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I was born for a storm

AMERICAN LION:
Andrew Jackson in the White House
By Jon Meacham
512 pp. Random House $30

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me.
—Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans after the War of 1812 had ended, lost his beloved wife Rachel between his election and his inauguration, and entered the White House with a bullet in his chest. His enemies vilified him as a murderer. They called his wife a bigamist and his long-deceased mother a whore. John Quincy Adams derided him as a barbarian who “hardly could spell his own name.”

Elected President in 1828 and 1832, he established the primacy of the federal government over the states, killed a national bank, faced down secessionists, and defended his family and friends against vicious attacks.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham certainly picked a colorful and significant subject for a presidential biography. In an age when there was “little difference between the personal and political,” he writes, the Jackson administration was roiled by “war, intrigue, and sexual scandal, and it left a permanent mark on the nation....This book is not a history of the Age of Jackson but a portrait of the man and of the complex relationships ... [that] transformed the presidency.”

For the general reader, American Lion is an excellent and enjoyable introduction to the life of a transformative president. It covers neither Jackson’s entire life nor his military career, but focuses instead on the challenges and intrigues surrounding his presidency. I read this book on my Kindle (only $9.99 that way), and after reading the epilogue I even found the back matter interesting, about how Meacham spoke and met with descendants of some of the key players in this biography. Meacham, a Tennessean like his subject, is a superior writer. While writing a compelling narrative of Jackson’s world, Meacham acknowledges that Jackson was neither all good nor all bad—and was in fact plenty of both.

“Lion” is an appropriate term to describe Andrew Jackson. Brave, fierce, loyal, and sometimes brutal, he would do anything to hold the Union together in the face of Sentator John Calhoun’s nullification and secession threats. When Calhoun wanted his native South Carolina to pick and choose which federal laws to obey, President Jackson threatened to enforce laws with federal troops. He would have hanged Calhoun if he felt it necessary.

In some ways Jackson was emblematic of his time, preaching equality and democracy while remaining what Meacham calls “an unrepentant slaveholder” and driving the Cherokees and Seminoles from their homelands. As was true with the Constitution in the 1830s, his ideals applied only to white men and not to women or blacks. He was a complex man whom his enemies regarded as a dictator, but he saw his overriding job as preserving the Union in a time when its future was hardly certain.

Meacham encapsulates Jackson’s legacy neatly:

The tragedy of Jackson’s life is that a man dedicated to freedom failed to see liberty as a universal, not a particular, gift. The triumph of his life is that he held together a country whose experiment in liberty ultimately extended its protections to all...

By projecting personal strength, Jackson created a persona of power...that propelled him forward throughout his life.

Meacham also illuminates Jackson’s personal life and that of some of the key players around him, showing how deeply entwined the personal and political could be. He had married his wife Rachel before her divorce from her previous husband became final, and Andrew’s political opponents showed her no mercy. Between his election and inauguration, she dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. Margaret Eaton, the wife of the Secretary of War, had a reputation for sleeping around and was routinely vilified and shunned by proper Washingtonians. But Jackson regarded the Eatons as friends and the attacks on her as unfair, and he defended them both in public and in private.

Meacham writes of an era when people professed a love of democracy but could put up with inequality, strove for justice but were “prone to racism and intolerance,” saw themselves as one nation but could be bitterly divided, and often acted with arrogance while craving respect. Our current era is brotherly love by comparison.

Anyone who thinks times are difficult now—and they are—and anyone who thinks 21st century politics are dirty—and they are—may take comfort in reading American Lion. If the United States could handle the 1830s and the decades that followed, we are a good bet to handle anything.

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Bob Sanchez is an associate editor and the webmaster of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.

Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.

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