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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
