Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news

Well, I called this blog "Old Hickory's Weblog" for most of its existence 'til now. So I'm happy to see this refreshingly historically literate commentary on Andrew Jackson and the Nullification Crisis in response to our President's bizarre Civil War revisionsm from this past weekend ("People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?"). Because Josh Marshall in this piece knocks it out of the park in Trump Knows Jack about Andrew Jackson. SAD! TPM 05/01/2017:

The final months of Jackson’s first term as president saw what historians refer to as the Nullification Crisis. In critical ways, it was a dry run for the Civil War. The notional trigger of the crisis was a tariff law which was generally opposed in the Southern states. But the real issue was the authority of the national government, whether states or groups of states could block federal laws or even secede from the union, and ultimately the security of slavery.

The originator of these doctrines and driver of the crisis was one of the great political stars of the early 19th century, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Who, we might add, is the real political ancestor of Trump and Steve Bannon. As Josh also concludes at the end of the piece.

... the Nullification Crisis cut to the core of one of his central beliefs: the inviolability of the federal union. Today we hear ‘nationalism’ used as a byword for xenophobia, racism and militarism. Jackson had his mix of each. But Jackson thought the crisis, what Calhoun was doing could not have been more important. He actually wanted to march an army down to South Carolina and hang Calhoun. To the extent Jackson knew about the Civil War and was 'really angry' about it, he was really angry at the Southern planter aristocrats who would later start the Civil War. He was ready to go to war in 1832-33 to vindicate the union and popular democracy – two concepts that to him were basically inseparable.

Josh slips up a bit when he says that Jackson "also become known for his militarism." Say what? There was wasn't even a standing army to speak of when Jackson was President. Remember all those big wars during the Jackson Administration of 1829-1837? Me neither. I believe the sum total of them amounts to: the Second Seminole War of 1835-42. I think Ken Burns did a 12-part documentary series on that one. (Or, NOT!) Unless we include that it was during Jackson's Presidency that the US snatched the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from Argentina and gave it to the British, leaving a still-unresolved problem. But Josh redeems himself on that one:

Most of the public image of Jackson today, at least in the public arena is driven by the writing of Walter Russell Meade, whose grasp of the man and the period is, I would argue, rather thin and presentist. It’s this Jackson – militarist, unilateralist, authoritarian and nationalist that Bannon is in love with and through Bannon has become Trump’s favorite President.

Andrew Jackson has become the Schroedinger's Cat of contemporary American politics. Republicans don't believe in science, so rather than looking for quantam complexity, they just make stuff up to fit their preferred narrative. Democrats worry that if they challenge the Trump/Bannon/white-supremacist image of Jackson, it might upset some hardcore Republican somewhere who would never consider voting for a Democrat ever. So they cede the image of Jackson - Revolutionary War veteran, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a Founder of the country and of the Democratic Party - to Republican hackery.

The reason that the Steve Bannons of the world would go to the trouble of fabricating a bogus historical version of Jackson: because Jackson has an enduring reputation as a pioneering political reformer. They make use of his image. The Democrats don't bother to contest it.

I visited the Reagan Library and Museum in southern California two weekends ago for the first time. They have a replica of the Oval Office as it was during St. Reagan's Presidency. I learned from the guide's spiel that St. Reagan was 6'1" tall. And LBJ was 6'5". I also noticed that he had a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the office, although not positioned in so prominent a way as Trump has it. St. Reagan surely realized that the well-known image of Jackson the Democrat had a firmly-established reputation as a reformer. And using it fit well with his pitch to the so-called Reagan Democrats that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me."

And the Democrats can't use their own well-established party symbol! It reminds me of the famous quote, a attributed to poet Robert Frost, that a liberal is someone "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

One fascinating thing in learning about Argentine history is that contesting 19th century history is still a thriving practice. Left-nationalists and kirchneristas, not just historians but politicians and polemicists - proudly identify themselves with the images of Mariano Moreno (1778-181) and Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). While conservatives look to Bernardino Rivadavia (1780-1845), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and especially Bartholomé Mitre (1821-1906) as the secular saints of their political tradition. But here in the US, only the Republican Party draws on that symbolism of the early days of the US, which still resonates strongly for many American voters. Zach Schonfeld notes in Understanding Donald Trump's Weird Obsession With Andrew Jackson Newsweek 05/01/2017, "Despite the more despicable aspects of his legacy, he remains reasonably popular among historians. (Though his popularity is sliding, and some are blaming Trump for that.)"

Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2007), his contribution to the American Presidents Series, is a fairly recent but pre-Trump account by a liberal historian that stresses elements of Jackson's democratic achievements and legacy without ignoring the less democratic aspects of his character and career.

