Yeah, he looked pretty ancient in 1845, the year he died. Imagine how grim he looked when the Civil War was ticking him off 16 years later.
Or perhaps I should say, first there was the miracle of Frederick Douglass, who’s doing a terrific job getting noticed out there, and now there’s Old Hickory:
Donald Trump expressed confusion in an interview published on Monday as to why the civil war had taken place. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the war started, “was really angry” about the conflict.
Trump also said Jackson, a slaveholder and war hero who led a relocation and extermination campaign against Native Americans, “had a big heart”.
The president made his remarks in an interview with the Washington Examiner to mark his 100th day in office, which fell on Saturday. “It’s a very intensive process,” Trump told his interviewer of the presidency. “Really intense. I get up to bed late and I get up early.”
His remarks about Jackson and the civil war appeared to arise from a discussion of a painting of the seventh president that Trump moved into the Oval Office after his inauguration. Trump has called Jackson “an amazing figure in American history – very unique so many ways” and said that he identifies with his populist forebear…
Yes, he certainly does sound, um, “very unique” (why look up to someone who’s only a little bit unique?) and… completely “amazing.” And what, precisely, did this dead man think about the war?
“He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the civil war. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the civil war – if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a civil war? Why could that one not have been worked out?”…
I’m going to make up some history myself, and invoke the clause that the terrific Alexander Hamilton slipped into the Constitution that says that no one who knows nothing about anything can serve as president of the United States. It’s in there, trust me….
I’ve called this guy an “ignoramus” a number of times, but I had no idea just how deep the chasm of ignorance went. It just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?
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Will anyone even watch “Drunk History” any more? Will even the most irony-infested hipsters find it amusing after this, or will they just regard it as, to quote our president, “Sad!”?
“Very unique?!!!” Not good. Sick. Not good. Very not good.
Double-plus ungood…
He doesn’t read. Anything.
Trump aside, it’s an interesting alternate history hypothetical: If Andrew Jackson had somehow had more longevity, or had been just a little younger, and the middle-aged, vigorous Jackson had been President in the years leading up to the Civil War, and during it, would things have gone differently?
I was hashing this out with my Mother-in-Law over (and after) dinner tonight. We thought about a variety of things.
First, Jackson would be a celebrated war-hero and veteran who had seen the harsh realities of war. Perhaps he would have been able to use some this credibility to help cool off the younger fire-eaters (like Maxcy Gregg) and perhaps help them realize a war would be horrific. We decided that he probably wouldn’t have been successful.
We thought about how he was a Southerner, and perhaps could have used that credibility to broker a deal. In the end, I guess it comes down to whether the South would have accepted a ban on slavery outside the existing slave states, and then some sort of eventual phase out.
The thing is, we both discussed how Jackson wasn’t really a deal-maker. He was a man of action, a force of nature, a man of conflicting personalities, but he wasn’t a great compromiser or diplomat. He was ready to send troops into SC to assert the federal will by force, which allowed Clay and others to cobble together a compromise. Absent the compromise, I believe Jackson would brought the full force of the federal army into SC.
We then got into a discussion about how Jackson might have prosecuted the war differently than Lincoln. After all, he was a celebrated war hero. Would he have been as deferential to McClellan’s inaction early on? Would he have personally led the troops from the front? How would he have interacted with Winfield Scott? I think they were more rivals than old war chums. Would Southern soldiers have shrank from combat at the sight of Jackson, like they did with Washington in the Whiskey Rebellion?
Could the war have ended earlier? Maybe. It’s interesting to think about. Would Jackson have taken Little Round Top on the second day of Gettysburg if he had been there?
Alternate history followup: If there had been no Civil War and slavery had somehow ended peacefully in the late 1800’s, (say 1885) how would that have affected race relations in America?
Would we still have had the Jim Crow South? Would we still have had a struggle for civil rights for blacks? Would race relations be better, worse, or no different?
Interesting to think about.
