[Marxism] Andrew Jackson: slave-owner and Indian killer

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 56, Number 9 · May 28, 2009
Goodbye to the 'Age of Jackson'?
By Daniel Howe

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
by Jon Meacham
Random House, 483 pp., $30.00

Andrew Jackson
by Robert V. Remini
Palgrave Macmillan, 204 pp., $21.95

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson
by David S. Reynolds
Harper, 466 pp., $29.95

Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877
by Walter A. McDougall
HarperPerennial, 787 pp., $19.99 (paper)

During the years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War of 1846, 
the United States underwent a great transformation. In 1815, at the 
close of the second war with Britain, the US was what we would call a 
"developing" country. Most people worked in agriculture, often on 
semisubsistence family farms, eating food they grew, their lives 
governed by the weather and the hours of daylight. It was the slowness 
and uncertainty of transportation and communications that kept their 
lives so primitive. Only people who lived near navigable water could 
readily market crops; others relied heavily on barter with their 
neighbors and the local storekeeper. Only luxury goods could bear the 
cost of long-distance transportation on land, and information from the 
wider world was among the most precious of luxuries.

Thirty-three years later, in 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, 
much had changed. The United States had become a transcontinental major 
power. Its expanded empire stretched from sea to sea, integrated by 
revolutionary innovations in transportation and communications. These 
included the railroad, the telegraph, the steamboat, the Erie Canal, the 
steam-operated printing press, and innovations in papermaking. The 
mechanization of agriculture had begun, with Cyrus McCormick's invention 
of the reaper in 1831 and John Deere's steel plow in 1837. Techniques of 
mass production, even more important than mechanical inventions, were 
starting to transform manufacturing's age-old artisan traditions.
Little Bookroom / Savoir Fare London

These innovations not only raised the standard of living but also 
fostered the growth of democracy. Improvements in communications rescued 
people from the tyranny of isolation. Cheaper paper, more efficient 
printing, and faster transportation encouraged the proliferation of 
newspapers and magazines. These could be distributed through the mails 
thanks to federal policies that multiplied small-town post offices and 
subsidized printed matter with low postage rates. The press in turn 
facilitated the development of nationwide mass political parties. Many 
newspapers were put out by political parties (or factions within 
parties) and existed more to voice a point of view than for commercial 
reasons. American democracy expanded as rival candidates exploited the 
newspapers and magazines to appeal to the nationwide public. Andrew 
Jackson filled his "kitchen cabinet" of informal advisers with 
newspapermen. By 1840, as many as four out of five qualified voters were 
going to the polls—a far higher level of participation than has been 
achieved by the expanded electorate of recent decades. Mass democracy 
had replaced the patrician republic created by the Founders.

Since this "middle period" in American history is so interesting and 
important, why does it get so little attention compared with the 
Revolutionary era of the Founders and the time of the Civil War? Even 
academic historians have had little to say about it in recent years, if 
one may judge from the number of papers presented at meetings of the 
Organization of American Historians. The answer seems to have something 
to do with the identification of this period as "the age of Jackson" or 
"the Jacksonian era."

Andrew Jackson has long been at the center of attention for the years 
from the War of 1812 to the war with Mexico. Rising to a position of 
political dominance in a peaceful revolution, he has seemed to personify 
the common man as an American hero. Over the years the identity of this 
"common man" has shifted. For the Progressive historians Frederick 
Jackson Turner and Vernon Louis Parrington in the early 1900s, the 
common nineteenth-century American was a frontier farmer. For the New 
Deal Democrat Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., he was an urban workingman. 
Still, Jackson could be portrayed by all three as the leader of a 
democratic movement.

During the past half-century the records of many national heroes have 
come under challenge, and none more so than Andrew Jackson's. Historians 
noticed that Jackson, the symbol of American democracy, was an ardent 
white supremacist. Upon assuming the presidency in 1829, Old Hickory's 
highest priority was "Indian Removal": the expulsion of the Native 
Americans who lived east of the Mississippi to designated areas west of 
the river. Against strong opposition, Jackson pushed his removal measure 
through Congress by narrow margins and then enforced it ruthlessly. 
Turner, Parrington, and Schlesinger all ignored Indian Removal when 
writing about Jackson's presidency; more recent historians could not do so.

Jackson was not only a slaveholder himself but a strong defender of 
slavery against its contemporary critics. In 1835 abolitionists began to 
mail their literature to prominent Southern whites who they hoped might 
be open to persuasion. Jackson interpreted their action as inciting the 
slaves to rebellion; he expressed his loathing for the abolitionists 
vehemently, both in public and in private. With the President's full 
support, Postmaster General Amos Kendall encouraged local postmasters to 
censor the mails. When Congress responded with a statute mandating that 
mail be delivered to its addressee, Jackson's administration ignored it.

Jackson's embrace of class conflict has endeared him to some liberal 
historians, notably Schlesinger. When vetoing the bill extending the 
charter of the Second Bank of the United States, Old Hickory wrote this 
memorable denunciation:

     The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to 
their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under 
every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth 
can not be produced by human institutions.... But when the laws 
undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial 
distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to 
make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of 
society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time 
nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to 
complain of the injustice of their Government.

It should be evident that Jackson's notion of class did not pit the 
propertyless against capitalism, but (as the historian Richard 
Hofstadter long ago pointed out) rallied believers in bourgeois values 
to denounce government favoritism to a privileged few. Beginning with 
Edward Pessen's study Jacksonian America in 1969, the claim of Jackson's 
political movement to egalitarianism has been under serious challenge.

With regard to gender, Andrew Jackson proved a staunch defender of 
patriarchy. "I did not come here [to Washington] to make a Cabinet for 
the Ladies of this place," he declared in reaction to a group of 
Democratic women who shunned the wife of his secretary of war, John 
Eaton, because of allegations that she was sexually promiscuous and that 
her affair with Eaton before their marriage had driven her first husband 
to suicide. As the scandal grew more intense, Jackson told his cabinet 
members that he expected them to keep their wives in line. Rather than 
admit the existence of a social sphere in which women exercised 
autonomy, Jackson then replaced his entire cabinet.

As Jackson's standing in the American democratic pantheon has been 
shaken, public interest in the middle period of US history as a whole 
has diminished. Without Old Hickory as a unifying focus, no alternative 
intepretation of the era has yet captured the popular imagination. To be 
sure, efforts have been made to reconstitute the "Jacksonian" character 
of the time. In 1991 Charles Sellers described his vision of an evil 
"Market Revolution" forced upon unwilling, noncommercial farm families—a 
vision that resembled that of Vernon Parrington to a surprising extent. 
In this morality play, Jackson led the vain but heroic resistance to 
commercial capitalism.

However, economic historians have not confirmed Sellers's celebration of 
subsistence farming, and have pointed out that Americans were dealing in 
a global market as early as colonial times. As recently as 2005, Sean 
Wilentz restated Schlesinger's interpretation of Jackson as the cutting 
edge of "the rise of American democracy." But Wilentz has moved away 
from the history of the nineteenth century, as did Schlesinger himself, 
and into the politics of the present. For the most part, both historians 
and the general public have found it harder and harder to regard Jackson 
as an authentic democratic hero.

Against this historiographical background, we now have Jon Meacham's 
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. One can only marvel 
that the editor of Newsweek finds so much time and energy for historical 
research and writing. Like Meacham's other books, his new one is well 
written and reflects study of original manuscript sources. It contains 
more personal detail and charming anecdotes about White House life in 
the Jackson years than any other book since Marquis James's Andrew 
Jackson: Portrait of a President (1937). Meacham places himself in the 
mainstream of present-day American liberalism. Accordingly, he makes no 
effort to defend Indian Removal, justly concluding, "There is nothing 
redemptive about Jackson's Indian policy."

Meacham is loath to admit, however, that there was a difference between 
the Indian policy pursued by Andrew Jackson and that of his predecessor 
and political opponent, John Quincy Adams. Jackson zealously pursued 
Indian Removal as a major goal of his administration. On the other hand, 
Adams tried as president to respect the Indians' treaty rights as best 
he could even while recognizing that the behavior of their white 
neighbors made this very difficult. After Jackson's inauguration, Adams 
saw that the Indians were likely to lose their land, but he wanted to 
expose the "perfidy and tyranny of which the Indians are to be made the 
victims." Jackson rejoiced in Indian Removal as a triumph for himself, 
his party, and US national interests. His instructions to the army 
officers who carried it out always emphasized haste and sometimes 
economy, but never the need for humanity, honesty, or careful planning. 
Adams recalled Indian Removal as "a perpetual harrow upon my feelings."

Meacham's evaluations of Jackson's other policies in office vary. Arthur 
Schlesinger had glorified Jackson's "war" on the national bank as an 
attack on big business that prefigured FDR's assault on "malefactors of 
great wealth." Meacham adopts a more detached and judicious perspective. 
"On balance," he writes,

     it seems most reasonable to say that the nation's interests would 
have been best served had the Bank been reformed rather than altogether 
crushed, but balance was not the order of the day once Jackson 
decided—as he had done early on—that the Bank was a competing power 
center beyond his control.

Meacham praises Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis of 
1832–1833, as everyone does today, and as even the opposition party did 
at the time. South Carolina "nullified" two federal tariff acts when a 
special convention declared them null and void within that state. 
Jackson's credible threat of military action to enforce federal law 
combined with Henry Clay's famous aptitude for compromise resolved the 
crisis with the promise that the tariff would be gradually lowered. On 
the other hand, Meacham grants that Jackson's Specie Circular of 
1836—which required payment for government land in gold and silver and 
not paper currency—nudged the country into a sharp recession that turned 
into a prolonged depression. In short, Meacham's verdicts on Jackson's 
presidential policies are mixed and restrained.

Yet at the end, Meacham glorifies Jackson as a lion in the White House. 
He rejoices that Jackson was a strong president, and that later strong 
presidents—the two Roosevelts and Truman—looked back on his example with 
approval. Well, yes, Jackson was a strong president, but his strength 
was charismatic and personal rather than institutional. He did not 
strengthen the presidency as such; if anything, his abuses of power 
(such as removing the government's deposits from the national bank, in 
defiance of statutory law) made people fearful of the executive branch.

After Jackson, there commenced a series of weak presidencies. Of his 
next eight successors, only one, James Knox Polk, could be considered 
strong, and even he served only one term. The next strong president, 
Lincoln, had belonged all his adult life to the party opposed to the 
Jacksonian Democrats (that is, first the Whigs and then the 
Republicans). Lincoln was certainly no disciple of Jackson's, although 
he cited Jackson's resistance to nullification once in a while for 
tactical reasons. Lincoln pursued the policies of John Quincy Adams, who 
shared his loathing for slavery, supported much the same program of 
federal aid to transportation, education, and industrialization that 
Lincoln enacted, and foresaw not only civil war and emancipation, but 
even the mechanism by which emancipation could occur—the presidential 
war powers.

A further irony cries out for notice. Why should a liberal like Meacham 
celebrate a strong presidency per se? Maybe Barack Obama will be 
accounted a strong president. But as of now we haven't had a strong 
liberal Democratic president for over forty years. We have had some 
strong Republican presidents in that time: Reagan, Nixon until overcome 
by Watergate, the younger Bush until overcome by Iraq. Hasn't Meecham 
read Schlesinger's Imperial Presidency , which testified to the author's 
disillusionment with a strong executive?

Robert Remini, official historian of the US House of Representatives, 
has devoted most of his long and prolific career to lives of Andrew 
Jackson and his famous contemporaries Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Martin 
Van Buren, John Quincy Adams, and Joseph Smith. His latest book is a 
military biography of Jackson that appears in a series called Great 
Generals, edited by former NATO commander Wesley Clark. Lucid and 
straightforward, it will no doubt prove useful to cadets and military 
history buffs of all ages, and it will remind students of political 
history that Jackson always remained primarily a military man. Remini is 
a scrupulous and honest researcher who never bends his findings to his 
wishes. Although he much admires Jackson, Remini admits that his hero 
obeyed orders only when he agreed with them, committed wholesale 
violations of civil liberties, and owed his victories as much to luck as 
military skill. By my count, this is Remini's fourteenth book on 
Jackson. If there is anything very new in this one, he doesn't point it out.

David Reynolds's ambitious book, Waking Giant: America in the Age of 
Jackson , is the work of a literary historian who has turned to the 
social context of literature (what literary scholars call "cultural 
studies") and then to history itself. Clearly he wants to remedy the 
lack of public interest in the middle period, a worthy goal, and to call 
attention to the rich diversity of America in that era. Accordingly, 
Reynolds writes about politics and popular culture, literature, drama, 
and art, and he is particularly perceptive in his comments on painting. 
He describes the religious movements of the day, emphasizing their 
multitudinous variety. Bizarre fringe groups especially engage his 
attention. He gathers together in one chapter "reforms, panaceas, 
inventions, [and] fads," including a good account of the temperance 
movement and some elementary history of science. Reynolds explains his 
approach this way:

     Most overviews of the period slight its bumptious, nonconformist, 
roistering elements, its oddities and cultural innovations—its Barnum 
freaks, crime-filled scandal sheets, erotic pulp novels, frontier 
screamers, mesmeric healers, half-mile-long paintings; its 
street-fighting newspaper editors, earth-rattling actors, incarcerated 
anarchists; its free-love communes, time-traveling clairvoyants, 
polygamous prophets, and table-lifting spirit-rappers—all of which 
created social ferment and provided fodder for energetic American 
literary and artistic masterpieces.

Unfortunately, Reynolds never develops an interpretation of his period 
beyond his fascination with variety and oddity. He does not recognize 
the spiritual hunger that the various religions addressed, the moral 
earnestness of the varied reformers, or the very real differences of 
policy between the rival political parties. He never explains why people 
had such intense faith in progress, or the relationship between science 
and religion at the time. He presents considerable material on sex, 
including masturbation, prostitution, and abortion, but seems chiefly 
interested in the sensational aspects of the material, like the coverage 
in the penny press of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett. 
Reynolds makes superficiality a virtue; America, he keeps insisting, was 
superficial, sensational, and tawdry.

While trying to break new ground, Reynolds retains the conventional 
sense that Andrew Jackson embodied the democracy of his period; to 
believe in democracy was to support Jackson politically. Accordingly, 
Reynolds minimizes Jackson's white supremacist policies. He represents 
Indian Removal as simply reflecting a consensus among whites, ignoring 
the powerful opposition to Jackson's expulsion program. He characterizes 
Jackson's censorship of antislavery mailings as a moderate measure 
designed to "prevent conflict over slavery"; it would be more accurate 
to describe it as designed to protect slavery from criticism.

Only three years before the publication of Waking Giant , Reynolds 
published John Brown, Abolitionist , portraying the antislavery fanatic 
as a hero and denying that he was a terrorist, despite his murders of 
Southern settlers in Kansas. It is quite impossible to reconcile 
Reynolds's celebration of Brown's militant version of abolitionism with 
his defense in this book of Jackson as a racial moderate. One is left 
wondering whether Reynolds was attracted to Brown's career simply 
because of its hopeless, useless violence, and the drama of his defeat.

"This period can be divided culturally into the pre-Jacksonian and 
Jacksonian phases," Reynolds writes. "The dividing point between the two 
phases occurs around 1828, the year Jackson was first elected president 
and became a truly symbolic, and controversial, hero of the people." 
Before 1828, Reynolds explains, the pre-Jacksonian writers Washington 
Irving and James Fenimore Cooper produced works under the influence of 
European models. After that date, American literature became more 
independent, reaching its enduring greatness under the leadership of 
Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville.

We can agree; but tying this evolution to party politics doesn't work. 
Cooper supported Jackson's Democratic Party, and Irving accepted office 
under Jackson. On the other side of the divide, Emerson and Thoreau 
never identified with Jacksonian democracy, while Whitman quit the 
Democratic Party in disgust at its proslavery position well before 
publishing Leaves of Grass. Hawthorne was indeed a partisan Democrat, 
but took his literary inspiration from Puritanism, not Jacksonianism. 
Melville's Ahab is a sinister embodiment of demagogy. It is surprising 
that Reynolds, a respected literary historian, puts forward such a 
simplistic political interpretation of literature.

Whatever usefulness Waking Giant might possess is vitiated by a 
multitude of factual errors, particularly evident when Reynolds is 
discussing political matters. The Monroe Doctrine did not actually arise 
"from a quarrel with England." Andrew Jackson was not the first 
president to use the pocket veto. The Liberty Party was not the same as 
the Free Soil Party. Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was not arrested for 
polygamy, but for suppressing a critical newspaper in Nauvoo, Illinois, 
where he was mayor. Secretary of the Treasury William Duane was not "a 
supporter of the BUS [Bank of the United States]"; he opposed its 
recharter but declined to violate statutory law by removing the federal 
deposits from the bank in the absence of a finding that they were unsafe 
there. In listing Whig presidents, Reynolds includes John Tyler, who was 
expelled from the party, and forgets Millard Fillmore.

Citations are frequently ambiguous or not supplied at all, even for 
remarkable assertions such as this one: "Premarital pregnancy rates fell 
from 30 percent in the late eighteenth century to under 10 percent by 
1850." Reynolds's latest book is, accordingly, not simply a failed 
effort but quite unworthy of the author of such fine works as Walt 
Whitman's America (1995) and Faith in Fiction (1981).

