Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy
by Robert V. Remini
Summary
This is the crowning volume of Robert Remini's three volume life of Andrew Jackson, the fullest biography of the seventh president ever written, and it carries Jackson from his second inaugural in 1833 to his death at the Hermitage in 1845. The great set piece is the Bank War's climax: Jackson removes the federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States, defies a Senate censure, and destroys the institution he regarded as a monster of concentrated private power corrupting the people's government, and Remini, the war's leading historian, narrates it as the decisive battle in the creation of American mass democracy. Around it the volume ranges across the nullification aftermath, the Texas question, the gag rule fights over slavery petitions, the founding of the Democratic party as a national machine, the panic of 1837 that his policies helped ignite, and the old man's final years as party oracle. Remini's Jackson is the champion of the common man against privilege, and he presses the case with narrative energy and total command of the sources; on Indian removal, the volume's darkest matter, he offers the defense that removal saved the tribes from extinction, an argument later historians have rejected outright, and readers should weigh that chapter against the modern scholarship. The book won the 1984 National Book Award for Nonfiction, honoring the completed trilogy, roughly 1,600 pages that remain the foundation of Jackson scholarship, and the achievement is easiest to state plainly: as Jon Meacham put it, you cannot write about Jackson without standing on Remini's shoulders.
Historical Context & Significance
Remini spent a quarter century on the trilogy, publishing the volumes in 1977, 1981, and 1984, and the National Book Award for the finale honored a scale of presidential biography few scholars attempt. He taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and later served as official historian of the House of Representatives. The interpretation has aged unevenly and importantly: his framing of Jackson as democracy's champion set the terms that critics like Andrew Burstein and Mark Cheathem wrote against, and the defense of removal now reads as the trilogy's failure, argued over in every reassessment of Jackson's place on the currency and in the pantheon. The research beneath it remains indispensable to both sides, which is why the trilogy stays in print while its conclusions get rewritten.