Andrew Jackson enters the American chronicle as a refusal that never cooled. A teen in a war, ordered by an enemy officer to polish a pair of boots, he answered with a no that earned steel across his face and set the pitch of his life. The slash did not create his temper; it certified it. Orphaned by the Revolution’s chaos and sickness, hardened in the Carolinas where arguments were settled by nerve before they were settled by law, he learned the world’s first lesson early: that authority often arrives as a boot, and dignity sometimes begins as a refusal to kneel. The boy became a rider over bad roads, the rider a lawyer with sentences like blows, the lawyer a judge who treated procedure as a kind of frontier carpentry, the judge a militia general who could make a mixed crowd stand in a straight line by force of presence alone. In him, a republic still deciding whether it wished to be governed by rules or by voltage found a man who could impersonate both. He widened the circle for millions of white men and closed it brutally for peoples who stood where expansion wanted to go. He despised public debt as if it were a personal insult and distrusted institutions whenever they took on the smell of a class that thought itself born to supervise. He loved law when it blessed necessity and suspected it when it opposed his sense of what the hour required. He spoke of the people with a sincerity that moved cities and a selectiveness that erased entire nations.
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