For a similarly broad-based work, celebrating American cultural 
diversity in Whitmanesque fashion and more sympathetic to Andrew Jackson 
than I am myself, a much better choice would be Walter A. McDougall's 
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829–1877. The title is 
a quotation from Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "And sing me before you go 
the song of the throes of Democracy." McDougall has his quirky likes and 
dislikes, which keep a reader engaged; he has new ideas on some 
subjects; and he provides information that is much more reliable than 
Reynolds's.

McDougall is not in the least intimidated by current intellectual 
fashions. He is more critical of Andrew Jackson for destroying the 
national bank of his day than for his part in expelling the Indians from 
east of the Mississippi. He is surprisingly critical of Lincoln, whom he 
accuses of alienating Virginia by a premature call for troops to 
suppress South Carolina's rebellion. He portrays an age in transition, 
when Americans too often deluded themselves with self-righteous 
pretensions, an age in which he finds parallels with our own, but not 
the simplistic ones of conventional historiography.

McDougall's characteristically imaginative assessment of the two 
political parties of the middle period deserves quoting at length:

     Who were the conservatives and who were the liberals in this second 
party system? If one adopts twentieth-century definitions it might 
appear that the libertarian Democrats were the conservatives and the 
statist Whigs the liberals. But in the parlance of nineteenth-century 
Britain, where the labels originated, the reverse would be true.

     In regard to slavery, free-soil Whigs would appear the liberals and 
the Democrats supporters of a racist status quo. But in regard to 
workers' rights as understood later in the century, neither party was 
"progressive." In regard to ethnic and religious tolerance the Democrats 
would appear the liberals, since they embraced Catholics and immigrants. 
But in regard to education and social reform the reverse would be true.

     The only way to get a grip on the growing divide among Americans in 
the mid-nineteenth century is to purge our contemporary notion of the 
political spectrum and try instead to imagine the ambivalent anxieties 
of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in a 
telegraph office.

McDougall's juxtaposition of manure and a telegraph office is an 
inspired metaphor for the changes of the period he treats. Andrew 
Jackson arrived in Washington in a carriage in 1829 and left eight years 
later on a train. The revolutionary consequences of new technology in 
transportation and communications that transformed American life during 
the middle period can provide a better focus for historical writing than 
a personality cult focused on Jackson himself.

The term "Jacksonian America" is inappropriate and misleading. Jackson 
was a divisive figure who polarized people and whose policies as 
president proved as often harmful as beneficial. Taking Andrew Jackson 
to typify early-nineteenth-century America does a disservice to our 
country's history, which has many interesting aspects and admirable 
people outside the orbit of Jacksonian Democracy (originally the name of 
the Democratic Party, not a general characterization of the United 
States). Most Americans today consider the abolitionists heroes, though 
Andrew Jackson hated and feared them. Other candidates for present-day 
honor include DeWitt Clinton, mastermind of the Erie Canal, built by the 
State of New York; Horace Greeley, crusading journalist; Horace Mann, 
advocate of state aid to the public schools that would create a literate 
citizenry; Lucretia Mott, Quaker feminist; and the black polemicist 
David Walker.

Jackson's partisan rivals the Whigs, often disparaged simply as snobs 
who couldn't reconcile themselves to equal rights, actually have a 
strong claim on our respectful attention. The Whigs (their name was the 
traditional one for critics of executive abuses in Anglo-American 
history) understood the benefits of economic development and wanted 
government at all levels to promote it. They, not Jackson, endorsed 
federal government intervention in the economy. When the stock market 
crashed in 1837–1839, the Whig leader, Henry Clay, declared the American 
people "entitled to the protecting care of a parental Government." The 
Democrats, led by Jackson's chosen successor Martin Van Buren, insisted 
that Washington observe strict laissez faire.

The American experience between 1815 and 1848 did much to shape the 
country we live in. Social reform, religious zeal, large-scale 
immigration, wild swings of the business cycle, wars brought on by 
executive power in the face of severe moral criticism—these and other 
issues bear a surprising resemblance to some we face today. They can 
well bear reexamination by historians and citizens who seek to 
understand the past and its effect on the present. Such a reexamination 
may reorient the conventional definition of a "Jacksonian" period and 
provide a new perspective on the politics of that time. Who knows, 
today's liberals might find many of their sympathies engaged not by 
Jackson's Democrats but by the Whig party of John Quincy Adams, Henry 
Clay, and the young Abraham Lincoln.



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