Seven years ago, as Donald Trump moved into the White House, it seemed that every opinion writer was obliged to produce an essay comparing him to Andrew Jackson. People close to Trump like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Pence insisted on the comparison during Trump’s inauguration. Trump found a painting of Jackson in the
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| Addressing Navajo veterans of WW2 in front of that painting |
White House art collection to hang over his desk. Trump visited the Hermitage, Jackson’s 1000-acre home outside Nashville, that March. He also spoke admiringly of Jackson, with his characteristic precision and clarity of language: "an amazing figure in American history—very unique so many ways.” And Jackson seemed to provide the writers a hook on which to hang a story about the beginning of a Presidency that otherwise appeared to be unprecedented.
The essays they wrote ranged from mocking to serious to fearful. Some noted that both were tall men, although Jackson was rail thin and Trump is obese. Some noted that both were considered outsiders despite their wealth. There are caveats here, because Jackson began his life as an impoverished orphan while Trump was heir to his father’s real estate fortune. Also, Jackson had actually served as a judge, and - briefly - as a Congressman and a Senator. Trump, by contrast, had never served the public in any capacity whatever before being elected President. The pundits made laughing contrasts between the military histories of the two men: Jackson was a Major General in the War of 1812; Trump attended one of those private boarding schools where they wear uniforms. Trump avoided actual military service by receiving five draft deferments, the last one for a bone spur which miraculously disappeared with the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the voluntary Army.
Since the 2020 election there is a new point of comparison which I have not seen mentioned. Trump keeps on shouting about how the Presidency was “stolen” from him. He and his supporters are impervious to the fact that he lost both the popular and the electoral vote to Joe Biden. (He also conveniently forgets the fact that he was elected in 2016 despite the fact that more people voted for Hilary Clinton.) In his day, Jackson, too, felt that a conspiracy denied him the Presidency in 1824. That year, he received more popular and more electoral votes than any of the other three candidates. But because nobody had a majority, the election was sent to the House of Representatives as the Constitution requires. Congress picked John Quincy Adams. Jackson did not, however, like Trump, urge his followers to break into Congress and seize power. He just ran again in the elections of 1828 and 1832 and won both, then stepped down after two terms following the custom established by George Washington. I am afraid that if Trump gets back in, he will never surrender power.
Getting back to the pundits of 2017, the truly significant comparison they made about Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump was their racism. I will not examine Trump’s white supremacist ideology here, but it is worth taking a closer look at Jackson's.
Long before running for President, Andrew Jackson made hisreputation as an “Indian fighter.” That meant that he led troops armed with guns - US regulars, state militias and Indigenous Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw allies - against traditionalist Creeks armed mostly with bows and arrows. He massacred about a thousand of them, then forced all the Creeks - both those who fought against him and those who fought alongside him! - to sign a treaty ceding a huge portion of their land. Anytime you see that phrase “Indian fighter” it is worth stopping to interrogate it. It usually stands in for dawn attacks on peaceful camps (Custer), burning tens of thousands of acres of farms and orchards (John Sullivan), and giving medals to buffalo hunters for destroying Native livelihoods (Phil Sheridan.) “Fighting” was often the least of it.
How about his racism as President? Jackson considered one of his greatest accomplishments to be pushing the Indian Removal Act through Congress. That law pretended to be voluntary, but it forced about 60,000 Indigenous people from 18 tribes to leave their homes, their farms, and their cemeteries, and to move west of the Mississippi. We use the phrase “Trail of Tears” to describe that removal, but it doesn’t really capture the full horror: a QUARTER of the forced migrants died along the way while under guard by the US Army. It doesn’t really capture the gross criminality of white people shooting their Native neighbors to death in their own homes then stealing the furniture - and even the flooring! It doesn’t capture the hunger of Native people whose crops were burned by white people intent on stealing their farms. None of this was voluntary. I will return later to the historians who deny that this was genocide or a policy of white supremacy.
