Founding Grammars (12 page)

This fact alone distinguished Jackson sharply from earlier presidents, although he was not completely deprived of higher education. As a child, he studied for three years at a private Presbyterian academy that offered Latin and Greek, as well as English grammar and other advanced classes. Later he attended a private school briefly to brush up on his Latin before studying for the bar exam. These experiences made him better educated than many Americans. They didn't compare, though, with his predecessors' privileged educations, which included exclusive private schools, tutors, and in some cases colleges such as Harvard and Princeton.

The election of 1828 was remarkable for the no-holds-barred campaigning on both sides. Andrew Jackson and his opponent, incumbent president John Quincy Adams, had already squared off during the 1824 election, when Jackson won the most votes out of four presidential candidates, but not an outright majority. The lack of a clear winner sent the decision to the House of Representatives, which voted Adams into office. Now supporters of both men were prepared for a brutal return match.

Adams supporters seized on Jackson's limited formal schooling and shaky spelling skills as a major campaign issue. The pro-Adams
National Journal
went on the attack by publishing a note that they claimed to have received in Jackson's own handwriting. Filled with lurid vocabulary and laughably bad spelling, it seemed to prove that Jackson was as ignorant as his enemies claimed he was: “When the midnight assasins plunges his dagger to the heart & riffles your goods, the turpitude of this scene looses all its horrors when compared with the act of the secrete assasins poinard levelled against femal character by the hired minions of power.”
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(The note probably alludes to the vicious insults leveled at Jackson's wife, Rachel, during the campaign, which newspaper readers of the time would have realized.)

Other Adamsite papers followed up by claiming to have seen letters by Jackson in which “many of the plainest words of the language” were misspelled, such as
solem
for
solemn
and
goverment
for
government,
and “good English” was “shockingly violated.” These were “proof positive,” declared one editor, “that the man who aspires to the chief magistracy is incapable of writing a commonly decent letter.” To Adams supporters, this lack of literacy was evidence of Jackson's “absolute incapacity” to hold the office of president. Adams considered Jackson “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Adams, in contrast, had once been a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.
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Naturally Jackson's supporters jumped to his defense. The fervently Jacksonian
United States Telegraph
published a forceful editorial against the
Journal
's “pitiful and contemptible slander.” The paper revealed that the supposed “note” was actually a printed pamphlet, almost certainly written by someone other than Jackson. Another pro-Jackson writer enlarged on this idea with the suggestion that the pamphlet was a hoax meant to trick the Adams people into making fools of themselves. Yet others declared that they were in possession of letters from Jackson that not only displayed “perspicuity and precision,” but were “almost fastidiously correct” in their spelling.
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They also argued that other office holders spelled just as badly. To demonstrate this point, one supporter went to the Library of Congress and unearthed facsimile letters from famous politicians such as former vice president Elbridge Gerry.

Portrayals of Jackson as a nearly illiterate bumpkin were obviously exaggerated. His successful legal career would have required substantial reading and writing. He had risen to the rank of major general during the War of 1812, and had served as the military governor of Florida, and as both a representative and a senator from Tennessee. He could not have filled these positions successfully if he had not had able to handle the written word reasonably well.

On the other hand, Jackson made no pretense of being scholarly. He didn't read for pleasure and was apparently unfamiliar with the classics in spite of having studied Latin. As president, he admitted to one of his aides that anyone going through his private papers would find examples of “false grammar and bad spelling.”
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Although he could be a powerful and eloquent speaker, his style tended toward the folksy rather than the elevated.

Washington Globe
editor Francis P. Blair, a member of Jackson's informal “Kitchen Cabinet,” remarked, “He was not … what is commonly termed an orator. But he was a fluent, forceful, and convincing speaker.… When perfectly calm or not roused by anything that appealed to his feelings … he spoke slowly, carefully, and in well-selected phrase. But when excited or angry, he would pour forth a torrent of rugged sentences more remarkable for their intent to beat down opposition than for their strict attention to the rules of rhetoric—or even syntax.”
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Jackson's grammatical and compositional skills, or lack of them, were beside the point. His ability to sway his audience and “beat down opposition” was what counted. The adoring crowds that had clamored to touch the new president weren't interested in Jackson's spelling capabilities or grammar. They had voted for him because he was a man of action from an ordinary background like themselves. They preferred him over an elitist rhetoric professor. As Duff Green, editor of the
United States Telegraph,
put it: “To argue against the presumption of General Jackson's fitness for the Presidency because he cannot spell is absurd. We care not if
he spell Congress with a K.
He may … understand the rights and duties of that body, or of the people, or himself, as well as if he spelled it correctly.”
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After the inauguration, Jackson's supporters followed him as he rode on horseback to the White House to host a reception. Here the crowd turned into a mob. They swarmed into the building in a suffocating mass, shoving to get at the tubs of orange punch and other lavish refreshments. Eager to get a glimpse of Jackson, they climbed onto delicate damask-covered chairs in their muddy boots. A horrified Justice Story later described the event in a letter to his wife: “The president was visited by immense crowds of all sorts of people, from the highest and most polished, down to the most vulgar and gross in the nation. I never saw such a mixture. The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”
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President Jackson also escaped eventually by climbing out a side window. He spent the remainder of the evening at a nearby hotel while the partiers continued their celebration. The public rooms of the White House were soon a welter of broken glass, stained carpets, and smashed furniture. Only when waiters carried the tubs of punch out onto the White House lawn did the crowd begin to disperse.

