President Donald Trump suggested this week, in an interview on Sirius XM radio, that Andrew Jackson could have avoided the Civil War by negotiating a settlement. “Why could that one not have been worked out?,” he opined.
The statement launched a flurry of criticism from historians—who noted, among other things that Jackson died more than a decade-and-a-half before the Civil War began—and stirred a feeding frenzy among comedians and satirists.
But the lifting up of Jackson by Trump has a much deeper origin than simple historical amnesia. According to a recent article on Zerohedge, the renegade financial blog:
“When Trump moved into the White House on 20 January, he immediately hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. The current U.S. President has made no secret of the fact that the seventh U.S. President is both his role model and his idol. Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has repeatedly compared Trump to Jackson. After the new President’s inauguration, for example, Bannon said: ‘I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House.’ ”
In March, Trump made a visit to honor Andrew Jackson’s grave in Tennessee, placing a wreath on his tomb.
Jackson is an important symbol for Trump and his advisers, and his mention now may presage a plan to overturn a proposal by former President Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to replace Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill.
The Washington Post, in its report on the history of Jackson’s image on U.S. currency, noted that it is not the first time that Jackson’s darker history has been ignored. It noted that the Trail of Tears—Jackson’s cruel and deadly relocation of Native Americans—was “barely mentioned” in Arthur M. Schlesinger’s 1945 biography of Jackson. “Instead, Jackson was more of a populist figure, seen as a ‘champion of the working class against the business community.’ ”
Trump’s supporters are quite aware of the symbolism of honoring Andrew Jackson.
“Tough and seemingly at war with the world, Jackson was the leader America needed while it struggled to survive as a fragile republic in a sea of powerful regimes hostile to the idea of liberty,” writes the Daily Signal, a conservative website owned by the Heritage Foundation. The article concludes: “The President is taking a stand for Jackson with this small gesture, which simply draws the line. It shows the world and the American people that we are proud of who we are and what we mean to be again.”
But such an analysis ignores what even Jackson’s contemporaries saw as flaw. For instance, as the Post noted, Jackson’s biographer of record in 1888, James Parton, gave him a decidedly mixed review:
“He was one of the greatest of generals, and wholly ignorant of the art of war,” Parton wrote. “A writer brilliant, elegant, eloquent, without being able to compose a correct sentence, or spell words of four syllables. The first of statesman, he never devised, he never framed a measure. He was the most candid of men, and was capable of the profoundest dissimulation. A most law-defying, law-obeying citizen. A stickler for discipline, he never hesitated to disobey his superior. A democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.”
Sounds like Donald Trump does have a sense of history after all, and has chosen to celebrate Andrew Jackson for some very personal and political reasons.