Jackson was also an enslaver and a human trafficker. At any given time he enslaved 100 to 150 African American people who did all the work that made him rich. But they weren't always the same people: he also got rich by buying and selling them: over the course of Jackson's lifetime about 300 different individuals passed in and out of his "ownership". Jackson admirers claim that he was “generous” with the Black people he enslaved. I will just note an ad he posted in the newspaper for several weeks in the fall of 1804 for an unnamed “runaway man,” who he described as “six-foot one, stout-made, and active.” Jackson offered a $50 reward for the man’s return, along with an extra $10 for each hundred lashes, up to three hundred. It begs the question: Generous with what?
Must I explain why it is racist to believe that Black people are so different from white people that whites should be allowed to enslave them? I will note that Jackson appointed Roger Taney to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Taney wrote in Dred Scott v Sandford that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” [Italics mine.]
There are still defenders of Jackson today, and they can be found among self-proclaimed liberals, too. They raise the tired argument that “he was a product of his times.” They say we are inappropriately applying the "changed standards" of our time to a different historical period. Do they think that Black people at that time believed they were meant to be enslaved? Do they think that Jackson's unnamed “runaway man” thought so? Do they think that the Cherokee agreed with Jackson that they were "doomed to weakness and decay”? And if they argue that, well, white people at that time thought so, they are still mistaken, because there were large numbers of white people at that time who opposed both slavery and ethnic cleansing. But - more importantly - they are also making my point for me, because they are saying that the opinions of Black and Indigenous people don’t really matter when we are evaluating the standards of that time.
But I am not writing this about the open racists who want to defend an Andrew Jackson. What bothers me is the so-called “liberals” who ignored all this as long as they possibly could. Who called (and still call) Andrew Jackson a “man of the people” without asking “Which people?”
Let's start with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and his 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning work The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger may have been the essential American liberal of the 1950’s and 60’s. With former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey (then mayor of Minneapolis, later Senator and Vice President), theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith (his fellow Harvard professor) Schlesinger founded the Americans for Democratic Action, the organization for liberals back then. Schlesinger was also well known as a member of the inner circle for both President John Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert Kennedy.
I emphasize Schlesinger’s liberal credentials because of the difference between the way he summarized Andrew Jackson in 1945 and the way all these political pundits did at the time of Trump's inauguration. The Age of Jackson is 500+ pages long. It contains not one mention of Jackson’s policy of Indian Removal. He does discuss the landmark Supreme Court case of Worcester v Georgia 31 US 515 (1832) No Natives were party to that case, though. Eleven Protestant missionaries had gone to work among the Cherokee Indians and the State of Georgia arrested them all for living among Natives without a state permit. The Court held that the Constitution explicitly forbids the states from making Indian policy, restricting that to the Federal government. The Court's decision is important for that precedent alone. It is also historically significant because both the State of Georgia and Jackson simply ignored the Court’s ruling and kept the missionaries in prison. But Schlesinger doesn't discuss this as a case about Native rights. Because it was about Protestant missionaries, he decides that it was a conflict between President Jackson and the mainstream churches... which somehow enhances Jackson's democratic credentials.
How does Schlesinger treat Jackson's relationship with African American people? Not at all. He can’t ignore the growing conflict in the US over slavery, but he tells us about Jacksonians who opposed Abolition on the grounds that wage workers in the North were poorly treated, too!* This is far from a discussion of Black people.
Schlesinger himself admitted this lack of attention in a 1989 reflection on The Age of Jackson in the New York Review of Books on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of its publication. Most of the article is a proud defense of his original book. But toward the end of the long article he briefly noted: “When I wrote The Age of Jackson, the predicament of women, of blacks, of Indians was shamefully out of mind.”
Despite this professed “shame” Schlesinger could not help but try to excuse himself. He added in a footnote, “Those who condemn Jackson and his works out of hand because of his Indian removal policy should, before rushing to judgment, read Francis Paul Prucha, ‘Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment.’” Prucha’s piece, written in 1969 in the Journal of American History, was a scandalously bad apology for Jackson. It was based on what Jackson said, not what he did. Jackson claimed for example - and Prucha echoed this claim - that the Indian Removal Act was voluntary. The truth? It pretended to be, but was not in practice.
