I’ll bet I paid a lot less than Subway did for product placement in this episode.
I want to thank the hit ABC show Nashville for using the cover of Andrew Jackson, Southerner as a prop in the mayor’s office. It would be better if someone on the show were actually reading the book, but I’ll take it.
(Of course, that portrait just happens to be the same one I’m using for my book cover, but one can dream.)
Amazon.com has Andrew Jackson, Southerner listed at a pre-sale price of 29.80. That’s 25% off of the list price of $39.95. I also plan to hold a contest of some sort to give away a handful of signed copies this fall.
The Fall 2013 LSU Press catalog includes Andrew Jackson, Southerner. Here is the description:
Many Americans view Andrew Jackson as a frontiersman who fought duels, killed Indians, and stole another man’s wife. Historians have traditionally presented Jackson as a man who struggled to overcome obstacles and helped create a more democratic United States. In his compelling new biography of Jackson, Mark R. Cheathem argues for a reassessment of these long-held views, suggesting that in fact “Old Hickory” lived as an elite southern gentleman.
Jackson grew up along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, a district tied to Charleston, where the city’s gentry engaged in the transatlantic marketplace. After visiting Charleston, Jackson moved to North Carolina, where he joined various political and kinship networks that provided him with entrée into society. In fact, Cheathem contends, Jackson had already started to assume the characteristics of a southern gentleman by the time he arrived in Middle Tennessee in 1788.
After moving to Nashville, Jackson further ensconced himself in an exclusive social order by marrying the daughter of one of the city’s cofounders, engaging in land speculation, and leading the state militia. According to Cheathem, through these ventures Jackson grew to own multiple plantations and cultivated them with the labor of almost two hundred slaves. His status also enabled him to build a military career focused on eradicating the nation’s enemies, including Indians residing on land desired by white southerners. Jackson’s military success eventually propelled him onto the national political stage in the 1820s, where he won two terms as president. Jackson’s years as chief executive demonstrated the complexity of the system of elite white southern men, as he earned the approval of many white southerners by continuing to pursue Manifest Destiny and opposing the spread of abolitionism, yet earned their ire because of his efforts to fight nullification and the Second Bank of the United States.
By emphasizing Jackson’s southern identity, characterized by violence, honor, kinship, slavery, and Manifest Destiny, Cheathem’s narrative offers a bold new perspective on one of the nineteenth century’s most renowned and controversial presidents.
The cloth (hardback) edition will be published in October and will retail for $39.95, and an e-book edition, almost certainly priced lower, will be available as well.
As I noted earlier this week, Robert V. Remini passed away on March 28. Given his age, it wasn’t unexpected news. In fact, I had just been wondering about the health of Remini and also Donald Cole, who turned 91 last Sunday, over the weekend.
Last year, I included Remini among the historians who influenced me the most. I only met him once, at the 2008 AHA roundtable on his history of the U.S. House of Representatives. After the roundtable, I stood in line to introduce myself and give him a signed copy of Old Hickory’s Nephew. It was a very academic fanboi thing to do, but more than any other historian, he had influenced my scholarship, as he continues to do so today.
Remini’s earliest influence on me was his narrative story-telling. I read his three-volume biography of Jackson twice as an undergraduate, and while I’ve never been able to emulate his writing style, it affected how I tried to write then and even now.
A lot of historians criticized Remini for his interpretation of Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. I think Remini (usually) tried to be fair in his assessment. He never struck me as an Jackson apologist on this topic, although he sometimes appeared too sympathetic to Old Hickory.[1]
The one area of Remini’s scholarship on Jackson that fell short, in my opinion, was in regards to Old Hickory’s slave ownership. Remini rarely mentioned slaves or analyzed how Jackson’s mastery over them affected his politics and vice-versa. His interpretation of Jackson instead perpetuated much of the historiography about him as a rough-hewn frontiersman, which Hendrik Booraem and Peter N. Moore have recently challenged.[2]
Like James Parton and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert V. Remini will undoubtedly be a name associated with Andrew Jackson for as long as Old Hickory is considered an important figure to study. He will be missed.
“‘His earthly toils are o’er, And History’s golden page, Shall wait for him no more.’”[3]
Updated: Link to University of Illinois at Chicago press release about Remini, with some useful links.
[1] Ronald Satz’s review of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars pointed out some of Remini’s too-sympathetic language (Journal of American History 90 [December 2003]: 1014).
[2] See my 2011 article, “Andrew Jackson, Slavery, and Historians.”
[3] Funeral eulogy for Jackson, 1845, quoted in Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (New York, 1977-1984), 3:530.
Tim Lacy has written a reflection about working with Jacksonian historian Robert V. Remini, who passed away last Thursday. I’ll post my own thoughts about Remini later this week.
I’m pleased to present the cover of my forthcoming book, Andrew Jackson, Southerner, due to be published in October.
I could not be happier with the work that LSU Press has done on designing the covers of this book and my first, Old Hickory’s Nephew.
The most recent issue of Tennessee Historical Quarterly includes an article, entitled “Forging the ‘Hero of New Orleans’: Tennessee Looks at the Centennial of the War of 1812,” by Dr. Tom Kanon, a TSLA staff member and an expert on Tennessee during the War of 1812. Kanon argues that “much of the reason for the ‘success’ of the Hero of New Orleans’s legacy rests in how Tennesseans perceived the War of 1812 a hundred years ago, during the centennial celebration of the war” (128).