But I said at the time that Trump visiting Jackson's grave and ludicrously trying to identify himself with Old Hickory was an instant dose of major bad karma. He's lucky that Jackson didn't claw his way out of his grave right there and bitch-slap him. He wouldn't have challenged Trump to a duel, though, because you only did that with somebody who was considered to have some personal honor.

Trump's vague remark that Jackson could have worked out something to avoid the Civil War attracted a lot of attention.

Jackson's supporters who were still around after the 1860 election were heard to wish they could have Jackson back in the White House for that moment. (Although, apparently unlike Trump, they were aware that Jackson was dead since years before.) But they were addressing a particular, immediate problem. Lincoln's famous decision-making style was to weigh decisions carefully and analytically, but then when he made the decision he followed it through in a determined way. And they were frustrated at Lincoln's seemingly restrained posture after he took office, in what they saw as a contrast to Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis. Lincoln himself later expressed regret that he hadn't responded more actively, like arresting Union military officers who resigned to go South to lead an armed rebellion against the US government. Trump may have heard some version of that, but what came out of his mouth in that interview was hopelessly garbled.

Tim Morris gives Trump way too much credit in understanding that situation, of which Morris himself gives a decent account, in Donald Trump is right about Andrew Jackson New Orleans Times-Picayune 05/02/2017.

Here are a few other notable reactions:

• Digby Parton expresses her gobsmacked response to Trump goofy Civil War remarks in Your Sixth Grader In Chief Hullabaloo 05/01/2017.
• Aaron Blake, Trump’s totally bizarre claim about avoiding the Civil War Washington Post 05/01/2017
• David Graham, Trump's Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017 Not so good.
• Tim Murphy, Historian on Donald Trump's Civil War Comments: "God Help Us" Mother Jones 05/01/2017
• Yoni Appelbaum, Why There Was a Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017
• Chris Cillizza interviews Jon Meacham, What would Andrew Jackson think of Donald Trump? CNN 05/02/2017
• Jessica Estepa, Note to President Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn't alive for the Civil War Tennessean/USA Today 05/01/2017

Christopher Wilson in Historians react to Trump’s Civil War comments: ‘That’s entirely wrong in every respect’ Yahoo News! 05/01/2017 quotes historian Eric Rauchway putting Trump's comment about Jackson's "big heart" in some necessary context:

There was also pushback against Trump’s musings that Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and his suggestion that the seventh president — whose Indian Removal Act essentially legalized genocide — had a “big heart.”

“Andrew Jackson himself was a slaveholder and the Jacksonians were slaveholders and they despised the abolitionists,” said Rauchway, “so it’s hard for me to believe that they would have been able to prevent the Civil War. And actually it was Jacksonian policies – particularly those of James K. Polk, who styled himself as Young Hickory, as a direct heir to Andrew Jackson – which precipitated the Civil War. That’s entirely wrong in every respect.”

“Jackson had a big heart for white farmers,” said Hemmer, “Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over non-white Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness.”

James Loewen responds to Trump's now-infamous question in ‘Why was there the Civil War?’ Here’s your answer. Washington Post 05/02/2017:

Trump’s conclusion about Jackson places him in a camp of 1930s historians who called it a “needless war,” in the words of James G. Randall, brought about by a “blundering generation.” That view is a product of its time, and that time is now known as the Nadir of Race Relations. The Nadir began at the end of 1890 and began to ease around 1940. It was marked by lynchings, the eugenics movement and the spread of sundown towns across the North. Neo-Confederates put up triumphant Confederate monuments from Helena, Mont., to Key West, Fla., obfuscating why the Southern states seceded. They claimed it was about tariffs or states’ rights — anything but slavery.

Earlier, everyone knew better. In 1858, William Seward, a Republican senator from New York, gave a famous speech titled “The Irrepressible Conflict,” referring to the struggle between “slave labor” and “voluntary labor.” When Mississippi seceded, it emphasized the same point: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

Simply to recognize this material interest renders improbable the “needless war” notion. Mississippi was right: Slavery was the greatest material interest in the United States, if not the world. Slaves made up an investment greater than all manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. Never has an elite given up such a stake voluntarily. The North went to war to hold the nation together, not to emancipate anyone. But the Civil War did end slavery. When might that have happened otherwise?

And I see that the next generation of the Clinton Dynasty has a safely simplistic answer that would not disturb any donor to the Clinton Foundation:

1 word answer: Slavery. Longer: When Andrew Jackson died in 1845 (16 yrs before the Civil War began), he owned 150 men, women and children. https://t.co/Icg6puG2JZ

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 1, 2017

Postmodernism never really took hold with me, I admit. But "Slavery. Longer." seems like a 2-word answer to me. I'm just sayin'.

