Political biographies are not what they once were. Often these days they are as indigestible as meticulous scholarship, uninspired by intellectual daring, can manage. There are not many of us, I suspect, who turn to them the way Harry Truman is said to have turned to Plutarch: in order to understand a friend or enemy by learning to read his soul.
Robert V. Remini’s biography of Andrew Jackson, now complete with a third volume, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy: 1833-1845, seems to me a partial exception to this.[1] Remini’s work is as fine as any the contemporary historical establishment can claim. It is fair-minded, colloquial, urbane, and up to the best standards of scholarship. What is more, Remini has a large point to make about Jackson and about American history. Certainly if any one recent work allows us to ask what keeps the best of our scholars from producing political biographies of the highest rank it is Remini’s biography of Jackson. To answer that question, however, it is first necessary to see how Remini understands Jackson historically, and his own biography historiographically.
More than any other book, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson(1945) has helped to make Jackson a figure of enormous importance for us today, a figure perhaps even more important than Washington himself. Still, it is worth remembering that even in his own time Jackson was larger than life. He dwarfed every one of his presidential successors until
