Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson is the seventh president of the United States (1829-1837) and commands the American army at the Battle of New Orleans just after the official end of the War of 1812, in 1815. Jackson completely dominates the politics of the 1820s and 1830s, so much so that the era's political institutions bear the name "Jacksonian Democracy." Today Jackson has a mixed legacy among historians, as he is quite popular for his support of popular democratic institutions against an increasingly corporatist Northern manufacturing industry but is widely criticized for both his friendliness to slavery and his intense distaste for the Native Americans and his removal of the Creeks and Cherokee from Georgia to Oklahoma on The Trail of Tears.

Sellers's Jackson is painted in a generally positive light. While he has an erratic toughness that earns him the nicknamed "Old Hickory," Sellers sees Jackson primarily as the historical manifestation...