I wonder how Chelsea would explain Jackson's position in the Nullification Controversy. She went to Stanford, so I'm guessing she had one or two decent American history classes. But if you take the real history seriously, slavery and antislavery were devilishly complicated. Last month, I wrote a bit here about Hinton Rowan Helper, who was one of the most famous and effective antislavery advocates. He was also a white supremacist with racist ideas against blacks so noxious I can barely read them. And that combination of attitudes was not at all unusual among antebellum white opponents of slavery.

The one famous white American prior to the Civil War I know of who had ideas on the equality of blacks and whites, and men and women that would sound respectable in 2018 was John Brown. But how many Americans today would regard the "terrorist" (and hardcore Calvinist) John Brown as someone with whom they could identify? I think most Democratic politicians today, of either the corporate or progressive variety, would do backflips to avoid identifying the guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown as some kind of hero. Even though the Union Army that put an end to slavery - and was mainly composed of white men who thought themselves to be part of a superior race - used "John Brown's Body" as a marching song. Like Josh Marshall says in his excellent post on Trump and Jackson, history is complicated.

Also, there's this from Hillary hardliner Simon Maloy:

not every day you see a GOP president shit on Lincoln in favor of a genocidal, racist, Democratic war criminal https://t.co/momFwItuOd

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 2, 2017

Seriously, dude?

Jamelle Bouie's heart and head seem to be in the right place in this piece from March, Donald Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson Slate 03/15/2017:

This is the most familiar vision of Jackson, heavily indebted to the mythmaking of the Democratic Party, which claims him as its founder next to Thomas Jefferson. In this popular narrative of the party, Jefferson embodied equality, autonomy, and economic opportunity, whereas Jackson stood for democracy and its expansion. Under his presidency, the United States renounced its property requirements for voting, opening the franchise to all white men. Defenders of Jackson acknowledge his racial exclusivity but see it as separate from a broader embrace of the principle of democratic participation.

That’s one view of Jackson. There is another. That perspective sees Jackson in a different tradition. Not of democracy, but of white supremacy. This Jackson was a planter who built his wealth and influence with the stolen labor of more than 200 enslaved Africans. He forced Native Americans off their land in a campaign of removal that claimed thousands of lives in service of white expansion and white hegemony.

Jacksonian democracy, in other words, was a racial democracy built on a foundation of ethnic cleansing, committed to race hierarchy and enslavement. And while Jackson rejected the nullification theories of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, he all but embraced the South Carolinian’s view that slavery — and racial caste more broadly — was “the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” Along with that racial ideology, he brought ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption and a profoundly anti-government philosophy that contributed to the panic of 1837, a crushing depression that lasted more than a half-decade.

Unfortunately, it's also a little-bit-of-this-little-bit-of-that approach to history. Jackson's two most significant democratic achievements as President were his successful fight against the Money Power embodied and symbolized by the Bank of the United States headed by Nicholas Biddle and his suppression of Calhoun's nullification scheme. Bouie ignores the first and trivializes the second.

But he does manage to say that Jackson's "populism ... is too exclusive." The present tense there is a tell. This is very much a presentist view of the Age of Jackson. And while I would call the Jacksonian movement proto-populist and let William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party be the first populists, I suspect that for corporate/Hillary Democrats, what bothers them about Jackson's "populism" is not that it was too exclusive, but rather than it made the Money Power a symbol of the wealthy ruling elite and successfully opposed it.

If the Hillary hardliners could scold Bernie Sanders for supporting a mayoral candidate in Omaha that had an anti-abortion record in his past, even though he had the most pro-choice position of any of the candidates in that race, I can picture them accusing Bernie or Elizabeth Warren of being "Jacksonians" and try to make that mean "Trumpists."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 9: Andrew Jackson and the Missouri Compromise

I'm out of step with current popular impressions of early US history in that I insist on validating the advancements in democracy and equality while recognizing that retrogression and restrictions on freedom were also taking place at the same time. American democracy in 2017 is vastly more inclusive than that of American democracy in 1820. We also just elected a xenophobic hyper-nationalist loon as President and made his party by far the dominant one at the national and state levels. It's hard to conceive a narrative of continual progress toward greater democracy, freedom and equality that doesn't also recognize that some things get better and some things get worse, and it's a very good thing if there is more of the former than the latter.

The initial Spanish colonists to the New World brought with them a missionary zeal that was simultaneously being expressed in the home country in the expulsion of Jews and the Reconquista of Grenada, along with the massive persecution of Muslims and Jewish converts to Christianity. The first century of Spanish colonization brought the Spanish Inquisition and the zeal of the Counter-Reformation to the Americas. This resulted in a view of the native inhabitants as uncivilized heathens who needed to be converted or exterminated. The germs and viruses that the Europeans brought with them to the New World did more to achieve the latter than military force or religious inquisition. Portuguese, English and French colonists brought similar attitudes (and diseases) to their settlements in the New World. Russia was last to the colonizing game in North America, discovering Alaska and the Aleutians in 1741 and brought their own version of Christian civilization to the native peoples there, with broadly similar results.

