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Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation

Amazon.com Price:  $2.60 (as of 02/05/2019 09:36 PST- Details)

Description

Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier revolt against political and diplomatic norms, a “populist” champion of extraordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration.

Despite his reverence for the “sovereign people,” on the other hand, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and regularly unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets. He made his name as a lawyer, businessman, and official along the Carolina and Tennessee frontiers, now and then ejecting white squatters from native lands and returning slaves to native planters in the name of federal authority and international law. However, he waged total war on the Cherokees and Creeks who terrorized western settlements and raged at the national statesmen who refused to “avenge the blood” of innocent colonists. All over the long war in the south and west from 1811 to 1818 he brushed aside legal restraints on holy genocide and mass retaliation, presenting himself as the only man who would offer protection to white families from hostile empires, “heathen” warriors, and rebellious slaves. He became a towering hero to those that saw the US as uniquely lawful and victimized. And he used that legend to beat back a range of political, economic, and moral alternatives for the republican future.

Drawing from new evidence about Jackson and the southern frontiers, Avenging the People boldly reinterprets the grim and principled man whose version of American nationhood continues to shape American democracy.

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