David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler are less interested in the sources of Jackson's behavior than in its effect on other people and the course of United States history. The point of Old Hickory’s War is to demonstrate the continuity between the Creek War of 1813–1814 and the First Seminole War of 1818 and the centrality of Jackson’s will to each. In a particularly well researched and well written narrative, they are successful in this demonstration. From 1813 to the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1818, the southern frontier was never quiet and Jackson was never far from the action. From his celebrated executions of the British citizens Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister to his offer to the government to seize the Floridas, it is clear that Jackson, and not those in the administration who supposedly controlled him, was determining the course of events.
Heidler and Heidler tell the story primarily from the frontier perspective rather than from the vantage point of Washington, but that suits their thesis about where the important action was actually taking place. Though they remarkably refrain from either glorifying or vilifying Jackson's actions against the Indians, the blacks, the Spaniards, and the British in Florida, they do make Jackson’s failings clear. They note how Jackson ignored and broke laws, threw out judicial proceedings he disagreed with, engaged in corrupt land deals, lied to the government, lectured his superiors, misrepresented his own actions, worked at cross purposes with civilian authority, and generally considered himself a law unto himself. To Jackson, no civilian government was superior to his military authority.
Yet Heidler and Heidler demonstrate how similar to our own age was the early American republic. All was forgiven because Jackson's actions were popular. They served the purposes of white southern planters seeking more land to exploit and a federal government bent on expanding the boundaries of the United States at the expense of its neighbors. Though Henry Clay railed at Jackson's behavior publicly and John C. Calhoun did so privately, President James Monroe fell silent and even the old puritan John Quincy Adams cynically welcomed Jackson's flamboyant indiscretions because they made possible his one-sided treaty with Spain.
Ruthless self-interest and contempt for the weak drove both Jackson and the United States on the Florida frontier in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Heidler and Heidler tell the story in great detail, and they tell it well. They do not try to dress it up with romantic visions of honor or selfless devotion to the protection of dependents. The southeastern frontier was not a pretty place, and the bold and defiant types who inhabited it, like Andrew Jackson, were worshipped for their success, not the sometimes ugly means they used to attain it.
Lawrence Frederick Kohl