Andrew Jackson Make America Great Again Rachel Jackson

Thanks to Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson is in faddy once again. A few weeks ago Trump tweeted "Go get the new book on Andrew Jackson by Brian Kilmeade…Really adept. @foxandfriends." Trump of course fancies himself equally an heir to Jackson, a comparison first peddled by the now out-of-favor Steve Bannon. I has lost count of the number of times Trump has been photographed with a portrait of Old Hickory looming backside him, most inappropriately during a ceremony honoring the Navajo code talkers, veterans of the Second Earth War. It is not clear if Trump has read Kilmeade's new book on Jackson and the Boxing of New Orleans, only he is reportedly a diligent viewer of Kilmeade's morning time show on Play a trick on news. The two class apparently a mutual admiration lodge. Having recently presented at a conference on Andrew Jackson marking his 250th altogether at Yale University, I am struck by how this historical illustration is more false than truthful. Perhaps even the ghost of Jackson is protesting since the historic magnolia tree he planted at the White House in honour of his beloved wife, Rachel, has finally given up and will be removed. Nosotros are living in an age of non just fake news but imitation history.

Traditionally, Jacksonian Democracy, the emptying of property holding qualifications for voting and an attack on Hamiltonian economic views, was understood to represent the expansion of American democracy, albeit for developed white men only. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put forward this view in his magisterial The Age of Jackson in 1945. Many American historians since have retold that familiar story of what was called the Republican-Democratic Party, cartoon a linear genealogy of American democracy from Jeffersonian Republicanism and Jacksonian Democracy to FDR's New Bargain liberalism. Counter narratives that portrayed Jackson as an Indian killer and slaveholder accept long inhabited the edges of the history of Jacksonian Democracy. More than recently they have occupied center stage. But the history of Andrew Jackson, indeed Jacksonian Commonwealth or every bit information technology was properly called past many contemporaries, "the white human being's democracy," is a bit more complicated than either version. Today, Trump and his followers have sought to encompass Jackson and his newfound admirer nether a wide blanket of populism. But this endeavor 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.

Conscientious historians of the age of Jackson take shown that the institution of white manhood suffrage preceded the election of Andrew Jackson, even though the process continued to unfold during his Presidency, and that the white man's democracy in the United States was accompanied by the disfranchisement and severe curtailing of black men'south suffrage in many northern states. Jackson represented the coming of age of the "common man" or what I would phone call the common white homo. Moreover his economic 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 as the American system, proved to be a windfall for "pet" Autonomous state banks and champions of free trade. When it came to white women, Jackson's chivalry, his undying allegiance to his dead married woman and his decision to uphold the honor of Peggy Eaton, wife of his Secretary of War, fifty-fifty at the toll of risking his administration, stands in glaring contrast to Trump's calumniating attitudes and behavior toward women. While it is important to note the limits of Jacksonian Democracy, political, social, and economic, it is articulate that Trump'due south accession, personality, and policies take little in common with Old Hickory'south.

In 1824, Jackson was denied the White House co-ordinate to his supporters by a "corrupt bargain" between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, who combined their back up 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 election past the Electoral College, while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly iii meg votes, the most in American history in a presidential election, could not be farther from this scenario. Whatever kind of populism Trump evokes, he cannot fifty-fifty lay claim to the attenuated, racially exclusive nature of Jacksonian democracy. The profoundly anti-democratic nature of Trump's ballot, aided past America's rotten borough Electoral College, land 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 70 percentage of eligible male voters typically cast ballots in elections. In contrast, a minority of a minority voted for Trump. Fifty-fifty at the symbolic level, while Trump blithely lied most 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 Democracy, 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 democracy presaged the emergence of a new kind of mass democratic politics in the Us.

Trump's attempt to claim Jackson's economic populism, with all its limitations, is similarly misguided. Trump and the party he represents have fabricated information technology articulate that theirs' is the party of the 1 percent, the plutocrats and billionaires, even faux ones like Trump himself. The uneasy political alliance between southern slaveholders and northern obviously folk in the Autonomous Political party built painstakingly past Jackson'southward lieutenant, Martin Van Buren, would unravel under the pressure level 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 Autonomous Party founded by Jackson was an immigrant friendly ane, equally long as they were white. Irish and German Catholics flocked to its standard put off by the evangelical, Protestant tone of its rival, the Whig political party. Today of course nativism is a authentication of the modern GOP and Trump has perfected it past abusing Americans of Mexican descent and with his idiotic plans to build a border wall. As Lincoln, calling out nineteenth century nativists, put it, "Equally a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We at present practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get command, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some state where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russian federation, for case, where despotism tin be taken pure, and without the base of operations alloy of hypocrisy." Trump's campaign, it appears, took that advice literally.

The one part of Andrew Jackson'south legacy that Trump'southward many critics, historians and pundits, have referred to in comparison him to Jackson is the latter's reputation every bit an Indian fighter and enslaver. Even the nearly ardent of Jackson'south admirers cannot prettify his record here. During the Showtime Seminole War, in defiance of directly orders, he pursued and killed hundreds of Creeks and equally President, presided over the infamous Trail of Tears that forcibly displaced nearly xl,000 Cherokees, resulting in the decease of around iv to five g. Jackson's personal fortunes were linked to the expansion of the slavery-based Cotton Kingdom, as 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 every bit in a new Jackson biography by Steve Inskeep.

Like a majority of the slaveholding democracy's early Presidents, Jackson was a slaveholder who had no qualms about owning human property or dispossessing Native Americans from their lands. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, Jackson'south adoption of the Creek orphan, Lyncoya, and his call to arms to the blackness population during the Boxing of New Orleans reveals a complicated racialist outlook. Adoption signaled not only benevolence but assimilation and cultural death for Native Americans, a stride above extermination. Jackson was too willing to recruit not just free blacks only also the enslaved in defense force of the slaveholding commonwealth during the War of 1812. African American abolitionists consistently reprinted Jackson'due south announcement of gratitude to the free blacks of New Orleans right down to the Civil State of war in their demands for citizenship. In 1836, he pardoned Arthur Bowen, an eighteen-twelvemonth old enslaved man sentenced to hang for threatening his mistress, at her behest. He deliberately arranged that the pardon should take consequence on July quaternary.

Jackson'southward staunch nationalism at times trumped his provincial identity every bit a southern slaveholder. He is a crucial figure in the development of the antebellum American state, a government of courts and parties every bit the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called it. The antebellum political party organization emerged defined past his persona and policies. One can likewise trace the origins of the regal Presidency to Jackson, much earlier than the twentieth century as virtually historians have argued. His Whig critics called him King Andrew and a recent biographer J.1000. Opal, draws attention to his vengeful personality. But Jackson'southward actions against perceived enemies of the nation state were much more than the upshot of fits of pique. He held no truck with abolitionists, enervating the federal censorship of their literature. Just he also famously held no truck with South Carolinian nullifiers and the extreme states rights ramble views of their avatar, John C. Calhoun. Jackson'southward forceful announcement against nullification or the alleged correct of a state to nullify a federal law, which he linked to disunion and the tyranny of minority rule, was the one precedent that Lincoln could evoke in issuing his Emancipation Announcement in the midst of Civil State of war.

Different Jackson, Trump has kind words for those who take committed treason confronting the United States or have been divers every bit its enemies, an odd position for someone so devoted to the Stars and Stripes that he has attacked football players kneeling earlier information technology. Trump is particularly fond of neo-Confederate Nazis giving them the respect he has withheld from African American soldiers killed in combat. Trump'due south inane suggestion that Jackson could have avoided the Civil 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 political party of Trump is the party of Calhoun rather than the party of Jackson.

Contrast also Jackson's liberal utilize of patronage to staff federal appointments with Trump'southward failure to fill many crucial positions in government. Trump and the current Republican Political party'southward anti-statist views would exercise away with regime in either its earlier autonomous or modern technocratic and bureaucratic incarnations. In the long history of the American Presidency, Trump, every bit historian Sean Wilentz recently argued, has no precedent, and his attempt to evoke Jackson's 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

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