The continuing move to take down monuments honoring the Confederacy has brought with it an encouraging spate of articles discussing the real history of the Confederacy and of the white supremacist, post-Civil War agenda behind neo-Confederate ideology, including Adam Serwer's The Myth of the Kindly General LeeAtlantic Online 06/04/2017.
One of my Facebook friends posted this piece on Andrew Jackson that is vague enough to be sparse on particular claims but nevertheless has a definite pseudohistory edge to it: Adrienne Keene, How I Feel As a Native Woman When Trump Idolizes Andrew JacksonTeen Vogue 04/19/2017. She happily accepts the idea of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump that Jackson is a fitting image for the current Trump Family Business Administration:
Trump embraced the comparison to Jackson, and once in the Oval Office, he chose a portrait of Jackson to hang in a place of honor. More recently, ... Trump spent the night at Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, the Hermitage, and laid a wreath on his tomb. He gave a speech at the site, stating that America will “build on [his] legacy.” He called Jackson a “military hero and genius and a beloved president,” but noted he was “also a flawed and imperfect man, a product of his time.” He ended his speech, “Andrew Jackson, we thank you for your service. We honor you for your memory. We build on your legacy, and we thank God for the United States of America.”
These statements and comparisons terrify me. Jackson’s legacy is nothing short of Native genocide. History has strangely been kind to him, painting him as a populist president, a “common man,” a political outsider who came to shake up the establishment and break the rules to serve the people. But the reality was far from it.
Jackson came to power campaigning against "the Money Power," concentrated wealth that corrupted democracy. American political leaders used terms like "Wall Street" and "the trusts" and the "malefactors of great wealth" and "economic royalists" to describe later incarnations of the same problem. And DONALD TRUMP wants us to think of him as a present-day Andrew Jackson? Ur-Confederate John C. Calhoun is laughing maniacally in whatever corner of the underworld he currently hangs out. Tom Paine is weeping.
Historians still provide some incredibly nuanced and insightful views of the pre-Civil War US history. But on seemingly the entire left of center, popular accounts reject nearly everything that would have been considered "left" at the time. Republicans and conservatives are much better at evoking historical imagery than the Democrats. But among other things, it leads to sloppy history.
It also leads the Democrats to miss the opportunity to challenge the far right's alt-history of the United States. Like the idea of Donald Trump being a new Andrew Jackson. The Democrats don't even bother to contest that bit of pseudohistory, although Keene doesn't present herself as speaking as a Democrat in that piece.
And even well-informed articles I've seen the last few weeks debunking neo-Confederate pseudohistory haven't yet seem to have focused on the fact that Jackson in the Nullification Controversy came down hard on the side of the Union and against threats of secession on behalf of slavery. Popular left and left-of-center history right now tends to reject Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (the two major founders of the Democratic Party!) out of hand because they were slaveowners. But Lincoln is still allowed to be the Great Emancipator. But how to explain that he saw Jefferson and Jackson as major role models, and understood his own political project as carrying on their work of democratic emancipation?
For that matter, Lincoln took part in state militia action against Indians in his younger years. And Indian tribes were among those Lincoln sent the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. Some groups of Indians supported the Confederacy, including in Oklahoma where the Creeks, Choctaws and Cherokees were relocated under Jackson Indian Removal Act.
I'll say again what I've said various times in other posts. Jackson's Indian policy was bad. The opponents of Jackson's Indian Removal Act did object to it in real time. But their arguments were things like, having Indian slaveowners in the South helped defend the institution of slavery. Keene at least alludes to that. And that it would be easier to Christianize the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees if they stayed in the southeast, i.e., easier to destroy their cultures completely.
Though Jackson rightly gets blamed for the Indian Removal Act, the removal of the Cherokees (what the term Trail of Tears originally referred to) under that law took place under Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, which most popular accounts don't even mention. Keene's article also omits that fact. That's not an excuse for Jackson's Administration. Other relocations took place under Jackson's Presidency, and they also caused a great deal of death and suffering.
Herman Melville was one of the few whites in America at that time who held something like a 21st-century view of equality for Native Americans. Francis Parkman came close, but Melville thought Parkman was a bit backward on the subject. And even the Great Emancipator was a white supremacist in today's sense, along with virtually every other white person in the US, including most of the soldiers of the Union Army that destroyed the Slave Power in the Civil War. The only famous white person prior to the Civil War that comes to mind who held views on racial and gender equality like those of American liberals in 2017 is John Brown. And how many white Americans today are willing to identify with the "terrorist" guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown?
History is complicated, Especially the part that human being make.
Jackson's Indian policy sucked. So did that of virtually every other white person in the US from before the American Revolution until, well, arguably even now. And while there were undoubtedly many settlers who wanted to just kill every Indian in sight, Jackson was not one of them. If "genocide" means anything like the official UN definition of it today - which involves a deliberate intent as well as concrete action aimed at exterminating an entire group of people - neither Jackson's Indian Removal Act nor the removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma count as genocide. The Cherokee removal on which Keene focused was mainly implemented by Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren. Obviously, "not genocide" does not mean "acceptable."
Republicans are not only better at evoking historical symbolism than the Democrats. And more willing to make up their own pseudohistory, which I guess we call alt-history right now. While Democrats aren't willing to defend the genuine democratic progress made prior to the Civil War even by their own party founders. This is one reason that saying adapted from Robert Frost remains current, "A liberal is someone who is so open-minded he won’t take his own side in a fight."
Adrienne Keene who authored the Teen Vogue article is presumably the same one who is an American Studies Professor at Brown University. She has a blog called Native Appropriations focusing on issues of "cultural appropriation," which seems to be a major focus of her scholarly work, as well.
The Hermitage (United States) (AFP) - Donald Trump hailed America's first populist president Wednesday, laying a wreath at the tomb of Andrew Jackson and waxing lyrical about the similarities between himself and the seventh US president.
On the 250th anniversary of Jackson's birth, Trump visited "Old Hickory's" Tennessee home, dubbed The Hermitage.
Praising "the very great" Jackson's willingness to take on "an arrogant elite," Trump broke away from prepared remarks to exclaim, "Does that sound familiar to you?"
"I wonder why they keep talking about Trump and Jackson, Jackson and Trump. Ooh, I know the feeling Andrew."
Since coming to office in January, Trump aides have sought to draw comparisons between the bareknuckle Democratic president and Trump.
Jackson is obviously trying to identify with the image of Andrew Jackson as the champion of the common man. And Trump probably means man, too, even though women can vote now. More specifically, white man. It's also a safe bet that Trump himself has never read a history book or substantive history article about Andrew Jackson.
I would call Jackson a proto-populist instead of "America's first populist president," as this article does. I'll let the Populist Party be the first populists. Even though William Jennings Bryant didn't make it to the Presidency. He did serve as Secretary of State, though.
Trump's ceremonial wreath-laying at Jackson's grave brings up one of my chronic laments about present-day left and center-left politics in the US. Conservatives may have some inherent advantage in evoking iconic historical figures, although I'm not willing to concede that it has to be that way. But Andrew Jackson actually was one of the founders of the Democratic Party. And Donald bleeping Trump has stolen the Jackson symbolism for himself and the Republicans.
