Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation by J. M. Opal (review)

Andrew Jackson, as author J. M. Opal says, is the "main character" rather than the "subject" of this book (p. 14). The main focus is the Old Southwest, especially Tennessee, before 1820 and the ferocious Indian warfare that scarred its early years. Parallel, but in a minor key, stand the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania and the Appalachian areas to the south, who had extensive experience living in proximity to an alien people given to militant hostility. The story of the bloody decades following the Revolution and the early development of the region is told graphically, succinctly, and with unusual and rewarding insight. Richly referenced, the book compares favorably with well-known earlier accounts; its nearest current rival is Steve Inskeep's more popular Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab (New York, 2015). Opal finds the story's significance in the local imperative to do what was necessary rather than what was authorized or legal and to relentlessly pursue vengeance against "'savage'" Native Americans, even when it amounted to genocide (p. 8). The resulting contest between unrestrained necessity and the civilized constitutional restraints of the new republic came to a revealing climax in the congressional debates of 1818 and 1819 over Jackson's behavior in the Second Creek War.

Ironically, the transforming power of Jackson's harrowing military experience on the frontier impacted a man of legal training and broad southern and urban experience who accepted an essentially Federalist view of the West. Jackson believed in the need for strict rules protecting property rights and commercial contracts as the basis for a society open to unrestrained individual enterprise. He consistently opposed popular demands for relief and inflationary paper money in times of economic difficulty, though his earlier public statements were ignored when he entered national politics in the 1820s. The most extraordinary impact of his presidency was the replacement, among those suffering from contemporary economic vagaries, of the generations-old popular demand for loose money and mitigated contracts by a populist call for an unchanging measure of value in the form of hard money. Throughout his presidency, Jackson opposed an unrestrained popular sovereignty that ignored constitutional restrictions, except when white Americans were defending themselves against their natural enemies.

Persuasive on so many things, the author stumbles when he tries to argue, in his condensed final chapter, that the implications of Jackson's military experiences in the Southwest before 1820 were made national during his presidency. Admittedly, Jackson's determination to prevent future disruption by the southern Indians, whether he deemed them savage or civilized, resulted in a selective exercise of federal power to transplant Native tribes across the Mississippi River. The doctrine of necessity also allowed Jackson to pick and choose what measures he regarded as constitutional in dealing with his political opponents. And yet to see "vengeance" as the central feature of Jackson's policy is to ignore the essential Anglophilia of his foreign policy, the empowerment (in his first term) of old Federalists even though he owed his election to strictly partisan Jeffersonian Republicans, and his willingness after 1832 to enter new, potentially ruinous areas of federal political conflict, notably over banks and paper money (p. 10). And to say that Jackson perverted the American commitment to the rule of law and obedience to constitutional rules by establishing the sacred duty of white American citizens to avenge each other goes beyond the evidence of the 1830s. Indeed, it derives from the common semantic confusion of conflating the Jacksonian party that the president dominated with the Jacksonian nation that he did not.