Andrew Jackson or Winning the Future

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times

Author: H W Brands

The extraordinary story of Andrew Jackson--the colorful, dynamic, and forceful president who ushered in the Age of Democracy and set a still young America on its path to greatness--told by the bestselling author of The First American.

The most famous American of his time, Andrew Jackson is a seminal figure in American history. The first "common man" to rise to the presidency, Jackson embodied the spirit and the vision of the emerging American nation; the term "Jacksonian democracy" is embedded in our national lexicon.

With the sweep, passion, and attention to detail that made The First American a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a national bestseller, historian H.W. Brands shapes a historical narrative that's as fast-paced and compelling as the best fiction. He follows Andrew Jackson from his days as rebellious youth, risking execution to free the Carolinas of the British during the Revolutionary War, to his years as a young lawyer and congressman from the newly settled frontier state of Tennessee. As general of the Tennessee militia, he put down a massive Indian uprising in the South, securing the safety of American settlers, and his famous rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 made him a national hero.

But it is Jackson's contributions as president, however, that won him a place in the pantheon of America's greatest leaders. A man of the people, without formal education or the family lineage of the Founding Fathers, he sought as president to make the country a genuine democracy, governed by and for the people. Jackson, although respectful of states' rights, devoted himself to the preservation of the Union, whose future in that age was still very much in question. When South Carolina, his home state, threatened to secede over the issue of slavery, Jackson promised to march down with 100,000 federal soldiers should it dare.

In the bestselling tradition of Founding Brothers and His Excellency by Joseph Ellis and of John Adams by David McCullough, Andrew Jackson is the first single-volume, full-length biography of Jackson in decades. This magisterial portrait of one of our greatest leaders promises to reshape our understanding of both the man and his era and is sure to be greeted with enthusiasm and acclaim.

The New York Times - William L. O'Neill

A founder of the Democratic Party, Jackson was hot-tempered, arrogant, violent and a ferocious partisan who introduced the spoils system into government. Brands's biography is dramatic; but unlike George Washington, another and greater man with humble roots who became an entrepreneur, general and president, Andrew Jackson makes your blood run cold.

The Washington Post - Ted Widmer

…a most sympathetic portrait…From the start of the story, he writes in the hagiographic voice that biographies of great Americans used to be written in. And frankly, it's a great story, from Jackson's poverty and early scrapes with mortality to his violent encounters with British soldiers when he was a mere stripling to his impressive rise as a Tennessee politician, soldier and statesman. Brands is drawn toward the dramatic and serves up everything you might expect in a ripping yarn: murderous duels, savage Indian raids, equally savage counterattacks and a lot of detail about Jackson's scorched-earth campaigns in Louisiana and Florida…The heavy focus on blood and guts comes at a price, however. Brands's treatment of Old Hickory's political career is comparatively thin.

