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The Book of the Week is “American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House” by Jon Meacham, published in 2008. This hodgepodge of a volume described the subject’s military and political careers and his times.
Born in March 1767 on the border between North and South Carolina, Andrew Jackson was orphaned by the time he was fourteen. Nevertheless, he got a license to practice law in 1787.
Jackson was elected president of the Union (the United States) in November 1828, and served two four-year terms. Throughout, he increased presidential power over the legislative and judicial government branches. He showed he believed in white supremacy (over the Native Americans and black slaves) while speechifying that he cared about them. He forced the Native Americans to take up residence west of the Mississippi river, claiming he was protecting them, as they would forever be fighting with the white man. His family owned slaves, who took care of his plantation in Nashville, TN.
In November 1830, he made his nephew’s newspaper, his administration’s communications outlet. He was accused of running a military dictatorship.
Read the book to learn much more about several of the kinds of political episodes that have repeated themselves beginning approximately two hundred and ten years ago; including but not limited to:
- accusations of a sex scandal involving the wife of president Jackson’s secretary of war;
- South Carolina’s threat to secede from the Union due to financial harm done by Jackson’s imposition of a tariff;
- Jackson’s persistence in trying to eliminate the hegemony of one man named Nicholas Biddle who owned a monopolistic financial behemoth called the Bank of the United States;
- deaths of various family members and friends.