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(Wilentz apparently wrote the letter that was signed by 4 other
historians excoriating the NYT's Project 1619. I am not surprised that
sectarian shitheads at WSWS would find him amenable to their designs.)
NLR 42, NOV DEC 2006
WHITEWASHING JACKSON
by TOM MERTES
Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson
Henry Holt: New York 2005
Reviewing the wave of political upheavals around 1830 that overthrew the
Bourbons in France, detached Belgium from the Netherlands, secured
Catholic emancipation to Ireland, brought the Reform Bill to England and
unleashed civil wars in Spain and Portugal, in his Age of Revolution
Eric Hobsbawm saw the most radical popular advance of the time in the
election of Andrew Jackson as President of the United States. Viewed
comparatively, two landmarks of his presidency stand out. The electorate
of 1828 that put Jackson into power, with a record 56 per cent of the
vote, was by far the largest in history: over a million strong, it was
three times the size of the American turnout in 1824. The mobilization
that produced this majority, moreover, was the work of the first modern
mass political party. The second development was more original than the
first, but together they spelt a lasting transformation of American
democracy, of whose importance posterity has never doubted. The
reputation of the man personifying this change remains far more
contested. In his own day, Jackson was hailed by many as a heroic
democrat, the beau ideal of a self-made man who rose to the nation’s
highest post as a foe of social privilege and slayer of the ‘monster
bank’, saviour of the nation and fearless champion of the people. Others
saw him as ‘King Andrew’, a divisive tyrant driven by petty personal
prejudices, contemptuous of the law of the land and merciless to the
weak, who debauched government with a spoils system and destroyed the
nation’s prosperity with a fixation on hard money.
The facts of Jackson’s career are stark enough. He was born in 1767 of
poor Scots-Irish parents, immigrants from Ulster, in the former lands of
the Catawba peoples, where North and South Carolina meet—an area well
known for its opposition to the eastern elites. At the age of fourteen,
he served the insurgents against George iii. Captured by the British, he
was slashed with a sword-blow by an officer, leaving a declivity in his
skull for which Jackson never forgave them. For the rest of his life, he
continued to believe that they wanted to retake the continent. Becoming
increasingly obstreperous after his mother’s death soon afterwards, he
frittered away a sudden inheritance from a grandfather in Ireland, but
learned enough law to get himself appointed by a drinking companion as a
prosecutor in the frontier zone of Tennessee—not yet a state—at the age
of twenty-one. En route to Tennessee, he purchased his first woman
slave. Like many later ambitious presidents, he then moved up the social
and political ladder through marriage to the daughter of a state
surveyor and land speculator. Jackson rose swiftly on the frontier as a
cotton planter, speculator and slave trader. In his early thirties, he
became Tennessee’s first Congressman, and a year later was briefly
Senator, before quitting for a lucrative job as a circuit judge back home.
However, Jackson’s real political breakthrough came from the camp, not
the courtroom. A trigger-happy brawler, duellist and warmonger, who had
long itched for military command, he got his chance in 1812, when war
broke out with Britain. Ordered south by Madison to block any danger of
Indian insurgents linking up with British forces or the Spanish in
Florida, he crushed a small Creek rising, unleashing a proverbial hatred
for the enemy with an exemplary massacre, and was allowed to dictate
terms of surrender that confiscated more than half of Creek
lands—territory covering most of today’s Alabama and a sizeable part of
Georgia—regardless of whether or not the population had fought against
him. Soon afterwards, Jackson cemented his military fame with a
successful defence of New Orleans against an assault by British
regulars, a battle fought—unknown to both sides—as the ink was already
dry on the Treaty of Ghent that concluded the war. Nonetheless, he was
widely feted as a second Washington, who had saved the nation—after the
humiliation of the torching of the White House by Admiral Cockburn’s
forces—in its second ordeal against Britain.
