Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 "A kind providence" and "The right to self preservation": how Andrew Jackson, Emersonian whiggery, and frontier Calvinism shaped the course of American political culture Ryan Ruckel Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Ruckel, Ryan, ""A kind providence" and "The right to self preservation": how Andrew Jackson, Emersonian whiggery, and frontier Calvinism shaped the course of American political culture" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1118. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1118 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “A KIND PROVIDENCE” AND “THE RIGHT TO SELF PRESERVATION”: HOW ANDREW JACKSON, EMERSONIAN WHIGGERY, AND FRONTIER CALVINISM SHAPED THE COURSE OF AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Ryan Ruckel B. A.., Trinity University, 1988 M.A., The University of Southern Mississippi, 1997 August 2006 Dedication For Terri In loving memory of Lillian, Barbara, Mavis, and Ford ii Acknowledgments I love my wife, Terri Smith Ruckel, who is my own special gift from Providence. To Terri I owe thanks for this entire project and for so much more. She has put up with a lot, but she never gave up on me. I recognize and hope to honor the many sacrifices she has made during our graduate journey that we began in that fateful year, 2001. I must also thank my family and friends for believing that I could and would complete this task. They always knew I would, even when I was sure they were wrong. They were right. In particular, my truly “great” Aunt Dorothy Bennett, my father, Gary Ruckel, and my brother, Taylor Ruckel, have believed and have remembered me without all the schooling attached. My father-in-law, Gary Smith, has cared for our family many, many times when the demands of graduate life prevented me from doing so, and I’m grateful. Thank you, also, Tricia, Tiffany, Taryn, Traci, and Tony, and Lauryn, Raegan, Lane, and Emili for being such great reasons to want to do well in life. None of my grandparents nor my mother have lived long enough to see me become a professor, but there has never been a day of doing this that I have not thought of them and their silent example. For being the best friends I never met and for so many good times, thank you, Paragonian Knights and the Vanguard of War. The LSU History Department has encouraged my progress as a scholar by word and deed, offering more than one kind of financial support. Without the Dissertation Fellowship from the LSU Graduate School, I would not have had the freedom to read, think, and write this past year. The Colonial Dames offered me a very generous award, which helped me purchase necessary computer equipment for my work. Damaris Witherspoon Steele not only wrote her very helpful history of her church, but she personally guided Terri and me on a tour of the Hermitage. Special thanks to my committee, in particular Gaines M. Foster, who wanted me to come to LSU in the first place. My advisor, Boyd Professor William J. iii Cooper, Jr., provided research and travel funds that allowed the trip to the Hermitage and to Philadelphia, as well as ensuring that the already-excellent LSU libraries contained all extant collections of Jackson’s correspondence. In addition to recognizing the worth of this project, he has encouraged me to recognize my worth as an individual. I will ever be grateful for his honorable example, his Providential concern, and his dedication to transition words. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments . iii Abstract . vi Chapter One Introduction: The Case for Jackson and God . 1 Two The Right Side of Providence . 12 Three The Jacksonian Christian Context . 37 Four A Father’s Invocation . 75 Five The Nation’s Father and Evangelical Providence . .101 Six Two Roads Diverge - Jacksonian versus Emersonian Providence . 135 Seven Conclusion: “His Will Be Done”– Jackson’s Confidence in “the Fountain of All Good” . 159 Bibliography . 166 Vita . 172 v Abstract Andrew Jackson has inspired numerous biographies and works of historical scholarship, but his religious views have attracted very little attention. Jackson may have been a giant on the political landscape, but he was also a human being, an ordinary American who experienced the same difficulties and challenges as other Americans of the early nineteenth century. Another common experience for many Americans of Jackson’s day included church life, revivals, and efforts to conceptualize every day events within the context of religious experience. Finding out where Jackson stood on religion and what role religion played in his thinking helps situate him as a man of his times. Unfortunately, he so greatly influenced his generation that he has taken on larger-than-life proportions, and even historians have found it difficult to present Jackson as an ordinary person who could choose to make the same responses to religion as did his contemporaries. In sum, looking at Jackson’s religious views as expressed in his correspondence regarding events both public and private helps explain him. Jackson wrote thousands of letters over the course of his lifetime, and his correspondence, especially his private letters to his friends and family, indicate that he did indeed inherit and live by a sturdy set of religious convictions, deeply rooted in the Calvinist tradition of Scottish Presbyterian Christianity. In his letters, Jackson briefly but consistently revealed his concern over his relationship to the sovereignty and providence of God. Jackson’s foundational belief that a sovereign God governed the world, guiding it toward a destiny only He could fully comprehend remained unshaken, even as he experienced the death of beloved family members, the difficulties of war, and other harsh realities of early nineteenth-century American life. As he grew older, Jackson also became more evangelical in his religious outlook, an experience common to many other people of the Jacksonian period. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on Providence serve as a foil to vi more greatly reveal the subtle difference between the Jacksonian Providential optimism rooted in uncertainty and the emerging, Whiggish world view that would eventually overcome it.. vii Chapter One Introduction: The Case for Jackson and God Andrew Jackson has stirred the American imagination ever since his astonishing victory over a vastly superior force of British troops at the Battle of New Orleans. The victory, at the tag end of the War of 1812, could very nearly have been a defeat but instead gave Americans a renewed faith in the moral and spiritual superiority of their republic, confirming for many that God had prepared a special destiny for the United States. Jackson necessarily appeared at the center of that divine plan because, as many Americans saw it, Providence had used his talents and courage to bring about the vindication of American honor at New Orleans. To his supporters, Jackson seemed to be “God’s right-hand man.”1 Ironically, in spite of the close association between Providence, Jackson, and the national sense of destiny, those who have written about Jackson have not explored Jackson’s own understanding of Providence, and Jackson’s other religious views have attracted virtually no attention at all.2 Jackson quickly became one of the best-known personages in the United States, which by the 1820s put him at the center one of the nation’s most defining political eras. Jackson’s exploits against the British, the Indians, and the Spanish endeared him to the frontier settlers, but so did his reputation as a duelist, gambler, and race horse owner. That record does not indicate that Jackson would be seen as a moral leader, much less a religious one. As a boy, Jackson had fought in the American Revolution, which left him orphaned at fourteen years old. Then his own 1John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 101-32. 2Strictly speaking, John Calvin’s notion of predestination applied only to the problem of salvation. Calvin argued that human beings could not by their own efforts attain salvation and therefore the event could only happen through divine action and election. 1 efforts and frontier opportunities enabled him to become a successful lawyer and plantation operator in Tennessee, a U.S. senator, and eventually president of the United States. Of course, not all Americans saw Jackson in a positive light. His opponents deplored the very aspects of Jackson that his supporters sought to imitate. Jackson so well represented both the ambitions and the fears of so many that American politics of the mid-1820s divided around him into two political parties that were largely “for” or “against” Jackson, shaping the course of American politics and life for decades to come. The Jacksonian Era turned out to be one of the periods most critical to American national identity, rivaling even the American Revolution, for the Jacksonians were intensely interested in defining themselves as the inheritors and caretakers of the republic to which the Revolution and the ensuing Constitution had given birth.3 They succeeded, at least, in establishing a set of ideas that have influenced American politics and life even into the twenty-first century, defining American conflicts over territorial expansion, relations with the Indians, the extension of federal power, slavery, the value of religion and public morality, attitudes toward alcohol, the right relationship between wife and husband, national honor, and the definition of the just cause for America to go to war, to name only a partial list.