Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times

OK - I'll admit how little I knew of Jackson as I started this biography. Battle of New Orleans, Old Hickory, Hermitage, 7th President, and that was about it. If you find yourself close to my level of ignorance, then you owe it to yourself to read this book. Brands has written a biography that reads like fiction. In a life that stretched from the Revolution to the entry of Texas, Jackson was instrumental in the shaping of both our current notion of representative democracy and the actual shape that our Union now assumes. One could argue that he is the most influential President not on Mt. Rushmore. Brands' biography touches on the unsavory side of Jackson: his slave holding, dueling, and most of all, his instrumental role in seizing America from the Native American tribes. I think Brands stops short of exonerating Jackson, but he does place him in context. The reader is left to be the final judge, but there is little doubt that Brands feels Jackson's undeniable greatness overshadows his undeniable flaws. Overall, I found this a fascinating look at an unjustly forgotten great American. Reading this was time well spent.

Too many Americans know Andrew Jackson only as the old guy on the $20 bill. But now Bill Brands has brought this seminal 19th Century figure to life for a new generation of readers with a fascinating biography of a truly extraordinary American. Jackson, Brands writes, was nothing short of the second George Washington. In 1814-15, it was not at all clear that the fledgling republican experiment would survive. Secessionist sentiment swirled in Federalist New England. The British had torched the nation's capital, and demanded American dismemberment as the price of peace. Fresh off their victory over Napoleon, a British land and sea force stood poised to invade at New Orleans and cut the country in half. In opposition, stood General Jackson and a poorly armed band of army regulars, militia, pirates, ex-slaves and locals of sometimes dubious loyalty. It was, Brands says, America's darkest winter since Valley Forge. That's when the second Washington emerged: Jackson turned back the British threat at New Orleans, destroying Wellington's Invincibles (under the commanded of Wellington's son-in-law) and ensuring that the Louisiana territory would remain part of the United States. Like Washington, Jackson rode battlefield success to two terms in the White House, ushering in a new phase in the American experiment: popular democracy. Jackson went on to wage vigorous battles on behalf of the common man. Not all of them, well guided, in retrospect. His successful assault on the Second Bank of the United States would leave the country without a central bank - or an adequate means of controlling its money supply - for 70+ years, exaggerating the sharp busts and booms that marked the 19th Century American economy. On the other hand, although viscerally opposed to central authority and in favor of states rights, Jackson was a fierce patriot, believing that all liberty and all security stemmed from the preservation of the Union. He would bring this conviction home at the point of a bayonet when his native South Carolina threatened secession during the Nullification Crisis. Jackson was certainly no angel. As military commander, he usurped civilian authority on more than one occasion. He engaged in duels and a wild street-brawl with men 20 years his junior (which nearly killed him), and possessed a hair-trigger temper, exacerbated Brands says, by chronic poor health. His Indian removal policy has drawn the opprobrium of modern critics far removed from the frontier dangers of the early 19th Century. Brands portrays both the good and bad in Andrew Jackson, summoning all the narrative gifts he demonstrated so abundantly in "An Age of Gold" and "Lone Star Nation" as well as earlier biographies of Ben Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt. Highly recommended.

For all his prominence among American presidents, Andrew Jackson has been the subject of fewer major biographies than one might assume. There is, of course, the masterful three-volume biography by Remini, which is and will remain for some time the major biography of Jackson, as well as the classic single volume by Arthur Schlesinger THE AGE OF JACKSON, a very great book even though Jackson emerges as more or less a proto 1930s New Dealer. This excellent new biography by H. W. Brands, who among his many interesting books wrote a stellar biography of Benjamin Franklin, does not supplant either of these books, but rather supplements them. While Remini's remains the for-now definitive biography of Jackson, those not willing or possessing the time to work through his three-volume work can feel easy about turning to this single-volume biography. I should note that Remini has produced a one-wolume condensation of his longer work, but I must confess an inherent bias against abridgements, even if performed by the author himself. Of all the American presidents, Andrew Jackson lived the fullest, most colorful life. Only Teddy Roosevelt can come close for the variety of his life's experiences and even he falls far short of all that Jackson managed to do or be in his life. Jackson was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, briefly a school teacher, a lawyer, a judge, a U.S. Representative to Congress, a U.S. Senator, a circuit judge, a duelist, a gambler, a slave owner and trader, a dry goods salesman, a farmer, a landowner, a major general in the state militia, an Indian fighter, and a general in the U.S. Army, all before achieving national fame at the Battle of New Orleans. One could argue that Jackson is not as interesting as some more physically sedate but more psychologically complex presidents such as John Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, or the two Roosevelts, but none of these others can match Jackson for the sheer pace at which he got things done. Brands does a great job at highlighting the more interesting aspects of Jackson's life. Given the amazing variety of his life's experiences, this is perhaps not that great of an achievement. He does in addition a fine job of bringing Jackson the person into focus, with his almost savage pride and propensity to take offense. "Thin-skinned" does not seem to describe Jackson as well as "no-skinned" might. Other political figures in American history fought duels, but none with such aggression. He was the only president to have killed a man in a duel. Jackson emerges as a vibrant, fascinating, and compelling character, if not someone you especially like. Brands is also good at placing Jackson in his time, which was the point in the nation's history when the Federalists and the Republicans (the Federalists later fragmented and the remnants became the Republican party while the Republicans later called themselves during the Jacksonian period Democrats) were contending over whether the new nation would be