Nicole Hemmer gives us a look at Steve Bannon's white nationalist narrative of Andrew Jackson in Jacksonian RepublicansUS News and World Report 03/14/217:
Jackson is an odd touchstone for Trump. He is, after all, one of the founders of the Democratic Party. But Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance, fits neatly with Trump's own worldview – a worldview that is coming to define not just Trump's administration, but also the Republican Party.
The rise of the Jacksonian Republicans is remarkable. For well over a century after leaving office in 1837, Jackson was seen by white Democrats not only as the father of the party but the man who breathed life into the country's democratic promise. Historians wrote paeans to the age of Jacksonian democracy, when ordinary white people tore power from the hands of white elites, when universal white manhood suffrage replaced property requirements to vote.
Unfortunately, Hemmer seems to accept too much of the underlying assumption of the white nationalist propaganda outlook when she writes, "Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance, fits neatly with Trump's own worldview – a worldview that is coming to define not just Trump's administration, but also the Republican Party."
Using historical imagery in politics is never going to be exactly the same as trying to understand history in a serious way. The two don't have to be disconnected. It's just two different approaches.
But that means we need to be careful with how one kind of view feeds the other. The view of history as a upward process of progress is very much an Enlightenment outlook. So is race as a way of claiming essential qualities of civilization for Europeans, including those in the New World that are assumed to be lacking in the "inferior, primitive" peoples. Even if we don't hold a view of inherent progress in history, if we also assume that democracy is a good thing, a desirable thing, then that viewpoint will in some way privilege the events, movements, processes and leaders that contributed to the development and advancement of democracy. And democracy - political, social and economic - is not a product of Immaculate Conception. It's product of a messy, complicated history made by human beings. The latter of whom are known for being fallible and inconsistent even in their best moments.
Historians use "anachronism" to refer not just to the colloquial meaning of old-fashioned. But also to describe projecting normative assumptions of the present onto the past. I can't entirely escape the suspicion that this gives conservatives an advantage over the left and center-left when it comes to appropriating iconic images of the past for present-day usage. Political conservatives in their most constructive mode want to "make haste slowly." Reactionaries want to restore a past era of glory, even when the image of that past era invariably turns out to be a very present-day adaptation of selective imaginings of the golden past. While the classic image of liberals (in the American sense), progressives, the left is more that of people who embrace change, who want to find innovative solutions to social problems and to create constructive adaptations to new problems. In that broad view, conservatives may just be more comfortable identifying with the past.
Yet if the famous statement from George Orwell's 1984 is true, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past," then the converse is also partially true: that narratives of the past shape the present and future.
So I would prefer to see the left and center-left take a more nuanced view of the democratic traditions in the American past.
Jackson and his legacy became part of a public policy discussion with the idea of putting a black woman on the $20 bill. I certainly have no issue with putting Sojourner Truth on the $20 bill.
But there are still meaningful connections from 19th century political movements in America to the present day. The direct political ancestor of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon was John Calhoun, patron saint of white supremacy. Jackson became Calhoun's arch-enemy over the Nullification Controversy, one of the major milestones on the road to Southern secession. One side in that controversy defended the traditions of democracy, the Constitution and the Union (all still developing in 2017); the other side defended treason in support of the institution of slavery and white supremacy. When he was literally on his deathbed there just inside the house from where Trump laid a wreath at his grave, Jackson said the only regret of his life was that he hadn't hanged John Calhoun for treason over his nullification stunt.
Since I've been especially bugged by neo-Confederate nonsense since the 1990s, I've grown very fond of the image of the slaveowner Jackson taking the right side against Calhoun when events forced him to choose between Constitutional democracy, on the one hand, and the democracy-hating "Slave Power," on the other.
Yes, Jackson's Indian policy was bad. So has every other President's been from Washington to Trump. And, no, that's not an excuse for Jackson or any of the rest of them. But Democrats and progressives today don't have much trouble still seeing the New Deal and FDR's pro-union policies as important democratic moments in American history. While at the same time criticizing his questionable compromises with segregation and flat-out condemning his order to intern Japanese-Americans. The same two-steps-forward-one-step-back process was at work in the Age of Jackson, too.
There's more of a "usable past" in that era than most Dems and progressives today seem to realize. It's of some interest to me that Jackson helped the pioneering American feminist Frances "Fanny" Wright set up a Utopian community called Nashoba in Tennesse in 1825. Among other things, the project was a biracial community with an abolitionist bent. He may have assisted her more because she was a friend of General Lafayette. But he did it. But we won't hear Donald Trump or Steve Bannon praising Andrew Jackson for assisting Fanny Wright to set up an abolitionist Utopian community.
Donald Trump trying to identify himself with the image of Andrew Jackson reminds me of the pictures from the infamous German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden featuring a giant image of George Washington. Rare Historical Photos provides this image from that rally (American Nazi organization rally at Madison Square Garden, 1939 02/19/2014):
The article makes this observation on why the we-love-Hitler crowd might pick George Washington as a mascot (emphasis in original):
There is a reason George Washington is up there and not Thomas Jefferson or James Madison Jr. Fascism was an ideology that emphasized action and heroism over intellectualism and philosophy. This is why Hitler’s ideal Aryan concept was a strong, handsome, and physically fit person rather than someone with a mind for civics. Men of action were the ideal example figures. The other part of fascism was extreme patriotism, which is why each nation/group had its own fascist symbolism and mythology. It wasn’t like communism where concepts were supposed to transcend ethnic boundaries, but an ideology where each nation had its own flavor. Washington, as a military leader, patriotic father, and someone whom a legend of heroism and virtue has grown up around, was the ideal figure for fascist groups looking to pull a symbol out of American history.
But anti-New Deal conservatives at that time did re-imagine Thomas Jefferson as a prophet of "free enterprise" Herbert Hoover economics. But liberals and leftists in those days were at least willing to contest the historical symbolism. Today, not so much.
I don't recall ever finding a reference to Andrew Jackson as a hero of the Radical Right in the 1930s, although there may well have been.
This is a big topic. But I'll make these observations about why I think the left and left-center have trouble with defending major democratic figures in the United States prior to the Civil War.
Anachronism: I think some of it is just that people on the left are likely to make moral and political judgments about history based on cherished standards of today. And to judge them harshly because the progress of those standards was much less developed than they are now. It's not only a lazy and unrealistic way to look at history. It's also a small step from saying that we don't like any political figure before 1860 because they didn't have the prevalent 21st standards on race and women's rights to saying they discriminated against blacks and Indians and women and there's no point in criticizing it. And much more realistic approach is to look at the actual debates over issues and the positions people actually took in those debates. Northern states in 1860 were free (non-slave) states because they had abolished slavery in their states. So opposition to slavery was very much a contemporary value in 1820, or in 1776, for that matter. And there is a lot to be learned from why people - and of course we're talking here mostly about white people, and in particular white men who could vote - lined up on different sides of that issue. It wasn't only white people, though. One of the arguments against Jackson's infamous Indian Removal Act was that some Indians in the Southeastern regions affected were slaveowners, and having examples of Indian slaveowners strengthened in institution of slavery. Real history is complicated.
Superficial understanding of social change: When Nicole Hemmer writes, "Jackson's belief that democracy and race were inextricably bound together, that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance," a lot of readers will assume that this is a common assumption on the left. And not without reason. But the same Enlightenment worldview that promoted chauvinistic notions of European civilization and white racial superiority also promoted ideas of democracy and equality and civil liberties that wound up presenting major challenges to the restriction of the vote to white property-owning men and to white supremacy in its various forms. And with widespread segregationist voter-suppression schemes in effect and Trump Muslim ban - to take only two examples - those conflicting notions are still in contention in the United States in 2017. The varying positions people take today on such issues matters, and it mattered in the past, too. The fact that most voters in the 1832 elections were white men who assumed "that whiteness was a prerequisite for self-governance" doesn't mean that there were no meaningful differences in the positions that took on, say, the vote in the Virginia legislature in 1831-32 over abolishing slavery in that state.
Insufficient historical literacy: The fact that Donald Trump can even try to pass himself off as the Andrew Jackson of the 21st century is prima facie evidence of this problem.
I hadn't realized before, or maybe I had forgotten, that Sanuel "Mark Twain" Clemons used his trademark white suit as a political and moral statement. Which suggests an interesting counterpoint to Johnny Cash's "Man in Black" self-branding, both of them representing a statement of solidarity with the downtrodden.
Tracy Fessenden writes about Clemon's white suit in Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007):
While the white suit would become identified with Mark Twain as indelibly as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the memorable dress belongs to a period of largely forgotten production, speculative narratives that break off without finishing and polemics that went unpublished in Twain's lifetime. And if the singular white suit stands in ironic contrast to the spotty literary output, it remains at least as difficult to read. Obviously, unreliably, the white suit projects a white persona: in Pudd'nhead Wilson, we recall, the infant slave Chambers becomes the white slave owner Tom Driscoll by being dressed in his master's "holy" clothes, his white Sunday gown ... In his white linen or silk-lined flannels Twain must have reminded audiences of the rajas who, according to Following the Equator, wrested the control of India from "Hindoo and Mohammed rulers" and "establish[ed] British superiority there." In Following the Equator, written just as the United States was launching the imperialist career that would soon eclipse Britain's, Twain confessed that his own and his Anglo-Saxon companions' white "Christian" clothes were in fact "a lie": "they are on us to expose us, to advertise what we wear them to conceal"; "they are ... a pretence that we despise gorgeous colors"; "yes, our clothes are a lie ... [T]hey are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral decay." [my emphasis in bold]
Clemons, in Fessenden's reading, presented himself as a proud representative of white American democracy while he simultaneously insisted on the deeply contradictory nature of that condition:
In pronouncing his White House and Savage Club audiences "unclean" Twain makes the white suit an invisible reproach to these sacred whites, to what in his "Greeting to the Twentieth Century" he calls the "stately maiden named Christendom," who "return[s] bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, & the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her packet full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."
Clemos Clemons, like other radical critics of American problems before and after, contrasted the ideals and preferred self-identification of the dominant American culture to the actual practices of the nation and its social reality:
If the spectacularly unblemished white suit would seem to distance Twain from an ensoiling "Christendom," however, it offers no comparable exemption from "whiteness." In "The Stupendous Procession," another of the unfinished narratives from Twain's white-suited period, modern nation-states parade with symbols of their territorial conquests, whiteness trumpeting its own ability to contain, as it were, all colors. America, the last and largest in the procession, marches with banners that pointedly revise the Declaration of lndependence - "All white men are born free and equal"; the Fourteenth Amendment - "white slavery shall no longer exist where the American flag floats"; and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - "Christ died to make white men holy; he [Abraham Lincoln] died to make white men free."
Someone once asked me if the use of Andrew Jackson's symbolism for this blog was meant satirically. It was a good question. And I remembered it when I read the passages in Tracy's book I just quoted.
Jackson is interesting to me as an historical figure in much the same way John Brown or Newton Knight, the subject of a new film, Free State of Jones, scheduled to be released this year:
Brown by resisting the national government dominated by the Slave Power, and Knight by resisting the traitorous slaveowners revolt against democracy that was the Confederacy, both in their own ways embodied the democratic spirit and the historical trend of the democracy by resisting the established orders of which they were a part, both of which claimed to represent the American ideal of democracy. Though in the case of the Confederacy, the remnants of electoral democracy for whites were embedded in an open rebellion against American democracy that aimed to press forward the development of the fundamentally antidemocratic slave system.
Jackson and the Jacksonian movement represented radical democracy of their time. To borrow one of Joan Walsh's favorite phrases, it represented the "left wing of the possible" at the level of the national government in the US at the time.
As I've said repeatedly here, in addition to heading a movement that expanded the franchise, supported the nascent organized labor movement and encouraged a new level of popular organizing and political participation, Jackson's Presidency is associated particularly with three major events, two of which were democratic and progressive, the other far more problematic. The successful fight against the Bank of the United States as a major tool of organized money and Jackson's successful stand against John Calhoun's secessionist move in the South Carolina Nullification Controversy were the first two. The Indian Removal Act was the third.
And the latter, reactionary and destructive as it was from any kind of democratic or humane view today, was very much a part of white democracy and the Enlightenment view of the Indians as "savages" and "natural peoples" who had to be "civilized" by white Europeans, or Americans, in this case.
Mark Twain used his white suit to both affirm to the ideals of democracy and of a humane spirit of religion while simultaneously reminding people of the dark side of real existing white democracy, particularly its brutal practice of imperialism and white racism.
The symbol of Andrew Jackson here represents a recognition that democracy advances through people committed to advancing it, even against their own conventionally-perceived self-interest. In Jackson's case, he was a rich man who defended the interests of the common people against the Money Power with which he could easily have identified. He was a slaveowner and a supporter of slavery who in the Nullification Crisis took the side of democracy and American patriotism against the incipient revolt of the slaveowners class of which he was a member.
But Jackson is also a symbol that reminds us, like Twain's white suit, that "democracy" for white people is not the sum total of all virtues, that democracy can and does inflict needless cruelty on the Other, whether the Other is American Indian or Philippine peasants or Arab noncombatants today who fall victim to our freedom bombs or unarmed African-Americans who receive vigilante "justice" at the hands of white racist police.
But in the end, human history is made by real human beings. Real human beings that still often produced the results that Hegel gloomily described: "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...")
But we also have to recognize the moments that point in a different direction. Polluted as they are with dark side of our human species.
When I started this blog in 2003 on the old AOL blog platform - science fiction writer John Scalzi was kind of a blog coach for people there - I picked a name and branding identified with Andrew Jackson, who in particular I saw and still see as a symbol of the pro-democracy democratic tradition opposed to the reactionary trend represented by John Calhoun, patron saint of the Confederacy.
In dealing with Jackson's Indian policies, I've always tried to state clearly that they were bad and not "defend" them. With the criticism I'm discussing in this post, I'm not going to worry much about whether it sounds like I'm "defending" policies of which I have made my criticisms clear.
What Jackson symbolizes in particular for me is what I've stated in the statement that's been on the blog for years, "He stood up against the secessionists and the economic royalists." And he did, in the Nullification Controversy and the fight against the Second Bank of the United States. At the time, Jacksonians referred to the latter as the chief representative of the Money Power, which meant basically the same as Theodore Roosevelt's "malefactors of great wealth" and Franklin Roosevelts "economic royalists." The use of the latter is, I suppose, doubly anachronistic, because I'm using a term from the 1930s that's not so common today and applying it to the situation a century earlier.
This opinion column by Albert Bender is a reminder that Jackson's Indian policy remains a challenge for the democratic tradition: Democrats shouldn't praise JacksonThe Tennessean 11/02/2015.
In a way, selecting historical figures as present-day symbols is similar to identifying saints in the Catholic Church. Despite Mary's Immaculate Conception, the Church assumes that even she sinned in life, even though it also claims that she got an Ascension without death at the end.
But the Catholic Church and most Protestant Christians could generally agree - in theory anyway - with the chorus of this song Sinners & Saints "The only thang different in sinners and saints/One is forgiven and the other one ain't."
The People's Worldsays explicitly of itself and its affiliated websites that they "enjoy a special relationship with the Communist Party USA, founded in 1919, and publish its news and views." It's the paper of what is left of the US Communist Party, in other words. I don't mention that to dismiss it as a source of news or opinion but as an identifier of the trend of thought in which Bender is working.
And the Communist Party's official histories of Andrew Jackson have never been particular flattering. William Z. Foster's 1954 book The Negro People in American History was written while he was in prison after being successfully prosecuted by the Truman Administration for the crime of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the American government. Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that his book wasn't particularly flattering to Jackson, one of the patron (secular) saints of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, in the same book he followed the Communist Party habit of praising Thomas Jefferson as a (bourgeois) revolutionary and advocate for the abolition of slavery.
Foster's account there of pre-Civil War politics is generally a decent account from a consciously pro-Abolitionist point of view. Though his purpose in the book is clearly political, not academic historiography. Historian Theodore Draper would later credit Foster for recovering the history of black nationalism in the US, which he also did in that 1954 volume.
But the tangle of ideologies over the last century and more, the fact is that Jackson and the politics associated with him as President represented a major step forward for popular democracy in the United States.
So, here's Bender's case against Jackson, from his November 2 column:
Some things you just don’t see coming. That was my reaction to the column by Mary Mancini, chairwoman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, praising that mass murderer, Andrew Jackson.
The column was posted in connection with the party’s annual Jackson Day Dinner.
As I have known Mancini as a voice of liberalism and reason in this community, I shall not engage in personal invective. I will just address the position of the state Democratic Party as manifested by Mancini.
The column states “Jackson was elected because he captured the imagination of the American people."
He captured the imagination of racist white people who imagined an America without Indians, an America where there was no place for Native Americans.
Was Jackson supported by racist white people? Yes. It would be safe to say that nearly every person who voted for him was a racist white man. The same was true of Presidents Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, JQ Adams, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln, to name only those elected before the Civil War. Women couldn't vote during that period (with minor exceptions). And virtually every white man and women believed that the white race was superior to blacks and Indians ("the Red Man"). Even among white Abolitionists, it was unusual to find ones that believed in the basic equality of the races that is recognized as the official conventional wisdom today, though a large percentage of whites still don't believe it in practice.
Did Jackson advocate "an America without Indians, an America where there was no place for Native Americans"? Did he campaign on such a platform in 1924, 1928 or 1932? No, he did not. Were there many Indian haters who more-or-less wanted that? Yes. In fact the only people who fit the category of "Indian lovers" in the first half of the 19th century in the US fell into two groups were people who had spent their entire lives in Eastern cities or nearby, and who had a more-or-less romanticized view of Indians, the kind of view contained in the Leatherstocking novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851).
The other group contained the relatively small number of whites who had actually lived and worked among Indians, like the fur trappers and the "mountain men." That last number included even a few intellectuals. The great historian Francis Parkman (1823-1893) lived among Indian tribes and learned some native languages, enabling him to write some detailed accounts of Indian life that are stilled valued by anthropologists and historians today. Because he did good work, and took the time to understand his Indians objects of study on their own terms. But even he has been criticized by historians for displaying some degree of racial prejudice against Indians. Even in his own lifetime, Herman Melville (1819-1891) criticized him for advocating harsh measures against Indians. Melville himself didn't live among American Indians, but he did spend a significant period of time among Polynesian natives in the South Seas, an experience he wrote about in fictionalized for in Typee (1846). Melville had a more tolerant view of other races than was common in his time. Yet that didn't prevent some element of nostalgic sympathy toward Confederate soldiers and officers from showing itself in his definitively pro-Union poems in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).
This is part of the dilemma of simply dismissing major American leaders and thinkers of the early 19th century as simply racists. Because carried through in the way Bender seems to envision, that would mean a ban on relying on any of them for any kind of positive, democratic and patriotic symbolism - on the part of people who oppose white racism and xenophobia today. Those who demagogue in favor white racism and xenophobia will be happy to use George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Robert E. Lee, John Calhoun and Henry Clay, and anyone else they choose to portray themselves as the Real Americans. The only conservatives you hear praising Andrew Jackson these days are those who somehow got the idea that Jackson stood for a militarized foreign policy. You do see today's Republicans and advocates of white supremacy making use of neo-Confederate ideas and symbolism. So as long as John Calhoun's ghost haunts American politics, I'm happy to invoke Old Hickory's ghost to remind people that there is a democratic tradition of national unity that was the radical opposite of Calhoun's treason. And a large-d Democratic one, too.
Apart from politics as such, it's also a matter of how we approach history both professional and popular. History isn't made by pure thoughts. It's made by impure people, some of whom can do bad things and still achieve good things that advance democracy,or enhance our understanding of the world. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) is a significant figure because of his important influence in advancing science and philosophy. The fact that he may have been a prick doesn't change that.
Bender attacks Jackson for the Indian Wars of his day:
Jackson carried out the most murderous removal campaign against Native Americans — Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Seminoles — in U.S. history. He was directly responsible for the hideous, agonizing deaths of tens of thousands of Native Americans, beginning with the Creek War of 1813-14.
Jackson was accountable for the deaths of thousands of Muscogee Creek people in that conflict. He envisioned an America without Indians. Jackson led armies that conducted a war of extermination against noncombatants — women, children, the elderly.
According to present-day Creek sources, hundreds of Creek women and children were also sold into slavery. They were starved and many murdered in captivity.
Many of the women were also raped. Creek children, particularly little boys, were sold for $20 each as “pets.”
Orphaned children were taken off the battlefields from the bodies of their dead mothers as “trophies.” Three such children were taken by Jackson himself, including the tragic Lincoya.
The two basic positions among white Americans on Indians in those days were that they either had to be pushed out of the way and/or killed off, and that they could be integrated into white Christian society through mission work and education. The opponents of the Indian Removal Act argued that it would be more difficult to Christianize the affected tribes if they were moved to Oklahoma. Some argued that since some Indians were owners of black slaves, their continued presence in the southeast US would strengthen the institution of slavery.
The Indian Wars are nothing for Americans today to be proud of.
When it comes to Jackson, though, we also have to consider whether he was especially brutal or deliberately instigated the kinds of actions that Bender uses in that brief polemic just quoted to suggest that it is what Jackson wanted. So far as I'm aware, that was just not the case. The Army units that Jackson commanded in the Creek War Bender cites wasn't the professional and disciplined army of today, so there were surely atrocities committed. But criminal behavior on the part of individual ill-trained short-term volunteers doesn't make it "a war of extermination against noncombatants." That's quite a charge, one that deserves more citation than Bender provides.
The phrase, "According to present-day Creek sources," strikes me as odd there. Was there no well-known historian, Creek or otherwise, who he could have cited by name? I'm also not aware that Indians were "sold into slavery," as Benton claims. Slavery was inflicted almost exclusively on people of some kind of African descent. It's also not clear whether he's talking only about the Creek War of 1813-14 in those paragraphs, or a larger number of conflicts.
Richard Blackmon in The Creek War of 1813-1814 (US Army Center of Military History, 2014) says of that war, "Poor communications and loose command arrangements further increased the challenges." The body counts are always a grim subject. But the number and type of casualties are a part of the story. They can also tell us something about the nature of the war. Blackmon writes, summarizing the entire conflict (p. 40), "Total deaths for U.S. forces, regulars and militia, are estimated at 575. About 1,600 Red Stick [Creek] warriors died. Many Indian civilians died of starvation or disease brought on by the loss of their homes in winter."
Blackmon writes of one phase of the war in 1813 (p. 21):
After [Col. John] Coffee’s victory at Tallushatchee, many nearby Creek towns pledged their loyalty to the United States. About one hundred loyal Creeks sought refuge at Fort Leslie near the Creek town of Talladega in what is now the state of Alabama. About one thousand Red Sticks led by William Weatherford surrounded Fort Leslie, stating that he would kill all inside unless the occupants joined him in warring against the United States. A Creek Indian from the fort managed to elude the besiegers and carry word of the situation to Jackson at Fort Strother. [my emphasis]
When you look at the specifics of that Creek War, it becomes hard to picture it as "a war of extermination against noncombatants."
Blackmon also says of the immediately preceding battle, "Red Stick losses amounted to 186 warriors killed and some 80 women and children captured, while Coffee sustained less than 50 casualties." Coffee was under Jackson's command at the time. And the subsequent events Blackmon relates (p. 22) don't picture General Jackson in a war of extermination against the whole Creek people, nor even one indifferent to casualties among Creek men:
The battles at Tallushatchee and Talladega significantly diminished Red Stick strength, and by rescuing friendly Creeks at Talladega, Jackson further cemented the relationship between National Council Creeks and the United States. Impressed by American power, the Creeks of the Hillabee towns, located in the northern Creek territory, pledged not to war any further against the United States. In return, General Jackson promised not to attack their towns.
Unfortunately, General [John] Cocke knew nothing of these arrangements. On 10 November, he directed General White with his mounted East Tennessee militia and some three hundred Cherokee warriors to attack the Hillabee towns. Since the Creeks did not expect an attack, they were completely defenseless when White attacked on 18 November. In fact, when White attacked at first light, many residents came out to greet the Tennesseans and Cherokees. The towns contained many warriors wounded from the battles at Tallushatchee and Talladega as well as women and children. White took the women and children prisoners and reported killing sixty-nine Creek warriors. His own command sustained no casualties. When Jackson heard of the attack he became furious. He viewed the slaughter as evidence of Cocke’s insubordination. The surviving Hillabees believed they had been double-crossed by Jackson and henceforth pledged to war against the United States.
As that incident shows, there were also conflicts among the Creeks themselves.
The Creek War took place during the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Blackmon remarks that in the period before the US declared war on Britain, the Americans "suspected British encouragement of Indian opposition to further American settlement on the western frontier." (p. 5)
Bender writes the following of the Indian Removal Act and its consequences and goes all Godwin's Law with a Hitler reference:
Jackson signed the Indian Removal Bill of May 30, 1830, and militarily enforced fraudulent treaties that brought further death to thousands of Native American men, women, children and elderly. Of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” it is said that no one younger than 6 or older than 60 survived the hideous march of death.
Much of the Cherokee past and future perished on the trail of genocide that killed two generations.
Yet the Tennessee Democratic Party wants to praise this racist monster — this racist devil incarnate — this early-day American Hitler whose deadly legacy for American Indians remains extant to this very day.
Not just Hitler, but a "racist monster" and "racist devil incarnate"! I'm surprised he didn't throw in "mean poo-poo head."
The Indian relocations under the authority of that law took place over several years. I'm willing to argue that an alternative should have been found. But the real history also does not suggest the alternatives would necessarily have been more favorable for the longer-term survival of the affected tribes. Whites in the region wanted Indian land. And many of them were more like John Cocke in their thinking than like Andrew Jackson.
Again, the Indian Removal Act was a bad idea. Yet even with bad ideas, it's important to get the history right. Yes, the Act was a signature policy and legislative achievement of Jackson's. But Bender is careful to give a precise date for the signing date of the law. But not for the dates of the "Trail of Tears." This undated PBS webpage, Indian Removal 1814-1858, gives the following account of the Trail of Tears.
The Cherokee, on the other hand, were tricked with an illegitimate treaty. In 1833, a small faction agreed to sign a removal agreement: the Treaty of New Echota. The leaders of this group were not the recognized leaders of the Cherokee nation, and over 15,000 Cherokees -- led by Chief John Ross -- signed a petition in protest. The Supreme Court ignored their demands and ratified the treaty in 1836. The Cherokee were given two years to migrate voluntarily, at the end of which time they would be forcibly removed. By 1838 only 2,000 had migrated; 16,000 remained on their land. The U.S. government sent in 7,000 troops, who forced the Cherokees into stockades at bayonet point. They were not allowed time to gather their belongings, and as they left, whites looted their homes. Then began the march known as the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.
The year 1938 was two years into the Van Buren Administration. I'm not willing to call Van Buren a racist devil monster Hitler, either. But Ben Carson and David Barton aside, people don't get to just make up the history to fit their political point of the moment.
Robert Lindneux did this painting called The Trail of Tears in 1942:
That website gives this account of the earlier relocations:
For the next 28 years [after 1930], the United States government struggled to force relocation of the southeastern nations. A small group of Seminoles was coerced into signing a removal treaty in 1833, but the majority of the tribe declared the treaty illegitimate and refused to leave. The resulting struggle was the Second Seminole War, which lasted from 1835 to 1842. As in the first war, fugitive slaves fought beside the Seminoles who had taken them in. Thousands of lives were lost in the war, which cost the Jackson administration approximately 40 to 60 million dollars -- ten times the amount it had allotted for Indian removal. In the end, most of the Seminoles moved to the new territory. The few who remained had to defend themselves in the Third Seminole War (1855-58), when the U.S. military attempted to drive them out. Finally, the United States paid the remaining Seminoles to move west.
