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Samizdata quote of the day – Andrew Jackson’s political legacy edition“After Butler, America has suddenly become a more Jacksonian nation. The shadow of Old Hickory looms larger than ever, and Donald Trump stands taller as his undisputed heir.” – Walter Russell Mead, WSJ ($) For those unfamiliar with the extraordinary politician and general, Andrew Jackson, check out this link for some biographies and studies. July 15th, 2024 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Andrew Jackson’s political legacy editionLeave a Reply |
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So just two days after countless opinion pieces comparing Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler drive a young man to an assassination attempt on him, you publish one comparing Donald Trump to one of the most evil men in American history. Unbelievable!
Dunno that I’d term Jackson “…one of the most evil men in American history.”
You’ve got far too narrow a scope if you’re going to come to that conclusion, I’m afraid. Andrew Jackson may have been a bastard, and he’s got a damned bad reputation thanks to revisionist history, but the sad fact is, he is what he is due to the people he supposedly “victimized”.
Of course, that’s assuming you’re angry at him over the various Native American tribes that sided with the British receiving their due while Jackson was running things, which is what he’s blamed for. Nobody remembers why he did what he did, or what led to it. Had the various tribes not fallen for the gamesmanship of the European powers that used them as catspaws, American history would be far different than it is. And, likely, Jackson’s life would have been different, leading to him being a different person than he was, historically.
Everyone wants to make believe that all of history takes place in a vacuum, where morality and everything else remains static. They also don’t go digging into the deeper history, and ever ask “Gee, why were the Indian tribes so universally loathed and hated…?”
Deerfield Massacre mean anything to you? Or, was that just cool ‘cos it was the white man (and, woman/children…) taking it in the shorts?
Anyone who wants to comment on the sad history of American/Native interactions really has to go back and look at primary sources, and try to wrap their heads around what actually went on out on the frontiers. It wasn’t what many think; the actual antecedent things for what went on during the late 19th Century Indian Wars springs forth from the earlier slaughters and raids going back to the 1600s in New England and the Old Northwest. Wounded Knee had a nasty back-trail to what the various native tribes did during the French and Indian War, as well as later on during the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812.
It ain’t a really smart idea to ally yourself with the side fighting your neighbors, when you’re the one who has to live next door to them after it’s all over. There were a lot of tribal types who failed to work that out, and paid for it.
I’d honestly have to say that in terms of “most evil”, I would likely vote for the various parties responsible for turning what was limited indentured servitude into outright chattel slavery, and the various tribal types who took up human cannibalism in the desert Southwest… And, if you’re going to extend “America” to include Central America? How about those Aztec priests, the ones who liked to sacrifice humans by the thousands?
Jackson, by comparison? A wholesome individual. Certainly, a better neighbor… So long as you didn’t go out of your way to provoke him.
Amen to what Kirk said.
Come up to the North and visit some of the massacre sites in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Read the writings of those days. No love lost for Indians in those areas, now or then. Jackson would have been a moderate in terms of treatment of the losing-side killers by local standards.
Right on. It doesn’t take much research to find accounts of Indian attacks in Texas that will stand with anything you can find in all of history for their viciousness. One that stands out to me in particular is the killing of a young girl, who had already been scalped, by the repeated application to her skinned head of red-hot knife blades, until she died.
The conflicts between the whites and the Indians were brutal on BOTH sides. Anybody selling anything different is FOS.
Anyway, my nomination for the evil man of US history goes to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who embroiled the US in a foreign war which killed 50K+ young American men so that his cronies could make lots of money selling arms and ammo to the US government. And for an encore he created the Great Society, which has gone a long way toward destroying the country.
Go read “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quannah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” by S.C. Gwynne. After reading about the things the Indians did to captives, you’ll think people like Jackson and Sheridan were down right restrained in their dealings with them. There were atrocities on both sides, but I defy you to find a page in any US Army manual that said gang raping female captives, including children, was an acceptable and normal practice. The myth of the Noble Savage who just wanted to hunt game and smoke the peace pipe and live quietly alongside his neighboring tribes is just that: a myth. Warfare on the frontier was a ghastly business and had been since long before whites showed up.
