The Valuations

In February 1825 the House of Representatives handed the presidency to another man, and Andrew Jackson spent the rest of his life collecting on it. He was elected in 1828, re-elected in 1832, and left office in 1837. By then he had signed the Indian Removal Act, concluded roughly seventy removal treaties, and presided over the deportation of approximately fifty thousand people.

He came out of the Waxhaws, on the unsurveyed Carolina border. The Revolution killed his mother and both his brothers before he was fifteen. He destroyed the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and dictated the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which took some twenty-three million acres. He beat the British at New Orleans in 1815 and invaded Spanish Florida in 1818 without orders. He has been on the twenty-dollar bill since 1928.

This book holds two records in parallel columns and refuses to bridge them. Jackson genuinely enlarged American democracy: he destroyed the congressional caucus, established the popular mandate as the ground of presidential authority, and in the Bank veto of July 1832 wrote the most powerful statement against oligarchy ever issued over an American president's signature. These were not two careers. The veto and the removal message of December 1830 rest on the same majoritarian premise. The first expands the circle of membership downward to the farmer and the labourer; the second establishes where that circle stops.

Twenty-one chapters stay close to the documents, and the last of them explains the title. In 1836 appraisers walked through the Cherokee Nation pricing every dwelling, fish trap and fruit tree; roughly sixteen thousand people appear in that record by name. Against it stand the other columns: twenty-five million acres opened to cotton, and the enslaved population of Mississippi nearly tripled in ten years. One Army invoice covers lumber for four hundred and sixty-nine coffins in eight weeks at a single post. No list of the dead was ever kept.