The worst of them read like an Election Edition Mad Libs, and even the best of them tell, with rare exception, the same Jacksonian story: scrappy maverick who splits rails and farms peanuts and shoots moose battles from the log cabin to the White House by dint of grit, smarts, stubbornness, and love of country. But their campaign biographies are much of a muchness. (Although, since Reagan’s “A New Beginning,” in 1984, the campaign biography, as book, has been supplanted somewhat by the campaign film, screened at the nominating Convention.) The United States has had some very fine Presidents, and some not so fine. Since 1824, no Presidential election year has passed without a campaign biography, printed about the time a candidate is nominated, chiefly for the purpose of getting him elected. Andrew Jackson would not kneel before a tyrant. A British officer, whose boots had got muddy, ordered the boy to clean them: Jackson refused, and the officer beat him, badly, with a sword. In 1781, when Jackson was fourteen and fighting in the American Revolution, he was captured. At its heart lies a single, telling anecdote. In 1824, Eaton published a revised “Life of Jackson,” founding a genre, the campaign biography. They told a story, the story of Andrew Jackson’s life. How they stirred has shaped American politics ever since.
They had no choice but to stir: their candidate was, otherwise, unelectable. Adams called this his Macbeth policy: “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me, / Without my stir.” Jackson’s supporters leaned more toward Lady Macbeth’s point of view.
In keeping with the tradition of the first five American Presidents, Adams considered currying favor with voters to be beneath the dignity of the office, and believed that any man who craved the Presidency ought not to have it. Jackson’s opponent John Quincy Adams refused to campaign at all. The following year, Jackson was a candidate for the Presidency. The two men took lodgings at the same Washington boarding house. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his biographer and friend to the nation’s capital. The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. At the Hermitage, Jackson’s thousand-acre cotton plantation outside Nashville, Eaton pored over Jackson’s papers and wrote seven more chapters. Like Reid, Eaton had never written a book. His choices narrowing, Jackson then tapped as his biographer a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named John Eaton, who had served under him during the War of 1812 and was married to Jackson’s ward. (In which, to be sure, Jackson’s merits were much extolled: only twenty of his own men were lost, but a hundred and eighty-nine Indians lay dead on the battlefield, and many more died afterward, for, as Reid put it, “the greatest slaughter was in the pursuit.”) Before his demise, he had drafted only the first four chapters of the General’s life he hadn’t got much farther than the Battle of Enotachopco, in 1814. Reid went to work until, one day in January of 1816, he took suddenly and strangely ill. (Ramsay had earlier ventured a medical opinion that the tailor was dangerously insane and, on his deathbed, he insisted that his assailant could not be held accountable for his actions.) Jackson next turned to his aide-de-camp John Reid, a man half Ramsay’s age, and very much in Jackson’s thrall.
But, before Ramsay had a chance to begin, he was shot in the back, three times, by a mad tailor on the streets of Charleston. He settled on David Ramsay, a sixty-six-year-old South Carolina legislator and physician and gifted historian whose books included a “Life of George Washington,” published in 1807. With a political career in mind, he cast about for a biographer to chronicle his exploits. On January 8, 1815, the General led American forces in a stunning defeat of an invading British Army, winning the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. Illustration by Bruce McCallīiographers of Andrew Jackson used to be cursed. John Eaton’s “Life of Jackson” established the genre of the campaign biography almost every one published since varies only in detail.
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