Now a full General, and appointed the us military commander in the
South, Jackson made sure he stayed in the limelight with a series of
annexations and lunges beyond the Union’s borders. In these years, he
pioneered operations of ethnic cleansing. Explaining that whites and
Indians could not coexist in peaceful proximity to one another, he
implemented the transfer of thousands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws
and Creeks beyond the Mississippi, nominally in compensation for the
loss of their lands to the east, in practice with widespread loss of
their lives as well. In 1818, on the pretext of a punitive expedition
against the Seminoles, without any constitutional declaration of war he
seized Florida from Spain, summarily hanging a couple of stray Britons
for good measure, with Cuba as his intended next stop—actions that
caused a storm in Washington, but were eventually covered, leading to
the satisfactory detachment of the peninsula from Madrid with the
Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819. With more dead Indians and more land,
Jackson’s star climbed ever higher in the political sky.
By 1824 he was poised to run for President. The Republican Party created
by Jefferson, still overwhelmingly dominant, was split between competing
regional contenders—Adams from the Northeast, Clay from the West,
Crawford and Calhoun from the South—allowing Jackson to enter an evenly
divided race, in which he won more popular votes than any of his
opponents. But because the Electoral College was unable to muster a
majority, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives, where
Henry Clay, who detested Jackson as a lawless adventurer, swung the
presidency to Adams—who then appointed Clay Secretary of State.
Capitalizing on this ‘corrupt bargain’, and casting himself as a
fearless outsider challenging an iniquitous establishment, four years
later Jackson won by a landslide.
Once in power, Jackson’s first priorities were a purge of the civil
service to install his supporters at all levels of the federal
bureaucracy, and more sweeping measures of ethnic cleansing, rammed
through Congress with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Next came an
assault on the country’s proto-central bank, the congressionally
chartered but privately owned Second Bank of America, viewed by Jackson
as a citadel of monopoly wealth and improper political influence. This
was a hugely popular campaign against the ‘monied interest’ that helped
him win a resounding second term in 1832, when the rallying power of the
newly created Democratic Party machine, the country’s first mass
political organization, came into full play; in 1828, Jackson had headed
a faction, but by 1832 he could count on the support of Party conclaves
across the country at state and local levels. His final years in office
saw him embroiled in tariff disputes with South Carolina, efforts to
censor abolitionist mail to the South, and a speculative bubble that
burst soon after his exit. Of more lasting significance, Texas was
prised away from Mexico, if without Jackson himself being able to annex
it, and mass deportation and death visited on ever larger numbers of
indigenous people. His immediate legacy was secured by the election of
Van Buren, his long-time political manager and lieutenant, in 1836,
and—in a more emphatic sense—by that of his Tennessee client James Polk
in 1844, arguably the most successful expansionist in us history.
Jackson polarized American opinion in his own lifetime, and has divided
historians ever since. Sean Wilentz’s portrait of him, produced for a
series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, draws heavily on his recent Rise of
American Democracy (2005), of which—Jackson looming larger than either
Jefferson or Lincoln—it can be regarded as a biographical distillation.
‘Old Hickory’ does not lend himself easily to political hagiography, but
Wilentz has shown himself capable of rising to the occasion.
Well-regarded in the eighties as the author of Chants Democratic, a
radical study of the early industrial working class in New York in the
tradition of Edward Thompson, in recent years Wilentz has caught the
public eye for the intensity of his identification with the Democratic
Party, and its last president. A ‘family friend’ of Clinton and intimate
of his courtier Sidney Blumenthal, whose apologia for the President he
vetted, Wilentz shot to prominence with an impassioned address to the
House of Representatives, in which he warned that to impeach the
incumbent would ‘leave the Presidency permanently disfigured and
diminished, at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any
Congress’; ‘the Presidency, historically the centre of leadership during
our great national ordeals, will be crippled in meeting the inevitable
challenges of the future’. Even the New York Times found him excessive.
Extolling Clinton for launching the Balkan War—‘the first us President
to stop a genocide’—Wilentz has since explained to Rolling Stone that
his successor (notwithstanding ‘high marks for ousting the Taliban’) is
the worst president in American history. Modern Republicanism, indeed,
is a toxic descendant of the very party that was created to frustrate
Jackson’s Democracy, the Whigs of the 1830s and 1840s. With these
retrojections, the scene is set for an update of the man they vilified.