The American democracy that emerged from the Revolution was a democracy founded on revolutionary principles that were understandably inspiring to many reformers and advocates of popular government and freedom in other parts of the world. The democratic republic of the United States was also a slaveowning republic and an expansionist nation. The expansion included the expansion of democracy and the expansion of slavery. And it was the expansion of a democracy largely restricted to white men.

With time, the real contradictions among democracy, westward expansion and slavery became increasingly obvious, resulting eventually in the Civil War. The Missouri crisis was a very obvious case in which westward expansion and slavery - more specifically, the struggle over the numerical balance in the Senate between slave and free states - were obviously in conflict. As Robert Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (1977), "Andrew Jackson determined the course of American expansion. He was, in fact, the greatest expansionist of them all."

At the time of the Missouri crisis, Jackson was a general during the John Quincy Adams Monroe Administration. He had successfully seized Florida from Spanish control. In the Adams-onís Treaty of 1819, aka the Transcontinental Treaty, Spain agreed to sell Florida to the United States. Remini says Jackson's reacted to the Missouri Compromise "as southerner and slaveowner," concerned about its implications for the Union and for the Peculiar Institution (slavery). He quotes Jackson's undated reaction from that time:

The Misouri [sic] question so called, has agitated the public mind, and that I sincerely regret and never expected, but that now I see, will be the entering wedge to seperate the union. lt is even more wicked, it will excite those who is the subject of discussion to insurrection and masacre [sic]. lt is a question of political ascendency, and power, and the Eastern interests are determined to succeed regardless ofthe consequences, the constitution or our national happiness. They will find the southern and western states equally resolved to support their constitutional rights. I hope I may not live to see the evills [sic] that must grow out of this wicked design of demagogues, who talk about humanity, but whose sole object is self agrandisement regardless of the happiness of the nation.

We see reflected in that statement by Jackson the Republican views to which Jefferson also adhered. There is the fear of slave revolt or post-emancipation black revolution. There is the fear of destabilizing the Union, which Jackson seems to suspect is a continuation of the Federalist secessionist plotting around the Hartford Convention during the War of 1812. And he also views the antislavery agitation as a cynical political move by Federalists and Northern Democrats following in their wake. Remini comments, "As far as Jackson was concerned, 'national happiness' included slavery fdor the south and the west, whether the north liked it or not."

In the Nullification Controversy of 1832 when Jackson was President, he was forced to choose between the interest of democracy and Union, on the one hand, and aggressive defense of slavery, on the other. Jackson chose the country in that dispute.

Mark Twain's white suit and Andrew Jackson

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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 12: Again with Madison and nullification

The Nullification Controversy (or Nullification Crisis) of 1832-3 was an important moment in the development of the conflict between slave and free states which eventually led to the Civil War.

An older US history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg recalled that it was one of two major events that secured Andrew Jackson's reputation: "Andrew Jackson's high place in history derives from the way he confronted the two great issues of his presidency: the nillification that threated the Union and the war on the Bank of the United States that arrayed the Jacksonians against the 'money power.'"

As to Jackson's Presidency, his successful sponsorship of the Indian Removal Act also counts as one of his major achievements, and certainly serves to qualify his deservedly "high place in history." The two acts that Morison et al mention greatly advanced the cause of democracy and equality; the Indian Removal Act is a blot on the history of American democracy. That Act is a different kind of embarrassment for neo-Confederates, though. It was, even more so than the Nullification Crisis, a case in which the vote split along sectional lines and was not about slavery. However, in this case the Southerners (including Jackson) were supporting a measure that overrode states rights, a irony that the opponents of the bill were more than happy to point out.

James Madison, 4th President of the United States and opponent of secession

But my focus here again is on the Nullification Controversy and James Madison's reaction to it, some of which I discussed in yesterday's post. Morison et al quote Madison at the end of this summary of the nullification theory elaborate by John C. Calhoun, who with this act began his career of treason to the United States:

Calhoun, once an enthusiastic nationalist, now believed that he had made a grave mistake, for protection had turned out to be an instrument of class and sectional plunder. In a document called the South Carolina Exposition, approved in 1828 by the legislature of that state, he set forth a new doctrine - nullification, though his authorship was secret. The Constitution, he asserted, was established not by the American people, but by thirteen sovereign states. Sovereign in 1787, they must still be sovereign in 1828. Since the Federal Government was merely the agent of the states, a state convention, the immediate organ of state sovereignty, could take measures to prevent the enforcement within state limits of any Act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional. Calhoun, however, recognized one constitutional authority superior to the interpretation of a single state, an interpretative federal amendment adopted by three-fourths of the states. Under the nullification doctrine, South Carolina insisted on the right to disobey the laws of the Union while claiming the privileges of the Union. Calhoun's sincerity and intelligence cannot be doubted, but as the aged Madison declared, 'For this preposterous and anarchical pretension there is not a shadow of countenance in the Constitution.' [my emphasis]

In an earlier work, The Oxford History of the American People (1965), Morison had described the Exposition's Calhounian political theory this way: "Nullification was based on two postulates: the common assertion that the Federal Constitution was a compact between states, and the theory of indestructible sovereignty."

