Here’s an important fact about the momentous break with Revolutionary-era republicanism that marks the start of American democracy: it took place two hundred years ago today. Its cradle was not Philadelphia or Boston, and its architects were not statesmen or intellectuals. To the contrary, the United States’ unique, frontier-inspired democratic ethos originated on the banks of the Rodriguez Canal, six swampy miles inland from the Port of New Orleans. It was there that Major General Andrew Jackson—then best known for killing Red Sticks Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in 1814—marshalled his troops to the edge of some ramparts. They unexpectedly found themselves, eyes wide and guns drawn, hovering over hundreds of British soldiers who had scuttled into the ditch below, awaiting the arrival of ladders that would enable them to climb out and fight. The redcoats tried to leap onto each other’s shoulders to escape; they were, as the historian John William Ward wrote in his book “Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age,” “sitting ducks for the American army.” The result was a bloodbath. By the end of the Battle of New Orleans, the British had suffered two hundred and ninety-one fatalities, versus the Americans’ thirteen, in large part because of a logistical snafu by the 44th Regiment, which was supposed to haul over the ladders.

With that, the War of 1812 ended, and the new republic had its first national military hero since George Washington. The glow of the Revolution had by then faded, and the American population was spreading into Western territory. The victory’s unifying impact was felt nationwide, with Jackson cast as a new kind of hero: one who resonated with the demos—trappers, yeoman, servants, day laborers, and other rough-hewn, Westernizing folk who viewed the East Coast as a bastion of aristocratic foppery. Where lesser politicians might have been capable of grasping the interests of this emerging demographic, Jackson, a product of the Carolina hinterlands, understood their identity.

Jackson’s ability to parlay backwoods cultural capital into national political prominence depended on a shrewd retelling of the Battle of New Orleans. This ingenious public-relations effort stressed raw courage over rare luck as the reason for the battle’s glorious outcome, and it began before the dust of war had settled. With help from a partisan media that was openly sympathetic to Western interests, Jackson and his acolytes essentially transformed a stroke of military good fortune into an idealization of American exceptionalism—one that democratized the uniquely American virtues embodied in Jackson’s scraggy persona.

Two weeks after the war concluded, Jackson praised his troops for their “untutored courage,” which he deemed superior to the “approved rules of European tactics.” His chief military engineer, Major Arsène Latour, in a memoir published in 1816, reiterated the benefit of Americans’ ruggedly native intelligence, calling Jackson’s forces “disciplined without having passed through the formal training of reviews and garrison manouevres.” This kind of carefully crafted rhetoric started, after forty years of independence, the project of culturally distinguishing the United States from its enervated former colonizers.

The myth linking the United States’s national character with Jackson’s celebrated heroism soon began to coalesce. In 1819, Congressman Alexander Smyth, of Virginia, called Jackson “the man appointed by Heaven to tread the wine press of Almighty wrath.” The image of Jackson as a divine handmaiden became so widespread that Jackson eventually adopted it, referring to himself, in 1826, as “the humble instrument of a wise and superintending Providence.” As Jackson entered formal political life, leading up to his candidacy in the 1828 Presidential election, admiration for his lack of military tutelage morphed into admiration for his lack of scholarly tutelage. In an editorial, a delegation of his supporters praised his attributes to a New York political convention as ones “which can never be acquired in the halls of the university.” His judgment, the editorial explained, was “unclouded by the visionary speculations of the academician.” The Jackson Republican, a paper created to stump for Jackson’s 1828 candidacy, highlighted his “natural sense”—an instinct that “can never be acquired by reading books.” In 1834, the New York Times (a newspaper unrelated to the one founded in 1851 and extant today) wrote of Jackson, “He arrives at conclusions with a rapidity which proves that his process is not through the tardy avenues of syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis.” Other minds might be “vigorous and cultivated,” but Jackson, who was seen as the antithesis of intellectual cultivation, “leaves them in the distance.”

Not everyone was so admiring of this developing caricature. John Quincy Adams, who lost to Jackson in the election of 1828, represented a Brahmin culture that Jacksonians despised. Adams seethed in a diary entry from 1833 that the President, who had just been chosen to receive an honorary degree from Harvard, was “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” But eight Western and Southern states had joined the union between 1800 and 1833, all of them eager to welcome intrepid pioneers and planters, and people were leaving the East Coast in search of cheap land and the chance to create their own myths. They didn’t care about Jackson’s literacy; exceptionalism required men of action. The statesman Henry Wise, of Virginia, articulated this qualification as well as anyone: “Jackson made law,” he wrote. “Adams quoted it.”

After Jackson’s death, in 1845, the connection between American character and rugged Jacksonian values only intensified. At Jackson’s funeral, the historian and naval secretary George Bancroft famously called him “the unlettered man of the West,” a leader who was “little versed in books, unconnected by science with the tradition of the past,” and “raised by the will of the people.” Benjamin F. Butler, who would later serve as governor of Massachusetts, eulogized Jackson by evoking, as so many did, the Battle of New Orleans, during which, he said, the general behaved as “some heaven-appointed and heaven-assisted warrior.” Butler wondered, “Who in these things does not see the hand of God?”

And so, Andrew Jackson was mythologized as an unschooled, sharpshooting, divinely chosen woodsman of the people. This image helped establish a version of democracy that became the foundation of a political system subject to crass populism, and disdainful of anything effete or intellectualized or European—one that frequently compels political candidates to doff the sport coat, grab a weapon, and shoot something, anything, for the cameras.

Counterfactual history is cheap, but it’s hard not to wonder what might have happened if things had turned out differently on that balmy January morning for Old Hickory and his ragtag troops. Had Jackson not stumbled into military victory at a time when the nation was desperate for a showcase of martial prowess, he might have festered in the backcountry, pursuing a career out of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,_ _clearing the landscape of Native Americans.

There is, indeed, good reason to think that, without Jackson’s injection of nascent populism into American political culture, the natural aristocracy of John Quincy Adams would have held sway, continuing to permeate political life, keeping the viral impulses of “we the people” at bay. But the Jacksonian myth, fashioned as it was from the cloth of battle, worked so well because it told a new story about American life, one that Americans, perhaps without even knowing it, needed to hear. If Jackson hadn’t channelled the seductive impulse to give the people the narrative they wanted, the narrative that explained them to themselves, somebody else would surely have told the tale.