Hmm, Bryan, it is interesting to think about. I believe that we still would have had Jim Crow, still would have had the civil rights struggle, and race relations would not have been significantly altered. Jim Crow wasn’t just a response to people being sad and angry about losing a war. It was a response to not wanting to change the economic system that benefited the people in power. Folks with a lot of land or businesses requiring labor still wanted the cheapest possible labor. Folks with money didn’t want to pay to educate people who had been deprived of education. Come to think of it, some things don’t seem to change.
I cannot imagine the fire-eaters of SC accepting a phaseout on ANY timetable, and certainly not within their lifetimes.
1885 seems completely unrealistic…
Agree. Slavery would have almost certainly existed well into the 20th century. Eventually we would have had some South African style apartheid.
Of course, it happened in Guns of the South, but that required the Southern leaders reading history books from the future, and realizing how posterity would view them.
Lacking such a deus ex machina, I don’t see it happening.
Thought experiments such as Bryan describes are essential parts of our military “war colleges.” I truly hope that POTUS was engaged in a thought experiment, rather than showing a very scary ignorance about U.S. History.
As for the speculation about Jackson… I really can’t wrap my head around it. Let’s say Jackson was born 40 years later, which would have made him about Lincoln’s age, and he’d have been in his prime when the war broke out.
He would have been 6 or 7 years old at the time of the Battle of New Orleans. So much for his great military reputation, which was largely based on that surge of good feeling his victory gave the country at the end of a less-than-triumphant war. Nor would we have the famous story of him refusing to black the British officer’s boots during the Revolution.
What would his legend have been built upon? Well, if there was a legend at all, it would have been built on completely different experiences under completely different circumstances, and Jackson would have been a different man.
So it’s hard to put him in 1861 and make predictions…
Yeah, you sort of have to have him born at the original time but then stop him from aging during his Presidency. (And somehow get around the two term limit tradition).
It requires a willing suspension of disbelief. You know, like Trump supporters. 🙂
I just realized my last paragraph might have been confusing. I was referring to the other great Jackson – Thomas J. Jackson a/k/a Stonewall Jackson.
I’m sure everyone who was also educated in Lexington, Va., got it…
Nice hypothetical but as a slave owner it is likely Jackson would have sided with the Confederacy.
I disagree. Jackson was a Union man. It was one of his driving convictions. He was a Union man long before he owned slaves. He didn’t grow up on a plantation. He despised the elite planter class.
He had a great many faults and was an imperfect man. However, to label him as a Confederate is to be historically illiterate. His quote about Calhoun, while probably apocryphal, is nevertheless instructive.
“John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation, I will secede your head from the rest of your body.” – Andrew Jackson
Yep. People are complicated.
And they were in olden times as well, as much as we like to caricature them.
Even Andrew Jackson…
Which raises an interesting research question – What % of slaveholders sided with the union. I’d guess less than 1%. General George Thomas, The Rock of Chickamauga was a southerner whose family owned slaves when he was young but not sure he owned slaves in 1861 when he sided with the north. People tended to be more loyal to their state than the country. Thomas was an exception.
And that fact — that people could think of a state as more their country than the United States — is the gulf that separates me from so many, perhaps most, who lived in that time.
It’s so hard for me to understand them on a gut level.
Here we have Robert E. Lee, one of the most honorable, conscientious men ever to wear a U.S. Army uniform, resigning his commission rather than fight against his “country,” meaning his state, of all absurd things.
I get it intellectually. I can say to myself, “That’s the way people thought then,” and even give you reasons why.
But I still can’t get to where I can justify something so bizarre to me. I’m condemned to see it from a post-1865, and for that matter, post-1945, perspective. My concept of what the United States is and stands for is just so vastly different….
I had a history professor who contended (half-seriously) that the Civil War was fought over a verb.
The United States IS a nation.
or
The United States ARE a nation.
You make a compelling argument for abolishing the electoral college. 🙂
The truly sad and sick thing to me is a narcissist in power. One who never apologizes when clearly wrong, doubles down on errors, and enjoys being covered by his sycophants and apologists – even bragging how they stay loyal after he shoots someone in the middle of main street. Especially sad because lives are at stake. Perhaps even the near future of a civil society.
