Can you imagine a President of the United States who blatantly ignores its conventions, ridicules its established order and appeals beyond these directly to the electorate, 
Jackson once loomed large in our collective cultural memory, but I suspect that memory is now a bit fuzzy for most Americans, who when pressed might at best tentatively identify him as the grim-looking fellow on the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Of course, Jackson has hardly been forgotten by historians, who have long recognized his centrality as the most consequential president of the antebellum era, although their assessments of him have seen a marked rise and fall over time. Once lionized as a giant in the emergence of a more democratic polity and a more egalitarian nation, a critical reexamination in the more recent historiography has revealed substantial “warts,” not only underscored by his leading role in “The Indian Removal Act” of 1830 that led to the deaths of thousands of Cherokees in the so-called “Trail of Tears,” but also in the ill-effects of the long echo of his “spoils system,” the dangerous naivety of his economic strategies including the “Bank War” that led to the Panic of 1837, as well as other forceful if misguided policies that some have argued set irrevocable forces in motion that later resulted in Civil War.
Andrew Jackson has been the subject of hundreds of biographies and related works. A prominent chapter has frequently been devoted to the Bank War, long framed as a flamboyant clash of wills between Jackson, who loathed banks, and the shrewd if hapless Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States. A famous game of cat and mouse prevailed, as the standard tale has been told, with Jackson ultimately victorious, the bank abolished and Biddle sent packing in surprising and ignominious defeat.
It is such a familiar story that has received so much attention in the literature that it might seem unlikely that anything new could be said of it. So, there is then something of real genius in the astute reexamination showcased in the recently published monograph, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America, by Stephen W. Campbell. In this brilliant if not always easily accessible book, Campbell—a historian and lecturer at Cal Poly Pomona—challenges the orthodox narrative that puts Jackson and Biddle front-and-center to widen the lens to encompass the nuance and complexity that informs a long overlooked and far more intricate, multilayered confluence of people and events on both sides. The Bank War was indeed a great drama, but it turns out that there were many more essential players than Jackson and Biddle, and much more at stake than simply re-chartering the bank. As the subtitle suggests, Campbell notes that integral to the Bank War were common threads that ran between post offices, branch banks, and newspapers in what was indeed such a tangled weave that much went unnoticed or disregarded by historians prone to focus on the larger tapestry.
Today we might bemoan certain cable news propaganda vehicles that eschew reporting in favor of distorting, yet at its worst this phenomenon bears almost no resemblance to the partisan press of Jackson’s day, when there was little expectation of any kind of objectivity. In fact, valuable contracts for printing government documents were doled out to the politically simpatico, who were expected to promote the official line. Meanwhile, the Second National Bank through its branches had powerful financial incentives at hand to entice their allies in the press to champion their point of view.
Then there was the post office, which to us perhaps smacks of the anachronistic and irrelevant. Yet, its importance to early nineteenth century Americans cannot be overstated, since it effectively served as the sole vehicle for personal, business, and official communication. But it was not only first-class mail that passed through post offices, but also newspapers, so branches could—and did—act as a kind of local valve for what sort of media could be passed across the counter. It was after all Jackson’s Postmaster General, former newspaper editor Amos Kendall, who famously permitted southern postmasters to refuse to distribute abolitionist tracts, another spark that was to fan antebellum sectional flames. Odd as it may seem now, Postmaster General was the single most valuable cabinet office in that era because of the vast patronage it controlled. Through its direct and indirect influence over the press, the White House clearly stacked the deck against poor Biddle, who despite vast resources could not hope to compete in the arena of what today we might term “messaging.”
While little of this material is in itself new or groundbreaking, Campbell deserves much credit for being the first to astutely connect all the dots of these seemingly unrelated elements to the Bank War. But he goes further, articulately probing the economic realities of American life in the 1830s and deftly fitting the financial institutions of the day into the larger picture. The way banks and the economy functioned then would be almost unrecognizable to modern students of finance. Campbell peels back the fascinating if arcane layers of antebellum banking that other historians of the period have long neglected.
For the world of academia, The Bank War and the Partisan Press is a magnificent achievement, but alas much of it may remain unknown to the wider public because it is not always easily accessible to the general reader. This is not Campbell’s fault: he is after all quite skillful with a pen. But this was originally a thesis expanded into a book, so the strictures of academic writing sometimes weigh heavily on the account. Also problematic, perhaps, is that the text is somewhat rigidly compartmentalized, so that each sub-topic is exhaustively explored by chapter, rather than more seamlessly woven into the narrative. These are mere quibbles to a scholarly audience and hardly detract from the finished product, but I would like to see Campbell revisit this theme one day in another title designed to reach more readers of popular history. In the meantime, if you are a student of Jacksonian America, this is an essential read that receives my highest recommendation.
