The Life of Andrew Jackson
Robert V. Remini
I didn't expect to make any more progress on this project until after grad school, or at least not until a semester break. But to avoid going nuts as I wait for classes to start, I assigned myself the task of finishing this biography, and I'm so glad I did. Spending time in the world of early 19th century America has drawn me back into my "academic mind" and has actually helped me better define my interests (for the moment anyway) as I've picked classes and had to introduce myself and "what I want to work on."
At any rate... Jackson.
My impression of Andrew Jackson going into this (as I think I mentioned in a previous post) was basically this: the Father of American Empire and Genocide. Remini points out that this is what most historians in the later 20th century have had to say about Jackson, so it's no surprise that that's the understanding I had. After reading this author's one-volume abridgement of his 3-volume series on Jackson, I have mixed feelings.
Remini does an adequate job of addressing genocide and assigning Jackson appropriate blame for it. He doesn't shy away from identifying Jackson's oddly conflicting perspectives on American Indians: Jackson seemed to genuinely believe that his "removal" scheme was the best option for preserving Indian culture - that it was inevitable that tribes would be slaughtered if they stayed on the land the Americans coveted, so to avoid disappearance, they should be disappeared to the west of the Mississippi, where, as we all know, they were left in peace for "as long as the grasses grow and the rivers run." Or, for about six months. It strikes me that Remini is in an odd generational gap in America, where his entire education and nearly all of his body of work was written in a context of celebration for the "founders" of the country, but the past few decades have required caveats every few chapters in his writing. Perhaps it's beyond the scope of this particular book to address our apparent need for our story to be one of heroes and patriots with a few blemishes, rather than downright complicated, paradoxical personifications of good and evil all at once.
Jackson's impact on the power of the presidency can't be overstated. Some of the concepts we take as a given today were essentially invented by Jackson, such as the President acting as the "head of government," or the concept that the President is a direct representative of the People. Even the concept of "the people" seems to have been developed in this populist period. Jackson is the first "common man" to be elected, and I found all kinds of interesting parallels in rhetoric and context between Jackson and Obama, a "people's" president in new and perhaps more authentic ways.
I do leave this reading with a more nuanced view of Jackson. I can see the ways that his ideologies have influenced our system for the better: establishing the importance of paying off debt (as the only president, I think, to ever preside over the total elimination of the national debt), limiting involvement by the federal government to issues that are of such importance that they can't be handled by individual states, preserving the union (and really defining the idea of union) in a way that probably gave Lincoln the cultural and rhetorical precedent to be capable of holding the country together a few decades later. There were points in this book where I began to more deliberately evaluate my thoughts about the role of government in our lives, and it's due to Jackson's level of passion and commitment to republican ideals.
This is also the period where the Democratic Party is born, though it's clear that the term does not mean what it does today, and that Republican isn't the same, either. So it's hard to label Jackson's ideas in a convenient lump-word, but I think that's what I appreciate, from my historical vantage point. The founders, the early "artists" of our democracy, clearly couldn't define the "right" way to be an American any better than we can today, and that's a difficult and hopeful idea to consider. I think the point is that being an American, in the best sense of the word, is not to be left or right, but to be engaged. To be willing to commit energy and effort to asking questions and considering real-world examples. To have a civil dialogue and to protect everyone's right to an opinion, regardless of how it turns out.
I still have some major problems with Jackson. But I think I'm able to give him some credit, as well, for helping to better define the idea of the United States of America. I believe he loved his country. As for me, I think there's work still to be done to undo the injustices buried in the establishment of that country - and for those groups who were collateral damage along the way to experience some of the ideals it's meant to represent.
