Authoritarian Fatherhood: Andrew Jackson’s Early Familial Lectures to America’s “Red Children”

The present article questions how Andrew Jackson employed the rhetorical strategy of fatherhood to bolster American nationalism while justifying the denigration of American Indians. The author argues that Jackson’s lectures illustrate a paternalism that situated American Indians in a socially subordinate position and that privileged American nationalism—particularly by way of westward and southern expansion. This subordination was accomplished through a rhetoric of authoritarian fatherhood. That is, the father-child relationship that Jackson systematized helped forge an American nationalism. In this article, several samplings of Jackson’s lectures are analyzed to uncover the patterns of Jackson’s authoritarian fatherhood. Jackson’s rhetorical fatherhood coalesces into three themes: fatherly guidance, fatherly punishment, and fatherly demagoguery. These three themes, it will be argued, formed the core of an American paternal nationalism advanced with the rise of Jackson as a national rhetorical figure.