They neglect to consider that this very internal conflict and the changes it brought to the American political structure comprised one of the most fundamental shifts in the nation’s history, and also that Andrew Jackson rewrote the book on American political leaders just as surely as Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway remade the narrative form of the novel. Lots of people could write like Hemingway—although not as well—once he showed them how. And the same thing could be said for the political talent of Andrew Jackson: Lots of politicians could approach the voters in the homespun style of Andrew Jackson—although rarely as authentically—once he showed them how.The Scots-Irish culture has to date produced at least a dozen other presidents, some of them pretty fine leaders, but Old Hickory remains in a class by himself. Andrew Jackson was an original, an unusual and fearless leader who dominated the American political process more fully than any president before or since. And he did so not through the tedious, secretly sneering Machiavellian half-truths that pervade so much of today’s carefully scripted American politics.