Publishers Weekly

Sounding like a schoolteacher whiling away a snowy winter's day in his classroom by sharing a historic tale with his students, Montgomery reads Brands's life of the nation's seventh president with careful attention and understated smoothness. Beginning with Jackson's humble roots and Revolutionary War experience in the Carolinas, and taking him through his time in the White House, Brands's biography follows in the footsteps of other recent blockbuster biographies of the presidents. Montgomery's voice maintains a consistent tenor, only occasionally lapsing into clich d emoting, as he treks his way through the ridges and valleys of Jackson's career. With a faint twang underscoring his flat, uninflected tone, Montgomery's voice sometimes lacks the necessary aura of scholarly authority that would invest Brands's book with its full share of historical richness. Even so, Montgomery keeps listeners intrigued, never allowing the fidgets to set in and smoothly moving Jackson's life along without fuss or undue theatrics. A little more theatricality, though, might have made the entire endeavor a more rewarding experience for Montgomery's students. Simultaneous release with the Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, July 11). (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Brands (history, Univ. of Texas, Austin; The Age of Gold) displays his masterly storytelling skills with this thoughtful, frank, and readable biography of a complex individual possessed of many strengths and faults. Brands sees Jackson's greatness as his unshakeable loyalty to the American republic: "His times contributed to the way he turned out. If he defined life as a struggle, it was largely because life for America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a struggle." Using primary sources, Brands covers familiar ground in a candid though not revisionist approach to Jackson's Scots-Irish heritage, elopement with Rachel Robards, military campaigns against Native Americans and the British, and presidency. He also probes Jackson's views on core issues such as slavery and westward expansion. His book differs from Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson and Andrew Burstein's The Passions of Andrew Jackson, among others, by emphasizing Jackson's deep faith in democracy, pointing out the parallels between Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, "who articulated the Jacksonian creed best-better than Jackson himself." Recommended for all public and undergraduate libraries.-Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Industrial-strength historian Brands (Lone Star Nation, 2004, etc.), prolific in the Ambrose-McCullough vein, turns his attention to oft-overlooked Old Hickory. Andrew Jackson still gets more press than contemporaries such as John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, but the hero of the early Indian wars and the Battle of New Orleans hasn't had a good full-scale biography since Robert Remini's three-volume life, published from 1977 to 1984. Brands's biography is more action-packed than bookish, suiting its subject. He places Jackson's family in the context of the great trans-Appalachian migration of the Scots-Irish, a people known for independence and scrappiness (see James Webb's Born Fighting, 2004); Jackson himself, Brands writes, was a pre-teen champion of the Revolution, his head filled with "an abiding hostility to all things British," an attitude he would have many chances to exercise in the border wars with the British-backed Shawnee and Creek nations and in the War of 1812. Though a military hero, Jackson had a checkered reputation, so that an elderly woman from his home village, on learning that he was running for president, said, "When he was here he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house. . . . If Andrew Jackson can be president, anyone can!" Her compatriots disagreed, and Jackson handily won the popular vote against Adams in 1824, only to have the House of Representatives hand Adams the office. The subsequent outcry forced electoral reform, and Jackson again won by a large margin in 1828. His two terms were marked by controversy, but Jackson remained consistent to his small-d democratic values, opposing a national bank as monopolistic andunconstitutional and thwarting an early effort by his native South Carolina to secede from the Union. Brands illuminates the life of an American original while shedding light on such matters as the conquest of Texas and the origins of the Civil War. A pleasure for history buffs.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	xi
	Child of the Revolution (1976-1805)
1	The Prize	3
2	I Could Have Shot Him	29
3	Alone	44
4	Away West	63
5	Shadowed Love	85
6	Republicans and Revolutionaries	100
7	Fighting Words	127
8	Rendering Judgment	148
	Son of the West (1805-1814)
9	Conspiracy	175
10	Affair of Honor	201
11	All Must Feel the Injuries	216
12	Master and Slaves	229
13	Nor Infamy upon Us	240
14	Native Genius	256
15	Old Hickory	271
16	Sharp Knife	293
17	The River of Blood	320
	American Hero (1814-1821)
18	Peace Giver	351
19	The Spanish Front	368
20	Pirates and Patriots	389
21	Day of Deliverance	411
22	The Second Washington	444
23	East by Southwest	468
24	Party and Politics	487
25	Judge and Executioner	502
26	The Eye of the Storm	517
27	Conquistador	532
	The People's President (1821-1837)
28	Cincinnatus	565
29	The Death Rattle of the Old Regime	586
30	Democracy Triumphant	607
31	Democracy Rampant	634
32	Spoils of Victory	645
33	Tools of Wickedness	656
34	Jacksonian Theory	671
35	False Colors	683
36	Attack and Counterattack	708
37	Or Die with the Union	735
38	Justice Marshall for the Defense	751
39	Wealth versus Commonwealth	768
40	An Old Friend and a New Frontier	786
	Patriarch of Democracy (1837-1845)
41	The Home Front	823
42	To the Ramparts Once More	841
43	The Soul of the Republic	860
	Sources	872
	Annotated Bibliography	951
	Acknowledgments	978
	Index	979

Interesting book: First Time Leaders of Small Groups or Essentials of Economics Study Guide

Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America

Author: Newt Gingrich

America's future in the twenty-first century, argues Newt Gingrich, will be determined by the decisions we make now. His book is a grass roots call to action--and will set the debate for the new administration and Congress.