Kanon’s article examines the role of the Ladies’ Hermitage Association (LHA) and its leaders, especially Mary C. Dorris, and the Andrew Jackson Memorial Association. He proposes that these two organizations’ efforts sought three objectives: To make Jackson “the hero of the War of 1812″; to emphasize the importance of the Battle of New Orleans in “[stopping] British aggression . . . [and saving] the Louisiana Purchase for the United States”; and to create a sense of pride about Tennessee “backwoodsmen” and their importance in winning the battle and the war (152).
This article is exactly what I’ve hoped someone would undertake to help explain the evolution of the memory of Jackson among Americans. By focusing on the epicenter of Jacksonian memory, Kanon has provided a starting point for other studies.
My panel was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. One of my c0-presenters, Ryan Quintana, is from Franklin and is teaching at Wellsley, so we compared notes about our geographic and family similarities.
I’ll be honest–I find it hard to pay attention during panels on which I am a presenter because I’m thinking about my own presentation. Ryan and Diane’s papers were good, if the questions from the audience were any indication. David Brown asked me a question about why Jackson’s slave ownership was important (or something like that). I fumbled around for an answer that in hindsight wasn’t very good.
If I had been thinking straight, I would have connected Ed Baptist’s Parish Memorial Lecture to Jackson’s pursuit of national security during the 1810s and the concomitant growth in his slave acquisitions. Jackson sought to remove southeastern Indian tribes to protect the frontier; he was also concerned about runaway slaves allying with those Indians to threaten white frontier settlers. The opening of the Southeast encouraged the cotton and land booms of the 1810s, which Jackson took advantage of for his and his friends’ personal gain. While Jackson may not have consciously allowed his slave ownership to influence his actions in the 1810s, it clearly played a role in his pursuit of Manifest Destiny and the benefits that accrued to slave holders.
I stayed in the same room to hear Craig Friend’s and Brian Schoen’s presentations. By that time, the room had grown unbearably hot, and I gave up trying to take notes. Friend’s presentation dealt with the concept of Confederate manhood, while Schoen’s addressed the diplomatic maneuverings that took place during the secession winter of 1860-61. Both were good, and my lack of note-taking was solely due to heat and fatigue.
My summer research agenda for 2012 was a bit different from the last two years I’ve written about here (2010) and here (2011). I sent off the Jackson manuscript to LSU Press right after the semester ended in May, so there wasn’t anything to do in that regard. (I did start working on a skeleton index to pass the time and ease the manuscript’s absence. *sniff*)
My research tasks this summer both centered on slavery. First, I worked on an article on the 1828 presidential election, tentatively entitled “Slavery, Kinship, and Andrew Jackson’s Presidential Campaign of 1828.” The title is self-explanatory, and you can read a much shorter version of the article here. My research entailed spending a lot of time looking at newspapers from 1827 and 1828.
My second project was starting on a paper that I’m presenting at the BrANCH conference in October. The paper is entitled, “The Evolution of the Enslaved Community at Andrew Jackson’s Plantations, 1790s-1840s.” Here’s the proposal I wrote:
Historians have been remiss in examining the enslaved people who labored for Andrew Jackson. Most of the scholarship on the enslaved community has focused on The Hermitage and has been undertaken by archaeologists, who have provided important but untapped context for understanding their experiences.
This paper will examine the evolution of Jackson’s enslaved community, emphasizing the change that its members experienced as Jackson went from a land-speculating man-on-the-make to a traditional southern planter. Early in Jackson’s Tennessee residency, the people whom he enslaved were subject to severe violence. Later, Jackson displayed a more paternalistic manner, which speaks to his awareness of his public image and need to preserve stability among the enslaved population as he faced significant financial debt.
This paper will clarify the historiographical debate between Robert Remini and Matthew Warshauer over why and when Jackson altered his treatment of his slaves. It will also explain how the defiant actions of one of Jackson’s slaves were instrumental in bringing about this change, speaking to John Blassingame’s argument that slaves were transformative agents and not simply victims of the peculiar institution.
With this presentation, I’ll be setting forth my preliminary thoughts about a bigger project I want to undertake: a study of Jackson’s slave communities from an historical perspective. Most of my time on this project was spent updating and expanding a database I have compiled on Jackson’s slaves.
I also wrote two book proposals, which are still in the discussion stage with publishers. These didn’t require archival research, but I spent time refreshing my memory on Jacksonian political history and historiography.
This crane would have been helpful more than once this summer.
Looking back, Summer 2012 at Jacksonian America wasn’t very Jacksonian. My summer reading list dictated the topic of many of the posts. If you’re looking for some reading material, here’s a look at the past couple of months.
My summer reading list included several books on fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. You can find my reviews of the books at the following links:
In addition to reading and reviewing these books, I also picked up a memoir by Lewis Donelson III and a new book on the Snow race riot of 1835.
In early June, I attended The Historical Society conference in Columbia, South Carolina. My paper, entitled “Old Hickory Just Got All Sexypants,” was part of this panel that I summarized. I also attended a great session on digital history.
I reflected on the historians who influenced me the most and what I would have studied if I hadn’t chosen Jacksonian politics and celebrated the ten-year anniversary of completing the Ph.D. and two years of blogging.
For those interested in the process that goes into writing a scholarly book, you might want to look at my posts on editing the manuscript and working with your editor(s).
Summer wouldn’t be any fun without vampires, though. I proposed a mash-up with Andrew Jackson and aliens to take advantage of the Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter novel and movie (which is deeper than one might think, it turns out). To top it off, a reader informed me he had already written a screenplay about Jackson and vampires.
I also took down (and put back up) part of a fence, re-shingled part of a shed, and changed an electric ballast without electrocuting myself. Let me tell you, blogging was a lot more fun.
