This in-depth treatment of the age of Jackson (not in particular his biography so it extends well beyond his presidency) showed me that in many ways things were not so different then as now. Back then, the country grappled with wealth inequality - a struggle between the producers (laborers, farmers, and working people who actually produced items but often received little pay) and the accumulators (those who did not manual work but made many through the efforts of others). I rather like those 19th century terms better. Andrew Jackson was the first 'outsider' president from the frontier and not from the founding fathers' established order. I'm still trying to understand early American banking. As near as I can tell, banks were able to print their own notes which basically provided the paper currency. Of course, this gave them incredible power. I get the impression that paper money is not so much the problem but rather who controls the issuance of paper money. In that era, the fluctuations of value in paper bank notes meant that workers were paid in paper money when the value was high and then lost out when its value plummeted. This is what Jackson fought against. This is an amazing work of scholarship in its readability but so detailed that I still found myself flipping to the well-organized index to review definitions of groups such as the Barnburners and the Hunkers. (Apparently names for small political groups and their views were just as catchy as terms such as Tea Party today.)

The title of the book is very accurate, this is not a biography of President Jackson, but rather, a review of the era that bears his name. The banking war takes up the majority of the book and is an incredibly interesting fight to read about. The fights between business and worker, and the split of the political parties in the lead up to the civil war were less substantive but equally gripping.

Unfortunately, there was absolutely no mention of the trail of tears or anything at all about the Native American experience during the era, which makes me wonder if other events are selectively chosen to not appear because of Schlesinger’s positive opinion of the Jacksonian era.

All in all though, what was covered was very compelling, if likely biased, reading. The Jacksonian and Jeffersonian eras likely have a lot to teach us about our own, but, undoubtedly, we won’t know enough to benefit from the past, we’ll just pick out pithy quotes and use them for our own purposes, no matter their original intent.