American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
by Jon Meacham
Summary
Jon Meacham narrows his focus to Andrew Jackson's eight years in the White House, opening just after the 1828 election victory that was shadowed within weeks by the death of his wife, Rachel, in December of that year, months before his March 1829 inauguration, a loss Jackson blamed directly on the political enemies who had attacked her earlier marriage and divorce during the campaign. Meacham follows Jackson into office already convinced that his opponents would stop at nothing, a conviction that shaped the ferocious loyalty he demanded from, and gave to, the people around him for the rest of his presidency.
The book gives real space to the Petticoat affair, the social war waged by cabinet wives, led by Vice President John C. Calhoun's wife Floride, against Peggy Eaton, the wife of Jackson's secretary of war, whom the other wives refused to receive socially over the speed of her remarriage after widowhood. Meacham traces how Jackson's furious defense of the Eatons, which he connected directly to the attacks on his own late wife, split his cabinet and poisoned his relationship with Calhoun, who would later become the first vice president in the country's history to resign, and helped clear the path for Martin Van Buren's rise to the presidency that followed Jackson's own. The book follows Jackson through the nullification crisis, when he threatened military force against South Carolina's attempt to void a federal tariff, and through his war on the Second Bank of the United States, which he vetoed and ultimately dismantled as a tool of entrenched elite power.
Meacham writes with access to newly available diaries and letters kept inside Jackson's own household, and reading the book means following a president whose personal loyalties and grudges drove policy as much as any principle did, an intimate account built from inside the White House rather than from the podium. It suits a reader who wants Jackson's expansion of presidential power explained through the emotional life of the man exercising it.
Historical Context & Significance
American Lion won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography over finalists H. W. Brands's Traitor to His Class, a life of Franklin Roosevelt, and Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens. The journalist Jill Abramson praised the book as well researched, drawing on new anecdotal material and up to date historiographical interpretation of a presidency often reduced to a few famous fights.
Meacham wrote the book while serving as editor of Newsweek, drawing on newly available letters and diaries kept by members of Jackson's own household staff and family circle. It remains one of the most widely read modern accounts of Jackson's presidency, credited with giving equal weight to his genuine popular appeal and to the more troubling parts of his record that later biographies have pressed harder on.