Robert V. Remini

Andrew Jackson

Remini is best known for his work on America's 7th President Andrew Jackson.^[4] His book Andrew Jackson, published in three volumes (1977, 1981, 1984) is considered his magnum opus. It was originally conceived as a single volume, but Remini tried to convince his editor, Hugh Van Dusen, to allow for two. He at first refused. “We were sitting there in the middle of The Marriage of Figaro and he turned to me and he said, ‘You can have two volumes,’ and that was the beginning of it,” Remini recalled. “Then, when the presidential years grew to be more than another volume, I needed a third volume. I took him to see Tristan und Isolde — and it worked!” The finished series totaled approximately 1,600 pages.^[8] “There was an electrifying dynamism about Jackson that I found irresistible,” Remini said. He went on to call him “the embodiment of the new American." He added, "This new man was no longer British. He no longer wore the queue and silk pants. He wore trousers, and he had stopped speaking with a British accent."^[4]

Remini's works on Jackson have generally received praise.^[4][8] Jon Meacham, an acquaintance of Remini who later wrote his own biography of Jackson, said, “He was practicing a kind of narrative historical biographical craft at exactly the moment when most of the academy was moving toward intellectual and group-driven history.” He continued, “You cannot write about Jackson without standing on Remini’s shoulders.”^[8] While Remini has been credited for his unique focus on Jackson the individual, he has also received criticism for seeing things too much from Jackson's point of view and for identifying too closely with his subject.^[4][8] “Seeing the world through Old Hickory’s eyes, we appreciate him as a complex human being,” history professor Andrew R.L. Cayton wrote in a New York Times book review of Remini's Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars (2001). The problem . . . is that we see the world only through Jackson’s eyes.”^[4] A 1984 review by James M. Banner of the New York Times of the final volume of his Jackson biography-Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845-says that "he cannot be said to be respectful of interpretations more skeptical than his own, nor of being detached." Banner argues that Remini's work is "a biography of the old school, governed by an old strategy and unabashed in its sympathies." He concludes by declaring that Remini's 3 volumes are not "the right vehicle for what we need."^[9] However, the final volume won the 1984 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction.^[2]

Of Remini's three volumes of Jackson, Joel H. Silbey says that "one comes away with the feeling that here is how Jackson saw himself, might have set forth his won case, and wished to be remembered."^[10] In his review of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, Andrew Denson criticizes Remini's "silly" conclusion that Jackson's support for Indian removal saved the Indians from extinction, pointing to the existence of Indian communities east of the Mississippi River as evidence to the contrary.^[11]

Remini wrote a one-volume abridgment to the original series, called The Life of Andrew Jackson, which was published in 1988.^[12] It has been described as similar in analysis and perspective to the original volumes.^[13]

Other work

Remini also wrote biographies of other prominent Americans of the early 19th century, namely Martin Van Buren, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Joseph Smith.^[4] His 1991 biography of Clay, entitled Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union, was well-received.^[14][15] Brian Boylan of the Los Angeles Times credits Remini for the ability to write a fair biography of Clay even after his extensive work on Jackson, who was Clay's "bitter enemy." Remini "treats Clay with such affection and care that after half a century of being a vague name in pre-Civil War American history, Henry Clay springs to life in all his fascinating brilliance."^[14] Historian Otis A. Singletary writes that the biography of Clay was "thoroughly researched and written in a lively and engaging style."^[15] The biography of Webster, published in 1997 as Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize.^[16]

In 2008, Remini published A Short History of the United States, which was just under 400 pages long. According to a book review:

Remini's final chapters are slightly rushed and his judgments too general to be useful, but these flaws are easily overshadowed by his masterful middle sections focusing on the 19th century (his scholarly specialty). In contrast to some surveys of American history, like Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States or William Bennett's America: The Last Best Hope, Remini delivers an objective narrative of this nation's history that readers of all political stripes will appreciate.^[17]

His last work was At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise that Saved the Union (2010).