But if he were a SMART narcissist, I’d feel a little better. This is an abysmally ignorant person, an aggressively ignorant person, who because of his narcissism thinks he’s brilliant….
A further word about ignorance…
We all suffer from it. For instance, I felt a bit handicapped in answering Bryan’s supposition (what if Jackson HAD been around in 1860?), in that I haven’t made a study of Old Hickory. He’s just this guy who made a bad impression on me when I was studying that period, long ago. Bryan’s read a lot more about him, so I’m at a disadvantage imagining how he would have acted in a different time period. (Although I’m happy with my answer, which is that Jackson in a different time would have been a different man with a different reputation.)
We all know less than some people about some things.
But the most powerful man in the world seems to know basically nothing about the story of this country, or about the central issues and conflicts that formed it and brought us to where we are today.
This is extraordinarily shocking, even to those of us who knew he was really, really ignorant — just not THIS ignorant. He’s like those amazingly empty-headed adults they recruited for “Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” (Check out this prize-winner. The producers of the show must have hugged themselves with glee when they found her. She’s really hot, so good TV there, and knows basically nothing…)
It’s utterly astounding…
Whoa. I’ve hit on another area where I myself am ignorant. That dumb woman on “Are You Smarter Than a 5th-Grader?” is actually someone famous, not just some contestant the show discovered.
Wow. It just doesn’t take ANY brains to make it in this country, does it?
But let me add that she seems like a sweet-natured person, most probably nicer than I am…
This brings me to another topic that is uncomfortable on a number of levels…
As y’all may know, I continue to keep office hours more or less as I did at the newspaper — later than 9-5 people are used to — on account of all those years of working into the night and sometimes the wee hours of the morning at a.m. newspapers.
Unless there’s an earlier meeting, I aim to arrive at ADCO around 10, but am frequently later. Then I’m here an hour or two later than the others in the evening. If afternoon papers hadn’t died, I’d been an early riser — at the start of my career, I would often start the working day at 5:30 a.m. But they did, so I’m not.
Anyway, I know I’m running late when I see this extraordinarily stupid-looking game show come on one of the big HD screens at one end of the lounge of the Capital City Club. It comes on at 10, so it’s a cue to get up and go. But sometimes, this morning for instance, I stand and stare at it in wonder.
I’ve Googled and discovered that it’s “Let’s Make a Deal.” It’s astounding. There’s this studio audience of people wearing silly costumes, and they are all intensely excited. Apparently, one of them is chosen to be a contestant down front. From the moment they start interacting with the host, these contestants are more excited than a child who’s eaten a whole box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. Grown men in absurd costumes clap their hands like delighted babies being shown a puppy.
They are so amazingly… uncool.
I’ve tried imagining being that excited about something. If the host told me I’d just won several billion dollars, I’d be very pleased (knowing I’d never again have to work at anything I didn’t want to do, and that everything my family might ever need would be covered for generations to come), but I’m almost positive I would not act anything like these people — bouncing, leaping, dancing around — who are transported with ecstasy at the prospect of receiving far lesser prizes, things that don’t in any way transform their lives or anything like that.
I would almost certainly smile. I might muster a “That’s great!” But that would be about it. I would be deeply disappointing to the producers of the show.
Who ARE these people? Why does this excite them so much? Who enjoys watching them, perhaps even identifying with them?
I can no more imagine being one of those people than I can imagine applauding at a Trump rally. And again, I feel that sense of alienation that I do when I see a crowd of cheering football fans, or contemplate the outcome of the recent election. Or try to understand why someone wants to buy Ivanka Trump-branded products.
It’s hard to understand how we can be members of the same species, and yet react to stimuli so differently.
It’s not that I’m so very cool. I’m probably even sub-average on the coolness meter. In fact, my lack of excitement over some of these things is probably closely related to geekiness.
And I’m conscious that the difference is that those people may be kinder, more generous people than I, because they (the ones in the audience) can be so happy over the happiness of the other people winning the prizes. And the prize-winners are so very grateful for the prizes.
