Driven West: Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears to the Civil War

A. J. Langguth

Nov 2010 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Mel Foster

About this audiobook

By the acclaimed author of the classic Patriots and Union 1812, this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation. After the War of 1812, Presidents Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk led the country to its Manifest Destiny across the continent, but the forces and hostility unleashed by that expansion led inexorably to Civil War. As president, Andrew Jackson decreed that the Indians of Georgia be forcibly removed to make way for the exploding white population. His policy set off angry debate in the Senate among such giants as Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, and protests from writers in the north like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who represented the growing abolitionist movement. Southern slave owners understood that those protests would not stop with defending a few Indian tribes.

About the author

A. J. Langguth, a professor emeritus of journalism in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is the author of almost a dozen books, including Union 1812, Patriots, Driven West, and Our Vietnam. He lives in Los Angeles.

Mel Foster, an audiobook narrator since 2002, won an Audie Award for Finding God in Unexpected Places by Philip Yancey. He has also won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. Best known for mysteries, Mel has also narrated classic authors such as Thoreau, Nabokov, and Whitman.