Author: John Spencer BassettPublisher:
ISBN: 9781331337409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Book Description
Excerpt from The Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. 1 Probably the first person to take thought of a life of Andrew Jackson was Jackson himself. His letters show that he began to preserve material for his biographer from the time he became a public personage. The drafts of the letters he wrote, the letters he received, and his simplest public papers were carefully filed away in boxes. Some of the papers were endorsed, "To be kept for the historian." They became numerous with the wars against the Creeks and the British, his first great achievements; and out of that phase of life came his first biography. To Major John Reid, military aide, faithful companion in the darkest hours of trial, author of many of Jackson's military papers, and a man of real ability - as his book shows - was entrusted the task of preparing this story. He carried the narrative through the Creek war before it was interrupted by death in 1816. Jackson was concerned to find a man to complete the work, and at last hit upon John H. Eaton, then a promising young lawyer whose industry was so great that the book was placed before the public in 1817. Its origin, progress, and completion were all under the direct oversight of Jackson himself. Eaton brought out a second edition in 1828, with chapters bringing the story down to date. It was not a critical work, but the parts which had no bearing on the political campaigns of 1824 and 1828 were well written. Reid particularly recommends himself as a straightforward historian. Jackson's political career brought forth a plentiful crop of biographies, all of which are mentioned in the exhaustive preface to Parton's "Life of Jackson." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