The sheer fact that the tribes were given reservations and still exist can be chalked up to European values of restraint instead of just going ahead and outright killing every Indian who so much as looked at whites funny. Yeah, they got a raw deal because DC just sucks in general and always has, but the Indians weren’t simply genocided to a man.
You’re entitled to your opinion.
When we put up quotations about things, the contributors to this blog don’t necessarily agree with what a particular person says or does.
Remember what it must have been like before everyone got offended all the time and you could have a conversation about ideas, from whatever source. Just imagine that. You can if you try.
When Andrew Jackson was born and raised most of the world had slavery, and the tribes he is accused of treating so badly practiced slavery themselves. Even the British Empire did not get of slavery till the 1830s – other powers had it much later, for example the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia and other lands, openly practiced slavery till the 1960s (yes – the 1960s).
As for his conduct towards the tribes – Jackson argued that he was no more brutal towards them than they were brutal towards each other – although this sounds very much like the “Warren Hastings defence” that Edmund Burke condemned (basically “those people over there do bad things, so it is O.K. for me to do bad things”). Andrew Jackson also pointed to the remains of ancient towns that he had found – and asked what had happened to these places, what had the nomadic tribes done to them. Modern academia does not like such questions.
Basically the dispute is not over whether violence was necessary, of course it was – no people survives unless they are prepared to use violence against other groups (America today is no longer feared by other groups – which is why millions of hostile people are coming over the Southern border – that will either be stopped, or the United States will be destroyed), but, rather, whether Andrew Jackson or his representative (remember Jackson himself was hundreds of miles away from the “Trail of Tears” and there was no television in those days, he relied on reports that were written by government officials for his information) were CRUEL – with Congressman David Crockett (no stranger to violence) arguing that YES Jackson and his people did slip over into cruelty.
Today we tend to agree with David (not “Davy” please) Crockett – that the violence tipped over into cruelty, in spite of Jackson being a complicated man who, for example, adopted an Indian (“Native American” as his son and sending him to Harvard) – violence is needed to create and sustain a nation (when a people loses the will to defend itself against other population groups – that people signs its own death warrant), but CRUELTY should not be defended.
Economic policy.
Andrew Jackson was quite right to pay off the National Debt – the Hamilton-Clay policy of binding the rich to the state (the government) via the National Debt was politically corrupt (it is called “Civic Nationalism” today – the worship of the government institutions themselves, rather than the support of the people, the nation) and economically incredibly harmful.
Andrew Jackson was also correct to oppose the National Bank – it (like the later, Civil War era, National Banking Acts with their special privileges for the New York Banks) was despicable – both politically (it institutionalised corruption – as the vile “Federal Reserve” system does today) and economically.
However, Jackson’s handing out of money to State level “Pet Banks” was quite WRONG – they (like the Bank of the United States before them) pyramided Credit Money Expansion on top of the gold and silver taxpayer money that was deposited in them – creating a classic Boom-Bust (just as previous Credit Bubble banking had created such Busts as the Crises of 1819 – remember bankers refuse to be honest “Shylocks” they insist on trying to create money, from nothing, which causes economic chaos).
Martin Van Buren (the Vice President of Jackson and future President himself) was correct.
The tax money, the gold and silver, should not be put in a national bank or in State level banks – it should not be put in banks at all, it should be kept (physically kept) in a real “Independent Treasury” and paid out, in cash, to finance government spending – this government spending (and here Jackson and Van Buren were agreed) should be kept to a minimum.
Martin Van Buren was an ex banker himself – he knew that Credit Bubble banking is a scam, a confidence trickster game.
My fear is that this knowledge has been lost and that, for example Donald Trump and J.D. Vance (good people though they are) do not understand, as Martin Van Buren did, that both fiat money and Credit Bubble banking are evils. Terrible evils.
As for keeping down government spending and making sure that only physical gold and silver are treated as money – this was known long before Martin Van Buren or “Bullion Benton” (Senator Benton of Missouri – “of course I remember President Jackson, I shot him once – he was a fine man!”).
It was Roger Sherman, the only person to sign all of America’s Founding documents, who warned about this at the Constitutional Convention.
