Andrew Jackson: Soldier and Statesman

by Ralph K. Andrist

153 page hard cover book in the American Heritage Junior Library series.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1963

Reviews

[William Razavi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. Even a 1963 book can't gloss over just what a complete jerk Andrew Jackson was. To whit: the book excitedly tells us how he was the first representative sent to the US House by the new state of Tennessee in 1796 and he only did two things of note. The first of these was to refuse to vote for giving thanks to the outgoing president, George Washington, for his service to the country. And why? Because President Washington had attempted (attempted, mind you, without much success) to enforce federal treaties protecting Native American land from settlers. Andrew Jackson hated Native Americans so much that he was a jerk to George Washington because of it. And even this book which lovingly refers to Jackson every other line as "Old Hickory" can't completely whitewash Jackson's horribleness.
Jackson's overseeing of the Indian Removal Act which ethnically cleansed everything east of the Mississippi is reduced here to a mere paragraph but you get enough of a sense of his constant fight against Native Americans that it was his favorite hobby. Slavery is reduced to an early line about how he never really had a problem with slavery. When the last chapter described the man as being really just "a farmer at heart" I had to laugh because his idea of farming involved holding other people in bondage on stolen land to do the farming. Must be nice.
I suppose the problem with any biography of Jackson is that unless the author is scathing in their hatred for Jackson then any amount of even neutral portrayal of the man will seem too good for him. Though I will credit the author here for pointing out Jackson's hypocrisy in fighting South Carolina's attempt to nullify federal law over tariffs while supporting Georgia's defiance of federal law in ignoring the rights of native Americans so yeah, even the one thing you might look upon favorably in terms of holding the Union together in the face of the nullification crisis is itself nullified by Jackson's own defiance of federal law and court judgments.
As always with these the illustrations are the reason to keep them hanging around. If Jefferson has become problematic then with Jackson there is no problem, he's just rotten...and what's even more important is that there were those in his own time who recognized that he was rotten. It's just that he is representative of a time when there were a lot of like minded genocidal jerks in this country.

[Amie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only three stars because there was only one brief chapter about his presidency.