Andrew Jackson had a long face and striking blank eyes, but you already knew that thanks to the 20 dollar bills that are plastered with his face, you'd think that would be a pretty good legacy for a guy who died almost 200 years ago.

But Andrew Jackson wouldn't have been charmed by his little green portraits because he hated paper money, so much so that he messed with the money supply and threw America into one of its earliest recessions.

Welcome to very presidential. I'm your host, Ashleigh Flowers, you can find all episodes of very presidential and all other cast originals for free on Spotify.

And if you like what you're hearing, reach out on Facebook and Instagram app, podcast and Twitter at podcast network. Today, I'm looking at Andrew Jackson. He's often called things like fiery. He had a bullet permanently lodged next to his heart thanks to his love for Duling, generally a soldier type. But behind his man of the people image was a party full of bigoted old boy comaraderie, and it left America hanging by a thread.

The degenerate Jackson White House and the tactics that kept it all under wraps are coming up. Stay with us.

Andrew Jackson's greatest achievement isn't getting to the White House, it's getting to the White House despite all the scandals he started and mistakes he made before getting there, despite the kind of man he'd proven himself to be before he set foot in the Oval Office, impulsive, violent and racist, which means that to tell the real twisted Andrew Jackson story, we have to step a little bit farther back than we normally do.

It all begins in the backwoods of Woods now, Tennessee, with a pretty tragic childhood. His whole family died before Jackson was 14. Dad by a logging accident, brothers to the Revolutionary War and mother to Colora. So the kid starts getting into fights constantly and none of his relatives want to take him in. But then his story takes what looks like a positive turn. At 16, he gets a sizable inheritance from one of his grandfathers, giving him something to live on.

That is until he gambles most of it away and spends what's left on booze. Now, obviously, this behavior makes sense in a teenager who's lost his whole family.

He's probably sad, lonely and not really financially literate. But as Jackson gets older, he doesn't outgrow his anger issues and he definitely doesn't stop gambling. It's that same troubled teen that makes it all the way to the White House with a few stops in between. First, there's Nashville. After gambling away his inheritance, Jackson manages to get his life back on track, scraping together enough training with local lawyers to pass the bar. And then he's able to get a prosecutor job in the frontier town.

It's a good post for a young lawyer, but there's a reason he gets it. Nashville isn't particularly glamorous at the time.

It consists of a couple buildings smack in the middle of the wilderness surrounded by Native American territory.

This is where Jackson picked up his lifelong racism toward Native Americans. He sees them as the enemy and outside force to be quelled with violence. As he starts to get into land speculation, he takes advantage of that prejudice to buy and sell land, which legally still belongs to natives. Charming, but Nashville's justice system was pretty basic in the 70s 90s, and as a prosecutor, Jackson could get away with it. Nashville is also where Jackson picks up his wife, but that comes with its own issues.

It's the dawn of the 17 Nyos. Jackson is in his early 20s and he's living at a boarding house run by a woman called Rachel. Now she loves having this six foot one Jackson around. It's like a rough and tumble frontier town. So it's good to have a man in the house. But things get a little tense when Jackson starts hanging around Rachel's daughter, who's also named Rachel. But this Rachel is married. But, you know, these things happen.

And the younger Rachel looks pretty smitten with Jackson. To her, marriage is constantly on the rocks. Her husband's a jealous alcoholic, and something about Jackson's long face just really gets her. So as Jackson would later tell the story, Rachel files for divorce in early 1790 and she and Jackson immediately get married. But then they realize the divorce was never actually finalized, which means that their marriage is technically bigamy. So they remarry once all the paperwork is squared away in 1793 after two years of living in bigamist sin.

But at least it was all a misunderstanding. Well, according to Jackson, anyway. Meanwhile, the Jacksons neighbors in Tennessee saw a slightly different series of events unfold. It looks like Jackson and Rachel actually started living together before any kind of divorce was filed for at all, and she was already calling herself Mrs. Jackson. So no accidental bigamy. The Jackson just wanted to be together so badly they didn't care that Rachel was already married. Now, none of this matters that much at the time.

Again, it's the Tennessee frontier in the 17 Niños. Anything goes, but it'll come back to haunt Jackson in a big way once he enters the national spotlight. Polite coastal society certainly didn't stand for bigamy, and the scandals littering Jackson's early years don't even end there because Jackson's still more of a fighter than a lover. And between some of his other favorite activities, like betting on cockfights and horse races, he makes a habit of challenging his neighbors to duels.

For example, in 1886, a prominent lawyer named Charles Dickinson slanders Jackson's wife. Rachel Jackson is incensed and challenges him to a duel. But here's the thing. He knows Dickinsons a notoriously good shot. So realizing the stakes here, he goes in with a plan. Jackson will hold his fire and let Dickinson shoot first. Hopefully, he'll be in a rush and won't take time to aim. So he'll miss. Then, according to the rules of Duling, Dickinson will have to stand stock still while Jackson takes the follow up shot.

Taking as much time as he wants, the plan sort of works. Dickinson shoots first and the bullet hits Jackson right in the chest. But somehow Jackson's arms are still working. So ignoring the bullet in his chest, he takes his position. And Amy Dickinson stands still staring at Jackson as the second bullet flies and knocks Dickinson over dead. This was some very risky behavior. Jackson was lucky to come out alive, never mind escape the law for killing another man.

But he did come out alive, just barely. Dickinson's bullet was lodged in his chest right next to his heart, too close to be removed. It would just have to sit there, a testament to Jackson's prowess as a man as far as most Tennesseans were concerned.

And Jackson didn't go to jail either. His state had too much respect for the tradition of Duling to go after him, so basically he got away with murder. So you get the idea he's a violent fighter, a bit of a rule breaker even when it comes to the law. He's very bigoted, definitely a frontier type and not particularly statesmanlike, at least as far as the more polished East Coasters were concerned. But Jackson keeps rising through the political ranks.

He's also getting increasingly involved with the Tennessee militia. Which brings us to the first chapter of the official Jackson story, the one that shows up in his biography. And you guessed it, this is the war hero chapter. Remember the War of 1812 from your U.S. history class? Yeah, me neither. But that's fine. What you need to know as far as Jackson is concerned, is that the U.S. is up against the British in a contest of wills.

It's the rebellious son proving himself against his old man, if you will. And the British have recruited a lot of Native Americans to fight with them. Remember, Jackson is seriously prejudiced against Native Americans already. Plus, he's obsessed with duels and loves a good fight. His country's manhood is being tested by the British and the Native Americans. He is not about to sit this one out. It turns out Jackson's really good at fighting wars. He Notch's major victories against the peoples, but he's not content to just win.

He fights dirty, slaughtering as many Native Americans as he can with ruthless brutality. For example, he figured out how many people they'd killed by having his men literally count noses after cutting them off. Next, he negotiates an appallingly unfair treaty and takes a huge amount of land for the U.S. in what's now Georgia and Alabama, despite the fact that a lot of the land actually belong to a Greek faction, that he was allied with a job well done as far as Jackson's concerned, then it's time to move on to fighting the British directly.

At the famous Battle of New Orleans. He defends the city with half as many men as the British have. And miraculously, he comes out of the battle with only 71 casualties while the British lose over 2000. America was thrilled. That is America outside of New Orleans. Jackson basically held the city hostage after the battle. He refused to let up martial law for months after the British were defeated, mostly because he was terrified they'd come back. But what's really alarming was his response to criticism about the martial law.

He jailed a state legislator for speaking up about it, and then he jailed a judge who demanded the legislator be released. That is to say, Jackson decided he was the law constitution be damned. He was clearly still the same old impulsive kid with anger issues. But most of America didn't know about this. All they heard was that Jackson was a war hero and they loved him for it. His newfound fame also caught the attention of some of his smarter, more politically minded friends back in Nashville.

Sure, their buddy had a few skeletons in the closet, but as long as they could keep those out of the press, ordinary Americans were obsessed with him, so obsessed they might just elect Andrew Jackson, president of the United States of America.

Coming up, Jackson starts running towards the White House and prays no one digs up his scandalous past before he gets there.

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Incredible feats is offbeat entertainment that sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful and always surprising. New episodes air daily Monday through Friday, search incredible feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the story. He's a violent fighter, a rule breaker, even when it comes to the law, and he's completely bigoted, but it's eighteen, twenty four and a clever group of political minds have decided that Andrew Jackson is their horse. He should make a bid for the presidency.

Most importantly, he's enormously popular with regular Americans thanks to his war hero background. And while he's not a career politician, perhaps that's to his advantage. Plenty of people are upset about corruption in Washington. A political outsider is an appealing contrast. Plus, hopefully D.C. insiders won't take Jackson seriously, so they won't fight him too hard or dig around for his many skeletons. And then maybe, just maybe, he'll slip right past them and into the White House.

So it's full steam ahead. Jackson makes his bid and his political supporters, the so-called Nashville Junto, are proven right. Political bigwigs are shocked and horrified when Jackson wins a plurality of the vote. That is more delegates than any other candidate, but not a majority. This means that the House of Representatives will pick the winner amongst themselves, but obviously they'll pick the guy who got the most votes right. Or so team Jackson assumes. But they're wrong.

