H-SHEAR Feller on Burstein, 'The Passions of Andrew Jackson' Review published on Sunday, June 1, 2003 Andrew Burstein. The Passions of Andrew Jackson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. xxi + 292 pp. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-375-41428-2. Reviewed by Daniel Feller (Department of History, University of Tennessee)Published on H- SHEAR (June, 2003) Jackson Agonistes Jackson Agonistes In his magisterial 1860 biography of Andrew Jackson, James Parton wrote that "the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton's knocker."[1] Parton's readers would have known the story well. In 1830 Martin Van Buren was President Jackson's secretary of state. John C. Calhoun was vice president, and Margaret (Peggy) Eaton, an innkeeper's daughter recently widowed, was the scandal-tarred new wife of Jackson's old army comrade and secretary of war, John Henry Eaton. Van Buren and Calhoun had led the two main wings of the Jackson electoral coalition in 1828 and were rivals for the presidential succession. Jackson's anointment of the one and banishment of the other had momentous consequences: it meant not only that Van Buren would be president next and Calhoun never, but that the emerging national Democratic party would bear the organizational stamp and policy orientation of Van Buren's New York instead of Calhoun's South Carolina. And all this, Parton suggested, because the clever Van Buren had the wit to pay court to Peggy Eaton and thus humor Andrew Jackson's obsessive, pigheaded belief in the chastity of a salacious Washington barmaid. The question of Jackson's character has never ceased to tantalize. All agree that he was remarkably strong-willed and strong-tempered. The real issue is whether he was master or slave of his own passions. Detractors see a willful, self-obsessed, perpetually angry man, blown by powerful emotions beyond reason or control. Defenders portray a man of cool intelligence, artfully steering his legendary rages and tantrums to a carefully calculated end. Was Jackson the puppeteer or the puppet, the consummate dramatist or an unwitting actor doomed to play himself? How well did he really comprehend his own motives? It will not do to dismiss this question by complaining (as Professor Sean Wilentz has recently done) that a focus on Jackson's personality belittles the seriousness of political history.[2] For it is exactly how we should understand that history that is at stake. If spites and resentments ruled Jackson's mind, if some deep-seated animus controlled his actions, then that is a fact worth pondering. The question of character is no more off-limits for Jackson than for Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. As the late Edward Pessen opined, "there was an issue, too, in the fact that the American political system permitted its Chief Executive the latitude it did to determine the fate of grown men over such matters" as the Eaton affair.[3] If Jackson was not truly the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, then was he someone else's tool? If he was an unsavory and violent character, what does that say about the party that exalted him, the generations of Americans who idolized him, and the historians Citation: H-Net Reviews. Feller on Burstein, 'The Passions of Andrew Jackson'. H-SHEAR. 07-10-2013. https://networks.h-net.org/node/950/reviews/1186/feller-burstein-passions-andrew-jackson Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SHEAR who canonize him? If the answers to these questions prove unflattering to American democracy or to ourselves, it is best that we should know it. What keeps the argument over Jackson's character ever fresh is the nearly perfect balance of evidence on both sides. Parton, who gathered firsthand testimony from many of Jackson's contemporaries, stated the conundrum in classic terms, and Andrew Burstein begins by reframing it: "Which was Jackson?... Brave or unbalanced? Or both? Was he steel wrought in a fiery furnace, or an uncontrollable monster irresponsibly unleashed into the political world?" This is the crux of the matter, and as Burstein shrewdly remarks, "that sense of duality is as close to the historic Jackson as the modern record comes" (p. xiv). One could hardly conceive a better way to frame a new assessment of Jackson. Unfortunately it is all downhill from there. Burstein begins by parading his claim to superior sagacity and detachment. He faults predecessors for revealing more of their own predilections than of "the historic Jackson." "Too many popular biographers refuse to confront the problems of their own pretense and ideology, the problems inherent in how they relate to their subject." Forgetting the duties of "humility and self-monitoring," they "distort history with varying degrees of subtlety" (pp. xix, 250-251). His book will be different. Written "as dispassionately as possible," it will "present a deliberative, demythologized