Andrew Jackson Make America Great Again Rachel Jackson

Thanks to Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson is in vogue again. A few weeks agone Trump tweeted "Go become the new book on Andrew Jackson by Brian Kilmeade…Actually good. @foxandfriends." Trump of course fancies himself as an heir to Jackson, a comparison first peddled by the now out-of-favor Steve Bannon. One has lost count of the number of times Trump has been photographed with a portrait of Quondam Hickory looming behind him, most inappropriately during a ceremony honoring the Navajo code talkers, veterans of the Second World State of war. Information technology is not clear if Trump has read Kilmeade's new book on Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, just he is reportedly a diligent viewer of Kilmeade'due south morning show on Fox news. The two grade apparently a common admiration society. Having recently presented at a conference on Andrew Jackson marking his 250th birthday at Yale University, I am struck by how this historical illustration is more false than true. Perhaps even the ghost of Jackson is protesting since the celebrated magnolia tree he planted at the White House in laurels of his beloved married woman, Rachel, has finally given up and volition be removed. We are living in an age of non just fake news but imitation history.

Traditionally, Jacksonian Democracy, the elimination of property holding qualifications for voting and an attack on Hamiltonian economical views, was understood to represent the expansion of American republic, albeit for adult white men only. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put forward this view in his magisterial The Historic period of Jackson in 1945. Many American historians since have retold that familiar story of what was called the Republican-Democratic Party, drawing a linear genealogy of American democracy from Jeffersonian Republicanism and Jacksonian Democracy to FDR's New Deal liberalism. Counter narratives that portrayed Jackson as an Indian killer and slaveholder have long inhabited the edges of the history of Jacksonian Democracy. More recently they have occupied centre phase. Only the history of Andrew Jackson, indeed Jacksonian Democracy or as it was properly called by many contemporaries, "the white human's commonwealth," is a bit more complicated than either version. Today, Trump and his followers have sought to cover Jackson and his newfound admirer nether a broad blanket of populism. Merely this attempt reveals the disjunctures rather than the similarities between the white man'due south republic of Andrew Jackson and the alt-right, white nationalism of Trump, a product as much if not more of fascist, anti-democratic forces of the twentieth century rather than of its nineteenth century antecedents.

Careful historians of the historic period of Jackson take shown that the establishment of white manhood suffrage preceded the election of Andrew Jackson, even though the procedure continued to unfold during his Presidency, and that the white human being's democracy in the United States was accompanied past the disfranchisement and severe curtailing of black men'southward suffrage in many northern states. Jackson represented the coming of age of the "common human being" or what I would phone call the common white man. Moreover his economical policies that would define the Second Political party System of the American Republic, anti-Bank of the United States, anti-infrastructure, and anti-protection or what was known equally the American arrangement, proved to be a windfall for "pet" Democratic land banks and champions of free trade. When information technology came to white women, Jackson'south knightly, his undying allegiance to his dead wife and his determination to uphold the honor of Peggy Eaton, wife of his Secretarial assistant of State of war, even at the price of risking his administration, stands in glaring contrast to Trump's abusive attitudes and behavior toward women. While information technology is important to note the limits of Jacksonian Republic, political, social, and economical, it is clear that Trump's accession, personality, and policies accept piddling in common with Old Hickory'southward.

In 1824, Jackson was denied the White House co-ordinate to his supporters by a "corrupt bargain" between John Quincy Adams and Henry Dirt, who combined their support in the Electoral Higher to defeat Jackson, winner of the national pop vote. In 1828 and 1832, Jackson won the Presidency by overwhelming majorities in the popular vote count. Trump's ballot by the Balloter College, while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton past nearly three one thousand thousand votes, the virtually in American history in a presidential election, could non be further from this scenario. Any kind of populism Trump evokes, he cannot even lay merits to the attenuated, racially exclusive nature of Jacksonian democracy. The profoundly anti-democratic nature of Trump's election, aided by America'due south rotten civic Electoral College, state and local level Republican schemes of voter suppression and gerrymandering, stands in glaring contrast to the course of American commonwealth in the nineteenth century when the electorate expanded dramatically and over lxx percent of eligible male voters typically cast ballots in elections. In contrast, a minority of a minority voted for Trump. Even at the symbolic level, while Trump blithely lied nigh the size of his inauguration crowd, a contemporary critic had this to say about the "multitude" at Jackson's inauguration, the largest since the institution of the Commonwealth, that literally stormed the White House: "The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros [sic], women, children, scrambling fighting, romping." Jacksonian republic presaged the emergence of a new kind of mass autonomous politics in the United States.

