evidence: It was James Parton, America’s most prolific "great man" biographer of the nineteenth century, who convincingly captured the unsettling appeal of Andrew Jackson. The two-term President was, he stated, a "democratic autocrat." This wasn’t the only one of Parton’s paradoxes. His Jackson was at once a "patriot and a traitor"; he was among the "greatest generals" in history and yet "wholly ignorant of the art of war." The "first of statesmen" who had "never devised" a piece of legislation. To his rowdy followers, Jackson was the common man’s hero; to his outraged, outspoken enemies, he was an imperious imposter—"King Andrew I."