The pretext and public justification of South Carolina's act of defiance was the Tariff of 1828, which opponents described as the Tariff of Abominations.

But the underlying theme, the real basis for the nullification attempt of Calhoun's theories to justify it and otherwise defend slaveholders against the will of the democratic majority, was slavery. After Jackson had ended the crisis in early 1833 with the Force Act clearly establishing federal authority to enforce the laws in South Carolina and a compromise tariff more to South Carolina's liking, he predicted that the "next pretext" for such an attempt "will be the Negro, or slavery question."

Madison also recognized that some compromise on the tariff had to be part of the solution, though he was bitterly opposed to the nullification doctrine and South Carolina's backing of it. The tariff had been in part a political ploy, as Morison et al describe it, "It was a politicians' tariff, concerned mainly with the manufacture of a President [in the 1928 election]. Pro-Jackson congressmen had introduced a bill with higher duties on raw materials than on manufactures, hoping that New England votes would help defeat it and the onus fall on [then-President John Quincy] Adams, but the strategy misfired, to the South's chagrin." Proposing something you don't actually want passed can be a tricky business!

As Madison put it it in a letter to Henry Clay of 03/22/1832:

I fear that without alleviations separating the more moderate from the more violent opponents, very serious effects are threatened. Of these the most formidable & not the least probable [would] be a Southern Convention; the avowed object of some, and the unavowed object of others, whose views are, perhaps, still more to be dreaded. The disastrous consequences of disunion, obvious to all will no doubt be a powerful check, on its partisans; but such a Convention, characterized as it [would] be by selected talents, ardent zeal & the confidence of those represented [would] not be easily stopped in its career; especially as many of its members, tho' not carrying with them particular aspirations for the honors, &c &c presented to ambition on a new political theatre, would find them germinating in such a hotbed.

(That and the other excerpts quoted here are from The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed.; 1910.)

Henry Clay would be the sponsor of the compromise tariff that Congress would pass and Jackson sign a year later.

Madison recognized the legitimacy of the right of resistance to unjust authority and the right of revolution, of course. But he emphatically rejected the nullifiers' argument that the Tariff of 1828, their nominal cause, represented anything close to such a jutification:

The idea that a Constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings, and a Union aomitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty and happiness of the people of the States comprizing it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express. It is impossible that this can ever be the deliberate act of the people, if the value of the Union be calculated by the consequences of disunion. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, May 1832))

In a letter to C.E. Haynes of 08/27/1832, Madison argued against Calhoun's theory on the nature of the compact among the states:

And here it must be kept in mind that in a compact like that of the U. S. as in all other compacts, each of the parties has an equal right to decide whether it has or has not been violated and made void. If one contends that it has, the others have an equal right to insist on the validitv and execution of it. ...

It is true that in extreme cases of oppression justifying a resort to original rights, and in which passive obedience & non-resistence cease to be obligatory under any Government, a s1ngle State or any part of a State might rightfully cast off the yoke. What would be the condition of the Union, and the other members of it, if a single member could at will renounce its connexion and erect itself, in the midst of them, into an independent and foreign power; its geographical relations remaining the same, and all the social & political relations, with the others converted into those of aliens and of rivals, not to say enemies, pursuing separate & conflicting interests? Should the seceding State be the only channel of foreign commerce for States having no commercial ports of their own, such as that of Connecticut, N. Jersey, & North Carolina, and now particularly all the inland States, we know what might happen from such a state of things by the effects of it under the old Confederation among States bound as they were in friendly relations by that instrument [i.e., the Articles of Confederation].

And although South Carolina was nominally threatening to nullify federal laws while staying in the Union, Madison knew that secession was implied in the arguments:

I partake of the wonder that the men you name should view secession in the light mentioned. The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, 12/23/1832)

He expanded on that idea in a letter to Alexander Rives of January 1833:

The characteristic distinction between free Governments, and Governments not free is that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved than every other has to deny the fact and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, and nowhere less so than where it is now most contended for.

These arguments Madison is making about the government compact were based in classical liberal theories of government.