And Schlesinger's 1989 article doubled down on his defensiveness. He preceded his admission - “shameful” as it may have been - with a disclaimer: “As new preoccupations seize historians in the present, we discern new possibilities in the past. In this sense, the present persistently re-creates the past.” This is both undeniably true and irrelevant. Schlesinger was writing this retrospective in 1989, not 1945. Why was he still not concerned with “the predicament of women, of blacks (sic), of Indians”? And I must ask, why were you not concerned back in 1945?
The pundits writing about the incoming President Trump described Andrew Jackson as a racist genocidaire and slave driver. Was that merely a reflection of “new preoccupations”? Or was that view still being contested by self-described liberals, even in this new millennium? Were even those pundits ambivalent about the central importance of Jackson's racism? To answer, I want to look at how some other historians have looked at Jackson.
In 1891, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a sketch on Jackson for the Chautauqua Review. The 34-year old Roosevelt was then mainly known as a historian. His works on The Naval War of 1812 and The Winning of the West were well received by academics and the public. He had served three years in the New York State Assembly, but he had not yet headed up the New York police. He had not yet worked in the Department of the Navy, led a volunteer cavalry regiment, nor been Governor of New York. If Roosevelt already believed then that he would soon be President, he was definitely the only one who did.
Back to Andrew Jackson. Roosevelt wrote that Jackson loved horse-racing, cock-fighting, and games of chance. He wrote that when Jackson moved to Nashville in 1788 it was populated by “Indian fighters**, game hunters, and frontier farmers” whom he approvingly describes as “a manly race.” And he noted of Jackson’s reputation as a brawler that “Duels and street fights were at that time the recognized methods whereby gentlemen expressed their discontent with one another.”
Roosevelt already liked to think of himself as a “tough guy.” He had boxed while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He was also fond of retelling the story of three boat thieves he and two of his employees captured on the Little Missouri River in North Dakota. I am absolutely compelled to note that the then-27-year old Roosevelt, like any Gen Z Instagrammer today, brought along a camera to document this adventure. I am including this photo of him (left, in buckskins) guarding his prisoners with a double-barreled shotgun. I am charmed by the presence of a buffalo skull in the photo. I absolutely believe that he had one of his employees, perhaps the same one who
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| Theodore Roosevelt, left, guarding his captives. |
took the picture (no selfies with wooden cameras and glass plates!) place it in the frame to make for a more exciting picture. I am also compelled to remember that Donald Trump also likes to think of himself as a “tough guy” despite the fact that long before he had a Secret Service detail he already traveled with a body guard to protect him. In any case, Roosevelt also tells us that when Jackson had “discontent” with Tennessee governor John Sevier, “each had such a reputation as a fighter that the other was a little bit cautious.” I read that to mean that “gentlemen” only engaged in street fights and duels with men they were confident of beating.
A second historian who later became President assessed Jackson, too. When he wrote his 1893 work, Division and Reunion: 1829-1883, Woodrow Wilson was a professor at Princeton University. I have to conclude that he agreed with Roosevelt’s view of “a manly race” because he applauded:
the capacity of the English race to combine the rude strength and bold initiative that can subdue a wilderness with those self-controlling habits of order that can build free and permanent states.
A little flowery, to be sure, but the same general conclusion. He wrote of Jackson’s move from North Carolina to Tennessee that:
he had been obliged to eke out a shabby livelihood by saddle-making and working in the fields; had preferred horse-racing, cock-fighting, rough jests, and all rude and heedless sport to steady labor.
Wilson may have been less complimentary than Roosevelt about Jackson’s enthusiasms, but he definitely listed the same ones.
What impresses me about both of these is how we only see enslavement and ethnic cleansing in the background, the unspoken tasks of a “manly race” that “can subdue a wilderness.
But this is not a mere artifact of a less enlightened time. Let’s take a look at some contemporary historians who still consider themselves liberals. Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, for example, never disappoints. He has staked his considerable reputation on joining the most backward politicians in attacking Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project. Wilentz's critique hangs almost entirely on a single point in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay.*** That one point certainly fails to justify Wilentz’s wholesale denunciation or his keeping company with racists and fascists like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. It also demands that we ask ourselves what his underlying objection is, other than the fact that Nikole Hannah-Jones is a journalist and not a PhD historian.