*   *   *

Although Justice Story and other traditionalists were horrified that a man like Andrew Jackson could be elected, many Americans admired the rough pioneer virtues that he embodied. They respected his war record and saw him as a champion of average Americans, especially fellow frontier residents. That these virtues came along with a lack of sophistication and verbal polish didn't worry them.

This attitude was the countervailing force against the widespread notion that the first step on the road to success was a good education. Jackson's fellow Tennesseean David Crockett expressed the feelings of many Jacksonians in the preface to his autobiography. Addressing potential critics of his book's homespun writing style, he tells them, “I can only say … that while critics were learning grammar, and learning to spell, I and ‘Doctor Jackson, L.L.D.' were fighting in the wars.… Big men have more important matters to attend to than crossing their t's and dotting their i's.”
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David Crockett himself is the archetypal simple backwoodsman who rose to prominence without the aid of formal schooling. Although poor and barely educated, he was elected to Congress three times. Once there his forthright personality and colorful brand of western “tall talk” captured the imagination of the American public, especially easterners who viewed the Tennessee frontier as exotic territory. He was known as “the gentleman from the cane,” a reference to the stands of canebrake that still covered some western wilderness areas.

Crockett lore proliferated. Popular writers dubbed him “Davy Crockett” and spun his persona into an outsize American character. His motto—“Be always sure you're right, then go ahead”
—
became famous. By the time the real Crockett died gloriously at the Alamo at the age of forty-nine, he was a national icon.

Crockett's life inspired a genre—exaggerated tales of the intrepid men who settled west of the Appalachians. Among the Crockett-inspired writings were fake biographies, a play, and several issues of
Davy Crockett's Almanack.
The
Almanack
provided instructions on frontier skills—how to hunt wild hogs, the basics of rifle care—and sensationally titled anecdotes told in “Davy's” voice (although not really written by Crockett). Typically they relate remarkable deeds in boisterous, backwoodsy language. One volume includes the stories “A Tongariferous Fight with an Alligator” and “A Corn Cracker's Account of his Encounter with an Eelskin [Yankee peddler].”

In 1830, shortly after Crockett's first congressional term, James K. Paulding wrote a play called
The Lion of the West,
modeling his hero, the Kentuckian Nimrod Wildfire, on the mythical version of Davy Crockett.
The Lion of the West
was hugely popular. The play introduced eastern audiences—and later Londoners—to the western tall-talk tradition of extravagant boasts and fanciful word inventions. In a letter to his aunt and uncle that announces his pending visit, Nimrod writes, “And let all the fellers in New York know—I'm half horse, half alligator, a touch of the airth-quake, with a sprinkling of the steamboat!” Later he boasts to a new acquaintance, “Of all the fellers on this side the Alleghany mountains [sic], I can jump higher—squat lower—dive deeper—stay longer under and come out drier!… I've got the prettiest sister, fastest horse, and ugliest dog in the deestrict.”
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A cobbled-together variant of Nimrod's speeches appeared in a fictional biography titled
Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West Tennessee
and has sometimes been attributed to Crockett himself. According to this story, a drunken stranger staggers up to Crockett in a tavern and cries, “Hurrah for Adams.” When Crockett indicates that he's a Jackson man, the stranger asks, “Who are you?” The great man replies, “I'm that same Davy Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust.”
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Nimrod Wildfire and his like were partial to overblown words and expressions. They were responsible for such verbal concoctions as
rumbunctious
(hot tempered),
lickspittle
(a bootlicker),
exflunctify
(wear out), and
conbobberation
(commotion), and phrases like
kick the bucket, see how the cat jumps,
and
knee high to a frog.
Although it's likely that some were created especially for a particular story, others were genuine westernisms. David Crockett helped popularize several regional expressions including
bark up the wrong tree
and
go the whole hog.

Lindley Murray and other grammarians would no doubt have classified these fantastic figures of speech as low expressions, but American audiences loved them. Many entered the permanent vocabulary. Grammarians would also have frowned on nonstandard forms like
knowed
for
knew
that typified “stage western” speech. To millions of readers and playgoers, these linguistic quirks were a big part of what made tall tales so entertaining.

David Crockett's real life was less spectacular than his legend, but still remarkable. He was born in 1786 in rural Tennessee. The family was extremely poor and David (as he always called himself) had to scramble for a living from a very early age. He remarks in his autobiography that his father had neither the means nor the opportunity to give his children any “learning.” Like other poor children of the time, they were put to work as soon as possible. He recounts how his father hired him out when he was twelve to accompany an old Dutchman who was driving his cattle from Tennessee to Virginia. After traveling four hundred miles with his employer, young David made his way back home on his own. Although it was winter, much of his return trip was on foot.

Not until after this adventure was he finally sent to the local school. His school days didn't last long. Within the first week he got into a fight with an older boy, waylaid him after classes, and beat him up. Fearful that the teacher would punish him for fighting, he then stayed away from the schoolhouse. When his father discovered his truancy and threatened to beat him if he didn't return to school, David ran away from home.

He spent the next two years on the road, picking up casual work wherever he could. He only returned to his family after deciding that enough time had passed to soften his father's wrath. Crockett concludes his story, “But it will be a source of astonishment to many who reflect that I am now a member of the American Congress … that at so advanced an age, the age of fifteen, I did not know the first letter in the book.”
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He later attended school briefly to learn basic reading and arithmetic skills, but his formal education totaled less than a year.