Calhoun's idea of indestructible sovereignty made the novel assertion that "sovereignty" was absolute, that if a state was sovereign in its sphere of authority, that no other sovereignty could be above, including that of the federal government. Here in a letter to Sen. William Cabell Rives of 03/12/1833 who had recently given a Senate speech against it, he indicates how little such a notion had occurred to people before, and how patently ridiculous it struck him to be:

[Your speech] takes a very able and enlightening view of its subject. I wish it may have the effect of reclaiming to the doctrine & language held by all from the birth of the Constitution, & till very lately by themselves, those who now Contend that the States have never parted with an Atom of their sovereignty; and consequently that the Constitutional band which holds them together, is a mere league or partnership, without any of the characteristics of sovereignty or nationality.

It seems strange that it should be necessary to disprove this novel and nullifying doctrine; and stranger still that those who deny it should be denounced as Innovators, heretics & Apostates.

And in that letter he states even more clearly how obvious that secessionist tendencies are at work:

The conduct of S. Carolina has called forth not only the question of nullification; but the more formidable one of secession. It is asked whether a State by resuming the sovereign form in which it entered the Union, may not of right withdraw from it at will. As this is a simple question whether a State, more than an individual, has a right to violate its engagements, it would seem that it might be safely left to answer itself. But the countenance given to the claim shows that it cannot be so lightly dismissed. The natural feelings which laudably attach the people composing a State, to its authority and importance, are at present too much excited by the unnatural feelings, with which they have been inspired at' their brethren of other States, not to expose them, to the danger of being misled into erroneous views of the nature of the Union and the interest they have in it. One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned; that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co-States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them!

And in a draft letter from sometime in 1833, he addressed Calhoun's notion that special state conventions - like the ones that endorsed secession in 1860-61 - were a uniquely valid expression of the popular will, using the term "popular assemblages". And he also addressed the secessionists' anti-democracy attacks on government by the majority (which at this time still meant a majority of white men, and as Madison even notes in the draft, there were still property requirements for voting in many places):

You justly take alarm at the new doctrine that a majority [Government] is of all other [Government] the most oppressive. The doctrine strikes at the root of Republicanism, and if pursued into its consequences, must terminate in absolute monarchy, with a standing military force; such alone being impartial between its subjects, and alone capable of overpowering majorities as well as minorities. ...

The history of the ancient Republics, and those of a more modern date, had demonstrated the evils incident to popular assemblages, so quickly formed, so susceptible of contagious passions, so exposed to the misguidance of eloquent & ambitious leaders; and so apt to be tempted by the facility of forming interested majorities, into measures unjust and oppressive to the minor parties.

As odd as it seems now, the idea of a "standing military force" of any significant size in 1833 was considered to be in itself an anti-democratic thing.

Even after the South Carolina controversy was settled, Madison continued to see the secessionist sentiment as a threat to the Constitution and democratic government. In a letter to Edward Coles of 08/29/1834, he wrote, "On the other hand what [could] more dangerous than Nullification, or more evident than the progress it continues to make, either in its original shape or in the disguises it assumes. Nullification has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution & Union, and a match in the hand of every party, to blow them up at pleasure." And he saw where the alignment of the slave states with the Calhounian doctrine could lead:

It is not probable that this offspring of the discontents of S. Carolina, will ever approach success, in a majority of the States. But a susceptibility of the contagion in the Southern States is visible; and the danger is not to be concealed that the sympathies arising from known causes, and the inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility of interests between the South & the North, may put it in the power of popular leaders aspiring to the highest stations, and despairing of success on the Federal theatre, to unite the South, on some critical occasion, in a course that will end in creating a new theatre of great tho' inferior extent. In pursuing this course, the first and most obvious step is nullification; the next secession; & the last, a farewell separation. How near was this course being lately exemplified? and the danger of its recurrence in the same, or some other quarter, may be increased by an increase of restless aspirants, and by the increasing impracticability of retaining in the Union a large & cemented section against its will. [my emphasis]

Madison was annoyed by the kind of criticisms that some opponents of slavery were delivering against the South. But he was clearly unsympathetic, to put it mildly, to the secessionists using it as an excuse. Note here that he identifies slavery as the great dividing issue:

The positive advantages of the Union would alone endear it to those embraced by it; but it ought to be still more endeared by the consequences of disunion, in the jealousies & collisions of Commerce, in the border wars, pregnant with others, and soon to be engendered by animosities between the slaveholding, and other States, in the higher toned [Governments] especially in the Executive branch ["higher toned" here had a positive connotation], in the military establishments provided [against] external danger, but convertible also into instruments of domestic usurpation, in the augmentations of expence, and the abridgment, almost to the exclusion of taxes on consumption (the least unacceptable to the people) by the facility of smuggling among communities locally related as would be the case. Add to all these the prospect of entangling alliances with foreign powers multiplying the evils of internal origin. (Letter to Daniel Drake 01/12/1835) [my emphasis]

Maidson died in 1836 at the age of 85. So we can fairly say that he was very concerned about this issue up until the end of his life. In other words, he went out still fighting against the poisonous slaveowners' ideology of secession.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, john calhoun, nullification controversy

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 11: Madison and the Nullfication Controversy

When John Calhoun and his allies in South Carolina staged their confrontation with the United States and the Jackson Administration over the tariff in 1832-33, the nullificationists pointed to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had promoted during the Adams Administration in opposition to the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts as supporting their cause of nullification and treason.