This is about Jackson, though, so let’s take a look at Wilentz's defense of Jackson in his 2006 Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. Wilentz acknowledges that Indian Removal was at the center of Jackson’s plans, but complains about the way it is now characterized. I cannot quote him directly, because the writing is so convoluted,**** so I'll paraphrase: Historians today who criticize Jackson for genocide think he overturned the "ethical community" the United States was before he became President. I don't know where he is getting this stuff. Someone must have said something like it, but it is definitely a caricature of the views of his academic rivals. Moreover, it looks to me like a piss-poor defense of killing 15,000 men, women, and children while driving them a thousand miles from their homes.
Wilentz is not alone among supposedly liberal historians. Professor Robert Remini of the University of Chicago was probably the preeminent 20th-century historian of the Jackson era. He produced a three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson, among many other works. What does he say on the subject of Indian removal? In his 2001 book, Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars, Remini argues that Jackson was not an Indian hater, not trying to hurt them, but was rather trying to save them from the “inevitable annihilation” they would face if they remained in the East. This argument insists that while the US Army was easily powerful enough to carry out an ethnic cleansing against Indigenous people it was completely impotent to protect them against their greedy, murderous White neighbors. Remini wrote:
It needs to be remembered that removal was never just a land grab. That is too simplistic an explanation. Jackson fully expected the Indians to thrive in their new surroundings, educate their children, acquire the skills of white civilization so as to improve their living conditions, and become citizens of the United States. Removal, in his mind, would provide all these blessings.
Like Francis Paul Prucha above, Remini accepts Jackson’s public pronouncements in defense of his policy and takes them more seriously than he takes the policy itself. And he returns, again and again, to this (imagined) “inevitable annihilation.” Here is just one example:
Given the greed of whites for Indian territory and their insatiable demands that would only accelerate in the coming years, and given the fact that the two races could not and would not "intermingle" or live side by side, Jackson felt he had no choice but to insist on removal as the only means of preventing conflict and Indian annihilation. As "hard and cruel," as the policy was, wrote one contemporary a short while later, it "is now universally felt to have been as kind as it was necessary.”
Describing the Trail of Tears as “kind” really stretches belief. But I also have to say that everything in the first part of that passage was just as true seventy years later when the Sooners started invading what was then formally called Indian Territory and what is now eastern Oklahoma: the same “greed of whites for Indian territory,” the same insatiable and accelerating demands, the same racism. Watch Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-nominated “Killers of the Flower Moon” for just one small episode of the murderous white land grab in Oklahoma.
But, despite that, the truth is that the Cherokee are still with us, not annihilated. I have to repeat that: annihilation was not inevitable, for the Cherokee, or the Creeks, or the Choctaws or the Chickasaws, or the Seminoles whose removal was the aim of the Jackson Administration. Not for the Apache, not for the Lakota, not even for the Delawares, who Remini claims (p.55) were already annihilated in the 1830’s when Jackson was creating the policy of Removal, allegedly to “protect” the remaining Native people. Remini, writing at the turn of the 21st century surely knew all this. So why is he blinded to it in his writing?
I quoted Schlesinger earlier where he explained why each new generation of historians discovers something new in the past, why they are still writing new histories of the American Revolution and the Civil War, new biographies of Grant and of Hamilton. Schlesinger wrote that “The present persistently re-creates the past.” And that is true. But what got me going on this Trump-motivated assessment of Jackson is the persistence of a certain line of defense. It is a thread that appears beginning with the intellectual defenders of Jackson in his own time, the Orestes Brownsons and George Bancroft’s who populate Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson. It is a thread that continues through the historical work of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to Schlesinger himself and beyond, to Robert Remini and to Sean Wilentz.
