Where’s the birth certificate, President Jackson?

Now that we have Obama’s long-form birth certificate on hand, maybe we can all get back to the important things in life.  Like wondering whether Andrew Jackson was really born in America, for example.

From Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t know it was an issue until I read Allan Eckert’s classic book The Frontiersmen.  Eckert has his protagonist, Simon Kenton, and Jackson getting into a brawl near Danville, KY in 1779.  Here, Jackson is a member of a rowdy surveying team led by “Dr. Jonas Walker” running the North Carolina-Virginia line, which at that time would have also passed between the unborn states of Tennessee and Kentucky.  The crew shows up at a tavern where Kenton is eating dinner, and a drunk Jackson suddenly knocks Kenton to the floor, only to have the big frontiersman get up and beat the stuffing out of him.  According to Eckert, both fighters were about the same age, in their early or mid-twenties.  That would put Jackson’s birth in the mid-1750’s.  Conventional wisdom puts Jackson’s birth in the Waxhaws region of northern South Carolina (or maybe in southern North Carolina, but one controversy is enough for this post, thanks) on March 15, 1767.  Eckert thus moves Jackson’s birth date back about twelve years.

In a note at the end of the book, Eckert defends this decision, claiming that “there is good cause to believe…that Jackson was, in fact, born at sea while his parents, Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, were immigrating to America from County Antrim, Ireland, thus making him legally ineligible for the office of President of the United States, which he later assumed” (597). He presents four pieces of evidence to substantiate this claim.  For the sake of convenience, I’ve separated them out and numbered them here:

1. Simon Kenton told the story of the fight to Judge John James in 1833, and James transcribed the interview.  Kenton said that he and Jackson were close to the same age.
2. Henry Lee (not to be confused with Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame) claimed that he was with Kenton at the time of the fight, and corroborated Kenton’s account.
3. The same Judge James who wrote down Kenton’s story stated that in 1840 he accompanied a Kentuckian by the name of John Chambers to a political meeting.  On that trip, Chambers told him of an elderly neighbor who claimed that she was on the same ship that Jackson’s parents took to America, that Jackson was born “three days from land,” and that she herself “received him in my own hands.”
4. Finally, Eckert cites the testimony of Marshall Anderson.  Jackson and James Monroe stopped at the home of Anderson’s father during Monroe’s tour of the West in 1819.  Anderson overheard Jackson and his father chatting privately, and reported that when Anderson asked Jackson where he was born, Jackson replied, “I was born at sea.”

Eckert concludes that all this testimony makes it likely that “Andrew Jackson was not a native American and that his age has been altered by twelve years; that he was not, in fact, born after his father’s death, nor was he born in South Carolina, but instead was born in a ship at sea in 1755, the year his parents were immigrating from Ireland to America” (p. 598).

There are a few problems with this conclusion, aside from the fact that it dismisses all the other evidence we have that Jackson was born in the Carolinas in 1767.  First, Jackson’s parents did not emigrate to America in 1755, but a decade later.  I’m not sure why Eckert moves the date back, unless it’s simply to reconcile the born-at-sea theory with the early birth theory.

Second, while there are four pieces of evidence given in support of the theory that Jackson was born in the 1750’s and/or at sea, what we really have here are only two sources.  According to Eckert, Lee’s corroboration of Kenton’s story is in the manuscript collection assembled by frontier historian Lyman C. Draper. The other three pieces of evidence are recorded in an article written by Judge James and published in a volume of historical materials published in 1859.  In other words, we don’t necessarily have four independent witnesses, but rather four pieces of testimony reported by only two independent sources.

The quality of those sources also seems questionable.  Kenton and Lee got one thing right—there was a survey being run along the VA-NC border in the fall of 1779. Dr. Thomas Walker was one of the party’s leaders, and perhaps he’s the man Eckert refers to as “Dr. Jonas Walker.”  But I can’t find any evidence that Jackson was present.  I’ve been unable to find any reputable biographies of Old Hickory that mention a surveying trip in 1779; they all indicate that in that year he was right where he had always been, growing up in the Carolina backcountry.  We know that he was in the Waxhaws in the early summer of 1780 as the British swept into the area after the fall of Charleston.  I suspect that Kenton and Lee encountered someone else—perhaps someone else named Andrew Jackson?—and conflated this encounter with the name of a famous person, either through the fog of old age or a deliberate desire to magnify their own exploits. After all, in 1833, when Kenton told his story to Judge James, Jackson had just started his second term as president.

I therefore see little reason to believe the Kenton story, and even less reason to think Jackson was a grown man in 1779.  It is much simpler to believe that Kenton was either mistaken or fabricated the story than it is to believe that all the other evidence we have about Jackson’s age is wrong, or that a public figure like Jackson was able to knock ten years off his age without anyone who knew him as a younger man calling his hand on it. After all, this was an age of intensely personalized politics, and Jackson’s critics weren’t reluctant when it came to digging up dirt on his past.

The testimony regarding the birth at sea also seems dubious to me.  The remark attributed to Jackson by Marshall Anderson contradicts other public statements (at least as early as 1824) in which Jackson claimed South Carolina as his birthplace.  If Jackson lied about his place of birth just so he could take a shot at the presidency, why was he telling people that he was born at sea as late as 1819, when he was already a public figure?

