^B00:00:02 >> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:05 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:21 >> Good afternoon everyone, and thanks for coming to our Books and Beyond today. I'm Guy Lamolinara from the Center for the Book. And we're sponsoring this program today with our Manuscript Division. If you don't know much about the Center for the Book we're the division of the Library that promotes books, reading, libraries and literacy. And we also administer the Young Reader Center here at the Library which is over in the Jefferson Building, and the Poetry and Literature Center which administers the poet laureate of the United States Program. Additionally, we also have a program called the Library of Congress Literacy Awards, and we'll be announcing the winners of those this fall. Our mission is carried out nationwide as well, and we do that in conjunction with our 52 affiliated State Centers for the Book. Every state has a State Center including Washington, D.C. and even the U.S. Virgin Islands. And we have a partnership with about 80 like minded literacy organizations across the country. And one of the most important things we do at the Center for the Book is our National Book Festival which this year is September 5th at the Washington Convention Center. And that will be from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. And if you go to our website at loc.gov/bookfest you can see the list of the authors that we have coming. We have a great roster this year, and it will be about 150 authors. So if you've never been to the festival I really urge that you come. Before we get started I need to ask that you please turn off all your electronic devices. And I need to let you know that we're recording this event today not only for the Library's website but CSPAN is here as well. So if you ask a question you'll be a part of our webcast or the broadcast on CSPAN. And if you do have a question could you speak loudly please so that we can record it. Our webcasts are available at the Center for the Book website which is read.gov. And you can see more than 200 author discussions there covering virtually any topic you might want to explore. Today's author's book will be for sale here after the program. And the author will also be signing the book right over there at that table. So the book will be sold at a discount. I urge you to buy it today, and you can get a chance to talk to the author personally in the book signing line as well. One note about how we determine these Books and Beyond programs and which authors we will feature is the most important thing is that the author have done research here at the Library of Congress, and that's certainly true today. This author has done his research here in the Library's Manuscript Division which, as I said, is co- sponsoring the discussion. And today we have from the Manuscript Division Jeff Flannery. Jeff has worked as a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division reading room since 1985 with brief detours in the Library's intern program and our congressional research service. He has served as head of the Manuscript Division's reference and reader's services section since 2006. A native Pennsylvanian Jeff received his BA in history from Temple University, an MA in history from Ducane University, and a masters in library science from the University of Pittsburgh. Please welcome Jeff Flannery who will introduce our speaker. ^M00:03:43 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:51 >> Thank you. As Guy mentioned my name is Jeff Flannery, and I am the head of the reference and reader's services section in the Manuscript Division, and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Congress. The Manuscript Division is custodian to approximately 63 million primary source documents relating to American history and culture. Among our collections are the personal papers of 23 U.S. presidents and numerous other well known Americans including such notables as the poet Walt Whitman, aeronautic pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, astronomer Carl Sagan and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. One hundred and seventy years after his death Andrew Jackson still dominates the period between the passing of the founder's generation and the onslaught of the slavery crisis that overwhelmed mid 19th century America. During the age of Jackson one can mark the expansion of democracy, trace the development of modern political parties and witness a wave of political partisanship that would not look unfamiliar to modern audiences. One of the principle centers for the study of Jackson and his contemporaries is the Library's Manuscript Division. It is here that the collections of personal papers of the nation's leading figures shed light on their motivations, strategies, hopes and ambitions. The division not only holds the most significant collection of papers for Jackson himself but also includes those of many of his associates and rivals, Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and James K. Polk to name a few. The primary source collections are amply -- these primary source collections are amply complemented by the Library's vast collections of period newspapers, pamphlets, maps, books, prints and political cartoons. Researchers studying the age of Jackson will be astounded by the wealth of material available here at the Library of Congress. We are fortunate today to have as our speaker one of the finest young scholars in the field of Jacksonian studies. Dr. Mark Cheathem is a native of Cleveland, Tennessee and earned his BA in history from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, his MA in history from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, and his Ph.D. in history from Mississippi State University. Mark taught at Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi State University and Southern New Hampshire University before returning in 2008 