After some back door negotiations, the House picks John Quincy Adams as America's next president. Jackson and his supporters are incensed, but they also aren't ready to give up. Now they know for sure that Americans love Jackson enough to elect him president. Plus, if the country saw him as a contrast to Washington corruption before, they'll see it even more now. I mean, the way his supporters see it, the election was stolen from him by D.C. politicians.

Their back backdoor deals are the definition of corruption, the depths of the Washington swamp. So the Nashville junto makes that gripe very public and they start campaigning for eighteen, twenty eight.

Like their lives depend on it, the Juntos work is usually considered the first true presidential campaign ever before them. This kind of thing was not going on, certainly not on this scale. They set a lot of precedents that we still see playing out today and they are good at their job. They get as many newspapers aligned with their candidate as possible. And in places where there isn't a paper that they can win over, they just start one of their own.

They recruit Jackson lovers around the country to host rallies, to run parades and to distribute cheap prints of Jackson's portrait. These photos, of course, include very complimentary descriptions of Jackson calling out his military background, his down to earth values and statesman like demeanor. The big thing working on their side is that in the past few years, there has been some expansion in who's eligible to vote. More white men on the farmstead or frontier will have ballots and the JUNTO knows how to win that.

They make a big deal of the panic of 1819, which caused a depression and made a lot of people distrust the national bank. In contrast, Jackson, the down home political outsider, is just the ticket to change things. Speaking of Jackson, where is he in all of this campaigning? Honestly, he's mostly pretending he doesn't care about it. He was being very careful not to look too much like a power hungry politician that wouldn't really fit into his humble regular guy image.

Plus, the Junto doesn't want Jackson to be in the public eye too much, or he might do something really stupid and ruin everything already. The biggest issue with the campaign is one of Jackson's past scandals. This time around, the opposition knows Jackson is a threat and they're digging up all the dirt they can to discredit him. So far, the biggest thing they have is the bigamous origins of his marriage, four square conservative Americans. This wasn't a good look for a president.

The Nashville campaign worked overtime, burying the scandal under their version of Jackson's life, for example, by getting an entire very flattering biography of their candidate in every bookstore they could. Jackson's friend, John Eaton actually wrote the book. It touted what a military hero he was and how humble he remained through the years, despite his growing celebrity. Above all else, it insisted that he never pursued power. Power pursued him. The American people eat it up.

No other major scandals make it to the press. And the Nashville junto keeps campaigning. They promise big changes if their guy gets to the White House. And when the election finally rolls around, it all works, Andrew Jackson wins the presidency, even some of Jackson's supporters were shocked they'd gotten a deeply unconventional candidate into the White House. So naturally, the whole squad is ready to celebrate their victory. And the party, of course, is going down at Jackson's inaugural ball.

At first, things go as expected. Jackson's key supporters, including the Nashville Junto and the other powerful people they recruited, are drinking punch at the White House. They're politely chatting, always on the lookout for a chance to get Jackson's ear and talk about the future. What that future looks like varies wildly amongst the guests. Some Jackson supporters hopped on the ticket with pretty pure motives.

Putting their guy in office was an opportunity to change things in Washington for the better. But plenty of other supporters are more interested in gaining power for themselves. Now that they've gotten Jackson elected, he owes them the debt could easily be repaid, for example, with a well-paid, influential job like secretary of war or postmaster general. And then there is another category of Jackson supporters that also have promises to cash in on everyday voters. Jackson is their man and he has to acknowledge that.

So he opens up the inaugural ball to the public. They come in droves, everyone's knocking back buckets of punch, and everyone's running around the White House, stumbling over furniture and each other, trying to find Jackson. It's getting so crazy that the staff puts tubs of punch on the lawn in an attempt to draw the crowds back outside. But it's too late. The White House is getting full on trashed. One person in attendance even called the event a Saturnalia.

Even Jackson, who knows how to party, was overwhelmed by the situation and reportedly climbed through a window to escape. He couldn't handle his first night in the White House because the party he threw was too wild, so he ran away to escape it. That bodes well for the next four years. It's possible all the reports of craziness may have been exaggerated. A product of Washington insiders alarm that Jackson had been elected. They'd never had a president of the people before, not like this.

And they were worried that his leadership would be little more than a mob rule, a mess of low, class, brutish behavior.

