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DONALD B. COLE. A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy. (Southern Biography Series.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 332. $59.95

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: 111; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.111.1.166

1937-5239

Howard Watson,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

A key figure in the short-lived but path-breaking Second American Party System, Amos Kendall has long lacked a published biography. Donald B. Cole addresses this need in an account that is thorough, fair-minded, and illuminating. As befits the man who was celebrated in his own lifetime as the most elusive member of President Andrew Jackson's entourage, however, key aspects of Cole's subject remain obscure. Born in 1789, the thin, sickly son of a moderate Massachusetts farmer, Kendall worked his way through Dartmouth College and headed for Kentucky, where he found employment as a tutor in the home of Henry Clay. Always looking for something better, Kendall eventually became a partisan editor and political organizer. Disappointed and uncomfortable with his original patron, Kendall gradually moved away from Clay, first into the ranks of Kentucky's Relief and New Court parties, and then into the camp of presidential candidate Jackson. Cole places young Kendall firmly in the republican tradition of the revolutionary era but models his story as an example of Americans' gradual transition to democracy and liberalism. Although Kendall became famous for his slashing denunciations of banks, corporations, and the antirepublican abuses of what scholars now call the Market Revolution, Cole describes him as a pragmatist, or even an opportunist, with more use for political organization than ideological principles. Certainly his gifts in both organization and rhetoric attracted the attention of Jackson, and Kendall followed the general to Washington in 1829, where, as Fourth Auditor of the Treasury, he sought to expose the corruption that Jackson was certain had overtaken the federal government.