It’s like… on the rare occasions in which I find myself in the vicinity of a television tuned to one of those singing or dancing “reality” shows, I find the constant screaming of the audience really irritating. I mean, come on: If you are going to scream constantly, what do you save for when something worth cheering happens? (Of course, they just scream louder.)
But then I think again, they’re actually excited over the performances of these fellow humans. And it’s a pleasure that I’m incapable of summoning. So who’s a better person? I don’t think it’s me.
Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I know I’m probably sounding like a real jerk. I sound that way to myself…
Put another way:
There’s truth there… even though the lyric doesn’t work logically. Obviously, Paul meant to say it the other way around, that the fool makes the world a little colder by playing it cool, but…
I’ll shut up now…
Another thing that seems to have some sort of appeal to someone, but it completely eludes me…
http://www.thestate.com/entertainment/tv/article147999919.html
Wow Brad can you be any more condescending? Kellie Pickler is a fine singer. People listen to her voice, not her Jeopardy chops. And she’ll be performing in Columbia next month.
Did you watch the clip?
Something I didn’t realize until I was well into adulthood was the extent to which talents in the performing arts were not an indication of intelligence. I don’t know why I thought the things were connected, but I did.
I realized it fully during a period in the 80s when I did some community theater in West Tennessee. Some of the actors had talent — they could get into the head of a character and make the performance seem real, which I would have thought was an indicator of a subtle and supple mind.
And yet, in the early readings at the very start of rehearsals, they would demonstrate their lack of familiarity with some pretty simple, everyday words.
This surprised me. It wouldn’t now — there are plenty of bright people with, for instance, dyslexia. And of course, performing talent doesn’t mean skill in language arts. But it did surprise me then…
I’ve seen Ms. Pickler sing and enjoyed it. Your comment was that you found it surprising that anyone can be successful even with such limited intellect. She might find it surprising that a person who can’t sing can be successful.
She might.
I’ve seen Ms. Pickler sing and enjoyed it. Your comment was that you found it surprising that anyone can be successful even with such limited intellect. She might find it surprising that a person who can’t sing can be successful.
Going back to Jackson: I think he would have been furious over secession, and would have prosecuted an even more brutal war. Afterwards he would have done everything in his power to ensure that the South never rose again. If he abolished slavery, which he probably would have simply to crush the South, he would have imposed harsh Jim Crow laws to ensure that blacks remained subservient. I have a feeling that the results of a Jackson presidency during the civil war would been far worse.
You may be right.
Thank God it was Lincoln…
Has anyone yet mentioned Jackson’s Indian genocide?
Yes, it was mentioned in the original post, but it can’t be mentioned too often when the subject is Andrew Jackson…
To me, that goes FAR beyond his being a slaveholder, in terms of speaking to his character.
He was a Southern man of position and property. Of course he owned slaves. He’s generic in that regard. What’s not generic is what he did to the Indians. Not every Southern or frontier man would have done that. Davy Crockett opposed him on it, for one…
And yet, it was his prosecution of the Indian Problem that made Jackson popular with Americans.
I’d be curious to know exactly what it is about Jackson that makes him a Bannon role model.
Here’s what Alexandra Petri did with Trump History. (Here’s the original.):
Just to weigh in as somebody who does this stuff for a living . . .
I think I can piece together where Trump got this stuff. When I was growing up a respectable school of thought on the origins of the Civil War was known as the “Revisionist” school. As the Revisionists saw it, it made no sense to fight a war over slavery, because (1) slavery could never have gotten rooted in the territories (which was the big fight in the 1840s-1850s), and (2) slavery was economically nonviable in the long run and would have died of natural causes. The real cause of the War was a dysfunctional political system that led politicians to demonize their opponents for partisan advantage rather than cut deals (You’d *love* these guys, Brad–they were right up your alley). They actually had a lot of insight, especially into how white northerners who had no personal stake in slavery and were frequently hostile to both blacks and abolitionists could get drawn into a war that ended with emancipation (hint: it wasn’t slavery they opposed so much as slaveholders, a.k.a “the Slave Power,” who they saw as threats to *themselves*, and of course ultimately their country). The Revisionist David Potter’s *The Impending Crisis* is still to my mind the best analysis of the political dynamics that led to the War. However, the Revisionists’ tendency to marginalize the slavery issue led them into some blind alleys, and all too often gave aid and comfort to neo-Confederates. Moreover, the notion of slavery’s economic non-viability took a huge hit when economic historians using modern tools of analysis started investigating the issue and demonstrated conclusively that slavery was a highly profitable institution that could only have ended with forcible abolition. As historians have increasingly moved slavery to a central role in American history generally, the Revisionists have largely been forgotten, aside from those of us whose early training included considerable exposure to them. But Trump, being roughly my age, probably picked up on some of that in his childhood and youth
I think you are being way, way too kind to him, and assuming he knows a lot more than he knows.
Don’t put him on your level. He doesn’t deserve that.
This is not a guy who’s gotten mixed up because he just knows too much about different schools of thought about history. This is a guy who lacks a grasp of the basic, high-school-level outline of history and the main issues that have shaped the country.
He’s a guy who thinks a terrific deal-maker like him — or his new hero Andy Jackson — could have averted the war, because there was just no good reason for it. He completely misses how utterly intractable the division was, and fails to appreciate how hard people smarter than himself tried to avoid the split, which had been coming ever since the Constitutional Convention.
There were VERY good reasons why the split occurred, and South Carolina made no bones about them in stating the cause of secession. We can get into the weeds and talk in terms of the incompatible interests of different economic systems, and get into tariffs, and wages in the North, and so forth, but ultimately we know what underlay the whole mess, and had since the beginning…
All of that said from my high horse, I’ll walk it back a bit.
I just thought of something from my own experience that speaks to what you’re saying about Trump.
When I was in the 4th grade up in Maryland, I was making some sort of flat statement to my cousins about the Civil War (one that probably wasn’t very sympathetic to the Southern Cause and in fact was probably oversimplistic), and my grandmother stopped me and said, “Do you know what the war was about?”
I stopped myself from saying, “Yes, ma’am: slavery.” I sensed, although I did not know, that that would not have flown. My grandmother was a Southern lady. Her grandfather had been a slaveholder, and fought in the war, and served in the SC Legislature during the war, and one of his sons died in battle.
But I didn’t know enough about that stuff at the time, and really didn’t know what position my grandmother would take. I just sensed that she disapproved of where I was going with the topic.
And I had a sense that there were more complex explanations out there that just the word “slavery,” and I’d heard about them but didn’t understand them — the whole clash of economic systems thing (one of the systems, of course, being based in slavery!), and stuff about whether the states were as free to go their own way as they were to have united in the first place, and tariffs, and the fact that Lincoln’s public statements evolved as the war wore on, and all that stuff. All of which existed in a sort of gray cloud of which I was vaguely aware, and consisted of things that, at the age of 9, I knew I didn’t have a good grasp on.
So I did something that might surprise you. I retired from the field. I said, “No, ma’am.” I may even have added something like, “I know it’s complicated.”
Of course, today, I’ve come to understand enough that I have the confidence to say, “Ultimately, slavery.” But I didn’t know enough then to see how all the complexities fit together into a comprehensible whole.
Near as I can recall, my grandmother let me retreat, and didn’t pursue it further. And I felt like I had dodged an uncomfortable situation.
So, bottom line, I can agree with what you suggest about Trump — but I accept it on the basis that he has the understanding of a 4th-grader, not that of a professor…
By the way, I do not know, and cannot know, whether I read that situation with my grandmother right — and she’s no longer with us for me to ask.
Maybe she would have accepted “slavery.” I just had the feeling that she wouldn’t, and for all I knew, she was in the right of it. I was just a kid.
And from the vantage point of being a grandfather, I think I chose the right course. I may have been wiser then than I am now…