Jackson may not have been trained at Harvard like John Quincy Adams, but he possessed the ability to think deeply about constitutional matters, foreign policy, and economics. In tracing these transformative events, Brown does an excellent job at dispelling many of the misconceptions that have developed around Jackson, such as that he was an unserious thinker with an unstable personality. In doing so, Brown effectively demonstrates both Jackson’s steadfast personability and his enduring influence on American political life. The result is a kaleidoscopic approach, connecting moments in Jackson’s life to future episodes as well as to his legacy.
In losing the election of 1824 thanks to a vote in the House of Representatives (despite winning the popular vote), Jackson found his mandate as the people’s tribune. Jackson may have started his career by defending creditors and pursuing defaulters, but the economic chaos caused by the Panic of 1819 shaped his animosity toward banks. As Brown shows, Jackson learned a great deal from his youthful mistakes squandering his inheritance in Charleston and from his early political missteps as Tennessee’s first congressman and then as a senator. Whereas some biographies of Jackson paint him as a mere reactionary, Brown presents a more sympathetic view of Jackson’s personal and political development. By the end of his two terms in office, Jackson would inspire a desperate coalition, the Whig Party, bound together by their mutual hatred of his policies, but he would also be so popular that a third term was his for the taking if he wanted it. Based on that celebrity, many were eager to see Jackson in the White House, believing him to be a second George Washington, while others saw little more than an American Napoleon in the making. Brown correctly points to Jackson’s conquest of the Muscogee Red Sticks during the Creek War as the origin of his celebrity, which the startling outcome of the Battle of New Orleans only amplified. In charting Jackson’s life, Brown, a professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, deftly conveys what made Jackson so popular and polarizing. Brown’s The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson chronicles, Jackson produced such love, loyalty, and loathing from the American people in his own lifetime. “Slave Owner,” “Racist Scum,” and “Remember May 28, 1830” (a reference to the Indian Removal Act) were a few examples of the graffiti the protesters used to describe the man once known as the Hero of New Orleans.īut as David S. Statues of Jackson, along with those of numerous other famous (and infamous) American figures, were vandalized across the country during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. And recent Democratic presidents, first Obama and then Biden, have sought to remove Jackson’s image from the $20 bill. Similarly, the once celebratory Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners have almost universally been renamed or disbanded. On the Democratic National Committee’s history page, Jackson is nowhere to be seen. Even with Trump out of the White House, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton recently described the future of the GOP as “Jacksonian” at the Ronald Reagan Library in California.Īt the same time, the Democratic Party that Jackson helped birth seems unable to rid itself of the man fast enough. Trump solidified this connection by hanging a portrait of Old Hickory in the Oval Office and ventured to the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation home, in Nashville, Tennessee, to pay his respects. During the unexpected rise of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, Steve Bannon and other pundits compared the future 45th president to Jackson, ascribing to him a similar status as a champion of the people and the bane of Washingtonian elites. EVEN 175 YEARS after his death, Andrew Jackson is still all the rage, and a continual source of outrage.