| Title | : | The Passions of Andrew Jackson |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0375414282 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375414282 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 |
| Publication | : | First published February 4, 2003 |
Most people vaguely imagine Andrew Jackson as a jaunty warrior and man of the people, when he was much more: a power monger whom voters thought they could not do without—a man just as complex
and controversial as Jefferson or Lincoln. Declared a national hero upon his stunning victory over the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, this uncompromising soldier capitalized on his fame and found the presidency within his grasp.
Yet Burstein shows that Jackson had conceived no political direction for the country. He was virtually uneducated, having grown up in a backwoods settlement in the Carolinas. His ambition to acquire wealth and achieve prominence was matched only by his confidence that he alone could restore virtue to American politics. As the “people’s choice,” this model of masculine bravado—tall, gaunt, and sickly through-out his career—persevered. He lost the election of 1824 on a technicality, owing to the manipulations of
Henry Clay. Jackson partisans ran him again, with a vengeance, so that he became, from 1829 to 1837, a president bent on shaping the country to his will. Over two terms, he secured a reputation for opposing the class of moneyed men. To his outspoken critics, he was an elected tyrant.
Burstein gives us our first major reevaluation of Jackson’s life in a generation. Unlike the extant biographies, Burstein’s examines Jackson’s close relationships, discovering how the candidate advanced his political chances through a network of army friends—some famous, like Sam Houston, who became a hero himself; others, equally important, who have been lost to history until now. Yet due to his famous temper, Jackson ultimately lost his closest confidants to the opposition party.
The Passions of Andrew Jackson includes a fresh interpretation of Jackson’s role in the Aaron Burr conspiracy and offers a more intimate view of the backcountry conditions and political setting that shaped the Tennessean’s controversial understanding of democracy. This is the dynamic story of a larger-than-life American brought down to his authentic earthiness and thoughtfully demythologized. In a provocative conclusion, Burstein relates Jackson to the presidents with whom he was and still is often compared, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The Passions of Andrew Jackson Reviews
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I've had this book for years and put off reading it til now - I guess I was a little wary of the analytical approach, the mixed reviews and the fact that I've found some of Burstein's other books to be kind of annoyingly pretentious at times.
So I'm surprised that I actually kind of liked this. It reads like an analytical biography - it proceeds chronologically and hits all the highlights you'd expect in a book about Andrew Jackson, but pauses to ponder and deconstruct events and Jackson's thinking at key moments. Jackson had such an action-packed life, it's easy to fill a book just by reciting things that happened and things he did. So I appreciated Burstein's efforts to be more thoughtful and analyze Jackson's actions, motivations and relationships before moving on to the next big event.
To offer just one example, in discussing Jackson's character as it pertains to his attitude toward Native Americans, Burstein offers the provocative observation that Jackson was more like the Native Americans than he might have realized - Jackson, like "the Indian, deemed 'wild' or 'savage,' was as often praised for exhibiting bravery and stoicism, and ennobled for his resistance to the corruptions of civilization," yet "the image of the Indian as 'lordly savage,' the unrestrained, amoral son of the forest who was not rule-bound... was the image he found hardest to shake when it was being applied to him."
There are times when the pedantic pretentiousness seeps in - the book almost went off the rails for me (but quickly recovered) after much of chapter 3 was devoted to parsing Jackson's written words, introduced thusly: "Jackson... used verbs, adjectives, and nouns in distinctive ways that reveal a clear sensibility."
Ick.
But most of the analysis is thoughtful rather than eyeroll-inducing. Burstein takes care to consider the sources when recounting familiar events in Jackson's life, pointing out when certain versions may be embellished or unreliable. And while most Jackson biographies swiftly wrap things up with his death, Burstein continues on, considering his legacy, his strengths and weaknesses, and thought-provokingly comparing and contrasting Jackson with fellow general-turned-president George Washington and fellow advocate for the common man Thomas Jefferson.
This is not the first or only book to read about Andrew Jackson. If you're familiar with his life story, this book will retell the same events but from a unique perspective. I can't necessarily say I learned anything brand new - I mean, let's face it, as compared to his presidential predecessors, Jackson was not a deep and complicated guy - but this is a worthy and contemplative book that avoids getting bogged down in dates and places and events, and instead offers plenty of thoughts that will make you consider "who" Jackson was instead of just "what" he did. -
An interesting bio of a very complicated man. Not the best and far from the most indepth. This one seems to concentrate on his relationships with his wife, his close associates, distant associates and enemies. Much of what made him known or infamous was left out: nothing on the Trail of Tears, one paragraph on the banking system and little about many other aspects of his life from 1816 on. What was good was the emphasis on his early life up to 1816, but this could all be gained from other bio's. The author neither hero worhsipped him or completely condemned him, so it was somewhat even keeled. Burstein seemed to relish his accomplishments while also pointing out many incidences that showed what a dark man Jackson was (numerous duels, beatings and executions). This is ok if you want to learn more and have already read up on Jackson. Pass if you are looking to learn a great deal.