to his undergraduate alma mater where he is a professor of history and history program director. I can readily attest that during his many visits to the Library over the years Mark has proven to be a determined and resolute researcher whose devotion to pursuing documentation in the era is second to none. Dr. Cheathem is the author or editor of five books including Andrew Jackson and the Rise of the Democrats, and is currently completing a new book entitled the Log Cabin and Hard Cider Campaign of 1840: Politic's Entertainment in Antebellum America. He is here today to speak about Andrew Jackson, Southerner, which won the 2013 Tennessee Book Award. Please welcome Dr. Mark Cheathem. ^M00:07:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:07:11 >> Thank you for that introduction, Jeff, and thank you for coming out. I know it's lunchtime, and I'm accustomed to that. I teach students. When you teach them in the morning they're still recovering from breakfast. If you teach them right before lunch they're hungry. If you teach them right after lunch they're asleep. So if you fall asleep it really won't bother me. Hopefully you won't, though. I consider it a privilege to speak here. I was telling my wife before I came this will probably be the height of my professional speaking career to speak at the Library of Congress. So I really do appreciate the opportunity. I'm going to talk about Andrew Jackson as a Southerner today, but before I do that I want to give you a little bit of background about how I came to study Andrew Jackson. I think it's always important for listeners in the audience to understand where someone is coming from. When I was an undergraduate at Cumberland University which is about 30 miles east of Nashville, I had an undergraduate history professor by the name of Monty Pope who told me when I was entering my senior year, Mark, you need to go work at the Hermitage. And he was an Jackson expert and I trusted him, so I went and worked at the Hermitage for one summer. It was actually 20 years ago this summer. He didn't tell me I had to dress in period costume. And I'll be honest with you, in hot, humid Tennessee summers dressing in period costume which involves multiple layers was not exactly the most pleasant thing. And it certainly wasn't the coolest thing as a young 20, 21 year old college student. But in any case that is really where I became enamored with Andrew Jackson is giving the tours, learning about him, learning about his relatives, his family, his enslaved community, and coming to realize that this was a man who was very instrumental in American history. So I actually wrote my dissertation on one of Jackson's nephews, a man by the name of Andrew Jackson Donelson who as a prominent diplomat, newspaper editor and actually ran for the vice presidency in 1856. And when I finished that book I was looking for a new topic. And my graduate mentor, a man by the name of Dr. John Marszalek who has worked on William Tecumseh Sherman and now is editor of the Grant papers, the Ulysses S. Grant papers, he threw some ideas out to John, and he said why don't you tackle Jackson. I said, oh sure, I can do that. Well, little did I know that a guy named Jon Meacham was working on a biography that would win a Pulitzer Prize. And if I had known that I very likely would not have started down this path of looking at Jackson from a biographical standpoint. But I didn't know and so I did. And Andrew Jackson, Southerner came out in 2013 and has been a mild success I guess you could say in some terms. ^M00:10:01 So let me give you the premise of the book, and then I'll talk about some of the aspects that led me to interpret Jackson as a southerner. And in the short amount of time that we have I can't go into everything. But certainly during the Q&A or afterwards I'd be happy to talk to you more about this. So historians have looked at Jackson in a number of different ways. And one of the most significant ways they've looked at Jackson is they've looked at him as a westerner. They looked at his progress from the Carolinas to Nashville, Tennessee which was considered the west in the late 1700s, and they see Jackson almost like an early form of the cowboy. He sort of waltzes into town. If you've ever seen the Charlton Heston movie the President's Lady, my students don't even know who Charlton Heston is, so some of you may know. But I mean that's kind of how he comes across in the movie is sort of this rough hewn cowboy who is there to kind of win Rachel's heart and so on. Well, historians have treated Jackson that way to some extend. Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, depicts Jackson as sort of the embodiment of the frontier thesis, and other historians have played along with that. But if you look at where Jackson came from, if you look at when he arrived in Nashville, and if you look at what he did once he was there to me it seems fairly clear that, yes, that was the west, that was what was interpreted as the west at that point, but Jackson is not really a westerner per se. He has western characteristics, and he considered himself a westerner, but he also is a southerner, and his life exudes that identity. So I'm going to walk you through some of the characteristics of Jackson's southern identity. In case you don't know, Andrew Jackson was born on march 15, 1767 in the Waxhaws region along the North Carolina-South Carolina border. This is an area that if you're familiar with where Charlotte, North Carolina is it's about 70 miles east/southeast of Charlotte. There's some dispute by the way about whether Jackson was born in North Carolina or South Carolina because his family and then his relatives lived all along the border back and forth. Jackson believed he was born in South Carolina and that's what he always said. So I've tended to follow him in that. Regardless, this area of the Waxhaws was the back country. This was frontier area. It was an area that had been occupied by Native