The Creeks also refused to emigrate. They signed a treaty in March, 1832, which opened a large portion of their Alabama land to white settlement, but guaranteed them protected ownership of the remaining portion, which was divided among the leading families. The government did not protect them from speculators, however, who quickly cheated them out of their lands. By 1835 the destitute Creeks began stealing livestock and crops from white settlers. Some eventually committed arson and murder in retaliation for their brutal treatment. In 1836 the Secretary of War ordered the removal of the Creeks as a military necessity. By 1837, approximately 15,000 Creeks had migrated west. They had never signed a removal treaty.
The Chickasaws had seen removal as inevitable, and had not resisted. They signed a treaty in 1832 which stated that the federal government would provide them with suitable western land and would protect them until they moved. But once again, the onslaught of white settlers proved too much for the War Department, and it backed down on its promise. The Chickasaws were forced to pay the Choctaws for the right to live on part of their western allotment. They migrated there in the winter of 1837-38.
"World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...")
There's a new round of discussion about the contemporary role of Andrew Jackson as a symbol, specifically for the Democratic Party.
I guess it was a good move to use "Old Hickory" in the name of this blog instead of Jackson's name explicitly!
It makes me recall that when I started this blog in 2003 with this same name, originally on AOL, I had a couple of things very much in mind. One was my disgust at neo-Confederate ideology. The State of Mississippi had a special referendum election in 2001 to vote on getting rid of the Confederate battle flag symbol on their state flag. It was the only issue on the ballot. And a solid majority, including a heavy majority of white voters, voted to keep the Confederate version of the state flag. It was one reminder among other of the virulence of segregationist thinking, bolstered as it has always been by neo-Confederate ideology and symbols.
As the Andrew Jackson logo on the right side of the blog that has been there for years says of Jackson, "He stood up against the secessionists and the economic royalists." What makes his image a potent one in my mind against neo-Confederate symbolism is that Jackson was a slaveowner and supporter of slavery who nevertheless chose democracy and national unity against the narrow interest of the Slave Power as embodied in John C. Calhoun and his supporters.
He was also a wealthy man who in the conflict over the Bank of the United States chose democracy and the empowering of the "common man" over the narrow interest of his own class.
Which brings me to the other thing that was particularly on my mind in 2003. The Democratic Party, which honors Jackson as one of its founding spirits along with Thomas Jefferson, was in many ways flat on its back in 2003. The Party had collectively rolled over and played dead when Bush and Cheney and the corrupt Supreme Court stole the 2000 election and handed the Presidency to Dick Cheney. After that, they collectively rolled over for the authoritarian USA PATRIOT Act and allowed the criminal invasion of Iraq to proceed with minimal resistance despite the remarkable popular opposition and activism that opposed it.
Jackson symbolizes the very opposite tradition in the Democratic Party: democratic activism, mass mobilization, the fight against antidemocratic power and privilege. The Jacksonians even believed and publicly argued that Jackson had been cheated out of the Presidency in the election of 1824 by a "corrupt bargain" on the part of John Quincy Adams on behalf of the Money Power, or what Franklin Roosevelt would later call "the economic royalists."
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his now much-criticized The Age of Jackson (1945):
So superb a self-sufficiency could be effective only when matched by an equally superb self-control. Again contrary to the Jackson myth, there was small basis for the picture of uncontrolled irascibility. Jackson, who knew his reputation, never hesitated to exploit it. "He would sometimes extemporize a fit of passion in order to overwhelm an adversary, when certain of being in the right," said one observer, "but his self-command was always perfect." His towering rages were actually ways of avoiding futile argument. To committees which called on him to protest his financial policy, he would fly into vehement denunciations of the moneyed monopoly. When they left in disgust, he would coolly light his pipe and, chuckling "They thought I was mad," remark blandly on the importance of never compromising vital issues; one always lost friends and never appeased enemies.
This was the kind of spirit that the netroots were looking for in their Democratic leaders in 2003. It was this spirit that many saw in Howard Dean and his Presidential campaign, the kind many saw (perhaps somewhat overoptimistically) in Barack Obama, the kind we see now Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the kind that even Hillary Clinton now feels it necessary to display. It's the kind of fighting spirit that we've seen in movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives matter and in the present-day netroots movement itself.
As much as I value utopian political theory for the insight and inspiration it can give, I've always thought it was important to understand what is happening in real existing politics. And personal symbolism is important. However important principles and programs are, the people that democracies elect to office are human beings. People vote for individuals, however much they have partisan or principled considerations in mind. As we saw in recent days, Bernie Sanders' principled positions are not a replacement for how he interacts with real live voters, such as the Black Lives Matter protesters who challenged him at the Netroots Nation convention last week.
I don't defend Jackson's support of slavery. Nor his Indian policy. His Indian policy, particularly the Indian Removal Act which along with the fight against South Carolina nullification and the Bank of the United States was among the three most historic achievements of his Presidency. It isn't anachronism to say that. The policy was hotly disputed in Congress with clear arguments against it's morality.
The wrongness of the Indian Removal act is not mitigated by the fact that every other white American had bad ideas about Indians and Indian policy with exceptions like fur traders and Herman Melville. The latter had actually lived among aboriginals in the South Sea. Fur traders often integrated closely with Indian tribes with whom they worked.
And when it comes to national and democratic symbolism, Jackson as a 17-year-old actually fought in the Revolutionary War. It's not much of a stretch to consider him the last of the major Founders of the American Republic. That's not perfection. And it's not utopia. But it's not Aaron Burr or John Calhoun, either - who, ironically, were respectively Vice Presidents to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
General Jackson was also the hero of the Battle of New Orleans of early 1815. It's famous that the war with Britain had officially been concluded at the time of the battle, but neither side had yet gotten word. But if the British Army had won, the peace certainly would not have developed as it did. New Orleans even today is a critical port because of the traffic on the Mississippi River. It was already a critical port in 1814. Whoever controlled New Orleans could control the commerce on the Mississippi River. That was the main reason of Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. It was a principle of Jefferson's foreign policy that whatever country controlled New Orleans - France, Britain were the most practical options besides the US - was by definition the principal opponent of the United States.
So the Battle of New Orleans wasn't just an early 19-century media event. It was substantively very important. Though the symbolic significance of Jackson's forces defeating those of the mightiest Empire on the planet was also not nothing. It rightly made Jackson a national hero.
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's interpretation of Johnny Horton's folk classic, "The Battle of New Orleans":
I opened this post with the famous Hegel quote because it captures an important part of my own understanding of history. When Hegel described seeing Napoleon in the streets of Jena as witnessing the World Spirit on a horse, he didn't mean that he regarded the French General as a god or a model man. He meant that Napoleon signified to him the most progressive force in history at that time.
