Another Look at Andrew Jackson
From the print edition of The New American
Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle That Shaped America’s Destiny, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, New York: Sentinel, 2017, 237 pages, hardcover.
On January 8, 1815, leading a rag-tag army that included frontier militia, pirates, and allied Indians, Andrew Jackson defeated the British army at the Battle of New Orleans — an army that had just defeated Napoleon at the Battle of the Nations. But how significant was this victory, considering that the War of 1812 had already supposedly ended, unbeknownst to the combatants at New Orleans?
In 1961, Johnny Horton celebrated the American victory in his well-known song “The Battle of New Orleans,” which topped the music charts for weeks. In more recent years, the American commander Andrew Jackson has come under increasing assault, cast as a man of almost unbelievable evil. He is portrayed as a man who hated Native Americans — despite having adopted two Indian children as his own — and in Dinesh D’Souza’s movie Hillary’s America, he is even shown essentially raping a slave. Of all of Jackson’s sins, this last one is totally without historical foundation: There is not one shred of evidence that Jackson was ever unfaithful to his wife, Rachel, in their entire marriage.
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