As I did for this past summer’s SHEAR conference, I am posting for advance reading a .pdf of my paper, entitled “Slavery, Kinship, and Andrew Jackson’s Presidential Campaign of 1828,” for the upcoming Southern Historical Association meeting. It is part of the session, “New Perspectives on the Jacksonian South,” scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 29, from 2:30-4:30.
This paper is an abbreviated version of a chapter in the Jackson biography that I am completing for LSU Press. Suggestions for, and criticism of, the paper are welcome.
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics 
A reader pointed out some fuzzy writing on my part that I wanted to clarify. On p. 16, I mention that Francis Pickens “denied that there was a southern movement afoot to dismember the Union.” In the next sentence, where I state that “the former eventually proved untrue,” I am referencing Pickens’ denial of a southern plot.
A better phrasing of the last sentence on p. 16 might be, “Pickens was wrong about disunion, of course; even then, secession was on the mind of some southerners. But Jackson was not one of them.”