If the new nation failed to keep down government spending, and failed to ensure that (as the Constitution lays down – Article One, Section Ten) only physical gold and silver be legal tender in any State (anyone who says “that just means the States can not produce paper money – the Federal Government is allowed to” reveals themselves to be a scumbag) – the Republic would be lost.
Government spending has exploded out of control, especially since the 1930s, and most “money” today is not even paper (let alone gold or silver)_ – it is just numbers on screens, what Roger Sherman would, rightly, call Book Keeping Tricks (which the “financial industry” and the Corporations that depend upon it, is based on – fraud, very complicated fraud, but still fraud).
So Roger Sherman would not be surprised that the Republic is collapsing – any more than Martin Van Buren or Senator Benton would be surprised.
This is what they feared would, eventually, happen.
Benjamin Franklin argued that government, at all levels of spending – local-State-and-Federal, should not spend more than 10% of the economy.
In this Franklin agreed with Marshal Vauban of France (the famous general of Louis XIV) who wrote “The Royal Tithe” – an argument that all taxes, but one, should be abolished, and that the sole tax should take no more than 10% of the economy of France (the “Sun King” reacted to this by having the book burned by the public executioner).
Even in the 1920s America had gone beyond that (local-State-and-Federal-spending taken together), if we are talking about the size of government that the Founders (even moderates like Ben Franklin – yes he was a moderate, there were Founders who wanted a lot smaller government than he did) wanted, then we are talking about before the First World War.
As for Civil Liberties – as John Bright and Prime Minister Gladstone understood, if you have an Income Tax that means (by its very nature) that you have no real privacy from government – every detail of your life becomes the business of the government.
So 1913 (not 1933 – 1913) is the great crack in the American free Republic – with the creation of the Federal Income Tax and the Institutional Corruption of the Federal Reserve system.
When the great Corporations are dependent on funny money (Credit Money) created by a state supported body (for the talk of a “Gold Standard” in the 1920s concealed a massive Credit Money expansion – which, inevitably, ended in a vast bust) then it is not just an “economic” matter – the political institutions and culture of the Republic are corrupted.
The Indians Jackson had removed had become peaceful assimilationists by the time of the trail of tears. He just hated Indians.
(The farm where I live was once one of Jackson’s personal land grabs, and I’m a tenth generation Jackson hater.)
There’s plenty more to dislike Jackson for, including his personal corruption and furtherance of “democracy” to advance it. And he’s the first President to wreck the economy!
I don’t have a subscription. Did Mead go on to discuss other American populists….William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt, Huey Long, Robert LaFollet, Ross Perot…….?
@Steven R
Go read “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quannah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” by S.C. Gwynne. After reading about the things the Indians did to captives, you’ll think people like Jackson and Sheridan were down right restrained in their dealings with them.
But part of the problem that many today had, and most in Jackson’s day had, is to even talk about the “Indians” as if they were one homogeneous mass. The Comanches were the absolute worst, more akin, in my view, to MS-13. In fact MS-13 are charming in comparison. I remember reading about an attempt to do a prisoner exchange which they rebuffed by skinning a little six year old girl alive in front of her parents. This story is probably in the book you referred to.
But many other tribes were not. To stick with the “C”s the Cherokee, one of the targets of Jackson’s trail of tears were on the contrary a peaceful and assimilated, even sophisticated tribe. And I wonder how peaceful and nice we all would be if the Canadians started moving south taking over our land and destroying our society. How we’d feel if we were herded into reservations or saw our food supply destroyed both for sport and genocide.
I’m on America’s side for sure, but that doesn’t mean that I think the Indian tribes deserved what they got or were all the same. Some of those battlefields represent embarrassments for America as much as the Indians.
However, it is worth remembering also that the Indian tribes were to all intents and purposes stone age people when first encountered. They had no manufactured metal, no wheels, no machinery, very few had writing systems (the Cherokee being one exception) little medicine and so forth. So the west brought a lot of good things to them too.
BTW, one thing worth knowing when I hear people getting a bit too worked up about the trail of tears is that the Cherokee brought most of their possessions during the relocation, including their slaves… Which is something worth pointing out to people who get a bit too caught up in their ideas of the noble savage.
