Avenging the People
Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation
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Narrated by:
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Derek Shetterly
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By:
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J. M. Opal
About this listen
Most Americans know Andrew Jackson as a frontier rebel against political and diplomatic norms, a "populist" champion of ordinary people against the elitist legacy of the Founding Fathers. Many date the onset of American democracy to his 1829 inauguration.
Despite his reverence for the "sovereign people", however, Jackson spent much of his career limiting that sovereignty, imposing new and often unpopular legal regimes over American lands and markets. He made his name as a lawyer, a businessman, and an official along the Carolina and Tennessee frontiers, at times ejecting white squatters from native lands and returning slaves to native planters in the name of federal authority and international law. On the other hand, he waged total war on the Cherokees and Creeks who terrorized western settlements and raged at the national statesmen who refused to "avenge the blood" of innocent colonists.
During the long war in the south and west from 1811 to 1818, he brushed aside legal restraints on holy genocide and mass retaliation, presenting himself as the only man who would protect white families from hostile empires, "heathen" warriors, and rebellious slaves. He became a towering hero to those who saw the United States as uniquely lawful and victimized. And he used that legend to beat back a range of political, economic, and moral alternatives for the republican future.
Drawing from new evidence about Jackson and the southern frontiers, Avenging the People boldly reinterprets the grim and principled man whose version of American nationhood continues to shape American democracy.
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- Unabridged
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The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed - as many at the time feared it would - it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.
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Compelling
- By Jean on 03-05-18
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The Internal Enemy
- Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
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one of the best audiobooks I've read recently
- By D. Littman on 03-02-14
By: Alan Taylor
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The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears
- By: Theda Perdue, Michael Green
- Narrated by: George Wilson
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historians Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green paint a moving portrait of the infamous Trail of Tears. Despite protests from statesmen like Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, a dubious 1838 treaty drove 17,000 mostly Christian Cherokee from their lush Appalachian homeland to barren plains beyond the Mississippi. For 4,000, this brutal forced march lead only to their deaths.
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Great audio book
- By Steve on 03-23-08
By: Theda Perdue, and others
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'Mr. President'
- George Washington and the Making of the Nation's Highest Office
- By: Harlow Giles Unger
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Although the framers gave the president little authority, Washington knew whatever he did would set precedents for generations of his successors. To ensure their ability to defend the nation, he simply ignored the Constitution when he thought it necessary and reshaped the presidency into what James Madison called a "monarchical presidency." Modern scholars call it the "imperial presidency."
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A political genius
- By Michael on 03-28-17
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Toussaint Louverture
- A Revolutionary Life
- By: Philippe Girard
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.
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very powerful story
- By jim on 01-06-17
By: Philippe Girard
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Liberty's Exiles
- American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- By: Maya Jasanoff
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.
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Staggering in its Breadth
- By Anders P Morley on 02-21-21
By: Maya Jasanoff
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Without Precedent
- Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times
- By: Joel Richard Paul
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 17 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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No member of America's founding generation had a greater impact on the Constitution and the Supreme Court than John Marshall, and no one did more to preserve the delicate unity of the fledgling United States. From the nation's founding in 1776 and for the next 40 years, Marshall was at the center of every political battle. As Chief Justice of the United States - the longest-serving in history—he established the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of the federal Constitution and courts.
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Scholarly and Accessible
- By Diana Black Kennedy on 03-01-18
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The Indian World of George Washington
- The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
- By: Colin G. Calloway
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 23 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.
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A Washington hate book
- By EJ morris on 02-08-19
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A Disease in the Public Mind
- A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War
- By: Thomas Fleming
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time his body hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, abolitionists had made John Brown a "holy martyr" in the fight against Southern slave owners. But Northern hatred for Southerners had been long in the making. Northern rage was born of the conviction that New England, whose spokesmen and militia had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern "slavocrats" like Thomas Jefferson. And Northern envy only exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: race war.
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Listen skeptically, but still listen
- By David on 04-01-21
By: Thomas Fleming
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The American Slave Coast
- A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
- By: Ned Sublette, Constance Sublette
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 30 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of "breeding women" essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves' children, and their children's children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could be decommissioned only by emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States.
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Get "The Half Has Never Been Told" instead!
- By Ary Shalizi on 11-28-16
By: Ned Sublette, and others
What listeners say about Avenging the People
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Philo
- 06-25-19
A sharper, scarier view of early USA than I had
Wow! Seeing this, I realize what a shallow postcard image my mind had of USA's beginnings. This place was chaotic in a legal sense as well as a sense of physical hazards. It is a complicated path from a "state of nature" to settled land titles and from the sense of property-as-first-right-of-possession (of course, requiring dispossession of the existing locals) to transferable debt instruments held far from the land involved, and enforced by absentee owners through lawyers. Being a lawyer would invite as much hostility then as (I have experienced it to) recently. This is a fascinating approach path too -- through situations into personalities, centrally Andrew Jackson's. He spanned all these roles and, given his colorful and combustible nature, in ways entertaining as well as enlightening.
Here, the stories are vivid, yet factually precise. The deft, yet sober style reveals countless nuances of ideas, the life then, and people. The listener is rewarded at turns with sharp explorations of the roots of law, culture, politics, rhetoric, and the popular press. Just as the Founders did, the reader is led to consider the examples of great thinkers and orators going back to the Romans and even the Hebrew Bible, as these informed and shaped the thinking, speaking and acting of these pioneers on a stage of (sometimes bloody) action. In short, this book provides a deep education.
The story deepens into ever-bloodier scenes as Jackson's always self-involved personality evolves from resentful and fiery to a pathological and ghastly hue. There is no one (aside from his beloved Rachel, though his regard is often only his own fantasy projection), trusting in him or otherwise, he will not betray on his path to glory, all lit with homicide. He has no problem snatching some orphaned native child and sending him off to Rachel as a "toy" for his own adopted white son. He has no problem changing the script on his volunteers for his own vainglorious frolics beyond their original missions and contracts (always into more genocidal mayhem), and threatening deserters from this with death (and sometimes having it dealt out). Every principle becomes a rallying cry to violence, served up with very conscious lawyerly public-relations twist. I shudder, looking into this dark mirror, that this man was elected our president. He makes the much more humorous and many-faceted (!) Donald Trump look like a mild-mannered milk-toast, like the nicest guy you ever met. Only the vast error-absorbing (and blood-absorbing) openness and pre-media silences of this land absorbed this endless wake of suffering and self-absorption. The worst part is what this says about our forebears, to lift him on their shoulders. If USA, by its luck or divine favor or whatever, could survive this horrid man, we might make it through our present straights. The author is careful to note the misbehaviors of the natives, so this is no white-wash. That gives this a damning credibility. This was harder and harder to listen to. Nowhere outside of eastern Europe in the 1940s have I heard of such scenes. And yes, the Nazis consciously absorbed, and excused themselves by, plenty of these examples.
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