As it turns out, James Madison himself was still around to comment on the issue in real time. In a letter to Nicholas Trist in December 1831 (based on the date at the Library of Congress site just linked, he wrote:

I cannot see the advantage of this perseverance of South Carolina in claiming the authority of the Virginia proceeding in 93-99, as asserting a right in a single state to nullify an act of the United States. Where indeed is the fairness of attempting to palm on Virginia an intention which is contradicted by such a variety of contemporary proofs: which have, at no intervening period received the lightest countenance from her: and which with one voice she now disclaims. There is the less propriety in this singular effort, since Virginia, if she could, as is implied, disown a doctrine which was her own offspring, would be a bad authority to lean on in any cause. Nor is the imprudence less than the impropriety, of an appeal from the present to a former period. as from a degenerate to a purer state of political orthodoxy: since South Carolina, to be consistent would be obliged to surrender her present nullifying notions to her own higher authority when she declined to concur and co-operate with Virginia at the period of the Alien and Sedition laws. It would be needless to dwell on the contrast of her present nullifying doctrines. [sic] with those maintained by her political champions at subsequent and not very remote dates.

Besides the external and other internal evidence the at the proceeding of Virginia occasioned by the Alien and Sedition law do not maintain the right of a single State, as a party to the Constitution, to arrest the execution of a law of the United States. it [sic] seems to have been overlooked, that in every instance in those proceeding where the ultimate right of the States to interpose rs alluded to, the plural term States, has been used: the term State as a single party being invariably avoided. And if it had been suspected that the term respective in the 3d Resolution would have been misconstrued into such a claim of an individual State or that the language of the 7th Resolution invoking the co-operation of the other States with Virginia * * * * * * [ellipsis in original] would not be a security against the error, a more explicit guard would doubtless have been introduced. But surely there is nothing strange in a concurrence and co-operation of many parties in maintaining the rights of each within itself. [emphasis in original]

That quote are taken from the version published in 1912 as Madison's Famous Original Letter Against Nullification 1832, which title obviously assumed an 1832 date for the letter. The text of a portion of the letter is also available at the Library of Congress. And it is included in The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed. (1910), but it begins with the sixth paragraph of the 1912 edition; the two paragraphs quoted above are the second and third in the letter.

He certainly makes it clear that he did not support the nullification attempt by South Carolina, which was nominally over tariffs but was understood by Calhoun and his supporters as a trial run for nullification and secession in support of slavery. Of the major controversies that led up to the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis was the only one not explicitly about slavery.

The December 1931 letter is also an important document in interpreting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in their own context, with necessary allowance for the fact that here Madison was writing decades after the event.

In an earlier letter to Jared Sparks of 07/27/1831 dealing with South Carolina's nullification claims and the Constitutional arguments advanced to support them, Madison argued that "the nature of the Constitutional compact" precluded "a right in any one of the parties to renounce it at will, by giving to all an equal right to judge of its obligations; and, as the obligations are mutual, a right to enforce correlative with a right to dissolve them." He also said that is would be impossible as well as unjust to execute "the laws of the Union, particularly the laws of commerce, if even a single State be exempt from their operation." (From Writings, Vol. 9)

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, nullification controversy

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 5: Michael Lind on the southern roots of Republican Tea Party politics

One of Michael Lind's strong points as a political analyst is recognizing continuities between Southern segregationist political trends and the "conservatism" of today's Republican Party. And that is his focus in The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism Salon 08/02/2011.

His closing paragraph gives a good example of why I use Andrew Jackson as the namesake for my blog:

The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America's majority by sabotaging America's government. [my emphasis]

Lind looks at the regional composition of the House Tea Party caucus and, yes, it's heavily Southern. And he has some good observations about how Southern segregationist-obstructionist thinking shapes the Republicans' framing of the debt ceiling fight.

Being a big fan of both the patron saints of the Democratic Party's "Jefferson-Jackson" events, I'd have to say that Lind splits the ticket in an uncomfortable way here:

The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 asserted the alleged right of states to "nullify" any federal law that state lawmakers consider unconstitutional. This obstructionist mentality led to the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina refused to enforce federal tariffs. Civil War was averted only when President Andrew Jackson, a Southerner himself, forced the nullifiers to back down.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison did back the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. But the topic wasn't slavery or some general "obstructionist mentality." They were the repressive federal laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which directly impinged on freedom of speech and the press. The principle of federal judicial review had not yet been established; that didn't occur until the Jefferson Administration in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). Jefferson and Madison weren't trying to establish the right of states to secede. They were seeking a way to defend the basic First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and the press in the context of the still-new Constitutional government to protect basic and clear Constitutional provisions when no clear judicial remedies were available.