The onset and outcome of an American epic become joined in a time-warped
loop, as Wilentz’s outbursts at detractors of Jackson—‘losers’
literature’—match fulminations at critics of Clinton at the other end of
the Democratic narrative: the former’s ‘forceful style’ establishing
‘the foundations of the modern democratic presidency’ menaced by the
impeachment of the latter.
Wilentz’s central argument is that Jackson had a coherent body of
political ideas that underpinned his decision-making process. He was a
complete Jeffersonian in his distaste for excessive government
expenditure, his belief in spreading the nation ever-westward, his
support of the ‘common [naturally white] man’, strict construction of
the Constitution, suspicion to the point of paranoia of the ‘monied
interest’, and the idea that the federal government should not create or
protect elite privileges. His great achievement was to govern the nation
in the spirit of these popular principles. ‘Democracy’s ascendancy was
Jackson’s greatest triumph’, as Wilentz puts it—‘the supreme reason why
his legacy retains its lustre’. Formulated in this simplistic way, the
claim is quite empty. The expansion of the American electorate preceded
Jackson, who himself did nothing to enlarge it. His presidency responded
to changes such as the opening of the franchise to all white adult males
in almost all of the states, the hardening of separate spheres for men
and women, the rise of labour organization and, of course, religious
revival—it did not create them. The central innovation of his presidency
lay elsewhere, in the construction of a modern political machine capable
of integrating the popular forces unleashed by these developments,
against the background of the wide-ranging cultural transformation of
the period that Charles Sellers has called the ‘Market Revolution’. The
actual architect of the ascendant Democratic Party, however, was Van
Buren rather than Jackson, who had neither the same organizational gifts
nor interests. Intellectually, on the other hand, Jackson was the more
radical of the two—envisaging, at least at the outset, a series of major
alterations to the Constitution: abolition of the Electoral College and
direct elections of senators and the federal judiciary. It is
significant, however, that these got nowhere. Jackson never campaigned
for democratic reforms to the political system. His leadership was
essentially plebiscitary: the appeal of a military strongman. By
temperament a natural autocrat, he fitted the role well, unlike the
political generals—Harrison, Grant, Eisenhower—who followed him.
Nor was Jackson’s economic legacy in itself very substantial. His attack
on the Second Bank was fed by his conviction that, as Wilentz puts it,
improper activist government meant granting privileges to unaccountable
monied men on the make as well as to those already well established.
Sound, restrained government meant ending those privileges and getting
the wealthy off the backs of ordinary Americans, ‘the humble members of
society’.
But, combining suspicion of federal banking with a dislike of paper
currency, he had no coherent alternative as a system of popular credit
in mind. The result was a zigzag to chaos in his second mandate, as he
redistributed federal deposits to ‘pet’ state banks, leaving an
antagonized Second Bank in competition with them. This produced an
inflationary bubble as loans for land sales and other speculative
investments multiplied. Even Wilentz concedes the ‘enormous
government-sponsored land racket’ that ensued, over which Jackson in
practice presided. Belatedly, however, his administration, in principle
committed to hard money, started to require all payments for land in
specie. This was a key contributing factor in the subsequent financial
collapse, only just held off till he left office (here was a genuine
analogy with Clinton).
Jackson’s blunderbuss approach to opponents led to no clearer results in
the other major economic conflict of his tenure, over the tariff of
1828. Increasing the price of foreign goods, this hit the Southern
states much harder than the North, because with little manufacturing
they were more import-dependent. The South felt, correctly, that it was
paying for the protection of Northern manufacturing and the development
of Northern infrastructure. South Carolina, with the most slaves per
capita in the Union, took the lead in opposing the tariff, eventually
electing a convention that declared it in contravention of the state’s
sovereignty, and thus void. Thundering against this threat to the Union,
Jackson sent the navy to Charleston harbour to demonstrate federal
resolve in tax-collection, and got a ‘Force Bill’ through Congress
giving him the right to attack those arrayed against him, if their
defiance persisted. At Clay’s instigation, however, Congress watered
down the tariff and the dispute petered out, each side claiming victory.