In the previous post, I quoted California Gov. Jerry Brown saying in Rome:
I think the formation that I’ve undergone growing up in the Catholic faith, the Catholic religion, puts forth a world that’s orderly, that has purpose and that ultimately is a positive. And that’s very helpful when you look at a world that looks very much the opposite, in terms of the wars, the corruption and the breakdown. And so even though from an intellectual point of view it looks very dark, in another sense I have great faith and confidence that there is a way forward.
Whether one takes a Catholic view of history or a Hegelian one or some other kind, it proceeds through flawed individuals. Often deeply flawed ones.
But understanding how history proceeds, the history of democracy or any other aspects, making realistic assessment of those who advanced it, as Jackson did, and those who sought to impede it or take it in a retrograde direction, like John Calhoun.
I'm not willing to cede the progressive side of early American history to conservatives. The only white man of any note that I can think of in the early half of the 19th century who came close to matching prevalent 21st-century notions on race and gender and equal rights was John Brown. Who was (unlike Calhoun or Jefferson Davis) hanged for treason. Also, Brown was a "terrorist", and who wants to identify with one of those? Jackson was a wealthy slaveowner, who nevertheless when it came to choosing between his class and democracy with the Bank and the Nullification Crisis, chose the democratic side and fought for it effectively.
I'm going to try to look at the current media controversy over Jackson's legacy in upcoming posts.
I've been reading up a bit on the history of the Enlightenment with a particular view to the contradictory nature of its heritage.
The German journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft.Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft did a special issue in 2010 on the topic Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung (The Enlightenment and Its Effects in the World). One of the essays is by Volker Depkat, "Angewandte Autklärung? Die Weltwirkung der Autklärung im kolonialen Britisch Nordamerika und den USA."
Andrew Jackson, too Enlightened for the good of American Indians?
Depkat says the arguments in that speech "came out of a intellectual world whose essential elements and figures of thinking were bound to the Enlightenment" ("einer Vorstellungswelt entsprang, deren wesentliche Elemente und Denkfiguren der Aufklärung verpflichtet waren").
I think Jackson actually believed what he said in that speech, not that it was any excuse for the policy. The opponents of the Act argued that the Indians could be more effectively Christianized if they stayed put, and also that some of these Indians were slaveholders who upheld the Peculiar Institution.The white Enlightenment meant disaster for the Indians either way.
Jackson's speech got it tragically right on that point, too, when he argued that the relocation of the tribes "will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." No Happy Ending for the tribes subject to this civilizing tutelage.
The rest of the paragraph of which that passage is the conclusion is:
It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid. It will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions ...
As Depkat points out, here was the Enlightenment notion of continual historical progress and the civilizing effects of knowledge and Christian - white European Christian - civilization. There was the Enlightenment notion that white Christian civilization had the deeply moral and ethical duty to raise the lesser peoples, the "savages," to a higher (European) level of life.
This was a confusion of ideas, not lacking in cynicism and hypocrisy. But they were also ideas that grew out of concrete conditions in Europe, where the civilized Christians had mutually butchered each others in the Wars of Religion of the 16th century, followed by the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, then the largest slaughter in the history of humanity. Christian Europe would not exceed that record until the 20th century, when they far exceeded it twice.
Jackson was right in his calculations. And the opponents of the Indian Removal Act were right in theirs. Both were working from a concept of civilization that excluded the Indians from any concept of participating in American civilization as a distinct culture, as practitioners of their aboriginal religions. There were two types of "Indian lovers" among American whites in those times. There were urban idealists who were justifiably critical of the treatment of the native tribes but who had limited knowledge of real existing Indians. And there were those who were actively interacting with the Indians, like fur traders. The author Herman Melville, who actually lived among native tribes in the South Seas, was one such contemporary. The historian Francis Parkman took the time to become personally acquainted with native tribes and their languages, making his histories of enduring relevance for historians and anthropologists to this day.
The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings.
We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualised in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality.
When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not ... only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.
Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, — forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life — the Present formed by our private aims and interests.
In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. From this point the investigation usually proceeds to that which we have made the general commencement of our enquiry.
Starting from this we pointed out those phenomena which made up a picture so suggestive of gloomy emotions and thoughtful reflections — as the very field which we, for our part, regard as exhibiting only the means for realising what we assert to be the essential destiny — the absolute aim, or — which comes to the same thing — the true result of the World's History. We have all along purposely eschewed “moral reflections” as a method of rising from the scene of historical specialties to the general principles which they embody. Besides, it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present.
It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. We return then to the point of view which we have adopted; observing that the successive steps (Momente) of the analysis to which it will lead us, will also evolve the conditions requisite for answering the enquiries suggested by the panorama of sin and suffering that history unfolds.
Depkat also points to this passage from Jackson's speech as exhibiting the Enlightenment view of the duty of humanity to master Nature:
What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?
Depkat writes:
Sein Argument gründet somit in einem scharfen Kontrast zwischen der vorzivilisierten Wildnis und der durch Städte und Farmen bestimmten U.S.-amerikanischen „Fortschrittslandschaft". Letztere steht für Kontrolle über die Natur, für die rationale Nutzung der natürlichen Ressourcen, für soziale, ökonomische und kulturelle Komplexität sowie für eine fortlaufende, alle Bereiche des Alltags erfassende Verbesserung der Lebenssituation („improvements"). Damit verbunden wird ein ästhetischer Aspekt, denn die sichtbaren Manifestationen des Fortschritts werden als Verschönerung („embellishment") einer zuvor wilden und deshalb häßlichen Landschaft gesehen. Ferner bemerkenswert ist, dass die Verwandlung der Landschaft als Ergebnis der unablässigen Arbeit und des ausdauernden Fleißes („industry"), des Wissens und der Fertigkeiten („art") freier Individuen gesehen wird. Jackson entwirft damit einen kausalen Zusammenhang von Freiheit und Fortschritt, durch den die Fortschrittlichkeit des Geschichtsprozesses selbst befordert wird.
[His argument is thereby grounded in a sharp contrast between the pre-civilized wilderness and American "progressive landscape" defined by cities and farms. The latter stands for control over Nature, for the rational use of natural resources, for social, economic and cultural complexity as well as for a continuous bettering of the life situation ("improvements") encompassing all spheres of everyday life. Bound up with that is an aesthetic aspect, because the visible manifestations of progress are seen as beautification ("embellishment") of the landscape that was previously wild and ugly. Further noteworthy is that the transformation of the landscape is seen as the result of unrelenting labor and of sustained industriousness ("industry"), of knowledge of the skill ("art") of free individuals. Jackson thereby project a causal connection between freedom and progress, through which the progressive nature of the historical process itself is advanced.]
Also important to Depkat's argument is that groups including women, native peoples, labor, slaves and free African-Americans used Enlightenment arguments, especially as embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 US Constitution, to argue against the limits that earlier Enlightenment thought and political institutions based in Enlightenment concepts had imposed on them.
