streetsofsalem

Here I am with another Presidents’ Day post which I shall begin with my usual rant about Presidents’ Day: if you merge them all (or Washington and Lincoln) into one day of remembrance you’re going to forget some singular details. Not a fan of generic Presidents’ Day, although I realize we can’t have myriad Mondays off. That said, today I’m posting about one of everyone’s least favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who came to Salem at the beginning of his second term in the summer of 1833 as part of a New England tour (just like Washington decades before). Unlike Washington, the concensus is that Jackson was not popular in New England, but reading through some of the contemporary press accounts, I can’t quite tell if that’s the case. This post, probably like several this year, is an extension of research for Salem’s Centuries: I wrote a chapter on John Remond, who catered the big dinner for the President, and my research brought up several complaints about said dinner (not Remond’s cooking, but the guest of honor) and so I thought I’d “pull on this narrative thread” (to use my co-editor’s phrase) for a bit.

New England (and especially southern New England) did not support Jackson in either the 1828 or 1832 elections and so it might seem that the region was hostile territory, but it’s difficult to know whether it was the man or his policies which were unpopular. Jackson was a known enslaver but it was early days in Salem’s abolitionist movement, and while he was criticized for his policies towards Native Americans conspicuously by the genteel Elizabeth Elkins Sanders of Salem in her Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America (1828), I’m not sure that was a general view at this time either. No one seems to have anything to say about the First Sumatran Expedition of just the year before. While Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s strident assertion of states’ rights during the more recent “Nullification Crisis” was popular in the North, John Quincy Adams and his friends and supporters in Massachusetts seemed to aim more personal criticism at him, generally at his lack of education and uncouth behavior. The former president went so far as to refer to the current one as a “barbarian” when he learned that Harvard University would be granting Jackson an honorary degree during his New England tour. The President of Harvard, Josiah Quincy, proceeded with the investiture nonetheless and found himself rather charmed by Jackson, admitting that “I was not prepared to be favorably impressed with a man who was simply intolerable to the Brahmin caste of my native state……”

Election maps from the Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library; Bernhardt Wall, Following Andrew Jackson 1767-1845 (1937).

After his Harvard reception, the President rode up to Salem through Lynn and Marblehead on June 26 in a cavalcade and was met at the town line by a reception of dignitaries; he did not stop to chat, but rather traveled directly to Nathaniel West’s Mansion House  on Essex Street where he would spend the night. He was not well, and would not make it to Remond’s dinner. Since the idea for this post started with the dinner, I think I should say a bit more about it. Compared to other events catered by Remond, the menu was not as elaborate or the preparations made as far in advance. According to the Remond family papers at the Phillips Library, Remond made the contract only on June 20, less than a week before the President’s arrival. He promised a “handsome good dinner including mock turtle soup for 150 people” and the host party requested a few additions, including cherries, strawberries, sherry, champagne and cigars. Everything else was left to Remond’s discretion. (This just seems a little casual compared to Remond’s other extravaganzas—were they dissing Jackson?) The dinner did go on even in the President’s absence, with an afterparty on Chestnut Street. There are hints that Jackson’s frequent illnesses were convenient or of his own making (which are wrong—Jackson was ill). In his Memoirs (IX, 5), John Quincy Adams asserts that Jackson’s illness was “politic……he is so ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory….fourth-fifths of his sickness is trickery, and the other fifth mere fatique.” The next day he was up for a little trip around town in a barouche, however, for which people really turned out according to the Salem Gazette (June 28, 1833): “the crowd of Spectators was greater than has been witnessed in this place since the visit of Lafayette.”

Salem Directory, 1857 (two years before the Mansion House burned down).

You can’t gauge public opinion from mere numbers, so I’m not sure I can answer the question in my title. The Salem crowd was well-behaved by all acounts, but not exuberant. The most revealing detail of the Salem Gazette account was the lack of apparent intoxication among the spectators: we believe no serious accident occurred to mar the festivities of the day. And although we had frequent opportunities to examine the crowd of many thousands, we did not discover a single instance of intoxication, or disorderly conduct of any kind. And that was it, after the parade was over, President Jackson set off for Lowell and no more was said about him. In the following year, however, there was a notable incident that might reveal some sentiment towards Jackson in greater Massachusetts: the venerable USS Constitution was fitted out with a new figurehead depicting Jackson and while anchored in Boston harbor a local sea captain rowed out and cut off its head! In the print below, demons are doing the dirty work. Much later, of course, Jackson’s reputation deteriorated more dramatically, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Even though Salem City Hall was built with surplus funds distributed to local governments during his administration, Mayor (now Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor) Kimberley Driscoll moved to remove Andrew Jackson’s portrait from the City Council Chambers in 2019, and it was eventually replaced by a striking portrait of the seventeenth-century Naumkeag/Pawtucket leaders Squaw Sachem and Nanepashemet by Indigenous artist Chris Pappan.

Crop of  “The Decapitation of a Great Blockhead by the Mysterious Agency of the Claret Coloured Coat,” (Boston?, 1834), Swann Auction Galleries.