Lewis told John Coffee, an old friend of Jackson’s from Tennessee.Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His Country. “The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson but all his prominent supporters,” William B. and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” Jackson said to a friend.Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. is not spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians - and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her first husband.

The anti-Jackson assaults were more colorful. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table.

Jackson’s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I.

The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due and are pledged to their service.” Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. Rachel would be by his side.In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a letter. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty-four-gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. “How flattering to the cause of the people!” Now the president-elect’s family and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine - Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin - and, in this special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering congratulatory messages. “How triumphant!” Andrew Donelson said of the victory. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month before. Chapter one: Andy will fight his way in the worldChristmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville.

Jon meacham andrew jackson