The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics by David S. Heidler, Jeanne T. Heidler (review)

How did the rise of Andrew Jackson reflect the course of American democracy? Many historians have answered that question, while a smaller cadre deny the premise by stressing Old Hickory’s antidemocratic dimensions. Yet very few wonder how Jackson rose in the first place. As David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler put it, “no one has provided a thorough telling of how Jackson and his managers created a candidate and sold him to the American people” (p. 9).

Their book provides that telling and much more. Drawing from the Andrew Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as well as from a wide range of memos, memoirs, letters, and newspapers, the authors chart Jackson’s journey from controversial warlord to consensus candidate. The trip began in 1816, when Jackson’s oldest friend, John Overton, first imagined the hero of the battle of New Orleans in the White House, and it gained speed in 1821 and 1822, when Overton and other “Jacksonites”—people the authors describe as “those willing to use Jackson’s popularity to achieve political power”—set up campaign headquarters in Nashville (p. 5). After Jackson’s brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Jackson and his friends plunged into the presidential game and transformed American politics.

The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics is not only a superb history but also a genuine page-turner, an engrossing tale with a colorful cast of characters. Readers meet some big names: a weary Thomas Jefferson, a brooding John C. Calhoun, a scheming Martin Van Buren. We also learn about second-tier figures working for Old Hickory: the pragmatic John Overton, the smarmy William B. Lewis, the dashing John Eaton. Some collected affidavits to keep Jackson’s skeletons in the closet. Others planted anonymous praise in public papers or wrote confidential assurances to key players. By the mid-1820s, they had turned their man into a friend of both northern protectionists and southern free-traders, both old-school Republicans and recovering Federalists. “‘[T]hese Jacksonians are excellent politicians,’” one of their rivals had to admit (p. 359).

The book makes many contributions. Most obvious, it pieces together the Jacksonite network that eventually included the Nashville Central Committee, friendly editors, and subcommittees all over the Union. The resulting campaign, the authors demonstrate, was “the first modern presidential campaign in American history,” a well-orchestrated project with the look and feel of spontaneity (p. 6). Their research is all the more impressive because Jackson and company were careful to cover their tracks—or, in the case of Overton, to burn them.

Moreover, the Heidlers give fresh and judicious retellings of familiar topics: the Era of Good Feelings, the Corrupt Bargain, and the alleged storming of the White House on Inauguration Day in 1829. The discussion of William H. Crawford, a central yet forgotten figure in national politics during the 1810s and 1820s, is especially important. Finally, the book shows Andrew Jackson was a careful politician, a meticulous artisan of his own image who was more than capable of all the chicanery he despised.

A model of clear-eyed revision, The Rise of Andrew Jackson nonetheless follows the trail that the Jacksonites left behind in two important respects. First, the authors dismiss the widespread agitation for debt relief and public banking that roiled Tennessee and other states between 1819 and 1821 as “bleating,” just as Jackson did (p. 119). Yet stopping and silencing those efforts was central to Old Hickory’s rise, a crucial precondition for his kind of populism. Second, slavery is oddly marginal to the story, leaving a Jackson-approved impression that his biggest fans were yeomen, laborers, and other white plain folk. Yet the wealthy slave owners of the Gulf Coast were his most important...