I've been reading the books that Santa brought me, and enjoying them very much. Today's exercise is to write four and only four sentences on each of them. Two of the books are a part of a series on American Presidents edited by Arthur Schlesinger, written by an array of scholars and historians, two others are by a Lincoln scholar who I particularly enjoy and who has visited Fort Wayne numerous times, and given interesting talks on our 16th (and greatest) president.

1. Andrew Jackson by Sean Wilentz

Wilentz delivers a tremendously engaging book about our 7th president, packed into less than 170 pages, which strives to judge Jackson's administration in an even-handed way, despite the passions that his memory still evokes. Some historians (and polemicists) dismiss Jackson as a genocidal, racist monster, owing to his slave ownership and his brutal "Indian Removal" policies, despite his transformational populist, democratic (small d) campaigns and governing style. Jackson fought against and destroyed the Bank of the United States - which otherwise was a bastion of unchecked federalist power - and forcefully (via the Force Bill) knocked over South Carolina's nullifiers. The image that the reader ends up with is of a very tough fellow who - once in a fight - will never back down (his body had numerous bullets in it from duels and war wounds, and his head had a trench-like scar on it, where a British soldier struck him with a sword, when Jackson was a teenager in the Revolutionary War)

2. Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream by Gabor Boritt, and The Gettysburg Gospel; the Lincoln Speech that Nobody Knows by Gabor Boritt

Boritt is a great favorite, because he makes every effort to place things in context, and he incorporates a lot of historiographical commentary into his historical analysis. The Gettysburg Address book , for example, makes the point that that speech was more or less overlooked by mostly all the newspapers of the day; the address really only grew in stature in the very late nineteenth and early 20th century, as the increasingly inconvenient Emancipation Proclamation declined in popularity. Boritt lives in Gettysburg, and teaches at the Gettysburg College - which was there when the battle and the catastrophic aftermath came to town - and he paints a vivid picture of how the locals dealt with the maelstrom of dead and wounded, and then the visit of the president. In his book on the Economics of the American Dream, he educates us about Lincoln's economic Whiggery, wherein he supported high protective tariffs and extensive national ("big government") support for internal improvements such as railroads and canals and port improvement, and which was an unbroken belief all his life - even as he muted it in 1860 so as to keep the disaffected Democrats and Free Soilers in the new Republican anti-slavery coalition.

3. Benjamin Harrison by Chales Calhoun

In the late 19th century, Indiana was a critically important "swing state" in presidential politics, ranking right beside New York as almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, so that if a candidate had support across the state, he was automatically a serious contender for the White House. Benjamin Harrison was an honored Civil War brigadier general, successful attorney in Indianapolis, and the grandson of the short-lived President William Henry Harrison ("Tippecanoe" from the old "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too" campaign), so he had the required war record, Indiana connection, and "name recognition". As his law practice flourished, Harrison and his wife built a lovely home on Delaware Avenue in Indianapolis. He was a sparkling stump speaker, and could 'think on his feet', which served him well in law and in his developing political career. The interesting thing about his political career was that he seemed always to lose, and then advance; he ran for the US Senate and lost - even as his campaign efforts helped many Republicans in the state; he ran again and won the seat, only to lose his bid for re-election. His name got put into the race for the GOP nomination and he lost, only to win the nomination 4 years later, whereupon he lost the popular election to Grover Cleveland even as he prevailed in the Electoral College; and then he lost his bid for re-election in a rematch against Grover Cleveland 4 years later. More importantly at that point, he lost his wife two weeks before his re-election defeat (he was precluded from campaigning much by her extended illness, and his heart wasn't in it anymore in any case). The book on Harrison was surprisingly good, because I knew nothing about him going in (history remembers him as the guy in between Cleveland's two terms, if it remembers him at all), but in important ways he pointed the way for President McKinley - who is often remembered as "the first modern president". President Harrison had an activist legislative agenda, and got many important bills passed in his one term, including the Sherman anti-trust act, the McKinley Tariff Act, and the Silver act - and his timely soft-money manuevers prevented full-blown economic panics from occurring on two occasions (whereas after he was defeated, Cleveland's inept Hard-Money Democratic ideology smashed into the wall, and the economy went into a severe depression, costing the D's both houses of congress and the White House four years later). His diplomacy was mostly reactionary (as opposed to McKinley's unvarnished imperialism, which repelled President Harrison in later years), and he kept us at peace...although he was actually ready to go to war with Great Britain over seals in the Bering Sea! (thankfully, that was averted)

When President Harrison came home to Indianapolis, he was 59 and had no wife...so he ended up marrying his wife's sister's daughter Mame....which angered his daughter and son-in-law - but tough noogies for them!