And they weren't entirely wrong. The issue wasn't that Andrew Jackson was from Tennessee or that he didn't have a high society family. But the man behind the Nashville junto was definitely not as pretty as his picture. And America is about to find that out in a big way.

Maybe it's not surprising that the moment Jackson was in office, the new president got wrapped up in some drama of epic Real Housewives of D.C. proportions. Remember all those Nashville Junto guys hanging around at the inaugural ball? Jackson was happy to start handing out favors to all of them. And if he was in Washington to root out corruption, it did make sense to fire as many people as possible. Nine hundred nineteen at the start of his presidency, to be exact.

And then he replaced them with his guys who were the good guys, guys that believed in the common man. So, yes, the anti corruption president essentially started the spoils system. This means campaign supporters are rewarded for their loyalty with comfy positions in the government, a legacy that, like partisan campaigning, has lingered long after Jackson's presidency. But sure, put your friends in all the best jobs in Washington. At least they'll presumably all like each other and could work together and get some stuff done, or at least one would think until one heard about the Petticoat affair.

Shortly after the inauguration, one of Jackson's good friends and biggest supporters, John Eaton, married a young woman named Peggy. Rumors swirled around Washington that not only had Peggy worked as a tavern maid before her marriage, but that she'd been a sex worker or at least very promiscuous. Another rumor alleged that her first husband, a Navy sailor, died of suicide because she had an affair with Eaton. These rumors were serious scandals as far as other D.C. wives were concerned, and Jackson was furious about the gossip.

The Eatons were some of his favorite people in Washington, maybe because they reminded him of the rougher life on the frontier, maybe because Eaton wrote that fabulous flattering biography for him back in the campaign days. The rumors probably also reminded him of the persistent gossip about his own wife. And remember, Jackson was ready to duel anyone that spoke ill of Rachel. But these rumors weren't just coming from anyone. They were coming from Jackson's own cabinet members, wives who weren't thrilled to have a low class girl like Peggy at their functions were still their ringleader, was Flurried Calhoun, the wife of Jackson's very own vice president.

Now, Calhoun and Jackson already had their differences, mostly policy disagreements. But this was personal. Jackson felt like Calhoun didn't respect him after all. Jackson, like your typical hearty frontiersmen, assumes a man should be able to control his wife. But Calhoun isn't the only one that seems unable or unwilling to pressure his wife into playing nice. The genes are socially ostracized by everyone in Jackson's cabinet. The whole thing was a mess. Political and personal insults were slinging back and forth across what was supposed to be Jackson's inner circle.

By eighteen thirty one, things were boiling so hot that Jackson asked his entire cabinet to resign and every single one of them did except the postmaster general. And it was all over who was invited to what parties. It probably isn't a good sign that some petty mean girls drama could derail Jackson's entire administration. And that was just the first crisis of his presidency. Jackson saved his worst scandals for the second half of his term, and these mistakes would do more than ruin social lives.

They would leave the entire country reeling. That's up next. Now back to the story. After the Petticoat affair, things pretty much all went downhill for Jackson, his first term was an avalanche of disasters. There was the nullification crisis in which South Carolina almost seceded from the union over a disagreement about tariffs. Then in 1830, there was the Indian Removal Act, which today is Jackson's most memorably appalling action as president. The act authorizes the president to work out a deal with Native American tribes in the southern states if they left their fertile, valuable land in the Southeast.

Jackson would grant them new land west of the Mississippi. Obviously, the tribes were not very big on this idea. A lot of them tried to fight against it. But if they wouldn't play along, Jackson would forcibly remove them. Entire tribes were forced to walk thousands of miles from their homes to new, quote, Indian territory in the West. The death march, which killed thousands and displaced tens of thousands, has been labeled the Trail of Tears.

That kind of cruelty was right in line with the real Andrew Jackson, the one hiding behind the sanitized cutout that got elected.

Remember how he became a war hero by mercilessly slaughtering peoples? Now that he was in office, history was repeating itself.

The Supreme Court eventually pushed back against Jackson's behavior. They ruled that the state of Georgia, with Jackson's backing, had violated federal treaties by seizing Cherokee lands. States had no legal right to interfere with Native American tribes. But Jackson couldn't have cared less about the court's decision. He reportedly said about the chief justice, quote, John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it, end quote.

Last I checked, the president is supposed to listen to the Supreme Court and enforce the ruling. That's how the system of checks and balances works. Obviously, Jackson saw things differently. If he didn't like what the court said, he would pretend it never happened. The president completely ignored the ruling. The Cherokee land went to Georgia and the Trail of Tears marched on. And Jackson's everymen supporters, they cheered. The most horrifying part of all of this is that at the time, very few people considered it a crisis.

