After reading this book, I suddenly understood why so many Indians today believed that there was some sort of genocide being worked against them. This book covered a very unglorious period of our nation's history and how our nation grew. The author proves to be quite informative in his study and tried to take everything within the context of the period. Was the Indians in the east coast doomed as Jackson believed? The book make it very plain that they were doom because of people like Jackson. If the whites were honorable and true, most of these Indian nations would have survived easily but since the whites were not, the Indians were doomed as Jackson stated and wanted. Its almost amazing how treaties were made and thrown away like toliet paper. After reading a book like this, it really hard for our nation to stand so tall morally. Yes, all this took place a long time ago but we still whine about Pearl Harbor and the Alamo like yesterday. Our nation commited thousands of Pearl Harbor and Alamo on the American Indians as this book tell us so I think for that, it worth a read.

The list of Remini's work at the beginning of the book shows that he has devoted the better part of his career to studying and writing about Andrew Jackson. For me, that makes this work infinitely more valuable than a "popular history" written by someone who has dealt with everyone from Crazy Horse to General Patton. It enables the author, in dealing with this one aspect of Jackson's career--his wars and treaties with American Indians--to show how it all meshes with his personal and political outlook. He also adds ample insight into the American culture of the time.

I was very impressed that a person who had spent so much time with his subject was able to treat him so even handedly. He did not, in any way, make Jackson into the hero he was believed to be in his own lifetime. The author shows that, at times, Jackson could be a dictatorial maniac. He is also not depicted as being highly intellectual. However,Remini makes it clear that Jackson was just the kind of person America needed at the time, to accomplish its goals (no matter how inhumane they might have been).

In fairness to potential readers, I must admit that this was not the kind of book that "I could not put down." Even though I read quite a bit of history, especially dealing with the many Indian Wars, I didn't really get drawn into this until the point where Jackson got more involved in his political career and closer to the presidency. Though I don't know if this is due to the writing, or simply my personal interests. Even so, this did spark an interest, for me, in the life and career of Andrew Jackson, and I now look forward to reading some of Remini's other works on the man.

Although Americans are prone to refer to Jackson as "Old Hickory" or, in his day, as "the Hero", the Indian tribes of his day gave him the nickname of "Sharp Knife". This nickname was based upon Jackson's unrelenting warfare against the Creek Indians, particularly at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Professor Remini shows in his careful and thorough study of Jackson and the Indians that the sobriquet was indeed well deserved. The book is a thorough and careful exposition of the cruelties practiced on the Indians during the Jacksonian Era culminating in their removal from their homes and their relocation west of the Mississippi River during and subsequent to Jackson's Presidency.

Remini is a master of his materials. He has written a National Book Award winning biography of Jackson together with many other works on the Jacksonian Era of our history.

After a brief introductory chapter summarizing Jackson's early years, Remini plunges into the story of Jackson's Indian wars. Prior to his Presidency, Jackson conquered the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Seminoles in fierce no-quarter fighting. Jackson was resolute in his wish to remove the Indians from the Southeastern United States.

In addition to his leadership on the battlefield, Jackson was a participant in many treaties with the Indians in which the ceded large portions of their ancestral domain in return for small tracts of land and small sums of money. Here too, Jackson was a domineering, seemingly irresistible figure intent on opening the Southeast to the onrush of white settlement, with little regard for the effect of his actions on the Indians.

As a national hero based upon his victory at the Battle of New Orleans and his conquests of the tribes, Jackson narrowly missed the Presidency in 1824 but was elected in 1828 and 1832. He was able to implement the policy of Indian removal he had conceived in his years as a general and a treaty negotiator. He secured legislation from Congress authorizing the removal of the "Five Civilized Tribes" -- the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles -- and implemented this policy at great cost and suffering to the Tribes. It is a story all too little known today.

Jackson was a man of determination, strength, and will. He was also, in Remini's account, an American patriot. Shocking as was his treatment of the Indians, Jackson was moved by considerations of American Nationalism. In particular, he wished to protect the coastal areas of the United States from intrigue and invasion by England and France. The European powers tended to use the Indians as a means to threaten the United States.

Although he is properly critical of Jackson's cruelty, arrogance, and deceit towards the tribes, and of the horrors they underwent during the removal, Remini argues that there was no good alternative to the removal policy. If the tribes had not been removed they would have been overwhelmed by onrushing white settlement and lost entirely their tribal identity, as was the case with many northeastern tribes. Paradoxically, Jackson proved right in that the removal policy saved the southeast tribes from extinction. Of course, none of this excuses the cruelty with which the process was implemented; and Remini is far from trying to excuse it.

I came to Remini's book after reading an earlier study of Jackson and the Indians: Michael Paul Rogin's book " Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian." I wasn't entirely happy with the Rogin because of its hypercritical tone and because of its psychologizing. Remini's book constitutes a more thorough,thoughtful, and balanced consideration of this sad period in our history. This is a good book for those who wish to try to understand Indian policy and its role in our country's development.