Andrew Jackson Poem by gershon hepner

Engaged from birth in constant brawls,
Old Hickory won battles that were strange
avoiding British cannonballs,
becoming twenty dollars minus change.
Though he was not sophisticated he
fought for the rights of common men
unless they happened to be Cherokee,
for twenty comes in singles and twice ten.


At the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 British cannonballs sailed over the heads of the Americans who were led by Andrew Jackson, resuting in a disastrous British failure. Janet Maslin reviews Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham (“Elites and Rivals, Beware: He’s Tough as Old Hickory, ” NYT, November 10,2008) :
At one particularly combative moment during his strife-filled presidency, Andrew Jackson met with a delegation of congressmen and assured them that he would brook no opposition from the Bank of the United States, his favorite target at the end of 1833. When the congressmen left the White House, Jackson put on an old Indian headdress and rattled its feathers, calling it “war equipment.” This was the type of behavior that reinforced Old Hickory’s reputation as man who loved a good fight. But what was he so strenuously fighting about? “American Lion, ” Jon Meacham’s carefully analytical biography, looks past the theatrics and posturing to the essential elements of Jackson’s many showdowns. Mr. Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, dispenses with the usual view of Jackson as a Tennessee hothead and instead sees a cannily ambitious figure determined to reshape the power of the presidency during his time in office (1829 to 1837) . Case by case, Mr. Meacham dissects Jackson’s battles and reinterprets them in a revealing new light…“ ‘Sophisticated’ is not a word often used to describe Andrew Jackson, but it should be, ” Mr. Meacham writes. Certainly there were subtle calculations behind Jackson’s handling of the immensely difficult issue of nullification (states’ threats to nullify federal law) , a dangerous harbinger of civil war. In its cogent fashion this book illustrates how Jackson’s more polished political rivals, like Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, were unable to look past Jackson’s confrontational style to see the president’s true agenda. At the time of the Compromise of 1833, when Jackson found ways to satisfy the conflicting interests of both nationalists and states’ rights advocates while asserting the power of the presidency, he displayed the fine political art of projecting while looking for a way out.


11/10/08