Which is to say the history is much more complicated than the simple “cowboy and indians” we used to have, or the “noble savage vs. the western imperialist” that now seems rather more prevalent.
True enough. Aborigines were not saints. (“Mutant message down under” belongs in the fantasy section.) They even had slaves- women were traded between tribes, and children and girls were snatched by men if they found them alone. The book ‘Red Kangaroo’, by Ion Idress, is an eye-opener.
Fraser Orr The Cherokee syllabary only dates from the early 19th century, long post contact.
Sequoyah was a great Cherokee and a great American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
“The farm where I live was once one of Jackson’s personal land grabs, and I’m a tenth generation Jackson hater.”
That’s about seven generations too many to hold a personal grudge against a historical figure who died 179 years ago.
@staghounds
Fraser Orr The Cherokee syllabary only dates from the early 19th century, long post contact.
Thanks for the correction!!
Fraser Orr,
I’m not trying to say there was a plain vanilla Indian that every tribe and person was, like a cookie cutter version. The Eastern Indians were different from the Plains Indians who were different from the Western Indians who were different from the Arctic Indians and so on. But the English and French, and later Americans, had to deal with their own horrors. Indian raids to take captives, mass rapes, murder of babies in front of their mothers, captives sold as slaves to the French and English to be used on plantations in the Caribbean, warfare, the whole nine yards. The big difference was the Colonists had two centuries to beat the Indians into submission and the Indians couldn’t use the horses for sheer mobility like the Plains Indians. In any event, their ways were alien to the Europeans and while something like the mass rape of female captives and then treating the women like chattel slavery would be perfectly normal to the Indians but were repugnant to the Europeans and the local Indians had to either adapt of be destroyed
It is funny though that with the Eastern Indians during the Colonial era, commentators stated that the farther into the frontier one went, the more the more the lined between colonist and Indian blurred. Both cultures took what they wanted from the other so you had Englishmen in buckskins and Indians in wool and cotton. But it was still a terrible existence at times. When the French-Indian War (the North American part of the Seven Years War for our European readers) ended, one of the provisions was that children taken captive had to be repatriated. Consider a child taken as a captive at age five or so, raised as an Indian, and then one day he’s told he’s going home because of a treaty. He no longer speaks English, doesn’t remember his white family, and is separated from his Indian family. Or the other side of an Indian child raised as a white child, sent to white schools, grown up as a white man, and then told that was over.
It’s been done for us, and quite well. https://www.amazon.com/White-Deborah-Larsen/dp/0375712895
JJM, we’re not so keen on Oliver Cromwell or Bloody Mary, either. 😉
Staghounds presents the David Crockett argument concerning Andrew Jackson and the Indian tribes – and there is a lot of truth in the David Crockett argument. Although it should be noted that “assimilation” meant, till the 1920s, leaving a tribe – a person could not be a member of an Indian tribe and a U.S. citizen at-the-same-time till the 1920s – this is often missed in discussion of the topic. Jackson did not say (at least did not officially say) people of Indian “blood” could not stay – he said that members of tribes could not stay, the “a man can not be loyal to two different polities” (the tribe and the United States) argument – Vice President “Indian Charlie” Curtis, a proud member of his tribe AND a proud American citizen, refuted that argument in the 1920s (but that was 90 years later).
As for “wreaked the economy” – I have already presented where Jackson was wrong (his support of the State “pet” banks) and where he was right (his opposition to the despicable Bank of the United States and his opposition to the National Debt).
Jackson’s main opponents, the Henry Clay Whigs, were much worse – they were wrong on every economic question. Although the Henry Clay Whigs were vastly more moderate than today’s establishment – which is evil, insane, or both.
And without men like Andrew Jackson, yes men of violence, the United States would not exist – and without men like him, it will not endure.
It should be noted that the first great Credit Money bust in the United States (if one does not count the Continental paper money of the Revolutionary War period) was in 1819. Hence “The Panic of 1819”.
Credit Bubble banking – Credit Expansion (creating “money” from nothing and lending it out), is wrong – both morally and economically.
And Central Banking does not help limit it – on the contrary, it makes vastly worse, as the Federal Reserve has done since 1913.