The Age of Jackson

Only in the very widest possible sense could this book be called a biography of Andrew Jackson. The figure of Jackson looms large in its pages because his impact on his era had such a permanent influence on American democracy. This volume embraces that whole era from its inception to its present influence upon the history of our country. If it is biographical, it is also the historical, cultural, economic and political life of the United States as it grew and burgeoned from Jefferson's day to the violent early eruptions of financial and industrial forces which threatened our heritage of equal opportunity. The author offers an interpretation of democracy's future through a brilliant study of its strident past.

In his Foreword, the author stresses the new urgency given to the question of the meaning of democracy by the present world crisis; and he poses some questions of his own: What range of possibilities has democracy unfolded in the past? What methods has it found legitimate? What have been its values andd resources?

The heritage of Andrew Jackson is "his unending contribution to the vitality of our democracy. We look back on his amazing personality, we review his battles because the struggles he went through, the enemies he encountered, the defeats he suffered and the victories he won are part and parcel of the struggles, the enmities, the defeats and the victories of those who have lived in all the generations that have followed." (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

In the pages of this book a whole century comes to light: its ideologies, its controversies, its great personalities. We begin with the end of the Jeffersonian agricultural era; we see the slow but inevitable rise of industrialism and its radical effects on the national economy. The author show the development of the Workingman's Party, Locofocoism, the Whig Counterreformation, the relation of Jacksonian democracy to law, industrialism, religion and literature; the beginnings of the Free Soil movement. We see the Bank War in all its unbelievable violence; the struggle over the hard-money issue; the intensity of sectional disputes. Jackson himself, Van Buren, Amos Kendall, Fanny Wright and countless other figures of the past come to life amidst issues that are deeply akin to those of our own day.

The author believes that if American democracy is to endure, its moods, methods, and purposes in regard to the present must bear a vital relation to its attacks on similar crises of its past. He believes in democracy — particularly because of its flexibility, its powers of compromise, its safeguarding against revolution. And he makes us see how the simpler problems of Jackson's day reached down too the roots of democracy and were solved by a forging together of beliefs and motives from all sections of the country.