The Last of the Founding Fathers

To have been president of the United States is to be, at least in a historical sense, immortal. William Henry Harrison was sworn in as president on March 4, 1841, and died exactly a month later having done little in office besides succumb to pneumonia. But everyone today knows his name, if little else about him.Indeed, the presidents of the antebellum period in American history are, to all but specialists, now mostly just a blur of names: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce. Most of us would be hard-pressed even to tell you which states they came from.But there is one spectacular exception to this presidential obscurity: Andrew Jackson. His present successor in the White House recently spoke to the nation from Jackson Square in New Orleans, in front of his triumphant equestrian statue, and Jackson Day is a holiday in Louisiana. There are towns and counties and mountains named for him around the country. His face adorns the $20 bill. He has even received the ultimate in historical tributes: His name has become an adjective to describe his time and his policies.The 19th-century historian Francis Parkman called Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers. The first six presidents of the United States had been either Virginia landed gentry or prosperous and well-educated Massachusetts lawyers. Andrew Jackson was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, and has the least amount of known ancestry of any president. Orphaned young, he had, at best, a scanty formal education (although he read law and was admitted to the bar). And he came from the frontier, having settled in Nashville, Tenn., as a very young man, when it was hardly more than a collection of log cabins surrounded by often hostile Indians.But what he lacked in antecedents and polish, he more than made up for in guts, determination, and intellectual honesty, if not always sophistication. To put it mildly, he led the strenuous life that another successor, Theodore Roosevelt, so admired and emulated. Jackson was a lawyer, a judge, a planter, a horse trader, a gambler, a politician, a general, and a man who put his life at risk at the drop of an insult and lived much of that life in chronic pain, which he largely ignored, as a result. He was irascible, unforgiving to his enemies, and deeply loyal to his friends and his principles. The only thing he loved more than a good fight itself was winning one. Being the man he was, he usually won.Finally elected to the White House in 1828, he gave notice immediately that things would be different thereafter. Previous inaugural celebrations had been decorous, invitation-only events for polite society. Jackson invited one and all to come to the White House to help him celebrate and several thousand took him up on the offer, making a shambles of the place. He paid off the national debt, the only time a major nation has ever done so. He fought the “money interests” and broke the power of the Second Bank of the United States, with great and not always happy consequences. He established modern party politics. He condemned the Cherokee to the Trail of Tears. Most of all, perhaps, he held the increasingly fractious union together for another generation.By the time he died 17 years after his accession to the White House, a new, far more democratic country – Jacksonian America – had come into existence and, in many ways, we still live in that country.Such a man, one would expect, would have any number of biographies. And Jackson does. The first one was written more than a decade before he even reached the White House, and one of no less than six volumes was published before he died (how’s that for a living legend?). In this century, major biographies have been coming out roughly at the rate of one a decade. Robert Remini’s three volume biography, published between 1977 and 1984, is the most important of the more recent ones. But while majestic and indispensable to the serious student, at a total of 1,609 pages it is a long, hard slog for the general reader.The new biography of Jackson (Doubleday, 640 pages, $35) by H.W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, is altogether splendid. While scrupulous in its scholarship, it is aimed at the general reader and it is very good to read. It is also deeply informative, without being in the least hagiographic, about its remarkable subject and the world he lived in and changed so greatly.Mr. Brands’s “The First American,” a life of Benjamin Franklin, was one of the best biographies of recent years. He brought his complex, deeply human subject to vivid life and, thereby, brought Franklin’s world and his times to life as well. He has done the same here, with a very different man and a very different world. “Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times” is an enlightening pleasure to read from beginning to end.Mr. Gordon is the author, most recently, of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power” (HarperCollins).

The Last of the Founding Fathers

The Last of the Founding Fathers

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