Starts Like a Lion, Ends With a Whimper

I had such high expectations for Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, American Lion.

Meacham’s profile of America’s seventh President starts out with a bang. Jackson’s elected President and his wife, Rachel, dies five days later. Next, we learn of Jackson’s childhood in Waxhaw, S.C., and the brutality he witnessed first-hand at age 14 when he and his brother Robert are captured by British soldiers during the Revolutary War. (I wonder if Robert Rodat used Jackson as a model when he wrote the script for The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger.)

The action keeps up through the Battle of New Orleans and various battles against Indian tribes in the south and west.  But things comes to a screeching halt once Jackson is elected President in 1828. The action is replaced by politics, and Old Hickory’s inability to assemble a cohesive cabinet during his first term.

By the time his second term concludes, I was tired of reading about Jackson’s battles to defend the honor of Margaret Eaton, wife of Secretary of War Henry Eaton, his constant efforts to maintain a family atmosphere at the White House and his numerous bouts with depression and ill health.

Long-time rival John Quincy Adams accused Jackson of being “so ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory, willing even to talk of his ‘chronic diarrhoea’.”  I’m not sure if Jackson was a hypochondriac but he certainly ruled the White House with an iron fist and stayed very true to his beliefs, regardless of their political correctness. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that George W. Bush studied Jackson’s presidency very closely during his eight-year term.

Overall, this is a good but not great book. Kudos to Meacham for listing brief bios of the central characters to open this book. This is a technique I’d like to see in other biographies and history books.

Read American Lion in tandem with Paul Nagel’s biography of Adams to get a great perspective on this volatile period in American history (see separate review).