Americans. White settlers had moved from the east coast into the area, had pushed out for the most part the natives living there and had established a small settlement. Jackson's parents moved from Ireland to the Waxhaws region about two years before Jackson was born. He had two older brothers and, of course, his parents. His parents were not well off, but he had two uncles living in the area who were. And by well off I mean that they owned a substantial amount of land and they owned slaves. And slave property was an investment, a capital investment. So for you to invest even in one slave, much less multiple slaves, was an indication that you had some kind of money. So in any case even though this was considered the back country, even though it was considered the frontier, the Waxhaws region was connected to Charleston. And if you know anything about Charleston during this period you know that Charleston was a port city that was connected to not just the rest of the colonies but was really connected to the transatlantic world. So it was connected to Europe, it was connected to Africa, it was connected to the Caribbean and, of course, to the other colonies. And I make that point because it's important to understand that the Waxhaws region was a region in the back country, but people moved back and forth from Charleston to the Waxhaws. Certainly news traveled back and forth. Products traveled back and forth. And so to think about this Waxhaws community as being isolated and backwards really doesn't give a good testament to actually how connected it is to Charleston. And that's important to understand because Jackson is attuned to what's happening in Charleston. So during the revolution Jackson loses most of his family. His father dies around the time he was born in 1767. He loses an older brother a battle during the Revolutionary War. And then his mother and other brother die because of disease from prison camps during the revolution. So by the time Jackson is an early adolescent he doesn't have any immediate family. He has aunts, uncles, cousins. But he decides that he's going to leave the Waxhaws and go to Charleston and try to make it there. So when we're thinking about Jackson during the early part of his life through his early adolescent years, the thing to understand about him is that he's not oriented westward. He's not looking westward. I want to go westward. He's looking towards Charleston. He is oriented toward the coast, okay? Once Jackson is in Charleston he doesn't stay there very long. He gets involved in some gambling disputes and some other chicanery that we won't mention. He leaves Charleston and he moves north to the Charlotte, North Carolina area. And that is really where he begins to change his life. He falls in with a group of young men who are very well connected both locally, statewide and nationally with prominent political leaders. Many of them are sons of these political leaders. Jackson falls in with this group probably first through drinking and gambling and doing other things. But then he decides that he wants to become a lawyer because he had noticed that entering the legal profession was one way for you to move upward in the world. So Jackson studies for the law, become a lawyer, and then as a result of his connections with these other young men he is given the opportunity to move to Nashville which had been settled in the late 1770s, early 1780s. So it was around a decade old at that point. So by the time Jackson makes it to Nashville he's a 21 year old lawyer, and that is a significant difference if you think about where we are in our development at 21 years of age. Now, I teach primarily 18 to 21 year old students. Twenty one is not quite as mature as they think it is or as I thought it was. But it certainly is not the same as someone who is 14 or 10 even over 200 years ago. So the reason I'm emphasizing this is because it's important to understand that while certainly we change and mature and we grow and adapt as we get older, by the time you're 21 years old you have a pretty firm sense of who you are. You have a pretty firm sense of your personality. You have a pretty firm sense of the direction in life that you're going. And that's Jackson when he arrives in Nashville. Now, on his way to Nashville Jackson gets involved in a dispute. And if you know anything about Jackson you probably know he gets into these disputes periodically. Speaking of personality he has a very temperamental personality, violent even at times. So Jackson on his way to Nashville stops in Jonesboro, Tennessee which is near Knoxville, and he has to stop there because there are Native American attacks between Knoxville and Nashville. So he and his party stop, they spend a few months there. And while he's there Jackson needs to make money so he practices law. He gets involved in a dispute with another lawyer by the name of Waightstill Avery. He was Princeton educated, very prominent in North Carolina. The point of the dispute is not very clear. There was a court case. Avery and Jackson were on opposite sides. Avery apparently said something that insulted Jackson so Jackson wrote him a letter and challenged him to a duel. And the two men actually do go out to the dueling grounds and settle things and move on. So let me explain a little bit of something about dueling. Dueling is something that certainly as we get closer to the Civil War is associated very closely with southern men. And it's associated very closely with elite, white southern men. Not so much during this period in terms of the regional identification, but certainly among the upperclass. Jackson issued this challenge which says that he believed that he was a member of the elite upperclass, okay? Avery accepted the challenge which indicated his belief that Jackson was of the elite upperclass, okay? Now, why is that and why is that important? Dueling was something that only occurred among elite, white southern men. You don't have slaves, you