hegemony.........................

      One way to understand Jackson's unconventional courtship of Rachel is to see it as part of a broader personal approach by which he reckoned with the world.  Over a long public service career, he was occasionally accused of skirting legal niceties in the name of expediency.  While president he controversially removed federal deposits from the country's National Bank (thus earning a Senate censure for "assuming upon himself authority and power not conferred by the constitution"), and in another episode he tacitly supported southern postmasters who, in direct opposition to postal law, refused to deliver abolitionist materials.  Jackson, and indeed much of the political movement he headed, believed the country too confined by treaties and technicalities, the kind of formalities and piddling points that easterners presumably used to maintain hegemony over westerners.  In a similar vein, he believed his marriage to Rachel legal in the only sense meaningful to him, showing little concern for the lack of a contract.  In both contexts, in and out of power, he demonstrated a tendency for the intuitive, the immediate, and the practical.  This attitude no doubt reveals something about his personality and temperament, though it is almost certainly indicative as well of the frontier's mounting pressure upon older American institutions, practices, and protocols.

-David S. Brown:  The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson