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“The failures that are now taking
place are amongst the stock-jobbers, brokers, and gamblers,
and would to God, they were all swept from the land !”
– Andrew Jackson
Let's talk about treason. Treason and Andrew Jackson and the
appropriate way to respond to it.
Jackson is politically
incorrect these days. Hot tempered, angry and unforgiving Manifest
Destiny advocate who loved a lot of Indians like brothers and
children but also was responsible for the Trail of Tears and the
displacement of the Five Civilized Tribes to Oklahoma. Man of the
people — who at the White House on Inaugural Day had to climb out a
window to escape the crush of his worshipers, who pretty much
trashed the place — but drank very little and lived moderately.
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Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) ... Left to Right -
portrait in military uniform by Charles Willson Peale, 1819 and
Official White House Portrait by Ralph E.W. Earl, 1837 (Image of
Andrew Jackson created January 1, 2016 by USA Patriotism! from
photos of the two portraits)
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Accused as an adulterer and
seducer, he married one woman and loved her unto and beyond
death; and, took chivalry to new levels when Peggy Eaton was
accused of being a adulteress with one of his proteges.
Model of the western gunfighter, carrying lead from duels
until his death.
Autodidact, lawyer, governor,
senator, general and a thinker who didn't leave us a lot to
read, but tons to ponder. Kris Kristofferson played Jackson
in the recent History Channel “Texas Rising” which was
pretty bad, but seemed to play him in much the way his
friends did. Avuncular, friendly, reserved and proper, until
you got him mad. So don't get him mad.
During Andrew
Jackson's first term in office, the Vice President was John
C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Jackson is identified largely
with Tennessee since he rose to prominence as the commander
of the Tennessee Militia/Volunteers in various Indian Wars
including the Creek Wars. He was a Judge in Tennessee, the
governor of the state, and a Senator.
But Jackson was
a native of South Carolina, and both his brother and his
mother died as a direct result of British actions in
Charleston during the Revolution. Jackson himself was
ordered as a teenager by a British officer to clean and
polish his riding boots; when Jackson refused, the British
officer slashed him across the face with his saber. Jackson
joined the movement to the west, and rose to prominence as
an attorney, but also as one with a very hot temper.
Jim Webb features Jackson in his book,
Born Fighting, How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, along
with other figures like William Wallace. If you want to
understand that particular culture and how it interacts with
outsiders, you probably ought to read Webb's book; or, for
that matter, binge watch “Justified” which does a great job
of showing that culture functioning in a modern, unfriendly
and foreign world. Or, come talk with me and some of my
friends with Scots Irish roots and bad attitudes. You'll get
it.
Jackson had been an up and coming,
socially-mobile attorney and plantation owner in Nashville
when Aaron Burr went through to visit the west. Burr may or
may not have been considering forming a company of
freebooters to take over part of the south or southwest as a
new nation.
His political career in the United States
was basically over since he had won his duel with Alexander
Hamilton. Burr was part of that New England aristocracy
based in law, education, the church and trade. Burr was more
radical than Jefferson in terms of his attitudes toward
democracy, and in so far as he had a political ideology, it
was probably closer to Thomas Paine than Jefferson.
Jackson hosted him and became in the minds of many of the
main stream identified with Burr. Burr, the murderous,
incestuous, womanizing traitor. Burr the Princeton-educated
great grandson of Jonathan Edwards of Great Awakening Fame;
Burr, the one man who terrified Hamilton more than Jefferson
as the potential leader.
Burr who was insulted by
Hamilton; who challenged Hamilton, who refused to apologize;
Burr, who shot Hamilton and killed him, while the serving
Vice President of the United States. And people swoon today
because Joe Biden uses four letter words with the mic on.
Take time to deliberate; but when the
time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. ~ Andrew
Jackson
Jackson didn't care about those people who
disliked Burr; Burr was a friend. Never resigning as VP, Burr moved
on advancing the Republican (Democrat) agenda in congress as
president of the Senate before leaving to visit the west. He may
have been falsely accused, may not have been, of treason, and the
plan to form an alliance with Spain or against Spain but with the
intent of taking New Orleans and Texas and a bunch of other places
into this separate amalgamation. He was taken into custody on order
of the President — Jefferson — who had him brought to Virginia
locked in a carriage, where he was tried, and acquitted.
Burr
left the US for an extended French visit, Jackson stalked around
Virginia during and after the trial daring anyone to take Burr's
name in vain, and everything was more or less forgotten. (If you're
looking for a good read on the Burr Conspiracy hootenanny and
mountain oyster fry, Gore Vidal's Burr is an exceptionally
well-documented, accurate and enjoyable historical novel. Vidal, of
course, believed that the history itself was fascinating enough; all
he had to do was tell the story and throw in some dialogue and minor
characters to act as narrators.)
Except any noise about treason. ~
Andrew Jackson
During the War of 1812, the initial commander
of the American Army was a Revolutionary War Veteran, General James
Wilkinson who had been something of a pet to Washington and had been
the quintessential slimeball political general that all the
following slimeballs emulate but can never top.
Wilkinson, as
commander of the western Armies had been a close friend and
confidant of Burr, until Burr dropped whatever it was he was doing —
nobody's really sure — when Wilkinson informed Jefferson as to what
his Vice President had been up to, claiming to have played along to
gain information. Names were revealed including Jackson's.
Jackson challenged or threaten to challenge Wilkinson to a duel.
Wilkinson withdrew the accusation and apologized. After the
beginning of the was, Jackson sought a regular command but was
ignored initially for... James Wilkinson to whom the Virginia mafia
–Jefferson, Madison, Monroe — felt they owed a great debt.
Problem was that like most of the slimeball political generals,
Wilkinson had as much business leading troops in battle as he would
have had being a Tibetan Lama. He would have done less damage.
Jackson was furious for many reasons and when Wilkinson's invasion
of Canada was an absolute disaster at Montreal, he was fired and
wandered off into history and to Spain where he died in 1825.
Wilkinson had been revealed as a Spanish Military Spy in 1797, but
talked his way out of that one in much the same way he did with
Burr.
Jackson was beating every one who came at him, with few
regulars, no federal support for his Army and in what was probably
the most ignored though strategically important theater of the war.
Incompetence, treason and personal treachery fit Jackson's model of
general evil and uselessness.
Jackson, of course, was busy
winning the Indian War in the South, especially the Battle of Horse
Shoe Bend; then, in something unnecessary militarily but critically
important to the pride of the nation and then myth of the United
States. At New Orleans, with a mob of Indian fighters, Regulars,
Milita, Cajun, Creoles, Free Slaves and Pirates, he destroyed one of
the finest of Wellington's former generals, General Sir Edward
Pakenham, inflicting 2600 casualties at a cost of 13.
Despite
Jackson's issues with the Virginia cabal, he was very much a
follower of Jefferson's beliefs and ideas. He was opposed to tariffs
in general, opposed to the Bank of the United States, opposed to a
strong central government, except in matters of national defense. He
disliked the John Marshall's expansionist vision of the Supreme
Court's authority; he abhorred alliances of any type with any
aristocratic or authoritarian government, especially British.
He went back to Tennessee, ran for office, was elected to the
legislature and appointed as the commander of the state's forces and
the documentation makes a great record of what transpired next.
Jackson proved an exceptional commander in the field; he fought a
lot of duels which basically were well-organized gunfights; he also
was involved in and was shot in one particular gunfight that
resulted in the family he was opposing that day in Nashville moving
on to St Louis and being very, very apologetic to him and supporting
his positions for the rest of his life.
Twenty or so years
later, Jackson now a frail older man, complained of pain in his
chest where the ball from that particular gunfight had lodged in and
never been removed. His White House Physician recommended that it be
removed, and Old Hickory said, “Good. Now...” and took off his jacket,
shirt and stood there while the doctor opened him up, removed the
bullet, cleaned the wound and sewed him back up. I know this sort of
thing happens all the time on cable TV but in fact it's not all that
easy. It doesn't happen often when the patient is standing, in his
late 60s, has severe respiratory, cardiac and abdominal illnesses
and injuries as well as chronic migraines.
To keep my
reputation as a bleeding heart, Commie-Pinko-Progressive-Anarchist
intact, I have to admit the following: Jackson had no love for the
various Indian Tribes that made up the Five Civilized Tribes. He
didn't have any particular hatred for them; he just found them in
the way. He made his military reputation fighting tribes on the
frontier, which included Tennessee, parts of Kentucky, Alabama,
Mississippi and so on.
In other words, the reality of time
exposed him to different reality than faced other people in other
ages. This is unfortunate, horrible and inevitable — we do things
differently when we know more, have more stability and are able to
actually talk to each other with perspective. But, Manifest Destiny
was in fact a zero-sum game. By the time Jackson moved the civilized
tribes from their historic lands to the Indian Territories, the
entire nation was in favor. Jackson's most famous protege, Sam
Houston, was adopted by the Cherokee as a boy, and famously was
called the “Raven” and treated when sober as a chief.
While
the relocation was an absolute disaster for the people, it's not
reasonable to assume that Jackson intended it to be an exercise in
genocide, a term that didn't have any meaning in the 1830s. He
figured out how to make logistics work, and assumed the Army would
as well. He was wrong. Another way to look at is this — heroes suck.
All our heroes did awful things to everybody they could if necessary
to fulfill their goals, if you want to dig deep enough and magnify
the bad stuff.
The great constitutional corrective in
the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption
by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with
calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough. — Andrew
Jackson
That stipulated, Jackson did a number of
things that made him a great president and a true American hero. One
of them was his war with the Second Bank of the United States, which
was a forerunner of the Federal Reserve and guilty of most of the
things that Ron Paul accuses this Fed of doing; if Nicolas Biddle
had had electronic funds transfers to play with as president of the
2nd Bank of the United States, we'd have a monied aristocracy with
vast inequities of wealth and political power.
Jackson had
the political courage and skill to strangle the bank and prevent the
renewal of it's charter with the United States. It could have stayed
open as a private bank, except the bulk of its deposits were made up
of deposits from the government. When that moved to a variety of
banks, it no longer had the capital to influence policy or the
economy. It was an ugly fight, but Jackson prevailed. When a group
of bank shareholders and officials met with him in Philadelphia to
persuade him to not remove the deposits, he listened politely, asked
if they had anything else to say, and then responded...
Gentlemen! I too have been a close
observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had
men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have
used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the
country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when
you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the
deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten
thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your
sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families,
and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I
have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his
fist down on the table) I will rout you out! — Andrew Jackson
(It's a fight, by the way, that we're
probably going to have to have again, not with the Fed but with the
banking industry, stock market and the rest. of the malefactors of
great wealth such as currency and market manipulators and
speculators. ~ Michael Farrell)
Jackson's other great achievement was
slapping the nascent “Nullification and Interposition” movement back
into its womb, which was South Carolina, and to a large extent
remains centered there. Although Jackson was not a fan of high
tariffs, he agreed that some tariffs on cotton and other commodities
were needed to prevent England and France from crushing the American
textile industry. So, he supported them, and duties were charged.
This caused problems in South Carolina and the rest of the
cotton growing south. Various political figures, quoting or
misquoting Locke, Hobbes, Paine, Hamilton( which was odd since he
was the strongest proponent of high tariffs to protect US
industries) and Jefferson to the effect that this was slavery. The
government using tariffs — a tax — to raise money for operating
expenses like the Army, Navy, canals, railroads, expansion, service.
Pure tyranny!
All the rights secured to the citizens
under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except
guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary. —
Andrew Jackson
In such a case, these philosophers argued,
the state government had the right and duty to nullify the offensive
federal law, tax or duty and to protect it's citizens by interposing
itself between the poor suffering cotton barons and the government
of the United States. The Supreme Court, normally opposed to most of
Jackson's policies, weighed in that the theory was stupid,
unjustified and unconstitutional. However, the legislatures of the
Southern United States have never feared doing things that were
stupid, unjustified, and unconstitutional in the defense of the
rich, the comfortable and the ignorant.
The leader of the
nullification and secessionist movement was initially Jackson's Vice
President, John C. Calhoun was a hero of and role model for South
Carolina's approach to the Union and States Rights as well as a
champion of sectionalism — the idea that various areas of the
country had common interests and should be able to pursue those
interests despite the greater good of the whole.
New England
was also a strong advocate of this approach to government and
national policy at times; at various points up to and during the war
of 1812, representatives of the New England states met to consider
whether or not secession might not be in their best interests.
However, by 1828, that particular idea was pretty well tossed in the
trash in most of the nation. Except, of course in the South where at
times it continues to pop up like a nasty wart or boil; but in what
became Dixie, the deep south, it continued to fester.
Jackson
initially refused to be drawn into the debate despite the urging of
both sides. During the debates and arguments, Jackson supported
states rights and low tariffs, refusing to be drawn into the
nullification issue. However, by this time Calhoun had moved beyond
nullification and states rights to a position advocating the state's
final right to secession. Jackson regarded that as insane and
treasonous but did not differ publicly with his Vice President, yet.
However, finally at the Jefferson Day Dinner in March 1830.
Jackson rose at the formal dinner in Washington, proposing as a
toast, “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved.” After the
resulting drinking and clinking and “Hear, Hears”, Calhoun stood and
proposed a toast while the President was still standing...something
not done in those formal affairs in those days, and proposed, “The
Union, next to our Liberty, the most dear.” Jackson refused to
drink.
For the next two years, the President and the Vice
President fought, argued and tried to convince each other that they
were correct. Jackson initially saw this as a serious disagreement
between gentlemen, but when he discovered that Calhoun had opposed
him during the War of 1812 and after in consolidating eastern
Louisiana, Southern Alabama and Mississippi and Florida for the
nation, he stopped thinking of his Veep as a gentleman.
When
he found his administration involved by Calhoun and his supporters
in something called the “Petticoat Affair” which today seems like
relatively minor Capital Hill Debauchery, he became angry. Do not
make the master duelist angry. He raised the issue with the cabinet,
forcing the resignation of several members who were basically
Calhoun supporters, and made Calhoun feel the need for a less
unhealthy climate than Washington; he spent most of the rest of his
term in Charleston.
While in Charleston, Calhoun appears to
have been overwhelmed by his self-importance and began lobbying for
the foundation of the Nullifiers Party which supported the right of
the states to nullify Federal Law. In 1834, after two additional
years of arguing and threats, Jackson prevailed on Congress to pass
the Force Bill, which basically said that the President could take
whatever action necessary to enforce the customs laws in South
Carolina, including invasion. When asked shortly after the Bill
passed what he intended to do, according to legend Jackson said, “If
I thought the hair on my head knew what I intended to do, I'd cut it
off and burn it.”
Well, as legislative assemblies tend to do,
South Carolina and Calhoun and his supporters wandered around
threatening war and apocalypse in the capitol in Charleston and the
various taverns and verandas in Charleston. Jackson prepared to
blockade the port, sending ships into positions to enforce it, and
then let it be known that if he had to send the Army in to resolve
the crisis or institute the blockade, he would hang John C. Calhoun.
Things calmed down, although Calhoun's influence would continue to
be a problem until the next time the Nullification-Secession
continuum intruded, in 1860. Both antagonists were dead by then but
history seems to have made Jackson's position clearly the victor.
Except the Calhoun nonsense keeps coming up,
again and again and again. When workers vote Republican, it's not
like the poor whites in the south voting for the Republicans;
rather, it's like the slaves being offered a choice between slavery
and freedom, and choosing slavery.
In his farewell address,
Jackson was not just talking about government, but about the
overreach of the rich and powerful attempting to subvert the intents
of common good, more perfect union, and blessings of liberty. While
the people who would be his natural constituency in this country,
the working class, farmers and middle class, worry inordinately
about terrorism, Syrian immigrant children, and homosexual
marriages, the people Jackson referred to as a “den of vipers”
continue to distract the people and poison political discourse.
But you must remember, my
fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price
of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure
the blessing. — Andrew Jackson, March 4, 1837.
Original article at Veterans Today
By Michael Farrell,
Veterans Today
Copyright 2016
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