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The author strives to make Jackson more "knowable" through his personal letters with close friends. I'm not sure if I got any more insight into who Jackson actually was through the author's painstaking analysis and interpretation of various letters and communications. If the argument was that he was a "passionate" man, then I got that in eighth grade social studies. The last part of the book was curious. Burstein argues that the nation needed enemies in order to exercise a complete hegemony over the continent and that Jackson was the embodiment of that. I'm not sure that hegemony is a virtue. I'm not sure that the concept of manifest destiny was virtuous. However, Burstein seems convinced that they were. To him, this is why Andrew Jackson was the man who was willing to "take on the world" to enact "dominion over the national household" and strove to be the "unerring father who rewarded loyalty and love and punished all moral transgressions." This book, of course, challenged me to take myself out of the 21st century and evaluate Jackson according to his own time period. Having said that, I'm confident that I would've been an Adams man. This book didn't convince me otherwise.
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Was kind of a drag by the end
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I admit that I knew very little about Andrew Jackson before this book--I thought of him as an 1800's version of Donald Trump--plain-spoken, inexplicably popular, and not equipped to be President. As are most things in this world, I was neither completely correct nor completely wrong. Burstein's goal with this book was to try to sift through the very polarizing biographical information about Jackson (folks either see him as a remarkable president or the an example of the very worst president) and try to understand his "passions"--an 1800's meaning of the word, meaning what drove and inflamed him, as opposed to the more romantic meaning with which we are more familiar. And, in this, Burstein succeeds. From his own writings and the writings of those who knew him--the real him, not the idealized version--he was a direct hot-head consumed with both honor and making his mark on the world. He was also a magnetic presence who drew young, talented men to his side--but repelled most of them eventually, as Jackson's friendship demanded complete obedience, and any deviation from that was not just a betrayal of him but of America. Although I really felt like I understood the historical Jackson, Burstein's choice to focus on studying the character of Jackson sacrificed biographical information, as well as a clear narrative. There were chapters that highlighted events in Jackson's life but flipped-flopped between them, confusing the timeline. Also, the chapter focusing on his presidency was very weak on information--I would have preferred to learn more about Jackson's fight against the bank and other policy decisions rather than his inner cabinet squabbles. Still, Burstein's biography is well-written and well-researched, and I enjoyed learning about the good (his high respect for women and deep love for his wife, his loyalty to the soldiers he managed), the bad (the Trail of Tears, the martial law he issued in Florida), and the ugly (I lost track of the number of duels he participated in, tried to start, encouraged others to start...there were a lot of duels, guys) of the first "popularly" elected President.
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Nuance is not this book's forte. Burstein conceives of Andrew Jackson as an obsessively driven, insanely energetic and tempestuously passionate man, and it is this conception through which every other aspect of Jackson's life is filtered and interpreted. Jackson is posited as the new style of president, a violent change from the patrician gentility and cultured intellectualism of Washington and Jefferson. In this new populist, pioneering, self-reliant and self-aggrandizing mode, Burstein perceives warnings of the civil unrest to come.
While this might have made for a substantive study of Jackson's political role, Burstein is content to leave the actual historical narrative inchoate, sketched out in the barest detail while the personal panorama of Jackson's personality and psyche explodes and drowns out any other biographical approach. This one-sidedness lends the book a certain amount of focus, but at the same time flirts with exaggeration. Jackson at times appears as a Dickensian caricature rather than a human being. This is leavened only by Burstein's treatment of Jackson's relationship with his wife Rachel, which offers welcome, if sporadic, glimpses of a more human character. Yet, even here, the relationship is focused on scandal so that Jackson at his tenderest seems more concerned with saving face than a man of true feeling. "The passions" appear to be mostly selfish.
This is a book for those already familiar with Jackson's historical context, for precious little of that is given here. Whether Jackson's personality was really so limited is a question to be decided with more study, for Burstein hardly gives another perspective its say. -
I didn't know what to make of this book. It's not, strictly speaking, biography and it's not an examination of Jacksonian democracy. It's an attempt to approach Andrew Jackson's life by assessing his character, which would have been more effective in the context of a full-scale biography of the man who became the seventh president of the United States.
There is some interesting information in here - I found the chapter on Jackson's dealings with Aaron Burr fascinating, possibly because I find Burr one of the most intriguing people in US history - but overall this was not a particularly satisfying read. -
A very difficult read for minimum information. Jackson was a passionate and stubborn man with an exagerated sense of "honor." Burstein's view of Jackson had me thinking that he was like the other Southern "gentlemen" who lead the United States to a Civil War.
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Great book. Interesting character. Goes to another state to marry a friend's wife, invades Florida, shoots someone in a duel, beats people up on a consistant manner, and rocks DC with his posse. AND kids say history is boring.
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I give this book 3 1/2 stars. It took me a chapter or two to realize that this is not a book about what he did but how he felt about things that were important to him. After that I enjoyed the book. It was great to get to see the human side of Jackson.