don't have women, you don't even have -- there's no middle class like we think of today. We don't even have the lower classes, not just the poor but the lower classes, who engage in dueling. And you certainly don't see duels happening between men of unequal rank, unequal social rank. So Jackson could have believed that he was a member of the elite upperclass and issued the challenge, and if Avery thought that he wasn't on the same rank with him then Avery would have either ignored the challenge, would have beaten Jackson with a cane or with a whip or something else. That was the response that you had if you were challenged by someone who was not of your social rank. Avery doesn't do that. He accepts the challenge which means that he accepts Jackson as his equal. ^M00:20:01 The point of dueling was not to kill each other despite the cartoon imagery here. I'll say a little bit more about that in a second. The point of dueling, in fact, most of the time was to protect your public reputation. And the term that was used at that point was honor, to protect your honor, your public reputation, how people received you and in particular how men of your same social rank perceived you. So while there are some instances in which men fight duels and intend to kill one another, most of the time all you're doing is you're saying I'm willing to go out, I'm willing to face my opponent and stare him face-to-face, that's usually how duels took place, not this stand back-to- back, pace off and whirl and fire. That's not a good way to get an accurate shot. But you have to stand there and face one another, and you have to be willing to face death. And in doing so you preserve your reputation. You show to people that you're a man, that you're willing to die for that sentiment. So Jackson and Avery fight this duel, they fire into the air, they go about their business and things were settled, okay? Now, you may think, well, that's a failure but it's not because Jackson has just proven to other people in his party who is traveling with him, to people in Jonesboro which was Knoxville was the center of power in Tennessee at that point, he's proven to people that Jackson is accepted as one of their own. Jackson throughout the course of his life will get involved in other duels. Not as many as you sometimes read on the internet. You can't believe everything on the internet. I've seen some websites say that Jackson fought hundreds of duels or hundreds of duels. He fights two and a half. He fights the one with Waightstill Avery, he has an encounter with John Sevier that kind of is supposed to be a duel but turns out not to be a duel so I count that has the half. And then in 1806 he fights a duel with a man by the name of Charles Dickinson and, in fact, Jackson kills him in that duel. Dickinson shoots him, and then Jackson fires back and actually kills Dickinson. And that's the only time Jackson kills anyone in a duel. So, again, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Jackson will get involved in other violent encounters. There's a man who insults him, Jackson takes a whip to him or a cane to him proving that he doesn't see him as a social equal. He gets involved in a street brawl in downtown Nashville in 1813, winds up almost dying from that. So he has these other encounters throughout his life. And the violence is one of those things that, again, is not just solely characteristic of southerners. But when you pair it with honor and when you pair it with where Jackson is coming from to me indicates that he very much as a southern identity at this point. ^M00:22:52 [ Pause ] ^M00:22:59 Now, your eyes glazed over just like my students' eyes do. So we're not going to go through every person on here. I'm going to use this as an illustration of something. One of the key characteristics of southern life in this period and certainly of Jackson's life was the characteristic of kinship. And there are different kinds of kinship. Carolyn Earle Billingsley has written extensively about this. Laurie Glover has written extensively about kinship in the south. So there are essentially three types of kinship. You have blood kin, people who are related to you genetically. You have marital kin, people who marry into your family or whose family you marry into. And then there's a third type of kinship called fictive kinship. And this type of kinship is the type of kinship in which you are not related genetically or even maritally to someone, but you still consider them family. And so I'll give you an illustration. We have three children. Our two oldest are girls. And when they were younger there was a woman we knew who was like their grandmother. The girls called her grammy, she spoiled them like grandmothers and grandparents tend to do, the cake in the face, oh, it's okay, here, more sugar, more sugar and then sends them home. You know how that goes. So this woman Babs Nelson [assumed spelling] was not related to us in any way, but she was a member of our fictive kinship network. She believed that we were family, we believed that she was family. And I would venture to say that most people in this room probably have something like that or have had something like that in their life. So when you look at kinship in Jackson's life his blood kin, his immediately family was dead. His extended genetic family he really doesn't have anything to do with once he leaves the Waxhaws. Later in life some extended relatives write him, he writes back, but that's really the extent of it. He doesn't go back to the Waxhaws as far as we know. They don't visit him as far as we know. So what becomes important for Jackson are the marital kinship ties and the fictive kinship ties. So let me talk about the marital kinship ties first, and then I'll talk about this slide. When Jackson moves to Nashville he very soon after falls in love with a young woman by the name of Rachel Donelson Robards. She was the daughter of one of the co-founders of Nashville. John