view of Andrew Jackson" (pp. xviii, xx). To uncover the man beneath the myth, Burstein holds out three novel approaches. The first is more scrupulous research and deeper reading, "to find what Jackson's biographers have missed--documents that were overlooked, events oversimplified, quotations misapplied, relationships undervalued." The second is "an attentive dissection of language," by which one can "fathom meaning" from even the most casual expressions (pp. xv-xvi). The third is to focus on Jackson's friendships as a tool to unlock his character. Burstein promises to boldly go where no biographer has gone before. But the narrative that follows is shallow and misshapen, offering little new. Mostly it recounts the same old stories and rehearses the same old controversies. Burstein concentrates on Jackson's early years, reserving only a chapter for the presidency. Over time, historians have rooted Jackson's personality in various milieus, elucidating such shaping influences as western land-hunger, national acquisitiveness and ambition, the frontier's ambivalent impulses towards savagery and freedom or civilization and control, manly obsessions with honor and violence, slaveholders' thirst for patriarchal dominance, and the post-Revolutionary generation's fear of declension and inadequacy. Burstein invokes them all without choosing between them or sorting out their contradictions. What novelty there is in his account derives from facile psychologizing and airy speculation. Hemmed in by whites, according to Burstein, Indians beat their wives "to stave off an unendurable sense of inadequacy," while white frontiersmen fought and swore "in order to conquer or deny their fears of the wilderness condition." Jackson's own ambition ignited from his "first encounters" with the degraded Catawbas of his neighborhood and his craving to distinguish himself from them (pp. 15, 17, 5). Not only is the motive hypothetical, but so are the encounters themselves. Jackson never mentioned seeing any Catawbas. Promises notwithstanding, Burstein breaks no new ground in research. He uncovers no overlooked evidence, and his linguistic turn appears in practice to be a rationale for doing history on the cheap. In graduate school I was given a list of Historian's Commandments attributed to William Hesseltine. One was to "write about thy subject, not about the documents concerning thy subject." It is the historian's task, we were told, not simply to string together and comment on what our sources Citation: H-Net Reviews. Feller on Burstein, 'The Passions of Andrew Jackson'. H-SHEAR. 07-10-2013. https://networks.h-net.org/node/950/reviews/1186/feller-burstein-passions-andrew-jackson Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-SHEAR reported but, using their statements as evidence, to fashion our own self-standing narrative. A history should not lurch from document to document, but unfold from event to event. Burstein's focus on "Jackson-as-communicator" makes Jackson's words, not his actions, the primary subject (p. xvi). This justifies not bothering to craft a life story anew from scattered and fragmentary sources. Instead the text offers a kind of running commentary on Jackson's letters and on the failings of previous biographers, especially Robert V. Remini. Burstein wanders through this record, dispensing platitudes with an air of oracular profundity. "Patriotic mythmaking is always hard to temper," he gravely intones. "Dangerous consequences frequently accompany private ambition--it is almost a truism to say so" (pp. 119, 96). Burstein has located a contemporary dictionary and uses it to offer up pearls of insight. For instance, when Jackson felt aggrieved he often spoke of "redress." Now this same eighteenth-century lawyer's term was also used by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in the very next passage after one that complained of Indian savagery (p. 19)! Later we learn that Jackson and Willie Blount signed letters with "sincerely your Friend." They exchanged "respectful compliments" and offered "respects to your brother" and to "your good Lady" (p. 89). What of it? These were standard phrasings. It would take more effort than Burstein has made to sort out what in Jackson's language was conventional and what was idiosyncratic--which words reveal the times, and which the man. On the subject of Jackson's marriage, Burstein promises to "set matters straight." He will dispel myths that "we have been asked to believe for nearly two centuries" and reveal "what really happened." "What really happened" (he repeats this) was that Jackson and Rachel began living together as husband and wife without waiting for her estranged and departed first husband to get a divorce, perhaps even to provoke him into getting one. Though this made them technically adulterers, "in fact what they did was reasonable and expedient--and not unheard of on the frontier" (pp.