Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep (review)

Steve Inskeep’s new book uses the lives of Andrew Jackson and John Ross to discuss Indian removal and (white) American territorial expansion, maintaining that “their story is a prequel to the Civil War, and a prelude to the democratic debates of our era” (5). Inskeep, cohost of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, also claims that “Jackson, more than any other single person, was responsible for creating the region we call the Deep South” (9). He effectively argues the latter assertion, but the former is less clearly established.

Inskeep does an excellent job of demonstrating the key role that Jackson played in creating the South. Both the general public and historians focus so much on Jackson as the prototypical westerner-made-good that they forget that, growing up in the Waxhaws region, Jackson was geographically oriented toward Charleston, a port city that was part of the eighteenth century’s global economic network, and not across the Appalachians, where he eventually lived for most of his lifetime. They also fail to recognize that when Jackson arrived in Nashville, he was a twenty-one-year-old lawyer already acknowledged as a member of the southern elite. The mythology of Jackson as a frontier westerner fits many Americans’ preconceived notions about him, but as Inskeep makes evident, Old Hickory’s life tells a different story. The most effective presentation of this argument appears in Inskeep’s treatment of Jackson’s time in Alabama. Through the use of land records, he shows clearly how Jackson and his relatives and friends benefitted financially from the removal of the Creek and the opening up of their land to white settlement. Jackson served as a model for aspirational white southerners.

Less effective is Inskeep’s attempt to connect his story to both the Civil War and the twenty-first century. He periodically interjects familiar names—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln—but the effort comes off more as using trivial serendipity to add flavor to the narrative rather than including integral pieces that help readers see the consequences of the decisions made by Jackson and Ross. There is no question that Jackson’s actions exacerbated the nation’s sectional division, but Inskeep could have made a stronger case in that regard. Aside from in the epilogue, where Inskeep relates a road trip he took across the area discussed in Jacksonland, it is also difficult to see clearly the pertinence of the Jackson-Ross story to today. The book’s publication date prevented Inskeep from integrating discussion of the current debate over Jackson’s presence on the $20 bill, but in recent years there certainly has been enough public criticism of his removal policy one would expect more commentary on whether, in today’s America, Old Hickory remains a figure to be admired, detested, or both.

Inskeep’s presentation of the Cherokee perspective, via John Ross, is well done. One gets a good sense of the frustration that the Cherokee encountered in dealing with Jackson specifically and the United States generally. The tension between full-blood and mixed blood Cherokee, the division within the tribe over whether to remove, their treatment at the hands of the military as they were sent on the Trail of Tears—Inskeep effectively portrays them all. The pacing of the last four chapters feels rushed in comparison to the rest of the book, however, especially in helping readers understand what happened to the Cherokee between the 1832 issuance of the Supreme Court’s Worcester decision and the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835.

Inskeep is an excellent writer. He covers well-trodden ground in a way that seems fresh and not repetitive. Even those familiar with the Jacksonian period will find themselves entertained. While Jacksonland will not alter historians’ views of the era, it helps shine light on...