Wilentz lauds Jackson for ‘fortitude and cunning’ in resolving the
crisis, but the episode was in large part shadow-boxing. What lay behind
it was a more intractable tension, between mounting hostility to slavery
in the North and angry reaction to abolitionism in the South.
Here, naturally, Old Hickory acted to suppress criticism of the system
on which his personal fortune was built. Jackson’s commitment to
slavery—truculent like everything else about him—is an obvious
embarrassment for Wilentz’s encomium, putting his hero’s reputation at
risk with an important Democratic voting bloc today. But he is equal to
the challenge. ‘It is easy to judge Jackson according to
neo-abolitionist standards, to condemn him as slaveholder and, even
further, as pro-slavery’, he writes, but ‘such verdicts, though, too
often have more to do with the self-regarding sanctimony of posterity
than they do with history’. No doubt Jackson was in his way a typical
slave-owner, and ‘might even be counted as a pro-slavery man—except
that, in the 1830s, the vast majority of white Americans, including the
vast majority of anti-slavery northerners, blanched at the prospect of
stirring a slave uprising’. The exculpation by bland non-sequitur is
transparent. In Wilentz’s casting, Jackson was essentially moved by a
commendable desire to preserve the unity of American democracy from
sectional strife—a kind of rough-hewn Lincoln before his day.
Far greater exertions are required to burnish Jackson’s bid to construct
a Herrenvolk republic free of Indians. Here Wilentz’s contortions are
truly exemplary. His Jackson is a ‘sincere if unsentimental
paternalist’, who simply wished for the good of the indigenous peoples,
killing them only when ‘provoked’—though he lets slip a few pages
earlier that he was a ‘fire-eating hater of unyielding Indians’.
Yielding Indians were those who agreed to ‘voluntary’ removal from their
ancestral lands, for their own protection, to ‘safe havens’ (Kurdistans
for the 19th century?), so rescuing them from the ‘obliteration’ that
would otherwise have befallen them. If these operations did not go quite
as ‘smoothly and benevolently as Jackson had expected’, this was an
unfortunate outcome he had in no way intended. His main fault lay only
in too much financial rectitude. ‘Determined to minimize federal costs
and extinguish the national debt’, he scanted on funds for ‘the care and
protection of the relocated’. Criticisms of his actions at the time—to
which Wilentz devotes only a few paragraphs, also understating the
fierce resistance from the Indians themselves—were rife with hypocrisy
and pseudo-philanthropy, unable to see, as Jackson did, that the
existence of independent sovereign nations like the Cherokees was
unconstitutional. Certainly, ‘in order to save the Indians, Jackson’s
policy also destroyed thousands of them’, but to attack him unduly on
these grounds is to ‘confuse tragedy with melodrama’.
In this repellent casuistry, systematically whitewashing a murderous
programme of ethnic cleansing, that word stands out: tragedy. It recurs
on page after page of unctuous euphemism. There were ‘numerous
tragedies’ in Jackson’s presidency, ‘tragic limits’ to his outlook, and
‘tragic dimensions’ to his achievement. Even his stance on slavery
was—‘ultimately’—tragic. The function of the term is not merely to
absolve Jackson of central responsibility for the mass robbing and
killing of his deportations, but to envelop these in a mantle of
Shakespearean dignity. Michael Rogin’s still unparalleled portrait from
1975, Fathers and Children, leaves one in no doubt of Jackson’s
simultaneously patronizing and murderous policies towards his so-called
‘red children’. In contrast, after complaining of the sanctimony of
posterity, Wilentz ends his book by telling us that Jackson paved the
way for the loftiest values of the present. ‘If his own standards of
equality and justice fall beneath our own, he helped make it possible
for today’s standards and expectations to be as elevated as they are’
(sic). It is a relief from such sickly stuff to turn to a more robust
celebration of Jacksonianism as it historically was, and remains: Walter
Russell Mead’s Special Providence. Its admiring portrait of a tough,
xenophobic folk community, ruthless to outsiders or deserters, rigid in
its codes of honour and violence, is equally but more truthfully
present-minded. Another son of South Carolina, Mead identifies the
Jacksonian strain in American political culture as the principal popular
basis of support for the war on Iraq.
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