Why Every President Sucked

No. 07 · The Presidents

Andrew Jackson’s Biggest Failures

1829–1837

A war hero who democratized politics, enslaved more than a hundred people, and sent the Cherokee west.

Who was Andrew Jackson?

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, serving from March 4, 1829 to March 4, 1837. Born in the Carolina backcountry in 1767, he was orphaned during the Revolutionary War and carried a scar from a British officer’s sword. He became a Tennessee lawyer, planter and slaveholder, and a military hero after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. He was a duelist who killed a man in 1806, and he survived the first assassination attempt on a sitting president, in 1835, when both of the attacker’s pistols misfired.

Why is Andrew Jackson considered one of the most controversial presidents?

Jackson is not bottom-tier, but he is falling. C-SPAN’s historians ranked him 13th in 2000 and 22nd in 2021. Siena’s scholars moved him from 9th in 1990 to 23rd in 2022. In C-SPAN’s 2021 survey he ranked 8th on public persuasion but 39th on pursuing equal justice for all, and the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project named him the second most polarizing president, behind Trump. Historians have not found much new about Jackson. They have changed how much weight to give removal and slavery against his role in democratizing politics.

In my book, Jackson’s entry is about the Cherokee removal. What follows is the record around it, with the song I wrote for him threaded through.

Chords: C, G, D/F♯

Georgia Cherokee wanted to stay
Supreme court said that that's ok

1. The Indian Removal Act

Jackson made removing Native nations from the Southeast a priority from the start. The Indian Removal Act passed the Senate 28 to 19 on April 24, 1830 and the House 102 to 97 on May 26, and Jackson signed it on May 28. The Act appropriated $500,000, and it said nothing in it authorized “the violation of any existing treaty.” Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett, a Democrat, voted against it. The House margin was five votes. In practice, treaties were then negotiated under heavy pressure.

Jackson had been at this for years. After the Creek War, the Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814) forced the Creek to cede about 23 million acres, including land of Creek allies who had fought alongside him.

2. “Fell still born”: Worcester v. Georgia

In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall’s Court held that Georgia had no authority over Cherokee territory. The line commonly attributed to Jackson in response, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” is apocryphal. The Federal Judicial Center says it likely first appeared in an 1864 book by the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. I should say plainly that my book’s entry leans on that famous line, and the song does too.

What Jackson did write, in an April 1832 letter to John Coffee, is arguably worse: “The decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find they cannot coerce Georgia.” He never enforced the ruling.

But Andrew Jackson
He said hey chief justice
You made the ruling
Go head, enforce it
Until then, they're moving

3. New Echota and the Trail of Tears

In 1835, a small faction of the Cherokee, the Treaty Party, signed the Treaty of New Echota, giving up their land in Georgia. They did not represent the nation. More than 16,000 Cherokee petitioned Congress against it. The Senate ratified the treaty on May 18, 1836 by 31 to 15, one vote more than the two-thirds required.

Here is where the record needs care. The Cherokee removal itself, the Trail of Tears of 1838 and 1839, happened under Jackson’s successor Martin Van Buren. The National Park Service cites a missionary doctor’s estimate that more than 4,000 Cherokee died, nearly a fifth of the nation. My book says one in four. The better-supported figure is closer to one in five.

Jackson’s own presidency saw the Choctaw removal, which began in 1831, the Creek removal and the start of the Second Seminole War in 1835. He set the policy and the machinery in motion, and others finished it.

One little, two little, 15,000
Cherokee going to Oklahoma
1 in 4 ain't gonna make it there
Andrew Jackson and a trail of tears

4. A slaveholder-in-chief

Jackson owned about 95 enslaved people when he took office, and the Hermitage says it took more than 160 enslaved workers by the time he died in 1845. An 1804 runaway ad he placed offered ten dollars extra “for every hundred lashes” a captor would inflict, up to three hundred. In 1835, his Postmaster General allowed Southern postmasters to hold back abolitionist mail, and Jackson asked Congress to bar “incendiary publications” from the mails.

5. The Bank War and the Panic of 1837

Jackson vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States on July 10, 1832, and in 1833 he removed the government’s deposits and placed them in state banks, the “pet banks.” The Senate censured him on March 28, 1834, by 26 to 20, and after a three-year fight his allies expunged it in January 1837, writing “Expunged by order of the Senate” across the journal. In July 1836 his Specie Circular required payment for public land in gold or silver.

The Panic of 1837 hit two months after he left office. Historians disagree about the cause. The traditional view blames the Bank War, the pet banks and the Specie Circular. Peter Temin and later economists stress international forces such as British interest rates and falling cotton prices. The current consensus is that Jackson’s policies aggravated a crisis whose main triggers were abroad.

6. “King Andrew”

Jackson issued twelve vetoes, five regular and seven pocket, more than all six of his predecessors combined, and none were overridden. Critics drew him in a king’s robes. The spoils system is often credited to him, but the line “to the victor belong the spoils” was William Marcy’s, in a Senate speech in 1832. The Miller Center says Jackson was never so candid.

Andrew Jackson, all I'm asking
How'd you get your mug on the pretty little 20?

The case for Jackson

His defenders, including biographers Jon Meacham and Robert Remini, argue that he held the Union together in the Nullification Crisis by pairing the Force Bill with the 1833 compromise tariff, and that he democratized American politics. In January 1835, the United States paid off its entire national debt, the only time that has happened. Revisionists such as Claudio Saunt and Daniel Walker Howe treat removal as ethnic cleansing. That argument is why his ranking has fallen.

After the White House

Jackson handed the presidency to Van Buren and retired to the Hermitage, where he died on June 8, 1845. In December 2024, researchers announced they had located a cemetery holding an estimated 28 enslaved people about 1,000 feet from the mansion. His portrait is still on the $20 bill. Treasury announced in 2016 that Harriet Tubman would replace him on the front, and the plan has been delayed repeatedly since.

Hear the song

Read the full lyrics, browse all 43 songs, read more articles, or head to the book.

Sources

By Eric Olsen · Published