This is the thread that describes Andrew Jackson as a “man of the people.” One must ask “Which people?” because he was certainly not a man of the Black people or the Native people. It is the thread that characterizes Jacksonian Democracy as expanding democratic right. The truth is that the right to vote was given to white men who weren't property owners. But at the exact same time the rights of Black people were constricted. Before the Jackson era, most Southern states did not bar literacy among Black people, slave or free. Before the Jackson era they did not require free Black folk to leave the state or bar Black people from holding religious services without the presence of a licensed white minister. Even Carl Degler’s 1959 high school textbook in US History acknowledged (in a footnote, of course) that the right to vote was extended to the propertyless simultaneously with withdrawing it from free “Negroes.” And Degler puts no adjective before the word “propertyless.” His default person is white and a man.
And at the exact same time, Jackson was restricting the rights of Native people. He abrogated treaties which the Constitution itself defines as the law of the land. He seized their treaty-defined properties. He seized their very bodies without any justification of law and moved them thousands of miles from home, killing many on the way.
So when historians say that Jacksonian “Democracy” extended the right of people the unspoken words are “white” and “male.” This is not anachronistic thinking; this is not me imposing the standards of today on people in the past. First, it is not anachronistic because women, and Natives, and African Americans all resisted this at the time. And they were joined in that resistance by some white men.
But, importantly for the purpose of this essay, it is also not anachronistic because there are so many people even today who are content to see Black, Asian, and Indigenous people; women, immigrants, and gay people; as other… whether that just means less human or the full Taney: “having no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” And I say “so many people” not “so many white men” intentionally. Because the logic of racial capitalism and of white supremacy is that it enlists white women and white gay men against Black people, Black people against immigrants and Natives and Black women, Natives against Black people and against their own women.
I am glad that so many pundits in the press, writing about Donald Trump on the occasion of his inauguration recognized Jackson’s racism as central to his role in US history. But I have to look, too, at the persistent view, even in their columns, that he represented “the people.”
I will end by repeating the question: Which people?
* If you are interested, Schlesinger also discusses the Nullification Crisis. This was a moment during the Jackson administration when South Carolina decided they didn't have to obey Federal laws they didn't like, in particular a tariff on imported goods. What does this have to do with Black people? you ask. States like South Carolina, whose economies were based on forcing enslaved Black people to raise crops like cotton were dependent on purchasing manufactured goods from elsewhere. They especially liked English and French imports and resented paying tariffs on them.That Jackson rejected South Carolina's nullification of Federal tax law doesn't make him an opponent of slavery. It is far from making him a friend to African American people.
** There's that phrase again.
*** Wilentz has published a 15-page defense of his position titled “The 1619 Project and Living in Truth.” The entire tone of it paints him as a lonely liberal battler against extremism and the lies told by both the left and the right (by which he means anti-racists and racists) He acknowledges, sort of, that his objection to the entire project is a single claim in Hannah-Jones’s intro. She wrote that the American battle for independence was largely motivated by the fear that the British would emancipate the enslaved African Americans. This may or may not have been a contributing factor. Certainly Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that King George had "excited domestic insurrections amongst us" by which he probably meant the British offering freedom to enslaved people who took up arms against the rebellious colonists. I'll say that it may have been one cause. Even Nikole-Jones has since said that it may have been an overstatement. And what of the rest of their introduction? Wilentz's grudging words on the subject are: “There was nothing else in the keynote essay quite so egregious as its discussion of the American Revolution.” And he offers what is, at best, a backhanded compliment to the project as a whole: “The ensuing individual essays were for the most part better, although the quality of historical research and reasoning varied considerably from contribution to contribution.” (I could say the same of Wilentz’s work.) But he hides his actual objection, maybe from himself, in a brief statement later on the page. The 1619 Project, he complains, promotes the view that “America has not really struggled over the meaning of its egalitarian founding principles: those principles were false from the start, hollow sentiments meant to cloak the nation’s reliance on and commitment to the subjugation of Black people.”
**** "Jacksonian Democracy's first crusade, aimed, the critics charge, at the "'nfantilization' and 'genocide' of the Indians, removal supposedly signaled a momentous transition from the ethical community upheld by antiremoval men to Jackson's boundless individualism. Jackson's democracy, for these historians - indeed liberal society - was founded on degradation, dishonor, and death. Like all historical caricatures, this one turns tragedy into melodrama, exaggerates parts at the expense of the whole."
