When I flipped through Kevin D. McCann‘s The Peg Leg Politician on my way home from the book shop I realized that this was not a book that would doze on the shelf forever once I had read it. Now that I finished it I already reread a number of passages and there is still much to delve into more deeply.

This is what makes the book special to me:

A) Information
Primarily the book is a biography of Adam Huntsman, a distinguished lawyer and a politician of growing importance in pre-Civil War Tennessee who as a member of the Tennessee Senate and as a United States Senator was a well-known and influential figure of his time.

As a European, I found answers to questions on a more general level like: How did politics work in a Southern US state on a local and regional level? How did politicians interact, and what key issues were there? What was the life of a lawyer like, then and there?
Scholars of Tennessean history will appreciate McCann’s analysis of the political developments and social world that formed the platform on which Adam Huntsman interacted so lively with figures whose footprints in history were to be more lasting than his.

B) The fun factor
You will get to know a most colorful personality, vividly brought to life in this biography which includes some highly amusing anecdotes, partly involving his chief antagonist, David Crockett.

C) Professionalism
McCann includes a bibliography of more than 250 sources, from the 1810s to the 2010s. Yes, this is a solid piece of scholarship, not just another non-fiction book. You can always tell facts from deductions and assumptions based on them.
Though I’m a foreigner and much less well informed than any American historian I feel safe to say that McCann helps improve the understanding of the 1830s and -40s by spotlighting this contemporary politician. He comes up with new details and arrives at a well-based assessment of that figure’s role in history, while balancing the scholarly approach with refreshing scenes of the subject’s life.

D) Bonus material
Letters, newspaper articles, illustrations, a genealogy, and a political satire by Huntsman about Crockett including Crockett’s response, round off the picture of a remarkable yet largely forgotten political figure whose active phase spanned the Presidencies from Andrew Jackson to James K. Polk.
And there’s still more: the list of Huntsman’s slaves with short sketches of their individual fates touched me. Saving their memories is a merit in itself.
One more remark about the pictures: Huntsman lived before the photographic age, and apart from very few cartoon-like drawings there seems to exist only one portrait of him. McCann solved the problem by adding drawings by Wade Dillon that give an idea of Huntsman’s possible appearance.

E) All in all
You can feel that the author enjoyed creating this work. It absorbed me and I found as much fun in it as in a good novel. ( )