From Publishers Weekly
With tremendous admiration, even reverence, for his subject, Buchanan (The Road to Guilford Courthouse) recounts Andrew Jackson's early career and rise to American war hero. He focuses on the westward expansion from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, which he describes as a "folk movement" or mass migration of rough, often lawless people determined to lay claim to a new land and to fight until they prevailed. With graphic first-person accounts of Indian massacres and the retaliatory strikes of settlers, the author provides a very detailed military history of Jackson's defeat of the Chicamunga Cherokees and the Creek tribes who claimed sovereignty, until 1814, over the southeastern United States, and of his victory at the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Buchanan uses quotations from primary sources so well that they blend almost seamlessly with his own writing, which can sound oddly archaic and overwrought to modern ears (soldiers are "released by death"; British ships bound "eaglelike over the waves"). In Buchanan's eyes, Jackson is nothing short of "superhuman," and there is little balance in his treatment of Jackson's controversial views on Indians (the future president eschewed the idea of Indian sovereignty, although Buchanan argues that it was the English, and not the Indians, whom Jackson hated) or his invasion of Florida, a possession of neutral Spain, at the close of the Creek Indian war. Buchanan is unabashedly nostalgic for the days when battlefields were "fields of honor" and the ungoverned individualism and hunger for expansion of the frontier was at the forefront of the American experience. This account will appeal mainly to those who enjoy military history. Illus.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Not strictly a biography of Jackson, this work rather personifies in Jackson the southern version of the saga of settler expansion and frontier warfare that culminated in the massacre-soaked Creek War of 1813-1814. Buchanan prefaces Jackson's role with a chronicle of the flow into what is now Tennessee and Kentucky of land-hungry whites prior to the Revolution. The young Jackson sluiced over the mountains in 1787, his angry personality already formed from a penurious childhood and a hatred for the British. Buchanan, better at exposition than style, conveys Jackson's fortunes in the rough-and-tumble of raw Tennessee society, where perceived slights would dissolve into duels and ganglike violence: Jackson himself was shot in one duel and again in a street brawl. Jackson's personal story and the victory of the settlers merged in Jackson's ruthless campaign to crush the Creeks forever, followed by his victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815. The thickness of detail may not be to every reader's taste, but overall Buchanan is a capable chronicler of events.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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