The seventh president of the United States, who gave his name to the “Age of Jackson,” and whose nickname, Old Hickory, implied toughness, was at the time, and has largely remained, hugely symbolic in a nation that emphasizes self-help, frontier vigor, and determination. Although there was no widespread extension of the franchise, and certainly no dramatic upward social mobility during the Age of Jackson, his image was that of a common man who would extend the democratic process and the economic opportunities of the nation to common men generally. For an individual who, if nothing else, was a loner, he came across as a man of the people. Some of his popularity at the time derived from the fact that he had served (as a courier, as he was barely a teenager at that point) in the Revolutionary War. His childhood was resolutely grim; he had lost both parents by the age of fourteen. He studied law and, as many others did, moved to the frontier - to the territory that would become the state of Tennessee - for the opportunities that offered. When Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796, Jackson became the state’s representative in Congress. Land speculation enabled him to become a wealthy man, a cotton planter and a slave owner, but it was the War of 1812 that brought him to national prominence and, ultimately, the presidency, in particular his victory over British forces at New Orleans in 1815. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States during Jackson’s second term of office, he was critical of a man he described as “of violent character and middling capacities,” and one unpopular with “the enlightened classes of the Union.” Yet Tocqueville understood that it was “the memory of a victory he won twenty years ago under the walls of New Orleans” that maintained his public popularity. The victory alone was not in itself sufficient; it was the war, too, that played its part in securing Jackson’s image, his immediate financial future, and eventually executive office. The War ofi8i2, a second conflict with the British, was not just symbolically significant but, in practical terms, it removed many native peoples from both the South and the Northwest and opened up vast tracts of land to white settlers (and their slaves). New opportunities on a new frontier seemed to be opening up, and Jackson was well placed to exploit these. He first stood for election in 1824, but with four candidates in that election, and none with an overall majority, it fell to the House of Representatives to select the president, and it chose John Quincy Adams. In 1828, Jackson was elected president in an election that really witnessed party politics come into operation for the first time in America; elections became mass entertainment, and if image was not quite yet everything, it was definitely moving in that direction. In that respect, Jackson was a foretaste of things to come in American politics.
The election of John F. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic president, seemed at the time and since as promising a new start for America, as a moment when, as Kennedy himself put it, the torch was passed “to a new generation of Americans.” It was also one of the closest elections in American history, and one in which the media was deemed to have played a crucial role. In the televised debates between Kennedy and his Republican rival, the then-Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy was quite literally seen to be the more persuasive candidate (it is often observed that radio listeners tended to consider Nixon’s the stronger performance). Both this, and the tragedy of Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963, have heavily influenced the public perception of America’s thirty-fifth president, and a 2011 televised miniseries on the Kennedys will doubtless reinforce the reverence with which the Kennedy name is treated, or sometimes mistreated, in the United States. For the pre-9/11 generation, often a crucial historical marker in their lives was that they always remembered where they were and what they were doing when they heard that JFK had been assassinated. Kennedy’s brief presidency was itself overshadowed by the Cold War, in some respects defined by the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and was a time when the domestic program took second place to a vigorous prosecution of an anticommunist agenda. This drove the Kennedy administration to compete, globally and in space, with the Soviet Union. Prompted by the “Sputnik Challenge” in 1961, Kennedy committed America to achieving a Moon landing within the decade, but said little, and did less, about the growing racial problems that were more down to earth and, in states such as Mississippi, were becoming acute. Yet the Kennedy legacy was not so much in what the president himself did, or did not do, but in the symbolism and in the rhetoric provided by a leader who promised new frontiers for a nation that, in the aftermath of World War II and the McCarthy era, and in the context of the ongoing Cold War, wanted something, if not necessarily someone, to believe in.
As the president who held the American Union together in the midnineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln’s legacy might seem secure, but in recent years, concerted efforts to challenge the Lincoln legend have been launched; to very little effect, it must be said, since the scholarship on Lincoln is voluminous - it used to be the case that only Napoleon had more books written about him, but that may no longer be true - and shows no signs of diminishing. The focus of much of the debate (and sometimes diatribe) tends to revolve around Lincoln’s decision for emancipation, although there has been a move to critique Lincoln’s suspension of certain civil liberties in the Border States, especially, and with regard to the press, during the Civil War. Given that the Civil War is central to the national narrative (no Union victory, no nation), and Lincoln central to the Civil War, the understanding of the individual cannot be divorced from that of the war. Lincoln was a man of his time. Like Henry Clay, he was a frontier lawyer and, like Clay, he loathed slavery but was not convinced that a color-blind society was an option, and he also supported the idea of colonization for free African Americans. Much of what Lincoln said and did with regard to slavery and secession derived from the fact that he was a committed constitutionalist and operated within the assumption (and the legal position that implied) that secession represented a rebellion in, but not of, the South. He was also a pragmatist. Just as Clay had found that direct attacks on slavery stood little chance of success in an environment where slaveholding was entrenched, so Lincoln found that direct attacks on the institution were worse than useless and potentially damaging to the Union war effort in a nation where racism was not a sectional sin but a national outlook. Yet from the outset, what came to be called the Civil War (but not until 1912; before that point, it was the War of the Rebellion) was not clear-cut legally or constitutionally (for example, one of the first acts of the Union was to blockade Southern ports; yet in international law, no nation could blockade itself). In this context, whatever Lincoln did about emancipation had to be done in such a way as to make it binding on the nation once the war was over, and assuming the Union won. Not the least of his frustrations at the time was fielding the strident demands from radicals and reformers that he end slavery in a part of the country that the Union no longer controlled. In addition, the Civil War was waged by a Union in which the two-party system continued to function (it did not in the Confederacy), so both presidential actions and words had to be carefully considered in an environment where the maintenance of support for a war fought not by a regular army but mainly by volunteer troops depended on the continuing support at the polls. It is often assumed that the Union, with more men and a stronger economy, more munitions and a more robust transport network, was bound to win the Civil War, but that perspective ignores the real world in which Lincoln operated and the fact that all the power in the world (as Vietnam surely made evident) is worse than useless if not harnessed effectively. Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, has produced even more “what ifs” than the death of Kennedy in 1963. The period of Reconstruction (to 1877) has been regarded as a missed opportunity to consolidate the emancipation momentum that Lincoln had built up over the course of the conflict (the leading historian of the era has termed Reconstruction “America’s unfinished revolution”), necessitating the so-called “Second Reconstruction” of the 1960s.