The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) details the seventh president’s stormy relationship with the world of early America. It emphasizes his earthiness and bravado, his formative years on the violent trans-Appalachian frontier, his ambition to be a leader of men, and his obsessive belief that a moneyed elite in eastern cities oppressed “ordinary” citizens like those with whom he had grown up. It shows that Jackson was a democrat in name only, impatient with those who disagreed honestly. Friendship, for him, was generally based on a principle of “due subordination,” much as he had come to expect of junior officers during his years as a U.S. army major general.