Andrew Jackson And Donald J. Trump
The nation has had no elected president quite like Donald J. Trump. But his soulmate and prototype no doubt would be Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president.
Folk hero, national celebrity, and demagogue, Jackson prided himself, like Trump, on being the primo American Bad Ass. In spite of different circumstances, Jackson and Trump are temperamentally on the same page.
Trump himself is aware of the connection, or at least Steve Bannon and Walter Russell Mead have tried to make him so. In his first term of office he hung a Jackson portrait over his desk in the Oval Office, much to the consternation of the politically correct. As a slaveholder and Indian hater, Jackson has fallen out of favor inside the Democratic Party he founded. Yet the second quarter of the 19th century is commonly known to American historians as the Jacksonian Era.
Born to poverty but himself a rich cotton planter and slave trader, Andrew Jackson joined the revolutionary military as a courier at 12. When captured and forced into servitude by a British general, he rebelled. As punishment, the general cut Jackson’s face and hands, leaving scars visible for the rest of his life. The 1815 Battle of New Orleans ended the British effort to gain control of the critical American port and elevated him to national fame.
Andrew Jackson was not a nice man. His Indian removal policy was unquestionably one of the most shameful episodes in the nation’s westward expansion. Jackson bought and sold slaves from 1788 until 1844, both for personal use on his property and as trade arbitrage. In 1804, when one of his three hundred slaves escaped, he advertised a $50 bounty and then added a bonus of $10 extra “for every 100 lashes a person will give to the amount of 300,” that is, killing the runaway.
As president, Jackson set the nation in a new direction. He enfranchised the working man at the expense of the landed New England and Virginia ruling class. When a lunatic attempted to kill him outside the Capitol in 1835, Jackson — outraged — clubbed his would-be assassin with his hickory cane, demonstrating the courage and self-possession much like Donald J. Trump exhibited in Butler, Pennsylvania, this year.
Jackson believed the election of 1824 had been stolen in a backroom deal. Hatred between Boston brahmin John Quincy Adams and the rough-hewn Tennessee upstart simmered for decades. Jackson’s enemies called him King Andrew. He disregarded constitutional boundaries, and stacked federal offices with partisan loyalists. Defying Congress and the Supreme Court, he was formally censured by the Senate. Jackson dominated his cabinet, firing those who would not execute his commands. In two terms he went through four secretaries of state and five secretaries of the treasury. His veto of the Bank of the United States introduced generations of unstable monetary policy.
“To detractors he appears an incipient tyrant, the closest we have yet come to an American Caesar,” says Daniel Feller, editor emeritus of the Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee. Nonetheless, he was the hero of New Orleans, Old Hickory, charismatic and bold, beloved by his admirers.
“Although Jackson acquired wealth in land and slaves, he kept the common touch,” University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor has observed. “He cast his political campaigns as crusades to protect common men from elitists and their special interests. His enemies unwittingly contributed to his popularity by mocking the general’s manners and words as vulgar.”
In 1833 President Andrew Jackson made a tour of New England, the land of the Whigs, already in the grip of abolitionism. He was surprisingly well received. Worried by secession tremors in the south, and impressed by Jackson’s nationalism, Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard, decided to give Jackson an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws over Adams’s objection. Quincy said: “As the people have twice decided this man knows enough law to be their ruler, it is not for Harvard College to maintain that they are mistaken.”
Adams’ boycotted the event: his loss. At the commencement, Jackson was a hit. “I shall have to speak in English, not being able to return your compliment in what appears to be the language of Harvard,” he said. All the Latin I know is E pluribus unum.”
The classically schooled, brahmin audience loved the reply. Laughter and great applause. Dare any conservative hope a Josiah Quincy exists inside the Harvard faculty today, when the people’s avatar is Donald J. Trump?
Yet historians might very well someday call our own days the Trump Era. Like Jackson, the president-elect stands convinced of his own invincibility, and is eager to up-end political orthodoxies. Much of yeoman America sides with its hero and champion, and more, enjoys watching him topple the high and mighty.