But Lind's account is right on Old Hickory's stand on the Nullification Controversy.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john brown, lost cause, neo-confederate

Andrew Jackson, states rights and the South

Since I've been posting about antebellum Southern politics, I can't pass up the chance to work in some Andrew Jackson content here.

The pro-Confederate view of history, also known as the Lost Cause ideology, insists that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. Instead, in that view, the war was fought primarily over the issue of states rights. One of the main set-pieces in this argument is the Nullification Controversy of 1831-32, during Old Hickory's first Administration.

Briefly, the federal Tariff of 1828 was extremely unpopular in South Carolina. Many South Carolina leaders threatened to "nullify" the tariff, arguing that a state could impose its authority to block the implementation of a federal law it rejected. The dispute escalated to a point where a military confrontation threatened. Through the compromise efforts of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, President Jackson secured from Congress both a reduction of the disputed tariffs and a Force Bill expressly authorizing him to use military force to put down state defiance of the federal law.

Lost Cause advocates love to point to this as a key event leading to the secession of 1861, though it occurred three decades earlier. In the Lost Cause view, this was an instance where the Southern states were grouped against a sectional bloc of Northern states, the latter using national power in the form of Jackson and the Force Act to impose an unconstitutional law on a state. And the issue here was a sectional one focused on tariffs, not slavery.

So the argument goes. But it has several obvious problems. Why does one need to go back 30 years before secession for such an example? Because every other major North-South confrontation from 1833 to 1860 had slavery as an explicit issue. Why does the Lost Cause dogma prefer to gloss over the fact that Jackson was a Southerner and a slaveowner and his movement was primarily based in the South? Because those facts are reminders that the controversy was not at all exclusively a North-vs.-South sectional issue.

Also, it's a matter of some serious dispute among real historians - not just a phony pseudohistorical issue made up by ideologues - as to whether the Nullification Controversy was really primarily about tariffs.

The South Carolina radicals certainly realized that the issue could come to a head over slavery. It had already come up in the slavery controversy settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion had scared the Slave Power into a near frenzy. And that same year, free farmers from western Virginia forced the legislature to begin what became the last serious free debate about abolishing slavery in the states that eventually joined the Confederacy. (The debate was not "free" to slaves, of course.) The Slave Power felt increasingly on the defensive.

John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory's main opponent on the nullification issue, anonymously authored a pamphlet called The South Carolina Exposition which the defiant South Carolina legislature published. In it, Calhoun argued that the tariff controverysy was merely the occasion for demanding the right of nullification. The real issue was defending the "peculiar institution of the Southern States," i.e., slavery.

Jackson later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." (And you think political rhetoric today is harsh!) And Jackson was a Southern political leader who saw the issue of secession as being something other than a purely sectional issue. What Jackson the Southern President said in his proclamation to the people of South Carolina in December, 1832, was:

Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent [the] execution [of the laws] deceived you; they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. The object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?

That's what patriotic American Southerners thought of secession - in 1832 and in 1861.

No wonder old Jackson Democrats during the war used to grumble that if the General were still around, the slaveowners would never have dared to try seceding.

And no wonder the Lost Cause crowd doesn't like to recall great Southerners like Andy Jackson very often. That part of their "heritage" they would prefer not to remember, much less "honor."

But there was another major North-South controversy during Jackson's Presidency, one in which the vote in Congress was even more clear-cut than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in which slavery figured as a very minor issue, if at all.

Yet the silence about this Act from the Lost Cause crowd is deafening, even though it involved a North-South sectional controversy and national power vs. state rights, and slavery was not an issue. Wouldn't this be a perfect example for the Lost Cause argument that the Civil War was a sectional controversy over state rights, and slavery had nothing to do with it?

Well, it would. Except for one little catch. In this case, it was the Southerners, both in Congress and the Presidency, who were pressing for the use of national power to remove Indian tribes from lands coveted by the American whites. And they were willing to override states rights to achieve it. While that wasn't a central argument in the debate, Northern opponents of the bill mocked the Southerners for their willingness to overlook states rights when it was a measure they favored.

Over the following 30 years, there would be other occasions when the Slave Power would be willing to sacrifice the principle of states rights for the preservation of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy." And for "Southern honor," of course - though not a brand Old Hickory would have recognized as such.

See: Full text of 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina

Tags: american civil war, andrew jackson, john c calhoun, lost cause, nullification controversy