We can celebrate Harriet Tubman without disparaging Andrew Jackson. By Jim Webb. Washington Post, April 24, 2016.
Webb:
One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did. And summarizing his legendary tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against native Americans,” as reported in The Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.
This
dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in
a vacuum. Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American
South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and
undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in
decades.
Far too
many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without
full regard for historical facts. The myth of universal white privilege and
universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra, even though
white and minority cultures alike vary greatly in their ethnic and geographic
origins, in their experiences in the United States and in their educational and
financial well-being.
Into
this uninformed debate come the libels of “Old Hickory.” Not unlike the
recently lionized Alexander Hamilton, Jackson was himself a “brilliant orphan.”
A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the
Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both
brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded
combat veteran by age 13. Self-made and aggressive, he found wealth in the
wilds of Tennessee and, like other plantation owners such as George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves. He was a transformational president,
hated by the reigning English American elites as he brought populist,
frontier-style democracy to our political system.
Jackson
became the very face of the New America, focusing on intense patriotism and the
dignity of the common man.
On the
battlefield he was unbeatable, not only in the Indian Wars, which were brutally
fought with heavy casualties on both sides, but also in his classic defense of New Orleans during the War of 1812. His defense of the city (in which he
welcomed free blacks as soldiers in his army) dealt the British army its most
lopsided defeat until the fall of Singapore in 1942.
As
president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi
to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents,
including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the
Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end
the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain
annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population. Indeed, it
would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one
bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield
to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.
Today’s
schoolchildren should know and appreciate that Jackson’s July 1832 veto of
legislation renewing the charter of the monopolistic Second National Bank
prevented the creation of a permanent aristocracy in our country. Jackson was
virulently opposed in this decision, openly threatened by America’s elites.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Vernon Louis Parrington called this veto
“perhaps the most courageous act in our political history.”
Just as
significantly, in November 1832, South Carolina threatened to secede from the
Union. Jackson put a strong military force in position, letting it be known
that if it attempted secession he would have 50,000 soldiers inside the state
within 40 days, with another 50,000 to follow shortly after. Wisely, South
Carolina did not call Jackson’s bluff, and civil war was averted for another 28
years.
Jackson
was a rough-hewn brawler, a dueler and a fighter. For eight years he dominated
American politics, bringing a coarse but refreshing openness to the country’s
governing process. Jefferson called him “a dangerous man.” Quincy Adams termed
him a “barbarian.” But as Parrington put it, “he was our first great popular
leader, our first man of the people. . . . one
of our few Presidents whose heart and sympathy . . . clung
to the simple faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with
the rich.”
Mark Twain
once commented that “to arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character
one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.” By any standard we
should respect both Jackson’s and Tubman’s contributions. And our national
leaders should put aside their deliberate divisiveness and encourage that we do
so.
Jim Webb, a Democratic U.S. senator from
Virginia from 2007 to 2013, is the author of Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.
