#000065
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Jon Meacham
American Lion (2008) is Jon Meacham's Pulitzer Prize–winning account of Andrew Jackson's turbulent, transformative presidency. Rather than a full cradle-to-grave life, Meacham trains his attention on the White House years, drawing on newly available family letters and papers to render Jackson as a figure of contradictions: a slaveholder and Indian-remover whose politics we rightly condemn, yet also the president who redefined the office as a tribune of the common man and faced down nullification to hold the Union together. Meacham, a former Newsweek editor with a gift for narrative, gives full weight to the domestic drama around Jackson—the Eaton affair, the surrogate family in his orbit—and to the outsized personality that made him so consequential. Fluent, sympathetic but not uncritical, it's popular history at its most readable. For anyone interested in the presidency or the fractious growth of American democracy, it's an absorbing entry point.
more…less ▴
The author
Jon Meacham (b. 1969) is an American historian, journalist, and former editor of Newsweek, known for accessible narrative biographies of presidents and other public figures. American Lion won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
The subject
Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), the seventh president, was a self-made general and populist whose two terms reshaped the office. His legacy is deeply contested: champion of expanded (white male) democracy on one hand, architect of Indian removal and defender of slavery on the other.
The book
Published by Random House in 2008, the book concentrates on Jackson's presidency, using previously private letters and diaries to reconstruct both the political battles—nullification, the Bank War—and the personal dramas of his White House.
How it reads
Novelistic and brisk. Meacham is sympathetic to Jackson's force of will while acknowledging his cruelties; some historians find the balance too generous, so it rewards reading alongside more critical accounts.
For more context
Read alongside Robert Remini's multivolume Jackson biography and recent scholarship on Indian removal.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Jon Meacham
- Publisher
- Random House
- Year
- 2008
- ISBN
- 978-0-8129-7346-4
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine