The Life of Andrew Jackson
by Marquis James
Summary
Marquis James built his life of Andrew Jackson from two earlier books, Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain and Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a President, that the Pulitzer board recognized together under the title The Life of Andrew Jackson. The biography follows Jackson from an orphaned, penniless childhood in the Carolina backcountry, a boy who at thirteen carried dispatches for American forces during the Revolution and carried a British officer's sword scar the rest of his life for refusing to shine that officer's boots, through his law training, his rough climb into Tennessee politics and land speculation, and into the military career that made him a national figure.
James gives the Battle of New Orleans the weight it deserves as the moment Jackson's fame became unshakable, a lopsided January 1815 victory that turned a frontier general into a household name, then follows him through the bitter 1824 election he lost despite winning the popular vote, his supporters' fury at what they called a corrupt bargain between his rivals, and his landslide return in 1828. The book stays with Jackson through the presidency's defining fights, his war on the Second Bank of the United States and the standoff with South Carolina over the tariff, and it does not shy from his temper, retelling the 1806 duel in which Jackson took a bullet near the heart and still killed the man who fired it.
James writes with a journalist's narrative drive rather than an academic's caution, the same instinct that had already won him a Pulitzer for his life of Sam Houston, and reading the combined volumes means following an admiring, fast moving account built to make Jackson's contradictions, frontier violence and democratic conviction, vindictive grudges and genuine popular sympathy, feel like a single coherent character. It suits a reader who wants the Jackson legend told with real narrative pleasure, aware going in that James's warmth toward his subject means the book reads more as portrait than as a full reckoning with the more troubling parts of Jackson's record.
Historical Context & Significance
The Life of Andrew Jackson won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Biography in a year the board split between two books, this one and Odell Shepard's Pedlar's Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. It was Marquis James's second Pulitzer in the category, after The Raven, his 1929 biography of Sam Houston, had won in 1930; James was one of three authors to win the biography prize twice by 1938, alongside Burton J. Hendrick, who won in 1923 and 1929, and Allan Nevins, who won for Grover Cleveland in 1933 and Hamilton Fish in 1937.
James died in 1955 while researching a biography of Booker T. Washington that he never finished, and his Jackson remains the book most identified with his name, still cited as a standard example of narrative political biography from its era even as later, more critical Jackson biographies have taken fuller account of his slaveholding and his role in removing Native peoples from the Southeast.