Reviews for Andrew Jackson and the course of American freedom, 1822-1832

The average rating for Andrew Jackson and the course of American freedom, 1822-1832 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-06 00:00:00 Tonia Owens “Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom (1822-1832)” is the second of three volumes in Robert Remini’s series on Andrew Jackson. This volume was published in 1981 and the series was completed in 1984. Despite the significant historical scholarship and refreshing lucidity it offers, Remini’s series is no longer frequently read. However, in 1988 Remini published a single-volume abridgment of the series which maintains a relatively vigorous following. Remini was a historian and professor at the University of Illinois and authored several biographies during his forty-year literary career (of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren, among others). He was named historian of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2005 and was asked to author a narrative history of that legislative body. His resulting work “The House: The History of the House of Representatives” was published in 2006. Remini died earlier this year at the age of 91. This volume of Remini’s series covers the ten-year period which includes Jackson’s national political ascendancy, his contentious defeat for the presidency in 1824 by John Quincy Adams, his successful presidential campaign in 1828 and his first presidential term. Early in the volume, Remini lays the groundwork to prove the case that the Monroe and Adams administrations created an unprecedented level of corruption within the federal government. His effort is reasonably, but not entirely, convincing. He successfully demonstrates the existence of widespread, systemic corruption but is less convincing in attributing it directly to Monroe or Adams. This “Era of Corruption” underpins his central thesis that by running for the nation’s highest office, the virtuous General Jackson was responding to a public “call” to rescue the nation from the malfeasance of the very wealthy and the most politically powerful. Remini does a remarkable job of constructing an interesting, wonderfully penetrating and occasionally provocative narrative of the seventh president. I came away from this volume (and its predecessor) with a far more complete and coherent understanding of Jackson than I developed by reading about him in earlier biographical works by Marquis James and Arthur Schlesinger. Remini not only dissects Jackson’s actions within the context of his personality and worldview, but also wonderfully describes Jackson’s complex network of friends and political allies. Consistent with his treatment of Jackson in the first volume, there can be no mistake while reading this volume that Remini is favorably disposed toward his primary subject. In fact, although Remini’s Jackson is heroic but deeply flawed, the author has been accused of seeing the world “too much from Jackson’s point of view.” But this criticism is one of shading; Remini’s critiques of Jackson are too frequent and often too searing to leave the reader with an unrealistic, saintly image of Andrew Jackson. Overall, the second volume of Robert Remini’s series on Andrew Jackson was nearly as outstanding as the first. Though the description of some of the political issues facing President Jackson occasionally became a bit dense (and sometimes felt too lengthy) the book as a whole was well-paced, extremely approachable and quite engaging. This volume on Andrew Jackson was excellent and is well worth reading even without the benefit of the first or third volumes. Overall rating: 4¼ stars

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-14 00:00:00 Alison Downes I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked book #1 in this trilogy, despite a few concerns. So I was unpleasantly surprised that I didn't like book #2 nearly as much. In fact, for about the first 1/3rd of this book, I really didn't like it at all. While Remini seemed to strive to be balanced and objective in his approach to Jackson in the first book, he seemed to start this book with full-on hero worship. Or should I say "Hero" worship, since he uses "The Hero" (shorthand for "The Hero of the Battle of New Orleans") as a second reference for Jackson dozens, if not hundreds, of times throughout the book. Presumably he meant it as a way to not have to write "Jackson" over and over again, replacing it with "Old Hickory," "The General," "The President," etc., but I just found the use of "The Hero" to be somewhat grating and not conducive to objectivity. But that's just a surface-level complaint. I also thought Remini went way overboard in accusing the Monroe administration - and James Monroe himself - of corruption and malfeasance ("the greatest fraud in the nation," he writes of President Monroe, "sat in the executive mansion in Washington.") The purpose of demonizing Monroe seems to serve to portray Jackson as the savior of reform and liberty, who was poised to ride to the rescue and do what his predecessors could, or would, not. In that regard, he also does not have much good to say about John Quincy Adams either, particularly when it comes to his election as president, in a process that Remini believes was completely fraudulent. Jackson earned more popular and electoral votes, but not a majority, so the House was left to decide, which it did for Adams. "More Americans wanted Andrew Jackson as their president than anyone else. That fact was contemptuously dismissed," Remini writes. "That was corruption to shake the constitutional system to its foundations." In truth, as unseemly as the process and the "corrupt bargain" might have been, the Constitution provides for this very mechanism to select a president when no one obtains a majority of the vote. The House's role is not to rubber-stamp the candidate who got a plurality of the vote. So Adams's election was not something to "shake the constitutional system to its foundations" - despite what you think of the outcome, it was the very definition of constitutional. And in the mudslinging campaign of 1828, in which Jackson and Adams faced off again, the mud seems to have been slung mostly in one direction, according to Remini's telling - Jackson bears the brunt of it, while the charges leveled against Adams get scant mention. Once Jackson becomes president later in the book, Remini's narrative settles in to something that has more resemblance to his previous book - a detailed, objective telling that recounts Jackson's successes but doesn't hesitate to call him out for his faults and mistakes. Remini acknowledges that Jackson's first Cabinet was "among the worst... in the 19th century" and calls Jackson out for his stubbornness throughout the Eaton Affair. Remini acknowledges the criticism of Jackson's rotation in office principle, which was an unfortunate precursor to decades' worth of the spoils system, which was just as corrupt as the system it replaced. Nonetheless, Remini ultimately concludes that Jackson's motives and actions were correct. While Remini offers harsh criticism of the terrible humanitarian impact of Jackson's Indian removal policy, I couldn't help but get a sense of "he doth protest too much" when reading it. As harsh as his criticism is, it seems somehow perfunctory and insincere, because he goes on to credit Jackson for facing the issue and acting when others would not, and making the best decisions possible to resolve an impossible situation. And, once again, as in the first book, Remini does not address Jackson's attitudes toward slavery, even going so far as to euphemistically refer to Jackson's slaves as "servants." That's not to say the whole book is without its merits. The descriptions of Jackson's relationships with Martin Van Buren and with his Vice President John Calhoun are very well-done, as is the description of his wife Rachel's death. And Remini's ultimate conclusion that Jackson transformed the presidency, becoming actively involved in issues and legislation as opposed to deferring to Congress, is strong. "He was becoming the head of the government, not simply an equal partner," he observes. I'm not sure why Remini seemed to go overboard in disparaging Jackson's political opponents instead of being as objective toward them as he strove to be toward Jackson himself. For that, this was not as strong a book as book #1 was. I'll soon know how book #3 compares.