Donelson had come from Virginia. He was a very prominent, wealthy man from Virginia. He had taken his family to Nashville, had helped co-found the settlement. And he had died by this point by the time Jackson gets there. But Jackson moves into Nashville, falls in love with Rachel Donelson Robards. There's a slight problem, she's married. And I won't get into all the circumstances, but eventually her husband leaves her probably in part because of Jackson. And Andrew and Rachel travel down to Spanish Natchez, they come back and say that they're married. A couple of years later it turns out that Rachel and her husband had actually not been divorced. She had been a bigamist, Jackson had been an adulterer. They have to remarry or marry for the first time. There's lots of controversy about this. In any case by 1794 they're legally married, okay? Now, if you think about Jackson as someone who is not a member of the elite class because the Donelsons were elite, if he's not a member of the elite class why would Rachel Donelson's brothers in particular have accepted him given all the questionable circumstances? If you have a young man come into your family, he starts to take up emotionally or maybe even physically with your married sister, brothers have a way in the south of handling that, okay? The Donelson brothers don't. They don't reject Jackson. They don't throw him out of town. They don't chase him out of town. They accept his and Rachel's version of their marriage, of their relationship. So part of the reason I think they're able to do that and willing to do that is because they see Jackson who is on an equally social rank with them and as someone who is a much better choice for Rachel than her first husband. And, again, there are lots of circumstances to that. So part of Jackson's success once he moves to Nashville comes from his connections to the Donelsons. And there are many, many, many Donelsons. When I do genealogy to look up a certain person's name you have to wade through dozens of Andrew Jackson Donelson or Andrew Jackson so and so, Rachel Jackson so and so. It's very, very confusing. So you have this Donelson family network that's in Nashville in Tennessee that helps Jackson find legal cases to prosecute, that helps him find jobs, that helps him to speculate in land, that helps him find enslaved people to work for labor. The Donelsons are very much key to him advancing in Tennessee. In terms of political career Jackson depends not just on those family connections, but he also depends on those fictive connections, those people he considers family. And so back to the slide. There are a couple of men who are part of a fictive kinship network that Jackson utilizes to great advantage during his political career. And those two men are William B. Lewis, you'll see on the bottom right, and then his brother-in-law John Henry Eaton. These two men are the two men in Tennessee most responsible for Jackson running for the presidency and for him winning the presidency. John Eaton because a notorious [inaudible] because he marries a name by the name of Margaret, and that sets off a sex scandal in the early days of Jackson's presidency that, again, has lots of different interesting details to it. But before that John Eaton had served with Jackson during the War of 1812, had supported Jackson's political campaigns in 1824 and in 1828. Frankly had been Jackson's unofficial campaign manager coordinating a lot of the official correspondence and attacks and responses during those campaigns. William B. Lewis was, and you'll appreciate this, sort of a G. Gordon Liddy of his day. I like a Washington crowd. Again, my students are like who? Lewis was instrumental in a different way. He did a lot of the things that Jackson and Eaton and others didn't want to do or couldn't do. So he would dig up dirt on Henry Clay, for example, or try to dig up dirt on John Quincy Adams. There wasn't much to dig up frankly. But he did a lot of the dirty work, a lot of the behind the scenes work. ^M00:30:01 So these two men who were brothers-in-law are part of a larger kinship network that Jackson uses to advance himself politically. So, again, we're not going to talk about everyone. But if you notice on one side you have the Stokes family. This was a very prominent North Carolina family that William B. Lewis marries into after his first wife dies. And the Stokes family is very much involved in gaining support for Jackson in North Carolina. And then you'll notice on the other side the Claiborne family is a very prominent family in Louisiana. And this family was very strong in its support of Jackson and the democrats. So Jackson utilizes this one kinship network politically, and there are multiple kinship networks like this. And this is not necessarily uncommon in the early republic, but Jackson who isn't part of those Virginia families, those dynastic families like the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and so on, Jackson understands that this is something he needs to advance himself in his career, okay? And these fictive ties in particular very much become part of the southern network, part of the southern community. And in some cases you have stronger bonds within those communities, with members of those communities than you would ever have even with your own family members as we see in Jackson's case. ^M00:31:22 [ Pause ] ^M00:31:30 Now, one of the things that makes Jackson successful, and this is one of the clearest markers of his southern identity, is the fact that he owns other human beings. And this is one of the most prominent ways that he acquires wealth and produces wealth. And so this graph gives you an indication of some of that slave holding wealth or some of the numbers of slaves he owned in any case. These are not all the enslaved people that he was the master over. There are other plantations that he owns in Mississippi and in Alabama that have slaves on them as well. So these are just the ones in