American Lion

Chapter 1

Andy Will Fight His Way in the World

Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month before. How triumphant! Andrew Donelson said of the victory. How flattering to the cause of the people! Now the president- elect s family and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin and, in this special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.

On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty- four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. Rachel would be by his side.
In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend s good wishes: To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service. Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.

He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious. Jackson s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti- Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.

What passes for political drama today pales in the reading of Jon Meacham s vividly-told story of our seventh president. The rip-roaring two-fisted man of the people, duelist, passionate lover, gambler and war hero, was also a prime creator of the presidency as the fulcrum of executive power to defend democracy Meacham argues that Jackson should be in the pantheon with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln for this and for his role in preserving the Union and rescuing democracy from elitism. He makes the historian s case with wit and scholarship but Meacham also has the novelist s art of enthralling the general reader much as David McCullough did for the lesser figure of John Adams. Reading American Lion one is no longer able to look on the gaunt, craggy face on the $20 bill without hearing the tumult of America in the making. Tina Brown

Jon Meacham's splendid book on Andrew Jackson shrewdly places presidential politics in the context of Jackson's family life and vice versa. With an abundance of gripping stories, and with admirable fairness, Meacham offers a fresh portrait of one of the most controversial and consequential men ever to occupy the White House. Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Every so often a terrific biography comes along that shines a new light on a familiar figure in American history. So it was with David McCullough and John Adams, so it was with Walter Isaacson and Benjamin Franklin, so it is with Jon Meacham and Andrew Jackson. A master storyteller, Meacham interweaves the lives of Jackson and the members of his inner circle to create a highly original book. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

In magnificent prose, Jon Meacham has written an engrossing and original study of the life of Andrew Jackson.  He provides new insights into Jackson s emotional and intellectual character and