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“American Lion’: A roaring portrait of Andrew Jackson

Old Hickory, sex symbol?

Jon Meacham’s marvelously readable “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House” brings alive a profoundly flawed but dazzlingly charismatic American original.

Savage in war, madly romantic in love and fiercely loyal, our seventh president — as portrayed by this biographer — has little in common with the irascible populist from high school history.

In Meacham’s narrative, this dynamic Tennessean could win a Southern charm-off with Bill Clinton. His devotion to his wife, Rachel, rivaled that of Ronald Reagan’s to Nancy. Like JFK and Barack Obama, the snow-haired general had that tall, lean, man mojo. And his childhood makes Lincoln’s look soft. By the time he was a teenager, his parents and siblings were dead.

The author of “American Gospel” and “Franklin and Winston,” Meacham, who is the editor of “Newsweek,” once again displays his gift for illustrating how personal bonds and personal experience influence history.

In “American Lion,” he argues the orphaned Jackson, who would never sire children, spent his life forming substitute families that he would protect like a father, first with his soldiers. (Jackson won a heroic battle in New Orleans over the British in 1815.) Jackson also acted as paterfamilias to his wife’s relatives.

Finally, as president from 1829 to 1837, Jackson saw his role as protecting “the people” from established elites. He transformed the presidency and made it the activist branch we know today.

Jackson’s personal life also influenced his presidency, with serious political consequences. When Jackson took office, he was a bitter, grief-stricken widower. His adored Rachel had died of a heart attack on Dec. 22, 1828. Jackson blamed his opponent, John Quincy Adams, for spreading rumors about Rachel.

The couple fell passionately in love in 1788 when Rachel was married to her abusive first husband. Although they would later insist they thought Rachel was divorced, Meacham writes that the lovers lived as man and wife in 1790 to force her husband into suing for divorce. They were legally married in 1794.

The memory of Rachel’s suffering influenced Jackson the president. He became enraged when Floride Calhoun, the wife of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, snubbed Margaret Eaton, the beautiful wife of his secretary of war whose sexual virtue or lack thereof gripped Washington. “L’affaire Lewinsky” pales.

Meacham makes clear, however, that Jackson, a slave owner, showed none of this fierce gallantry to Africans, nor to Indians. In 1830, he ordered the Cherokees and other Indians to leave their lands. The result: the genocidal Trail of Tears.

You finish “Lion” with mixed feelings about Jackson. He was many things: charming, cruel, clever, courageous, committed to the Union. But never dull.