The other piece of evidence for the birth at sea is a bit of hearsay attributed to an elderly woman for whom we don’t even have a name.  And the story dates from 1840, by which time Jackson had achieved the pinnacle of his fame and power.  It seems more reasonable to assume that the old lady was muddling things up, as older folks sometimes do, by placing herself at the birth of someone who had become a celebrity and a beloved hero.

Here’s something else to consider.  Even if the story about a birth at sea were true, would it necessarily have made Jackson ineligible for office?  Most people assume that the Constitution restricts the office to natural-born citizens. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that: “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”  The bit about being a citizen at the time of adoption was necessary, because technically none of the first presidents were “natural-born citizens.” Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were all born in British colonies. No man who had attained the required thirty-five years of age necessary to become president had, at the time the Constitution was written, been born in an independent United States of America.

I suspect that even if Jackson was born at sea, he would have fallen under the “citizen at the time of adoption” clause.  After all, he had essentially lived his entire life in America, and had participated as a teenager in the Revolution.

Since politics of the 1820’s and 1830’s were even nastier than those of today, I’d imagine that if any of Jackson’s opponents had evidence that he was constitutionally ineligible for office, they would’ve used it.  The fact that Old Hickory’s detractors didn’t become the first birthers is itself pretty good evidence that Jackson was born where and when most people think he was.

I don’t intend this to be a criticism either of Eckert or of his book.  I enjoy his work, and I think The Frontiersmen is an absorbing read.  In fact, the entire “Winning of America” series is worthwhile for anyone interested in the early American frontier, even if Eckert’s free use of reconstructed dialogue and other novelistic techniques makes me hesitant to lump them together with standard non-fiction works of history.  I just thought the issue of Jackson’s birth was a neat little historical controversy that ties into recent political debates, and therefore the kind of thing that makes for good blog fodder.

Don’t fear the Dark Side

There’s an interesting post over at Dimitri Rotov’s Civil War Bookshelf.  Its main concern is the state of Civil War historiography, but it also raises some interesting questions about the role of narrative in historical writing.

Narrative history is one of those loaded terms.  When I was in graduate school, one of my professors (who is a first-rate scholar) had recently put out a successful book with a commercial publisher.  One day in class, the subject of “literary” history came up.  The professor made some wry remark about having “gone over to the Dark Side.”  He wasn’t talking about writing a popular book.  He was referring to its narrative format.

Part of me gets this dichotomy between narrative and analysis.  I completely agree that the historian’s reason for being is to understand the past and then to convey what he’s found.  The historian is not first and foremost a storyteller—although if he tells a good yarn in the process, then so much the better.  Few things irritate me more than reading Amazon.com reviews in which the reader says he loved a history book because “it was just like reading a novel,” or because he “got so caught up in the story.”  And I’m fully aware that a narrative framework imposes certain limitations on the historian, as does any other framework.

Still, I think we tend to draw too stark a distinction in terms of quality and seriousness between narrative history and whatever else it is that narrative history isn’t.  Most narrative history, if it’s written by any scholar worth his salt, will almost inevitably analyze and explain as well as relate the course of events.

I’d submit that every narrative historian, to one degree or another, will use the technique that David Hackett Fischer—whose body of work I admire as much as that of any living historian—calls “braided narrative.”  In two outstanding books, Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing, Fischer unashamedly employs a chronological approach, while interweaving analysis throughout.  The narrative and analysis work hand-in-hand to relate the events in question as completely as possible.  It’s an extremely effective approach, but I think the main difference between Fischer and other writers of narrative is that he’s more explicit about employing it, and employs it more extensively.  Any writer of history who uses a narrative framework will have to weave in some analysis to one degree or another, simply because you can’t really explain anything without doing it.

Actually, it’s worth asking when a given historical work becomes narrative history.  Is it when chronology is the main organizational technique?  That raises some problems.  Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom is generally chronological, but I don’t think anyone would call it a narrative.  Technically it tells a story—the story of colonial Virginia’s plantation labor system and its impact on notions of liberty and race—but within that general chronological framework, it’s thick with analysis.

Does a historical work become narrative when it relates a discrete sequence of events, following principles of time and location?  This, too, is somewhat problematic.  The author of even the most straightforward campaign study or account of a particular event (or series of events) will periodically stop his account for exposition or to summarize a conclusion.  Indeed, when John Demos wrote The Unredeemed Captive, his primary motive, as he says, was to “tell a story,” and that’s exactly what he did.  But major portions of the book are pure analysis and exposition.  Demos uses the story as a means to dissect colonial family life, Indian culture, French missions, and so on.  The book is as much an examination of the three-way relationship between English, French, and Indians in early America as it is a relation of the story of its main characters.

In fact, the history books that seem to me to be closest to pure narrative are the volumes in Allan Eckert’s “Winning of America” series.  And they contain so much imaginative reconstruction that tthey seem to me to be more non-fiction novels than historical works, so even here the designation “narrative history” is questionable.

I don’t think writing narrative is tantamount to going over to the dark side.  The only dark side in historical writing is doing bad history.  There’s definitely plenty of bad narrative history out there, just as there’s plenty of mediocre analytical history.  What separates good historical scholarship from bad is the quality of the questions asked and answers provided.