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Overview
“Far more than just a political story or, for that matter, a story of Andrew Jackson, Reynolds’s book shines a bright light on the cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic currents buffeting the nation. . . . Reynolds is a thoughtful historian and Waking Giant is as engaging and insightful a narrative of this critical interregnum as any written in years.”—New York Times Book Review
A brilliant, definitive history of America’s vibrant and tumultuous rise during the Jacksonian era, from the Bancroft Prize-winning author of Walt Whitman’s America
America experienced unprecedented growth and turmoil in the years between 1815 and 1848. It was an age when Andrew Jackson redefined the presidency and James K. Polk expanded the nation's territory. Historian and literary critic David S. Reynolds captures the turbulence of a democracy caught in the throes of the controversy over slavery, the rise of capitalism, and the birth of urbanization. He brings to life the reformers, abolitionists, and temperance advocates who struggled to correct America's worst social ills, and he reveals the shocking phenomena that marked the age: violent mobs, P. T. Barnum's freaks, all-seeing mesmerists, polygamous prophets, and rabble-rousing feminists. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Waking Giant is a brilliant chronicle of America's vibrant and tumultuous rise.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060826574 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 09/29/2009 |
| Series: | American History |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 466 |
| Sales rank: | 717,871 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.08(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Waking Giant
America in the Age of Jackson
Chapter One
Forging a National Identity
The United States emerged from the War of 1812 battered but confident. "The Star-Spangled Banner," written late in the war by the poet-lawyer Francis Scott Key, caught the nation's mood of cockiness in the face of ordeal, with its words about the American flag waving proudly in "the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air."
The war had been hard militarily for America but had produced its share of stars, including William Henry Harrison, who had defeated British and Indian forces in the Northwest; Oliver Hazard Perry, with his inspiring victory on Lake Erie; and, above all, Andrew Jackson, who had overwhelmed rebellious Indians in the South before rebuffing a British invasion of New Orleans in January 1815.
Jackson at New Orleans boosted the nation's morale, reviving the spirit of 1776. His ragtag army compensated for America's lackluster performance through much of the war by defeating the world's greatest military power. Jackson himself, already known as Old Hickory for his toughness in battle, earned another nickname as well: The Hero. At forty-seven, Jackson cut an imposing figure in the saddle. Wiry and ramrod straight—he never weighed more than 145 pounds despite his six-foot frame—he had a look of severe earnestness, with gray hair that formed a V on his forehead and swept upward from his gaunt, weather beaten face.
The son of Scotch-Irish immigrants, Jackson had been raised in the backcountry of South Carolina, where he received a haphazard education. During the Revolution he joined the patriots in the Battle ofHanging Rock and was taken captive. A British officer whose boots he refused to polish slashed him with a sword, leaving his head and his left hand scarred for life. He inherited money from his grandfather but wasted it on loose living. Impoverished, he studied the law— without reading a law book completely through, it was said—and was admitted to the bar, moving west to serve as a public prosecutor in Tennessee. He was married in 1791 to Rachel Donelson Robards, who mistakenly believed she had won a legal divorce from her first husband. Two years later a divorce was finalized, and he and Rachel were remarried; but they never escaped insults about allegedly having lived in adultery.
Jackson served briefly as Tennessee's first congressman and then as a U.S. senator, but, disillusioned by the Washington scene, he abandoned politics, opting for a career in the law and the military. Financial success allowed him to establish the Hermitage, a plantation near Nashville on which he raised cotton and bred race-horses. He had bought his first slave in 1788 and in time owned 150 chattels. He treated his slaves with paternal kindness but responded savagely to disobedience, as when he ran a newspaper ad offering $50 for a runaway slave "and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give to the amount of three hundred."
Level-headed but tempestuous, Jackson followed the South's code of honor, answering insults with violence. He attacked one enemy with a cane, battered another with his fists, and participated in a street gunfight that left him with a lead ball in his shoulder.
He also engaged in three duels. His 1806 duel to the death with the Nashville lawyer Charles Dickinson typified his attitude of Southern machismo. The duel originated in an obscure affront to Jackson involving a horse race and an insult about Rachel. Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel with pistols, and the two met on a field, standing eight paces apart. Dickinson, an expert marksman, fired first. His bullet entered Jackson's chest, shattering two ribs and settling close to the heart. Because of Jackson's loose overcoat, Dickinson did not see the wound and, astonished, assumed that he had missed his foe. Although Jackson was bleeding profusely under his coat, he fired back. "I should have hit him," Jackson later boasted, "if he had shot me through the brain." Jackson's bullet ripped through his opponent's bowels, leaving a gaping wound. Dickinson died in a few hours. Although for the rest of his life Jackson suffered from abscesses caused by the bullet in his chest, he kept the pistol with which he had killed Dickinson, showing it off and recounting details of the duel.
In the War of 1812, Jackson served as a U.S. army colonel and a major general in the Tennessee militia. A competent but not brilliant strategist, he proved himself a potent killing machine. He led a series of strikes on hostile Creek Indians that culminated in the Battle of Horse-shoe Bend, which resulted in the deaths of some eight hundred Indians. Having defeated the Creeks, he forced on them a treaty by which they turned over to the United States more than twenty million acres of their land, including large sections of Alabama and Georgia.
Jackson next drove allied Spanish and British forces out of Pensacola, Florida, before proceeding to New Orleans, which was threatened by a fleet carrying more than ten thousand British redcoats. He cobbled together a small force of army regulars, militiamen, Choctaw Indians, liberated Haitian slaves, and Baratarian pirates. A series of skirmishes against the British led to the major encounter at Chalmette, Louisiana, on January 8, 1815. Jackson's troops, protected by a wall of earth, wood, and cotton bales, fired at will on the swarming redcoats, who had forgotten to bring the ladders they needed to scale the American ramparts. By the time the battle ended, nearly two thousand British had been killed, wounded, or captured, compared to about sixty of Jackson's men.
The American victory at New Orleans had tremendous repercussions. The Treaty of Ghent, ending the war with England, was not finally ratified until February 1815. Had the British won the Battle of New Orleans, they would have been in a position to claim the southern Mississippi River Valley, which, combined with their holdings to the north, would have given them virtual control over large portions of America's vast western territory.
Waking GiantAmerica in the Age of Jackson. Copyright © by David Reynolds. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Prologue 1
1 Froging a National Identity 5
2 Political Fight, Popular Fêtes 35
3 Jackson's Presidency: Democracy and Power 81
4 God's Many Kingdoms 123
5 Reforms, Panaceas Inventions, Fads 175
6 Rebellion and Renaissance 236
7 Party Politics and Manifest Destiny 308
Epilogue: Endings, Beginnings 365
Acknowledgments 385
Notes 387
Selated Sources and Readings 419
Index 437
What People are Saying About This
“Reynolds asks us to more carefully consider the brawling, chaotic, boisterous years from 1815 to 1848 as a fascinating age in its own right. In this he succeeds handsomely. . . . Engaging and insightful.”
“It’s Reynolds’s depiction of an exploding popular culture that makes Waking Giant an unmitigated delight. . . . An intellectual history and group portrait of America turning from a republic to a popular democracy during the Age of Jackson.”
"A terrific introduction of succinct length to a period in our history that was once ignored." —-The New York Times
“Mr. Reynolds brings this remarkable man to life. . . . A terrific introduction of succinct length to a period in our history that was once ignored, a period increasingly recognized as a time when the foundations of much of modern America were laid.”