OUR POPULIST PROLOGUE

IT WAS DUSK ON MONDAY, SEPT. 3, 1827, WHEN THE party from South Carolina drew up at the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s plantation near Nashville. One of the travelers, a young woman named Julia Ann Conner, left a diary account of her surprise at finding that Jackson, whom she had expected to be a wild backwoodsman with a dictatorial bent that led his opponents to call him an American Bonaparte, was in fact nothing of the sort. He was, she recorded, a “venerable, dignified, fine-looking man, perfectly easy in manner.” The Hermitage was filled with history. A brace of pistols that the Marquis