The year 1832 was pivotal in Andrew Jackson’s presidency. He defeated Henry Clay to secure a second term and launched the policies that came to define his administration and his legacy.
These moments are among many captured in the latest volume of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, a UT project dedicated to transcribing and publishing the president’s entire written record.
Volume X, which covers 1832, is now available through UT Press. In 1832 Jackson pursued his removal of the Southeastern Indians, dismissing a Supreme Court decision in their favor as “still born.” He vetoed the Bank of the United States, declaring that “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” And he faced down the South Carolina nullifiers with a presidential proclamation warning that “disunion by armed force is treason.”
The project’s digital edition—a searchable database within the Rotunda American Founding Era Collection from the University of Virginia Press—has a new feature that will make it more valuable, thanks to a partnership with the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress recently loaded images online of its Andrew Jackson Papers and Martin Van Buren Papers manuscripts, which were previously available only on microfilm. Through a collaboration between UT’s Jackson project, the University of Virginia Press, and the Library of Congress, web users are now able to click from the printed versions in the project’s digital edition to images of the actual manuscripts in the library.
“This means that anyone wishing to see the original manuscript of a Library of Congress document that we printed in our volumes can click to it directly from our Rotunda edition,” said Daniel Feller, editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson and UT professor of history. “It also means that users can now use our edition to discover hundreds of documents in the Library of Congress that had not been properly catalogued before and were therefore essentially invisible.”
The UT project recently received a new grant of $115,500 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a federal agency.
So far, UT Press has published 10 volumes of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, covering his life through 1832. Volumes 11 and 12 are in progress. UT Press’s agreement with the University of Virginia Press makes the entire series available online to scholars around the world. New volumes are added after they are published.
UT faculty, students, and staff have online access to the entire American Founding Era Collection. Members of the public may use it on site at John C. Hodges Library.
—
CONTACT:
Lola Alapo (865-974-3993, lola.alapo@tennessee.edu)
Daniel Feller (865-974-7077, dfeller@utk.edu)