Andrew Jackson led a colorful and complex life in his 78 years. He was a military genius, plantation owner, Indian fighter, a racist toward non-whites, controversial loser of the 1824 and easy winner of the 1828 & 1832 Presidential elections, orphan, scarred by the British and married to a married woman, his true love. Mr. Brands tells his story of a man of contradictions in 600+ pages. Mr. Brands writes a dense, just the facts approach in his biography of this populist President from the West who campaigned against the elitist Northeast. The true climax of his Presidency was his delaying the onset of the Civil War with his staring down his own Vice-President and the South with a genuine military show of force during the secession crisis. Mr. Brands has written the best one volume biography of the seventh President, surpasssing Robert Remini's own 400+ page condensation ("The Life of Andrew Jackson"--1988) of his classic trilogy on Andrew Jackson. However, given that Jackson was at the center of American history for over 60 years, the reader is referred to Mr. Remini's three volume definitive biography of 1,600 pages (1977, 1981, 1984) for a fuller, richer picture of this fascinating President. In deciding which to read, it depends on how much time and how much interest the reader has in Andrew Jackson.

And unlike open admirers like Remini and Schlesinger, H.W. Brands should be given credit for presenting the man as he was. Most of us with any sense of American History know that Jackson routed the British in the last major military engagement of the War of 1812 - the Battle of New Orleans, fought actually two weeks after the war ended. Most of us know what a capable and determined President he was, Professor Brands sheds light on the things that we either do not know or know little about. For example: Thanks to Andrew Jackson, we have a Bank of America but NOT a Bank of the United States! There was actually a national bank whose power became too all-consuming. Jackson closed that bank, allowing open competition to flourish. Jackson was extremely popular not just as a war hero, but as a common man - reared on the then-frontier of the Carolinas and Tennessee, rough sown territories where men would settle accounts by duels, where children were often the product of illegitimate relations, and where hate of the Indians and of Blacks flourished. Jackson was a product of the backwoods, shared many of their prejudices, and tended to alienate friends as much as he did foes. For example, Davey Crockett was a valued scout and soldier in Jackson's war against the Creeks - and a friend to boot. That friendship ended when Jackson cruelly chose to force the expulsion of peaceful Cherokees along with the Creeks to the Oklahoma territory. The then Whig Congressman Crockett stood firmly and bravely against President Jackson's "Treaty of Tears" policies - and ended up ousted by Jackson's cronies in the following election. Crockett of course is better known for his subsequent death at the Alamo than for his gallant stand against Jackson's anti-Indian policies in Congress. Another friend who had unease over Jackson's hate of Indians was Sam Houston, who actually went to live with the Cherokees following the scandal that erupted over his wife's desertion of him when he was governor of Tennessee. But Houston chose political expediency over standing up to Jackson, and kept mum - and in Andy's good graces. Jackson's hate of Indians came out of his hate of the British, who killed members of his family, indirectly caused his mother's death tending to American prisoners-of-war on a British prison ship (she took ill and died due to exposure and neglect), and his own experience as a teenager when refusing to shine the boots of a British officer was slashed almost to the bone by the officer's sword in the bitter, backwoods fighting in the Carolinas. But fighting armed warriors is one thing; expelling peaceful citizens is quite another, as well as defying the Supreme Court's Chief Justice John Marshall who sought to prevent the Cherokee expulsions. In one of his more infamous statements, Jackson asserted that "John Marshall made the law. Now let him enforce it". Of course a modern day President might have faced impeachment, but not Andrew Jackson. Jackson also held th