middle Tennessee, primarily the Hermitage. Jackson starts out purchasing his first slave, a young woman by the name of Nancy on his way to Nashville from North Carolina in 1788. He very quickly understands that if he's going to advance economically he is going to have to acquire more slaves, and so he does that for the rest of his life. At one point he owns close to 200 slaves. Over the close of his lifetime he probably owns well over 300. The Hermitage has identified around 300 individual names of enslaved people living either at the Hermitage or at one of Jackson's other plantations. So this is a very prominent piece of Jackson's growing reputation, a very prominent part of him being a part of the member class. In order for you to be a part of the elite southern class you have to own enslaved people. There's no other way about it. And when you consider that the most valuable slaves in terms of cost, so if you just think about this in economic terms, if you look at young, male field hands who had worked cash crops, primarily cotton, if you look at their equivalent value today as being around $45,000 in today's dollars, that gives you some sense of what it meant to invest in slave property. So if you owned one slave, even if that slave is not a young, male field hand, let's say it's an older woman or an older man, even if it's $20,000 or $15,000 in today's money that's a fairly significant investment. You multiple that by 5, by 10, by 100, by 150, by nearly 200 in Jackson's case, he's a multimillionaire. That doesn't include the property he owns. It doesn't include the crops that are produced that are sold. So when you look at Jackson and you try to understand him as a southerner you have to understand that his slave ownership is very much a part of that identity. All these things tie together. Everything I've talked about ties together. Really the linchpin of all of this is slaveholding because without slaveholding Jackson doesn't advance to prominence or doesn't stay at that rank as he does throughout most of his life. So one of the questions that I get at least in Tennessee is what kind of slave owner was Jackson? And this goes to the other side of slavery. So we've talked about the economic side, how it benefits Jackson. But there's the other side, and the other side is what is it like for the enslaved people whom Jackson owns? And I could give you many examples. So I'll just say that Jackson is a fairly typical slave owner. There are times when he expressed sympathy, when he expresses regret about things that are happening to his enslaved people. There are times also when he orders them beaten or punished for things that they do. So I want to use Betty as one example. Betty was a young girl when Jackson purchased her and her mother. At this point this is in 1867, circa 1867 photos so this is post Civil War. You can tell she's an older woman at this point. The episode I want to talk is one that happens in 1821. Jackson's in Florida, and he had gone to Florida to be the territorial governor of the state or of Florida which was not a state at that point. And so he takes with him Rachel his wife, he takes some relatives, and he takes, of course, some members of their slave household, and Betty was one of those. So she's in her 20s at this point probably. So Jackson is off doing the things that politicians do. He's governing the territory, working out the transfer from Spain and all those things. And so Rachel writes him a letter complaining about Betty, complaining that Betty is putting on airs. And so you can almost see Jackson. Here he is doing the important work, and he expects his wife to handle these issues. And so he gets this letter and you can almost see him roll his eyes and be exasperated. So he writes back, and he writes back not to Rachel, but he writes back to some of the male members of his household including a nephew and a doctor who was living with him. And he told these men tell Betty, and I'm paraphrasing here, tell Betty to stop putting on airs, and if she doesn't comply then take her out in public and whip her. So we don't know what happens. We don't know if Betty is whipped. We know that she stays with the Jackson family even after Jackson's death. What's interesting about this particular episode and what's sad is that what Rachel was complaining about was that Betty was doing neighbors' laundry. That's what Rachel was upset about. Now whether that was a pattern of disobedience, whether that was a pattern of Betty trying to express her independence in the form of freedom we don't know. But Rachel was concerned about her doing other peoples' laundry, and that was what Jackson ordered her whipped for. So on the one hand you have Jackson who could express concern and sympathy. On the other hand you have a man who could order a slave woman whipped for doing other peoples' laundry. And that is why I say he's typical. It's pretty rare to find slave owners who are sadistic. And it's pretty rare to find slave owners who are overly compassionate. What you usually find is in the middle over a broad spectrum slave owners acting toward one end of the spectrum or toward the other at various times, and that's certainly true with Jackson. What Jackson is probably most known for today is Indian removal. And this is an important part of this southern identity. Jackson like many white southerners believed that Native Americans were in the way. That they would be better served either becoming like white Americans or moving. And so during the 18 teens, during the War of 1812 and after and certainly during his presidency Jackson tries to accomplish that. He does so through violence during the war of 1812. He does so through treaty and chicanery and deception after the War of 1812. And as president he uses paternalism and eventually force to remove Native Americans. And in doing so he provides I think one of the most important contributions that he could have made as a southerner. He opens up the