So about that Civil War brouhaha...

2. Andrew Jackson was indeed a “very tough person.” But the “big heart” bit is a stretch. There’s a reason why millions of Americans were thrilled with the 2016 announcement that Harriet Tubman would bump Jackson from the front of the $20 bill. An article in Indian Country Today recognized the 250th anniversary of the seventh president’s birth with an article entitled “Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst US Presidents” and recalled that: “In 1830, a year after he became president, Jackson signed a law that he had proposed—the Indian Removal Act—which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years 46,000 indigenous people were removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land ‘to white settlement and to slavery,’ according to PBS. The area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.”

3. Native Americans have every reason to disdain Jackson. But they are not alone. Describing Jackson as “a disaster of a human being on every possible level,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews correctly noted that, in addition to “Jackson’s role in American Indian removal—the forced, bloody transfer of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the South,” Jackson “owned hundreds of slaves, and in 1835 worked with his postmaster general to censor anti-slavery mailings from northern abolitionists” and that “Jackson’s small government fetishism and crank monetary policy views stunted the attempts of better leaders like John Quincy Adams to invest in American infrastructure, and led to the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that touched off a recession lasting seven years.”

4. Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder who stood on the wrong side of the fundamental moral issue of his times, and of the Civil War—human bondage. “In all reality, slavery was the source of Andrew Jackson’s wealth,” explains the website of the Hermitage, Jackson’s Tennessee home. “The Hermitage was a 1,000 acre, self-sustaining plantation that relied completely on the labor of enslaved African American men, women, and children…. When Andrew Jackson bought The Hermitage in 1804, he owned nine enslaved African Americans. Just 25 years later that number had swelled to over 100 through purchase and reproduction. At the time of his death in 1845, Jackson owned approximately 150 people who lived and worked on the property.”

6. The theory that “had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War” is just wrong. Jackson’s presidency finished almost a quarter century before the Civil War began. Jackson died 16 years before the war began. And Jackson was no friend to the abolitionists who sought to address the crisis of slavery. He even opposed those who sought compromise, like Henry Clay—who challenged Jackson in the election of 1832. Clay also ran against Jackson’s protégé, President James K. Polk, a slaveholder widely condemned for seeking in the late 1840s to expand the influence of slaveholders and the amount of territory where slavery was allowed.

7. Trump’s unsettling notion that the differences that led to the Civil War might “have been worked out” imagines what should be unimaginable: cutting deals with regard to slavery. The compromises of the pre-Civil War era did not prevent the war. Indeed, how can a nation that seeks to serve as a “city on a hill” example to the world compromise with those who would defend the practice of human bondage as economically or socially necessary? And what evidence is there that Andrew Jackson would have been a positive force in such negotiations? Jackson was a slaveholder who placed ads promising rewards for the return of a runaway “Mulatto Man Slave” that viciously promised “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” Jackson argued that the Constitution had settled the slave debate, and he attacked the anti-slavery movement as a threat to public order. As the president, Jackson referred to religiously motivated abolitionists as “monsters” and he decried the anti-slavery movement as “the wicked design of demagogues.”

Jackson might have kicked the war can down the road a few more years, but likely at the expense of slaves. I wouldn't call that a win. I can't imagine the Jackson I've read about negotiating a compromise that freed slaves, given what it would have cost him and fellow slave-owners. Unfortunately, I don't think abolitionist feelings ran quite high enough in the north that southern slave-holders would have compensated for them at going rates. (Even if they had been, I doubt southern agriculture could have been run quite so cheaply using paid labor, so I'm betting the south still would have resisted.

What I think we could have ended up with, at best, is another compromise that preserved the Union at the expense of slaves, while tensions still simmered close to the surface. And from my standpoint (and the standpoint of modern thinking), that would not have been acceptable.