Trump'south attempt to claim Jackson's economical populism, with all its limitations, is similarly misguided. Trump and the party he represents take made it clear that theirs' is the party of the 1 percent, the plutocrats and billionaires, even fake ones like Trump himself. The uneasy political alliance between southern slaveholders and northern manifestly folk in the Democratic Party built painstakingly by Jackson's lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, would unravel under the pressure of the slavery controversy by the eve of the Civil State of war. But the Republican Political party of today is an ideologically pure party of reaction, religious, economic, social, and political. While remaining closed to African Americans, the Democratic Party founded past Jackson was an immigrant friendly 1, equally long every bit they were white. Irish and German Catholics flocked to its standard put off by the evangelical, Protestant tone of its rival, the Whig party. Today of class nativism is a hallmark of the mod GOP and Trump has perfected information technology by abusing Americans of Mexican descent and with his idiotic plans to build a border wall. Equally Lincoln, calling out nineteenth century nativists, put it, "As a nation, we began past declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, information technology will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some land where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for case, where despotism tin be taken pure, and without the base blend of hypocrisy." Trump'due south entrada, it appears, took that advice literally.

The one part of Andrew Jackson's legacy that Trump's many critics, historians and pundits, have referred to in comparing him to Jackson is the latter's reputation as an Indian fighter and enslaver. Even the most ardent of Jackson's admirers cannot prettify his record here. During the First Seminole War, in defiance of direct orders, he pursued and killed hundreds of Creeks and equally President, presided over the infamous Trail of Tears that forcibly displaced nearly 40,000 Cherokees, resulting in the death of around iv to 5 thousand. Jackson'south personal fortunes were linked to the expansion of the slavery-based Cotton Kingdom, every bit a slave trader and slaveholder. The casual cruelty in his directive to pay ten dollars for a hundred lashes each inflicted on his delinquent slave belies myths of a paternalistic slaveholder reproduced uncritically as recently as in a new Jackson biography by Steve Inskeep.

Similar a majority of the slaveholding republic's early on Presidents, Jackson was a slaveholder who had no qualms about owning man property or dispossessing Native Americans from their lands. At the same time, Jackson's adoption of the Creek orphan, Lyncoya, and his phone call to artillery to the black population during the Battle of New Orleans reveals a complicated racialist outlook. Adoption signaled non merely benevolence but assimilation and cultural death for Native Americans, a pace above extermination. Jackson was too willing to recruit not merely gratis blacks but also the enslaved in defence of the slaveholding republic during the War of 1812. African American abolitionists consistently reprinted Jackson's proclamation of gratitude to the costless blacks of New Orleans correct down to the Civil State of war in their demands for citizenship. In 1836, he pardoned Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-yr old enslaved man sentenced to hang for threatening his mistress, at her behest. He deliberately arranged that the pardon should take effect on July quaternary.

Jackson's staunch nationalism at times trumped his provincial identity as a southern slaveholder. He is a crucial effigy in the development of the antebellum American state, a regime of courts and parties as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called it. The antebellum party system emerged defined by his persona and policies. One can besides trace the origins of the imperial Presidency to Jackson, much before than the twentieth century every bit most historians accept argued. His Whig critics called him King Andrew and a recent biographer J.M. Opal, draws attention to his vengeful personality. But Jackson'south actions against perceived enemies of the nation state were much more than the effect of fits of pique. He held no truck with abolitionists, demanding the federal censorship of their literature. But he as well famously held no truck with Southward Carolinian nullifiers and the farthermost states rights ramble views of their avatar, John C. Calhoun. Jackson'south forceful proclamation confronting nullification or the alleged right of a state to nullify a federal police, which he linked to disunion and the tyranny of minority dominion, was the one precedent that Lincoln could evoke in issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of Civil War.

Unlike Jackson, Trump has kind words for those who accept committed treason against the United states or have been defined equally its enemies, an odd position for someone and so devoted to the Stars and Stripes that he has attacked football players kneeling earlier it. Trump is specially fond of neo-Amalgamated Nazis giving them the respect he has withheld from African American soldiers killed in combat. Trump's inane suggestion that Jackson could have avoided the Civil State of war through compromise would probably surprise Jackson's critics and supporters alike well acquainted with his uncompromising defense of the American Wedlock and willingness to bring the country to the brink of state of war during the nullification crisis over federal tariff laws. Similar many historians, I have studied Andrew Jackson, and Trump is no Jackson. Ideologically, the GOP today, the party of Trump is the party of Calhoun rather than the party of Jackson.

Contrast also Jackson's liberal use of patronage to staff federal appointments with Trump's failure to make full many crucial positions in government. Trump and the current Republican Party's anti-statist views would do away with regime in either its earlier democratic or modern technocratic and bureaucratic incarnations. In the long history of the American Presidency, Trump, as historian Sean Wilentz recently argued, has no precedent, and his attempt to evoke Jackson'due south legacy to legitimize the continuing horror of his Presidency is as many of his actions and words, implausible.

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Source: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/167881