LAYFAYETTE SQUARE

Layfayette Square [photo]Andrew Jackson’s silhouette is unmistakably 19th-century American: the tip of the hat, the ramrod posture. The cockade of hair above the brow is rec-ognizably Jacksonian. (Compare his forelock in the Sully portrait on a $20 bill.) Jackson’s horse rears up from a plain granite oval, inscribed “Jackson” and “The Federal Union, It Must Be Preserved.” The quote was from Jackson’s toast at the 1830 Jefferson Day Dinner; Jackson was warning others to check threats of Southern secession over a tariff that favored New England mercantile enterprise over Southern agriculture.

The cannons on either side of the statue, cast in the Spanish royal foundry at Barcelona between 1743 and 1776, were seized by Jackson at Pensacola during the Indian Wars. This was the first equestrian statue cast in the United States. Sculptor Clark Mills’s 1850 work shows Jackson reviewing his troops after his triumph at the Battle of New Orleans.

Equestrian statues of military leaders are a tradition as old as time, but this portrayal of horse and rider is singularly apt, for Jackson raised horses in Tennessee and raced them in Washington, sometimes under the name of Rachel Jackson’s nephew, A.J. Donelson. Congress adjourned for races at the track east of Washington Circle.

As Jackson’s raised hat acknowledges his troops, so the North Portico of the White House, which frames the statue in this photograph, is an architectural salute to Old Hickory himself. The pediment supported by eight Doric columns was rushed to completion in 1829 to ornament the presidential mansion’s previously flat front facade, just in time for the famously rowdy inauguration of America’s first frontier president.

Elected as a man of the people, Jackson was nevertheless accorded a royal, if roistering, reception. Upstate New York farmers marked the great occasion by sending a wagon weighted down with several tons of cheddar. The Great Cheese lingered as an enormous presence just inside the front door of the White House foyer. After many months the general public was allowed to step inside the North Portico to carve off snacks. It vanished in a morning, but the grease spot lingered on.

PHOTOGRAPH BY VOLKMAR K. WENTZEL (CC ‘74); TEXT BY JUDITH W. FRANK (WASHINGTON BY NIGHT)

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