To most white Americans, the Indian Removal Act was considered a good thing. In fact, it may have even helped Jackson get re-elected. In 1832, he won by a landslide, so onto a second term. Jackson keeps up his racism by speaking out against abolitionism, unsurprising since he's a major slaveholder himself. At one point, he called abolitionists monsters and accused them of trying to start a civil war. He said they deserve to, quote, atone for this wicked attempt with their lives, end quote.

But don't worry, Jackson didn't stop at just being racist. He also botched the economy and caused a depression. Remember, Jackson came into the White House on an anti bank agenda. In fact, it was a huge point in his 1828 campaign. And Jackson was actually passionate about this policy, too. Unlike some of his other campaign promises, he had once sold land to a trusted buyer on credit. But then the buyer defaulted. After that, Jackson was totally suspicious of the concept of credit and by extension, banks.

So in eighteen thirty three, Jackson shut down the Bank of the United States. Essentially the Fed of the time, he felt better working with little pet banks. He presumably trusted these more because they were small and thus more of the people. Shaky logic, but also shaky precedent. Shutting down the National Bank didn't help the American economy at all. Inflation skyrocketed, but Jackson wasn't done. He keeps doubling down on the anti bank policies. In 1836, he introduces the species circular, which bans the use of paper money in land sales and insists that people pay in real gold or silver.

Because paper money is essentially a kind of credit, it doesn't have any value of its own unless it's backed by precious metal. And Jackson doesn't trust the idea of credit, which kind of seems insane, right? People thought so at the time to the ban of paper money. Land sales, shockingly, does not help. Land sales speculation slows down. States lose a bunch of income and the panic of 1837 follows. And voila, Jack. Since little depression, in fact, Jackson's games with American finances hurt the country so much that it led to the first presidential assassination attempt.

It's January 30th, 1835. Jackson's leaving the Capitol after the funeral of a congressman when suddenly Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, points a pistol at Jackson, takes aim and shoots the shot misses and Lawrence tries to fire again. But before he can, an incensed Jackson strikes back. He rushes Lawrence and starts beating him with his cane. Note that at this point, he's 67 years old, but he's still got some muscle. Lawrence is getting beaten to a pulp.

Onlookers are horrified and shocked, and they eventually rush into the fray and pull Jackson off the would be assassin. Luckily, nobody dies. But the reason Lawrence wanted to kill Jackson with the president dead, quote, money would be more plenty. Aside from the Trail of Tears, the insane vendetta against paper money is probably the mistake Jackson's best remembered for. And unlike the Trail of Tears, the money stuff was causing some serious dissatisfaction among voters. After all this, the president is starting to lose some of his luster.

He's also pushing 70 and his health isn't too hot. He still has a bullet lodged in his chest from his Dooling adventures, and it's starting to fester because the lead is poisoning him from the inside. But doctors still can't take it out since it's right next to his heart.

And this is probably why Jackson doesn't seek a third term. Instead, he returns to his Tennessee slave plantation. Jackson lives out his final days surrounded by the humans he owns. It's a fitting end for a populist whose everyman was actually a white man. Violence, racism and chauvinism were in his blood, from duels to Native American massacres to the demonic death march he directed across the country. It may have looked like D.C. fun and games were about to reach new heights when Jackson's punch bowls landed on the White House lawn.

But really, they marked the beginning of two terms of absolute disaster. Perhaps the most scandalous thing about Jackson is the fact that for generations he's been lauded as an American hero. Even to this day, the perception is often that he's a true man of the people who took down the D.C. elite. We still plaster his face on our twenty dollar bills despite the fact that he hated paper money. But the reality was very different. Whatever good Jackson may have thought he was doing was totally undermined by his racist, ill advised policies.

In fact, the most effective part of his political career wasn't anything he did. It was the work the Nashville Junto did for him. So congratulations to them and the political beast that they created.

Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. If you want to hear more episodes of very presidential, you can find them all for free on Spotify. Very presidential was created by Max Cutler and Ashley Flowers in Izapa Castle Studios original, starring Ashley Flowers.

It's executive produced by Max Cutler, Sound Design by Carrie Murphy with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden and Joshua Kern.

This episode of Very Presidential was written by Nora Battal with Writing Assistants by Kate Gallagher. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all audio Chuck Originals. Hey, podcasters, don't forget to check out the brand new Spotify original from podcast Incredible Feats, join host Dan Cummins as he explores true accounts of weird, wonderful and all out wild achievements. New episodes premiere daily Monday through Friday, search incredible feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.