Free Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party by Dinesh D'Souza

with irregular troops in the Revolutionary War. Later he led an intrepid band of Tennessee militiamen, together with slaves, free blacks, pirates, and Indians, to victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.
    These exploits are somewhat ambiguous. As a brash fourteen-year-old, Jackson was captured by the British before he could do much fighting, and contracted smallpox soon afterward. Thus the notion that he was a “hardened veteran” in his early teens seems to be a product of hagiography, not history. Jackson surely deserved his reputation for toughness in triumph over the British in New Orleans; in this sense, his nickname Old Hickory seems fully justified.
    Yet even this New Orleans triumph is vitiated somewhat when we recall that he was, even then, strong-arming his Indian compatriots to part with their land. In a manner that anticipates the intrigues and purges of the Clintons, Jackson seems to have been almost as dangerous to his allies as he was to his enemies.
    Jackson’s personal life, while unexceptional for a frontiersman, was nevertheless below the standard that Americans had previously expected from their foremost citizen. Arriving in Nashville in 1788, Jackson took up with a woman, Rachel Donelson Robards. Later it turned out thatRobards was separated from her husband but due to various complications the couple had never been legally divorced.
    When Jackson ran for president in 1824 and again in 1828, his opponents accused him of wife stealing and bigamy. The accusations were unfair because Jackson did not know about Rachel’s divorce complications. Eventually Rachel got a legal divorce and she and Jackson were formally married. Still, an aura of controversy surrounded this issue throughout Jackson’s presidency.
    Jackson was also known as a peevish, hot-tempered man who got into fights and provoked fights when there were none to be had. Fights in the Old South could easily escalate into lethal duels. Jackson almost got into a duel with Tennessee Governor John Sevier—a veteran of the American Revolution—in a squabble over who should head the state militia.
    He dueled over a personal issue with another man, Charles Dickinson, and killed him. Jackson too was wounded, taking a bullet in his chest that remained lodged there for the rest of his life. Men of this rough mettle are often admired but rarely loved, so the mystery of Jackson’s inaugural popularity remains to be solved.
    AL CAPONE, MAN OF THE PEOPLE
    I believe we can understand what was going on with Jackson and his inaugural mob if we fast forward about a century and envision a similar scene, this one involving the mafia chieftain Al Capone entering the Chicago baseball stadium. When Capone did this, the crowd would go into a frenetic roar, and people would throw their hats up and yell, “Big Al! Big Al! Big Al!”
    Capone, of course, was a mobster, so why was the crowd for him? The reason is that he was their mobster. As many in Chicago saw it, Capone was merely feeding their insatiable appetite for liquor, gambling tables, and women. Prostitution and gambling were illegal at the time, as was alcohol. Still, there was a demand for those things and Capone provided them. Naturally, the people were appreciative. They wanted,and he delivered. He may have gone around the law to do it but was there any other way to achieve the same result? Clearly not.
    The reason for Jackson’s inaugural popularity was that he was a nineteenth-century Al Capone. The people celebrated in Jackson’s White House because he was responsible for them obtaining the land to build their own houses. Jackson became a “man of the people” by providing them with something they wanted that they could not secure for themselves, namely, the land belonging to the Native Americans. Jackson was the consummate thief, and his people appreciated that quality in him.
    In this case Jackson didn’t do things exactly the Capone way. He didn’t really go