And uses as examples arguments for women's rights from Abigail Adams and the 1790 essay from Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), On the Equality of the Sexes.
Natalie Joy has an article on another issue that was a major theme for the Jackson Administration, Indian Removal. As I've said more than once here, even though this blog's name is a recognition of the vital democratic tradition that Jacksonianism represented, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was one major accomplishment of his that was a bad decision, and an immoral one by the standards of the time.
The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 famously signaled a new era in U.S. Indian policy, one that had dire consequences for thousands of Native Americans. Once in office, Jackson urged Congress to pass federal legislation authorizing him to sign removal treaties with all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, thus freeing up millions of acres of land for white settlement. The states most eager for such legislation were in the South, not coincidentally a region that had offered Jackson significant support precisely because he promised to make Indian removal a top priority of his administration. Georgia was particularly eager for the federal government to make good on its 1802 promise to extinguish Indian land titles within its borders, which included a significant portion of the Cherokee Nation. But Jackson's plan did not go unchallenged. In 1829, as both houses of Congress prepared their own version of what would become the Indian Removal Bill, reformers throughout the northern United States joined with Native Americans to fight its passage. [my emphasis]
I won't go into the complexities of Old Hickory's general approach to Indian policy here. I discussed it in this earlier post, Old Hickory and the Indians 04/08/2004, a review of Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). My focus here is more on the "antiremoval" coalition, as Joy calls them. "Antiremovalists," she notes argued against removal on moral grounds and defended the sovereign rights of the native tribes. "Most importantly," she notes, "antiremovalists believed that Anglo-Americans had a moral duty to bring Christian civilization to Native Americans, a project that would be greatly hampered by removal."
Morality in their eyes was deeply connected to Christianity and capitalism:
Making Indians "civilized" had been a central component of federal U.S. Indian policy since George Washington's administration, but it was not formalized until the passage of the 1819 Civilization Act, which provided funds for missionary organizations eager to participate in the conversion of "savages." "Civilization," it was commonly understood, was the only way for Indians to avoid extinction—the inevitable fate of uncivilized peoples who came into contact with more advanced cultures. What exactly "civilization" entailed was a matter of debate in the nineteenth century, but most people agreed that to be civilized, Indians would have to be guided by Christian morality, live as settled farmers, and abide by a written system of laws and government. Most importantly, Indians needed to acknowledge and embrace private property, including individual landownership. In 1789, no less a figure than Henry Knox, Washington's Secretary of War and the architect of early national Indian policy, argued that the key to civilizing Indians was "to introduce among [them] a love for exclusive property."
Abolitionists believed, as did most Americans, in the myth of the "noble savage," whose innocence of civilization was the source of his virtuous purity, but also his greatest weakness, for it left him vulnerable to the introduction of unwanted vices ... [my emphasis]
This is a reminder to be cautious about anachronism, the projecting of current understandings onto an earlier time. By liberal or left standards of 2013, even the Indians' white partisans weren't interested in assisting the Indians by putting them under white American laws, practices and institutions, especially the institutions of Christian churches and private property.
The irony acknowledged in the title of Joy's article is that the Abolitionists opposing Indian removal to prevent the spread of slavery found themselves in coalition with Cherokee slaveowners:
Most Cherokees did not own slaves, nor did they radically alter their traditional ways of living to conform to the standards of American civilization, but those who did were part of a growing class of wealthy and politically powerful elites who lived on large plantations like their white neighbors. And it was this elite class with whom antiremovalists, including abolitionists, had the most contact in print and in person.
And that coalition had many of the problems of such the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliances:
Throughout the debate over Indian removal in the 1830s, abolitionist support of the Cherokee cause was contingent upon a romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding. As part of their support for the Cherokee Nation's fight against removal, abolitionists found themselves in the unusual position of acting as apologists for Indian slaveholding, mounting a defense that drew heavily from the testimony of Cherokee leaders. Abolitionists accepted such testimony as fact, even when they had good reason to doubt its truthfulness, because it reinforced their own ideas about Indians, slavery and civilization. [my emphasis]
Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said shortly before he signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.
The antiremoval Abolitionists found themselves defending slavery in a kind of Hegelian way, arguing that the adoption of black slavery by the Cherokees was evidence of their progress in the American Christian form of civilization, including this unfortunately element of it. Joy observes that the establishment of classical liberal notions of constitutions and the rule of law, and slaveowning Cherokees were on board with that part of the program to some extent:
In 1827 the Cherokee Nation had written its own constitution, which included numerous provisions protecting the interests of slaveholders, including barring slaves and their descendants, free or enslaved, from holding office or voting. Many other laws including those against interracial marriage attest to the legal and political institutionalization of black chattel slavery in the Cherokee Nation.
... Abolitionists accepted that Cherokee slaveholding—at least in the short term—was compatible with and even evidence of civilization. The Cherokees' adoption of black chattel slavery, and the larger cultural, legal and political changes it wrought, proved their inherent capacity for progress. Because abolitionists did not believe slavery to be the basis of a civilized society, Indian slaveholding had to be merely an intermediary stage, not the end result of the process of civilization. [my emphasis]
But even given the complexities and moral ambiguities that politics often produce, the Abolitionists were fighting for the rights of the Indians, as they understood them. "Even after passage of the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, abolitionists continued to support Indian rights, often folding the plight of Indians into their condemnation of black chattel slavery," Joy writes.
Even though the Abolition movement was still relatively small, the conflicts between the North and the South due to slavery were already beginning to affect issues not directly connected with slavery as such:
Abolitionists joined the Indian cause because they saw in removal the influence of the slaveholding South. "One would think that the guilt of African slavery was enough for the nation to bear," one writer lamented in 1829, "without the additional crime of injustice to the aborigines." Although the Indian Removal Bill applied to nearly all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, southern slaveowners were clearly the most eager to obtain fertile Indian land, and abolitionists feared that removal would hasten the westward expansion of slavery at the expense of national honor. [my emphasis]
The Hegelian World Spirit was evidently at work in the alliance of the Abolitionists with Southern Cherokee slaveholders revealing to some of them the problems with their supported for colonization of African-Americans back to Africa after the abolition of slavery, i.e., mass deportation:
The fight over the Indian Removal Bill immediately preceded the radicalization of the antislavery movement in the early 1830s. This was no accident, as several historians have noted. Many reformers who supported the American Colonization Society and other moderate antislavery activities in the 1820s had been radicalized by their involvement with the antiremoval cause. Antiremoval activism convinced many antislavery reformers to reconsider the colonization of free blacks to Africa. They found themselves increasingly unable to justify their support for one policy (colonization) that bore such strong similarities to another (removal) which they strongly opposed. By 1831, leading abolitionists, including, most famously, William Lloyd Garrison, were denouncing the gradualism of colonization in favor of immediate emancipation, a crucial shift brought about, at least in part, by the debate over Indian removal in the late 1820s and early 1830s. [my emphasis]
The colonization idea for black Americans, which never gained more than marginal popularity among black Abolitionists, was nevertheless still seen by many whites as a viable option up until the Civil War.
