Writing in this manner allows Meacham to cover his subject in some 360 pages focusing on what he believes to be the major issues and personalities. There is real merit in such an approach as there are a limited number of people today willing to commit the time, money and energy necessary to read a two-three volume biography of our seventh president. This is not unlike the approach taken by David McCullough in his biography of John Adams another best selling work of history that became a popular HBO special.This book also has real value for someone like myself who has read a lot about Jackson. Books of this type tend to be more analytical which is of interest to those of us who already have more than a basic familiarity with the people and the issues. For me the only negative feature of the approach was the decision to devote as much space as Meacham did to Andrew and Emily Donelson who served respectively as Jackson's secretary and official hostess. Personally I would have preferred more information on Roger Taney, Jackson's Attorney General who as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would write in the Dred Scott decision that Negroes had no rights or at least no rights that whites had to respect.
Quite a statement for one of the leaders of what was known as Jacksonian Democracy with its emphasis on the people. This ties into what Meacham's categorizes as Jackson's tragedy - his inability to see that the principles of liberty and equality could and did apply to all. Indeed Jackson's attitudes towards Indians and slavery not only make it hard for us today to have a high opinion of Jackson, but also make it difficult to understand the favorable opinions held of him by respectable historians like Arthur Schelsinger and Robert Remini.
To be fair to some things that I have written about other leaders of the pre-Civil War era, part of this depends upon the perspective we take in looking at Jackson or anyone else of that time. If we look backward from today which is our natural inclination we find Jackson's constant pronouncements about the people more than a little hypocritical given his narrow definition of the people - whites especially white men. However, if we try to put ourselves into that time as if it were the present, it is at least possible to see the idea that Jackson's popularity both then and with historians is because he broadened or helped broaden the definition of the people from just white men of property.
The point being that Jackson's opponents had even narrower definitions of who the principles of liberty and equality applied to. Or at least that is what is often presented either directly or by implication. At this point, however, I am not accepting that without some more investigation. Certainly Henry Clay and others criticized Jackson not because of a broader definition of the people, but because of his (Jackson's) desire for power. So I have more reading and thinking to do.
On a side note I found it very interesting to be reminded again that the leading opponent of Jackson's Indian removal policy in the Senate was Theodore Frelinghuysen (picture above), a Senator from New Jersey. Descended from one of New Jersey's oldest families Frelinghuysen would go on to be the Vice Presidential candidate on the Whig ticket with Henry Clay in the election of 1844. I would be interested to know more about why Frelinghuysen was so moved by the Indian's plight given he probably had no vested interest nor were his constituents much impacted by the issue. This is an important part of New Jersey which I am going to guess, like much of our state's history, is little known or studied.
Meacham believes that Jackson's greatest triumph was holding the Union together during the tariff nullification crisis. While his conduct in that situation is certainly admirable, I have some differing thoughts on that which will be subject of my next post.
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