The inherent value on the face of a twenty dollar bill
A book report on Andrew Burstein’s the Passions of Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson is not a face on Mt Rushmore but neither is Crazy Horse. Washington and Jefferson had their slaves, Lincoln had his fighting boys, and TDR had his debasing of the Republican Party. The great men of traditional American democracy crowd the modern intellectuals mind of being the bad boy of modern American society.
Andrew Jackson was a mason which means he met the requirements of the society of his time and then some. However he is completely elusive to the modern mind. He had slaves, ordered the slaughter and suffering of many native Americans and consistently engaged in street violence and slander.
AJ would rather die than let himself be insulted. He was raised to be his own man. He owned slaves and never backed down. He wanted to be wealthy. Proud of his heritage and adaptable he imitates the savagery of the Native American while maintaining a personal code of civility.
A land acquired and cultivated for profit he thinks his way into a military and then political career through actions. Consistently and actively he seeks advancement and investment. He leaves the bench to manage his plantation and business. With each social promotion he becomes more vigilant of defending his personal honor.
In the military Jackson steals the political hour through his interpretation of patriotic masculinity as something hard, violent, and sacrificial. Seeing the administration as softened by money since John Adams took office after George Washington up to the current James Madison during the War of 1812 he wins New Orleans in the West while Washington, DC burns in the east.
Politically he consistently meets success only to abandon the public sector to pursue his more lucrative private interests. He is elected to Congress and works as a senator and a judge before returning to his estate, the Hermitage, which is not only a plantation and port of trade but by now has a shop, a bar, a horse racetrack and a landing dock for boats within its management.
The only thing to bring Andrew Jackson out of his version of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is the Presidency after the war of 1812. His Election ends the Virginian dynasty that Washington and Jefferson enacted and led with the exception of John Adams. Democrat is the name of Andrew Jackson’s party which is a new title for a new party while the opposition party is termed the whigs and represents the last of the old guard.
The cabinet is full of cronies but Jackson put them there because he thought they would think like him and would follow what he said. He becomes political enemies with two of the most famous senators of the time, Henry Clay and John Calhoun for two different reasons. First Clay did not want a military chieftain unacquainted with republican theory to succeed him in power and Calhoun did not want a man who he perceived to be and act as a tyrant to succeed him in power.
The point of view of Jackson saw the game of politics in Washington as schemes, plots and deception that he wanted nothing to do with. He was there to drain the swamp. Calhoun irked Jackson so much that by the end of his life he thought that not having Calhoun hung for Treason was his biggest regret. Calhoun labels Jackson as a tyrant in the same manner that the entire south labeled Lincoln a tyrant.
The South wanted nullification. Andrew Jackson was appalled. The issue to the South was retaining their rights and their slaves. The issue to Andrew Jackson, although he also had rights and slaves he wanted to retain, was preserving the Union. Although John Calhoun was AJ’s Vice President he resigns his post and returns to his senate in South Carolina to pursue his fiery leadership of the nullification of the Southern states.
In the textbooks of yesterday Jackson was a hero of white democracy and white expansion. The modern mind does not see victory in anything that is racial so that the scholar must reconsider if there is any value in Jackson’s legacy. The scholar must also find value in Washington and Jefferson amidst their slaves, for Lincoln and his slaughter, for Roosevelt and his debasement of the Republican Party.
Andrew Jackson is essentially the trailblazer of the civil war and western expansion. With Abraham Lincoln he thought the restraint of Southern Secession most important and its success as madness. With Washington and Jefferson he believed western expansion inevitable and vital by any means. He was a common man like Lincoln but held to a standard of gentility like his founding father predecessors. Only Theodore Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore looks down into the crowds beneath Mt. Rushmore and sees the legacy of Crazy Horse and Andrew Jackson combined into a new people that knows neither class nor race. In the light of day Theodore Roosevelt looks down from his stone monument stoic and thoughtful but in the night he broods alone and shrieks with echoes.
