America's Jubilee: A Generation Remembers the Revolution After Fifty Years of Independence

by Andrew Burstein

On July 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its fiftieth birthday with parades and speeches across the country. But what ultimately sanctified the national jubilee in the minds of the celebrants was an extraordinary the nearly simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the last pillars of the original republic, already venerated as legends in their own time. It was a watershed in the nation's history, a bright moment when the successors to the Revolutionary dream examined their own lives as they took inspiration from and found nostalgia in the accomplishments of the founders.

In this fascinating book, the distinguished historian Andrew Burstein explores what it was to be an American in 1826. Drawing on private diaries and letters, daily newspapers, and long-buried publications, he shows us the personal lives behind the pageantry and reveals an acutely self-conscious nation–anxiously optimistic about its future, eager to romanticize the Revolutionary past.

We follow the Marquis de Lafayette, the only surviving general of the War of Independence, on his triumphant 1825 tour of all twenty-four states. We visit an Ohio boomtown on the edge of the "new West," a region influenced by the Erie Canal and the commercialism that canal culture brought with it. We see through the eyes of ordinary citizens–the wife of a Massachusetts minister, the author of a popular novel of the day, the family of a prominent statesman–and learn about their gritty understanding of life and death, the nuances of contemporary sexual politics, and the sometimes treacherous drama of public debate. And we meet headline-makers such as the ornery President John Quincy Adams, the controversial Secretary of State Henry Clay, and the notoriously hot-tempered General Andrew Jackson, struggling to act in a statesmanlike way as he waits to be swept into the White House.

In this evocative portrait of the United States in its jubilee year, Burstein shows how 1826 marked an unforgettable time in the republic's history, when a generation embraced the legacy of its predecessors and sought to enlarge its role in America's story.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Andrew Burstein is the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and the author of The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson’s Secrets, and Madison and Jefferson, among others. Burstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he advised Ken Burns’s production "Thomas Jefferson." He has been featured on C-SPAN's American Presidents Series and Booknotes, as well as numerous NPR programs, including Talk of the Nation and The Diane Rehm Show. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Reviews

[Miles Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book covered a lot of interesting ground but was wordy and written in a clunky manner to such a degree I nearly lost interest. So much interesting anecdote but the delivery was fair to middling at best; its not a bad book and the notes have useful info on the Early Republic but I came away unimpressed.

[Jill Poulsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting topic to learn about, the generation after the founders and how they remembered and felt about their forefathers. It did get a little mundane in the middle, but I enjoyed the weaving of LaFayette's journey throughout.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an engaging synthesis focused on the American Jubilee - marking fifty years since the Declaration of Independence - and how celebrated individual lives came to represent the nation. In terms of historical content I did not discover anything remarkably new to me personally, but Burstein's interpretation pushes back the emergence of "Jacksonianism" to the generational shifts of the mid-1820s, before Andrew Jackson's presidency. This is a worth-while read.