I am glad I finally got around to reading Princeton professor Sean Wilentz’s brief book on the presidency of Andrew Jackson, published nearly a decade ago as a part of the “American Presidents” series by Times Books under the able editorship of the noted historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. While I know a good deal about Jackson’s life and influence, I found Wilentz’s explanation of the man’s importance in American history to be among the most convincing attempts to place him in proper context that I have seen. In summary, Wilentz demonstrates that while Jackson has become a symbol for a lot of things both positive and negative in American history, he remains relevant primarily for his role in expanding American democracy.
His last sentences at the conclusion to the book are perhaps his best:
“By pushing the idea of democracy as far as he did, and by equating the Union’s survival with the survival of free government, Jackson expanded the terms upon which Americans conducted the national experiment in popular sovereignty. As president, he established democratic and nationalist principles that have endured to this day. If his own standards of equality and justice fall beneath our own, he helped make it possible for today’s standards and expectations to be as elevated as they are. His tragedies are undeniable. So are his triumphs and his greatness.”
This brilliant insight, offered more coherently than most other serious scholars of Jackson’s era have attempted, are no doubt offered as a rebuke to the modern ahistorical political correctness surrounding the man’s influence in America’s past. Still, the statement is undeniably true in my opinion, for I have always thought that the modern vilification of Jackson misses the crux of his pivotal role in American history; a role in which our contemporary demonization of him was ironically made possible.
Wilentz approaches his understanding of Jackson’s political life through a cascading revelation of the core tenet of the worldview which animated his actions. In simplest terms, Jackson saw America’s experiment in democracy as nothing short of a battle against the powerful wealthy and privileged and the hard-working and disadvantaged common majority. He saw it as his mission to place as much power as possible directly in the hands of the people as the only possible safeguard against corruption of the dream of the Revolution, a pursuit that seemed as radical in its day as the decision to go to war against Britain a generation earlier. Jackson grew up in an age in which political leaders were famously skeptical of the ability of the populace they governed to understand or properly administer the functions of government, and had literally built into the government checks on their power far more limiting than what we have today. While Jackson was not necessarily a visionary thinker, famously reacting on visceral instinct to challenges that confronted him—sometimes leaving historians to wrestle with seemingly vexing contradictions—he was clearly inspired by notions of republican idealism expounded by founding father Thomas Jefferson. This philosophical outlook was shaped by experiences during a life on the rugged American frontier and guided by his famed indomitable will. The two together, Wilentz shows, yielded a political leader with iron principles but one whose inflexible nature simultaneously laid the groundwork for his greatness and threatened his success. Yet Wilentz makes a convincing case that Jackson could rely as much on political savvy as backswoods brawling to get his way in most circumstances. And he almost always got his way.
Jackson’s shortcomings are infamous, and they are highlighted in this book. As with a great many political leaders of his day and an overwhelming majority of the nation’s citizens, he approved of slavery and viewed Native Americans as an inferior race that could only be saved from extinction by removal from their homeland. But Jackson, Wilentz shows, was positively incapable of separating even these issues from the context of his consuming passion for the expansion of American democracy. In Jackson’s thinking to limit slavery meant infringing on constitutional rights, and acceding to Native American sovereignty within the states in his mind was an affront to the self-determination that was the result of the War for Independence. Jackson’s views on many issues would clearly be anathema to most informed American leaders today, but I would venture to say that so would those of a great majority of the men of his time. This hardly negates their importance in shaping our government today, or their relevance to our contemporary society. Jackson’s claims to fame in the political arena are many, from helping birth the modern American political party system to helping define the sphere of Federal authority. Wilentz convincingly shows that above all he remains transcendent because of his unique commitment to expanding democracy at a critical period in the country’s development. Without it, we would not be the country we are today.
JMB
The Historians Manifesto 
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