Clinton Shoots for Jacksonian Victory

Old Hickory's Legend Tied to His Win at the Battle of New Orleans - After the War Ended

President Andrew Jackson and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton

Answering the call of their beleaguered leader, they turned out in large numbers -- a coalition determined to wage an impossible fight against an increasingly insurmountable foe. Tough folk. Sturdy folk. Some considered them rag-tag and bobtail. Though they achieved victory in only one battle of an already decided war, they celebrated nonetheless, thumbing their noses at an elite foe. Their cheers thundered not only for the triumph, but for their leader -- the cross-grained, defiant and ferocious fighter.

This is not a description of Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton's win in the West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primaries, with all their anticlimactic jubilation, but instead an account of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Even so, advisers to both the Clinton and Obama campaigns should pick up a copy of Daniel Walker Howe’s "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1845," recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history.

Howe devotes his prologue to that long-celebrated winter slog in the swamps just outside the Big Easy. It was, by all measures, a crushing defeat for the British -- they suffered a 40 percent casualty rate in their main attack alone -- and a glorious victory for Gen. Andrew Jackson and his rag-tag Americans. It was the midwife to all the legends of Old Hickory, the many popular ballads and, most important, the notion that America actually won the War of 1812.

But at the risk of being labeled history’s biggest wet blanket, Howe points out the truth about the Battle of New Orleans: it had no impact on the war. The Treaty of Ghent, which officially ended the conflict, had been signed weeks earlier. In an age before the telegraph, news from Europe took weeks to arrive. Sadly for historical romantics, Jackson’s long-feted victory was meaningless in any real sense.

Clinton and her advisers no doubt hope her victories in West Virginia, Kentucky and possibly Puerto Rico will be judged turning points, but in truth they look more like the Battle of New Orleans—hollow triumphs if ever there were some. At least that’s what the pundit class is proclaiming. The Politico’s Roger Simon compares Clinton’s victory to a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it make a sound. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank likens her to the dead parrot in a famous Monty Python sketch. Even unabashed Clinton stalwart James Carville has declared the nominating process all but over.

Yet there is hope for Clinton in such an historical parallel. The war may have been officially over in January 1815, but Jackson and his troops didn’t know it. Neither did the British. Had they never fought outside New Orleans, the War of 1812 would probably have ended anyway, as Howe carefully argues. Without that last battle, though, our collective national memory may have been quite different. In the least, it’s safe to say the career of Jackson, whose political star rose immeasurably as a result, would probably have taken a varied path.

Nor was the Battle of New Orleans entirely futile. It proved that perception can smother reality. In the haze of malleable recollection, an unnecessary triumph can morph into an exalted historical hinge.

Can Clinton accomplish the same? If she defies the odds and captures the nomination, the emergent narrative will cast West Virginia as a watershed victory—the sort of turning point that pundits will burn into America’s consciousness. Such a victory would be more the political equivalent of past American successes at Saratoga, San Jacinto or Midway — battles that turned the tide of war.


A scenario more analogous to the Battle of New Orleans would have Sen. Barack Obama winning the nomination but then perhaps losing the general election to Sen. John McCain. In this case, Clinton could point to West Virginia and Kentucky as the moments when Democratic superdelegates should have taken a second, long look at the front-runner. If Obama does indeed fail to connect to working-class voters, as Clinton’s advisers say, then the May primaries might become the rallying cry around which her 2012 presidential campaign is built. “Remember West Virginia!” they will shout.

Regardless of these possible outcomes, one fruit of Clinton’s defiant victories in Pennsylvania, Indiana and West Virginia has already ripened. She has transformed her image from inevitable conqueror to recalcitrant scrapper. She now resembles less the imperious redcoat than the back-country American rifleman.

No matter what the future holds, she will carry that perception of accumulated toil and an irascible fighting spirit into later contests. This may well prove to be Clinton’s Jacksonian moment.

Jonathan Herzog, a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Stanford University, will begin teaching there this fall.

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