There is perhaps too much detail in the book about every snub, every social event and dinner party. This all should have been "inconsequential foolishness" - but it was Jackson himself who allowed it to turn into "a major political event." Marszalek explores the political consequences of all of this - how Jackson's opponents gleefully watched this unfold, while allies like John Calhoun developed into enemies, and political players like Martin Van Buren saw an opportunity to wheedle his way onto Jackson's good side.
He spent an inordinate amount of time defending her, trying to prove her critics wrong, insisting that the ostrasizing end and punishing those who disagreed - instead of, you know, running the country like a president probably should. So it was all just foolishness - except that Jackson couldn't let it go. She was "bold and aggressive in manners and speech," but "infamous for no particular transgression," he writes, "but everyone heard the rumors that she was an immoral person and that was enough to stigmatize her." Marszalek does a thorough job separating the truth from the unfounded allegations, when some who try to tell a condensed version of the story conflate all of it. It was the gossips who smeared her with allegations of promiscuity and infidelity in order to justify their treatment of her. Washington society snubbed Cabinet wife Margaret ("don't call me Peggy") Eaton, to the great consternation of President Andrew Jackson, even though her only crime seemed to be her forwardness and lack of early 19th century womanly refinement. And for better or for worse, he does seem to have produced the definitive account. Brands' Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times dispenses with the whole affair in about a half dozen pages. This book on the Eaton (or less genteelly, the "Petticoat") Affair begins by noting how historians have tended to view the scandal as "either a major political event or an inconsequential foolishness." And in the more than two decades since its publication, that's continued to be the case - Jon Meacham's American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House devotes a seemingly endless amount of space to contemporary gossips' every utterance about the scandal, while H.W.
0 kommentar(er)
