure of international interest. “Napoleon, returning from Elba to eke out the Hundred Days and add the name Waterloo to history, paused now and then a moment to study Jackson at New Orleans. The Duke of Wellington, chosen by assembled Europe to meet the crisis, could find time even at Brussels to call for ‘all available information on the abortive expedition against Louisiana.’” ¹ While his country

On a bracing November afternoon in 1821 Jackson rode up with his family to the Hermitage free for the first time in thirty-two years from all responsibility of civil and military office. He was now fifty-four years old and much broken by exposure and disease; the prospect of spending the remainder of his days among his hospitable neighbors on the banks of the Cumberland yielded deep satisfaction. The home-loving Mrs. Jackson, too, earnestly desired that he should not again be drawn into the swir

Monroe’s Administration drew to a close in a mellow sunset of popular approval. But no prophetic genius was required to foresee that clouds of discontent and controversy would hang heavy about the head of his successor. Adams certainly did not expect it to be otherwise. “Prospects are flattering for the immediate issue,” he recorded in his diary shortly before the election, “but the fearful condition of them is that success would open to a far severer trial than defeat.” The darkest forebodings

Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828 was correctly described by Senator Benton as “a triumph of democratic principle, and an assertion of the people’s right to govern themselves.” Jefferson in his day was a candidate of the masses, and his triumph over John Adams in 1800 was received with great public acclaim. Yet the Virginian was at best an aristocratic sort of democrat; he was never in the fullest sense a man of the people. Neither Madison nor Monroe inspired enthusiasm, and for John

The United States came out of her second war with Great Britain a proud and fearless nation, though her record was not, on its face, glorious. She went to war shockingly unprepared; the people were of divided opinion, and one great section was in open revolt; the military leaders were without distinction; the soldiery was poorly trained and equipped; finances were disordered; the operations on land were mostly failures; and the privateers, which achieved wonders in the early stages of the contes

It was more than brilliant oratory that had drawn to the Senate chamber the distinguished audiences faced by Webster and Hayne in the great debate of 1830. The issues discussed touched the vitality and permanence of the nation itself. Nullification was no mere abstraction of the senator from South Carolina. It was a principle which his State—and, for aught one could tell, his section—was about to put into action. Already, in 1830, the air was tense with the coming controversy. South Carolina had

“ Nothing lacks now to complete the love-feast,” wrote Isaac Hill sardonically to Thomas H. Benton after the collapse of nullification, “but for Jackson and Webster to solemnize the coalition [in support of the Union] with a few mint-juleps! I think I could arrange it, if assured of the coöperation of yourself and Blair on our side, and Jerry Mason and Nick Biddle on theirs. But never fear, my friend. This mixing of oil and water is only the temporary shake-up of Nullification. Wait till Jackson

It was not by chance that the Jacksonian period made large contribution to the working out of the ultimate relations of the red man with his white rival and conqueror. Jackson was himself an old frontier soldier, who never doubted that it was part of the natural order of things that conflict between the two peoples should go on until the weaker was dispossessed or exterminated. The era was one in which the West guided public policy; and it was the West that was chiefly interested in further circ

“ Oh, hang General Jackson,” exclaimed Fanny Kemble one day, after dinner, in the cabin of the ship that brought her, in the summer of 1832, to the United States. Even before she set foot on our shores, the brilliant English actress was tired of the din of politics and bored by the incessant repetition of the President’s name. Subsequently she was presented at the White House and had an opportunity to form her own opinion of the “monarch” whose name and deeds were on everybody’s lips; and the im

The events of the period covered in this volume are described with some fullness in all of the general American histories. Of these, two are especially noteworthy for literary quality and other elements of popular interest: Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People , 5 vols. (1902), and John B. McMaster’s History of the People of the United States , 8 vols. (1883-1913). The Jacksonian epoch is treated in Wilson’s fourth volume and in McMaster’s fifth and sixth volumes. On similar lines, bu

This e-book is a direct transcription of the Textbook Edition of The Reign of Andrew Jackson by Frederic Austin Ogg. One change was made, in the index, to conform the spelling of reëlection to what was written in the text. Page 242 : Change re-election, hyphenated for spacing purposes to spread to two lines, to reëlection....