Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson’s significance in this account lies chiefly in the force of his afterlife: he was the settlers’ political and cultural idol, a model for the qualities they claimed, and one of the first heroes through whom Harry Truman learned to imagine greatness. The book presents him less through a record of his actions than through the uses others made of his image, from the naming of Jackson County to Truman’s boyhood reading and Masonic fellowship.

The settlers’ ideal

For the predominantly Scotch-Irish, Baptist, Democratic settlers of Jackson County, Jackson embodied a distinctly western ideal. They regarded themselves as the true Americans and admired him as Old Hickory of Tennessee, a president from west of the Alleghenies and a man of their own Scotch-Irish stock. Jackson County itself bore his name. The association joined place and political memory: the county’s identity could be understood through the example its residents chose to honor.

That example was not presented as gentle or accommodating. The settlers saw Jackson as courageous and blunt, but also touchy, narrow-minded, intolerant, quarrelsome, and obstinate. Their admiration therefore carried a tension: the same hard resistance that signified independence could become inflexibility. An old Scotch-Irish prayer in the account asks for the speaker always to be right, while admitting how hard he is to turn. The prayer gives a local idiom to the traits the settlers associated with Jackson, making obstinacy part of a shared inheritance rather than merely an individual failing.

A hero in Harry Truman’s reading

Jackson also entered Harry Truman’s life through books. As a boy, Truman read the four volumes of Great Men and Famous Women, whose essays treated hundreds of historical figures. He was especially drawn to the volume Soldiers and Sailors and dreamed of becoming a great general. Among American heroes, his favorites included Jackson and Robert E. Lee, the latter an idol of his mother. Truman later confided that he studied the careers of great men in order to be worthy of her.

The placement of Jackson among Truman’s earliest exemplars helps explain the shape of his youthful historical imagination. His heroes were not yet the inventors, industrialists, or artists he might have chosen; at this stage, greatness meant the achievements of generals and forceful leaders. As his reading widened, his pantheon came to include Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cyrus the Great, and Gustavus Adolphus. Jackson remained part of that early company, a bridge between the local political ideal and the larger history Truman was trying to absorb.

A continuing emblem

Jackson’s presence extended beyond family memory and reading. Truman took Freemasonry seriously, and the account places Jackson among the order’s celebrated members, alongside Mozart and presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. For Truman, Masonic fellowship and ritual offered a connection to an institution claiming great antiquity; the association with Jackson added a familiar American hero to that tradition. The book does not describe Jackson’s personal role in the lodge, but his membership helps explain why his name could recur as both a political and fraternal emblem.

Across these settings, Jackson functions as a recurring standard rather than a fully narrated historical actor. The settlers invoked him to affirm a regional and political identity; Truman encountered him first among the lives of great men and later through Freemasonry. The account’s emphasis on both the admiration and the settlers’ acknowledged intolerance keeps that emblem from being uncomplicated. Jackson stands for courage and self-reliance, but also for the hard-edged convictions the community celebrated—and the stubbornness it recognized in itself.