deep south to white settlement. Now, certainly he has plenty of help in that regard. He has soldiers working for him, there are other people who are working for the same goals. But Jackson is really a driving force during and after the War of 1812 and during his presidency to remove these Native Americans from the southeast. And in doing so he opens up this territory for white settlement. And those white settlers oftentimes bring with them slaves. And those slaves oftentimes are working cotton. So when you look at the antebellum south, when you look at the south we think of hopefully not too often when you think of Gone With the Wind. When you think about the old south Jackson's not the only one who helps create it, but he certainly is a main instigator of that because of the removal of Native Americans and the vacuum, the land vacuum that opens up that has been filled by white settlers. This is something Jackson firmly believes in. He's a firm believer in manifest destiny. He's a firm believer that this land belongs to white southerners, and it belongs to the nation. And he's a firm believer that with Native Americans removed that the United States will be much better off in the end. And this continues, I'm not going to talk about this, but this continues out west with Texas. He's very much involved in the annexation of Texas, with Sam Houston and other people. ^M00:39:58 So he is someone that when you look at the map geographically of the south prior to the Civil War he in large part responsible for what that map looks like I would argue. And that's, as I said, one of the main contributions that he makes as a southerner, and it's a reflection of how he sees himself as a southerner. That is certainly not a western phenomenon. That is a southern phenomenon in Jackson's life. I could talk more and more and more about Jackson, and I'll be happy to take questions if you have any. But let me stop because I can go on and on so I should stop and see if you have any questions that you'd like to ask. ^M00:40:37 [ Applause ] ^M00:40:42 Yes, sir. >> I have a large number of questions but [inaudible]. >> Okay. >> Would you think Jackson's opinion about the union similar to that of Sam Houston in 1861? Second question, was Jackson's view of Native Americans and Africans similar to that of Thomas Jefferson? >> Two great questions. I'll answer your first question. The first question was was Jackson's view of the union similar to Sam Houston's in 1861? Let me answer it this way. I would say that if Jackson were alive in 1860-61, certainly before Fort Sumter, I think he very much would have been like Sam Houston. People have asked me that question before so I've thought about this a little bit. And it seems to me that Jackson had a strong supportive union that came largely I think from his military background that if he had been alive during the cessation crisis he at last initially would have supported the union. Now, once Fort Sumter happened and after Fort Sumter is when Tennessee seceded would Jackson then have gone with Tennessee that's a great question I don't really have an answer to. But I think certainly before Fort Sumter he would have supported the union. And your second question was was Jackson's views of Native Americans and Africans or African-Americans similar to Thomas Jefferson's? Jefferson expressed it much more eloquently. Jackson doesn't have the education that Jefferson does. I think the two men are probably more similar than people like to recognize. Jefferson talks about what happens if we free slaves. There will be a race war and these sorts of things. Jefferson is very much involved in a course displacing Native Americans just as pretty much every president before Jackson had been. So I would say that they're very similar or more similar than we like to give them credit for. There are a couple of things that make Jackson different. One, he didn't write the Declaration. So lots of things are forgiven when it comes to Jefferson because he wrote the Declaration. But the second thing is that Jackson is much more blatant and open about what he's doing, and he's also more successful at it. And so I think his success in that regard, no matter how we view it today, his success in that regard today comes off as something that is a negative and not a positive. Other questions? Yes, sir? >> Yes, what would say the slave population and the Native American population was in 1847 in the south? >> Great question. I wish I had access to Google at this moment. In the south you're looking at in terms of Native Americans tens of thousands. I think let's see from the 18 teens through the early 1840s around 50,000 to 60,000 Native Americans are displaced from the southeast. So tens of thousands. In terms of African-Americans in the south at that point there were eight million in 1860. There were a little over half a million in 1790. So you're looking at maybe between one and two million would be my best guess without Google. >> Thank you. >> Yes? >> I know this is one of those counterfactuals that historians often don't like, but how do you think that Jackson's presidency would have been different if Rachel had been alive? >> Oh, I've never been asked that. That's interesting. I don't know. Rachel did not like politics. She did not like Washington. She considered it Babylon like she considered New Orleans Babylon. Basically anywhere but the Hermitage was Babylon I think in her regard. She's an interesting character because when she was younger she was very vivacious and flirtatious. And she's kind of the it girl. And then when she gets older she becomes very religious and pious and kind of dower and boring honestly. So I think it would have changed things. I think certainly if you look at how Jackson reacts to the Eaton scandal I think he would have reacted with much less emotion. Because Rachel dies right before he takes office. And then the Eaton scandal begins at around the time he takes office. And a lot