Andrew Jackson

Abstract

Few today think of Andrew Jackson as a religious man. Actually, the American military hero and president professed Christianity throughout his life. Raised a “rigid Presbeterian,” his mother sought to provide her son with an education so he could grow up to become a minister, and the boy held on to his faith despite losing his family and suffering physically in the American Revolution. Jackson rose to prominence as a promising young man before a financial mishap and a growing number of personal conflicts—including killing an opponent in a duel—appeared to end his public career. Yet before his emergence as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson attended church, read his Bible, and prayed with his devout wife, Rachel. He held orthodox views on the divinity of Christ, the atonement, and an afterlife in Heaven, and he blended Christian tenets with the honor-based culture that dominated the antebellum South while reconciling his beliefs with his ownership of slaves and promotion of Indian Removal. As president, and especially during his “Bank War,” he equated his enemies with the forces of evil. Unlike the revivalists of his era’s Second Great Awakening, Jackson never experienced a dramatic conversion, and he advocated religious liberty and separation of church and state as core republican principles. Nevertheless, as the Second Party System developed during his presidency, Jackson’s frequent appeals for divine guidance and for God’s blessing on the nation further encouraged the development of an American civil religion.