"hanks for the article from Alan Taylor (which discusses a completely different book that you discussed before) stating pretty much exactly what I've said about Wilentz's view of Jackson from the start, not too bad considering Taylors interest in Native Americans."
Like where you said Jackson wasn't being rehabilitated by Wilentz? Yeah, except read the damn title of the review. That'd be the opposite of what you were saying. Thanks.
Also, read Tom Mertes review in New Left Review. It's called "whitewashing Jackson". Weird how if Wilentz wasn't rehabilitating Jackson/whitewashing his crimes, so many on the left seem to think so.
New Left Review 42, November-December 2006
Tom Mertes on Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson. A retouched portrait of the Democrat founding father—minus Indian massacres, slave exploitation and financial bubble.
Save a PDF file Send an email Print article
TOM MERTES
WHITEWASHING JACKSON
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.
So quiet
)
)
)
