It doesn’t seem appropriate to duplicate the conference recap here in this blog, but I wanted to add a thought or two.
The panel that I was on focused on John Catron and Andrew Jackson. Surprisingly, no historian has written a biography of Catron, despite being a member of the United States Supreme Court. (Add him to the my list.) Like Jackson, there were claims that he fathered a child with one of his slaves. Michael Birdwell and John Nisbet are looking to co-author a Catron bio.
No one seemed to disagree with my assessment of historians’ failure to address the role of slavery in Jackson’s life. I am planning a two-part blog series explaining John Spencer Bassett’s influence on Jacksonian historiography, which will speak to this issue more broadly than my forthcoming article.
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics 