Jon Meacham to Donald Trump: 'Lead all of us. Jackson did. You can, too'

Dear Mr. President,

First, a word of welcome. Today marks your inaugural visit to Tennessee as the 45th president of the United States. The successor of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, you are now the leader of the nation, charged with sacred responsibilities. The historian Henry Adams — grandson and great-grandson of presidents — put it best: The American president, Adams wrote, “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The lives and fortunes of hundreds of millions here and billions more abroad are in your care on the inevitably perilous voyage ahead.

Which is at least partly why you have come here to visit Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage — to seek, presumably, both inspiration for the future and sanction for the present. You have hung a Ralph Earl portrait of Old Hickory in your Oval Office, and your chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has argued that you are a neo-Jackson — a transformative populist figure. Your touring The Hermitage is powerful evidence that you agree. My hope is that you will note not only the surface similarities you share with the seventh president (the big personality, the fierce pride, the rhetorical antagonism toward political, economic and cultural elites) but that you will engage Jackson’s complexity rather than simply embrace his caricature.

It’s easy to see why Jackson appeals to you. He was a celebrity, albeit one whose fame was based not on "The Apprentice" but on his Agincourt-like victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815. He expanded the powers of the presidency and insisted that he was the only official elected by all the people. It was a distinction he believed made the White House, not Capitol Hill, what John F. Kennedy would later call the “vital center of action.”

Before Jackson, power tended toward the few, whether political or financial. After Jackson, government, for better and for worse, was more attuned to the popular will. A leader who could inspire the masses could change the world — as you, Mr. President, have shown us since that June day in 2015 when you rode the escalator from the lobby floor of Trump Tower down to your announcement, and into history.

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He was the most contradictory of men — but then, America was, and is, among the most contradictory of nations. He had massacred Indians in combat, executed enemy soldiers, fought duels and imposed martial law on New Orleans. A champion of even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan and brought him to live at The Hermitage, Jackson was the chief architect of the removal of Native American tribes. An enemy of the Second Bank of the United States, Jackson would have given his life to preserve the central government.

His opponents thought him a possible “American Bonaparte,” a putative dictator, yet he could be a figure of sophistication and of reassurance. In December 1814, with the Battle of New Orleans at hand, a leading hostess was disturbed to learn that her husband had invited Jackson to dinner. After warning her other guests about this “wild man of the woods,” the lady was stunned to find Jackson both elegant and charming. “Is this your backwoodsman?” her friends asked after Jackson left. “He is a prince!”

As you learn more about Old Hickory, please remember this: His populism was not borrowed or affected but real and deeply felt. Jackson spoke passionately of the needs of “the humble members of society — the farmers, mechanics and laborers” — and made the case for popular politics, fundamentally shifting us from republicanism to democracy. He did so in part because he had begun his life as one of that “humble” class. A self-made man who had risen to the highest levels of a slaveholding society, he genuinely wanted to widen the doors of opportunity to men like him. Today we rightly find his views morally shortsighted, but in his time he was a figure of democratic aspiration whose administration marked an important step in the perennial push for a more perfect union.

He was also a man who valued experience in governmental and military affairs. You have offered yourself to America as a president unburdened by conventional credentials. But the Jackson example teaches us that expertise matters. An uneducated boy from the Carolina backwoods, the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, Jackson became a practicing lawyer, a public prosecutor, a U.S. attorney, a delegate to the founding Tennessee Constitutional Convention, a U.S. congressman, a U.S. senator, a judge of the state Superior Court and a major general, first of the state militia and then of the U.S. Army. It’s too late, obviously, for you to undertake such preparation. Listening to those with such experience — something Jackson also did — is, however, a wise course to follow.

Jackson believed, too, in the constitutional order brought into being in Philadelphia in the long summer of 1787. “It is no longer a question whether this great country can remain happily united and flourish under our present form of government,” Jackson said in his farewell address in 1837. “Experience, the unerring test of all human undertakings, has shown the wisdom and foresight of those who formed it, and has proved that in the union of these States there is a sure foundation for the brightest hopes of freedom and for the happiness of the people. At every hazard and by every sacrifice this Union must be preserved.”

Compromise was thus an essential, if little-remarked, Jacksonian virtue. No other president fulminated more passionately or threatened his foes more vividly, but Jackson believed in the union with all his heart. His mother and his brothers had died in the American Revolution; to him, the nation was a sacred thing, hallowed by their blood. We were then, and are now, what Jackson called “one great family.”

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To Jackson, anger could be a means to an end. He understood himself and how others saw him, and he turned his vices into virtues. In facing down disunionists in South Carolina in 1832-33, Jackson thundered on about leading troops into the state and hanging his opponents “as high as Haman.” Yet in the evenings, alone in the White House, he wrote carefully constructed letters to his allies on the ground about how to bring the crisis to a peaceful resolution.

There is an anxiety, Mr. President, that you are too enamored of your own political base — that your tweets and your energy are directed toward motivating only those who already agree with you. On the wall of Jackson’s study at The Hermitage is a copy of his 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina. It may be difficult to read the old type, so here is a key passage: “Contemplate the condition of that country of which you still form an important part,” Jackson wrote, “consider its government uniting in one bond of common interest and general protection so many different States — giving to all their inhabitants the proud title of AMERICAN CITIZEN — protecting their commerce — securing their literature and arts — facilitating their intercommunication — defending their frontiers — and making their name respected in the remotest parts of the earth! Consider the extent of its territory its increasing and happy population, its advance in arts, which render life agreeable, and the sciences which elevate the mind! See education spreading the lights of religion, morality, and general information into every cottage in this wide extent of our Territories and States! Behold it as the asylum where the wretched and the oppressed find a refuge and support! Look on this picture of happiness and honor, and say, WE TOO, ARE CITIZENS OF AMERICA!”

We’re all Americans still, sir. Lead all of us. Jackson did. You can, too.

A final thought. Inside The Hermitage, next to his study, you will see the bedroom where Jackson breathed his last in 1845. “It is from within, among yourselves — from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power — that factions will be formed and liberty endangered,” Jackson said in his farewell to the nation. “It is against such designs … that you have especially to guard yourselves. You have the highest of human trusts committed to your care. ... May He who holds in His hands the destinies of nations make you worthy of the favors He has bestowed and enable you, with pure hearts and pure hands and sleepless vigilance, to guard and defend to the end of time the great charge He has committed to your keeping.”

Wise words, Mr. President, from a distant era. Those of us who have inherited those obligations would do well to heed them. Our hope — our prayer — is that you, in particular, will take them to heart.

Respectfully,

Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham, who lives in Nashville, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.” He is a trustee of the Andrew Jackson Foundation.