By Karen Parr-Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – Andrew Jackson, the seventh American president, was as hard as a coffin nail when it came to leading men into battle or fighting Indians. This earned him the name “Old Hickory,” but a lesser-known side was Jackson’s Southern gentility.
Fans of history can learn more about Jackson’s identity as a Southern gentleman at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9 at Austin Peay State University. At that time historian Mark R. Cheathem will discuss his new book, “Andrew Jackson, Southerner,” during his lecture in Morgan University Center, room 103B. The event is free and open to the public.
Cheathem said that historians have tended to view Jackson as a Westerner or Democrat based on the evidence, “including Jackson’s self-identification as a Westerner and a champion of the common person.”
No historians to date have studied Jackson’s Southern identity as thoroughly as has Cheathem, he maintains.
“What I think my biography offers is a more complete understanding of who Jackson was,” Cheathem said. “Very few historians have acknowledged his Southern identity, and no one has looked as him in that vein as extensively as I have. By adding this new interpretation of Jackson, I hope I have complicated the way that we think about his life, both realistically and symbolically.”
When Jackson died in 1845, he was one of Tennessee’s wealthiest men. Jackson had extensive landholdings, including the Hermitage plantation, along with numerous slaves. He was certainly no common man.
“He had used Southern kinship networks to reach prominence and had employed the Southern code of honor and violence to defend his reputation as an elite Southern gentlemen,” Cheathem said.
Minoa Uffelman, an Austin Peay State University associate professor of history, said, “There was much more to him and his time, and Dr. Cheathem will place Jackson in a broader historical context. There is only one period in American history named after a person, the Age of Jackson, indicating his significance.”
For more information, contact Uffelman at uffelmanm@apsu.edu.
Karen Parr-Moody began a career as a New York journalist, working as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, a beauty editor for Young Miss and a beauty and fashion writer for both In Style and People magazines. Regionally, she has been a writer at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper and currently writes about arts and culture for Nashville Arts magazine each month.