of his response psychologically and emotionally I think comes from his grief over Rachel. So at least in that regard I think you would have seen things turn out differently. She doesn't seem to have much effect on taming him otherwise. Of course, he was gone most of the time so how could she, right? Other questions? >> Obviously Jackson didn't have much formal education. I mean how did he achieve -- I mean he went on to study law. What education did he achieve through his career? For instance, was he involved in continuing education? >> So Jackson has some schooling in the Waxhaws. When he studies to become a lawyer basically what you did was you reads law so you would work for a lawyer and you would hand copy cases. And after you did that for a certain amount of time you would come before, in his case in front of three lawyers, three practicing lawyers, and they would determine whether or not he could practice law. So he didn't have to go to law school. He didn't have to get a license. And in that sense you had to get a license from these three lawyers' approval. He is a lifelong reader. He makes Biblical references all throughout his correspondence. He makes classical references to ancient Rome, ancient Greece, of ancient philosophers. So he is someone who seems to be very much a self-educated man for the most part, someone who was interested in continuing to grow his knowledge. He's not quite as illiterate, again, as people think he is. But he certainly was someone who didn't have the advances or the education of Jefferson or Calhoun or even a Henry Clay. Other questions? Greg? ^M00:47:17 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:47:48 Good question. So you have a man like Frederick Jackson Turner who depicts Jackson as a westerner. You have Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. who sort of depicts Jackson as this [inaudible] against the money interest. And by the time the 1960s roll around with ethnocultural and social schools of history a lot of their study of Jackson focuses on him and the removal. And so it almost seems like one of those questions about Jackson that's obvious if you just step back and look at the source material. If you look at where he comes from geographically, how he develops over the course of his early life before he moves to Tennessee, it's one of those obvious questions that I think honestly historians have just missed. And part of it may be because Jackson is easy to stereotype. If you stereotype him as a westerner, well, then that explains why all those people showed up in Washington at his inauguration. It can't be because they were looking for jobs. It has to be because they were sort of the Beverly Hillbillies from Appalachians which is not true. It's easy to stereotype him and to make him sort of a black and white figure and not see the nuances of his identity. Because he was a westerner. I want to be clear. I'm not saying that he didn't have western characteristics. But if you look at his life he makes more sense as a southerner in that construct that he does within the western construct. And no one has asked me about the twenty dollar bill so I'll bring it up. Thank you for that segue sort of. I think a lot of the things that you read about Jackson today in regards to the twenty dollar bill, and I'm like Dan Feller [phonetic] I'm sort of agnostic about it. If he's on the twenty or not doesn't really matter to me. But I think a lot of the arguments that you read about why he should be removed you could make some of those same arguments about Jefferson and Washington and Grant. I mean there are lots of things -- these are all flawed human beings. Now, does that mean we have to keep them on the currency? No. Does that mean that we should use those reasons to kick them off? I don't know. ^M00:49:57 I would rather see a different reason given than he was just a mean guy. He hated Native Americans. Well, you know that was pretty typical of his time. If there's a reason to remove him to honor a woman that makes sense to me. To get rid of him because he killed Native Americans, again you could say that for many people, even some of those on the currency. Yes, ma'am. >> I was just remembering from the 20s he didn't like the National Bank. >> Yeah, that's the other reason. That is one of the reasons that people do bring up that I think Jackson would agree with. He would not be on the paper money. He wanted hard coinage. He wanted [inaudible]. He did not want paper money. So I think he'd probably be happy if he were taken off. >> I always thought it was funny that Alexander Hamilton who loved banks is on ten, and you don't get very many of those. And Jackson who didn't like the National Bank is what you get from an ATM. >> That's right, that's right. Any other questions? Yes, sir? >> Now that they've allowed [inaudible]. >> Okay, I'll try to answer them. >> [Inaudible] United. >> I'm sorry? ^M00:51:01 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:51:24 >> So I'll take your second question. The Donelsons are as far as I know Scotch Irish which Jackson was as well. And your first question I'm not sure about the court case that you're referencing, but Jackson was very much opposed to the idea of a National Bank. He was very much opposed to the idea of money, particularly government money, being used to influence political elections. That's what the whole bank war is about when he tries to destroy the National Bank is because he believes the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, had used government money to try to defeat Jackson in 1828. And Jackson holds grudges. At that point he's not fighting duels or beating people, but he certainly could hold grudges. And that really seems to be a lot of the impetus behind why he combats the bank throughout his presidency. So if there are no more questions I guess we'll do the quiz. [Applause] Thank you. >> This has a been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E00:52:38