It is a favorite Republican slogan to repeat this apocryphal quote from Democratic President Andrew Jackson as his response to a Supreme Court decision written by John Marshall in the 1932 decision in Worcester v. Georgia. Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, who was Ronald Reagan’s surprise pick for the first female Supreme Court Justice, even quoted it in a speech in 2003 even as she acknowledged that the quote is “almost certainly apocryphal.” (1)
As explained in more detail below, the Supreme Court had not ordered the President or the federal government to do anything in that decision. It had ordered the a state court in Georgia to take an action. Eventually, Jackson encouraged the Georgia Governor to satisfy the Court’s actual order, which he did.
So, how did this fake quotation become a favorite quote for Trumpista Republicans today? Answering that question requires taking an excursion back into 1831 and looking at how historical experiences nearly two centuries ago shape our understanding of current politics. And, also, to see how warped it is for Republicans to use that quote to justify authoritarian defiance of courts and the democratic rule of law.
I was reminded of this again recently when I saw the quote repeated as seemingly legitimate by a German historian who generally does excellent work on American politics. (2)
Jackson as Democratic Party symbol
Jackson is justifiably criticized for his Indian policies. They were bad. The fact that American policy toward Indians was generally bad does not change the fact that Jackson’s were, too. Nor does the fact that Jackson’s attitude on Indian policy was not as bad as that of some of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Jackson’s biographer Robert Remini detailed Jackson’s policies in his three-volume biography of “Old Hickory,” as he was fondly called by his fans. He also devoted a separate book to the topic. (3)
The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson. It was originally called the Republican Party. His conservative opponents who would eventually form the Federalist Party for which John Adams was the first and only President, mocked the Jeffersonian party as the “democratic” party. This was a conservative play on fears of the radicalism of the French Revolution that began in 1989. That polemic element is presumably the origin of the completely bogus John Birch Society claim that the Founders intended to create a “republic” and not a “democracy.” Oddly enough in light of that claim, voters in the 1890s found the “democratic” label so scary (NOT!) that Jefferson’s party formally changed its name to the Democratic-Republican Party, on whose ticket his was elected President in 1800 and 1804.
The Federalist Party basically self-imploded around their British sympathies during the War of 1812 in which Britain invaded the US and even burned the US Capitol building. Memories of the American invasion of Canada in attempts to annex parts of it have become a more notable reference to America’s past history since the Trump 2.0 Administration began.
Jackson also became a national hero by leading US forces in the critical Battle of New Orleans that took place in 1815. Holding New Orleans was critical for the independence and power of the United States. Because whoever held the Port of New Orleans could control commerce on the Mississippi River, which would give that country a powerful commercial club to draw states in what we now call the Midwest to secede from the Union. During Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency, Jefferson took it as a guiding principle of his foreign policy that whatever country controlled New Orleans was the key national security threat to the United States.
Jackson assembled a remarkable force at the time, to which he recruited Indians and free blacks to fight against the British. He also worked with the legendary French pirate Jean Lafitte to fight the British forces attempting the seize the port. Isabel Allende in her wonderful novel Zorro (2005) even worked the fictional masked swordsman into the action around the Battle of New Orleans.
So, for all his sins in his life and political career, Jackson was legitimately celebrated as a national hero for his leading the battle that saved New Orleans from the British. As a young man, he had lied about his age in order to serve in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Which, it could be argued, even made him one of the Founders. But his credibility as a war hero furthered his political career, which had begun when he became a Congressman from Tennessee in 1796 and Tennessee Senator for the first time in 1797.
Remnants of the Federalist Party persisted in parts of New England after 1824. But the (Democratic-) Republican Party essentially dominated national politics until William Henry Harrison was elected President in 1840. The 1924 election produced a split within the party, when John Quincy Adams (who had switched from his father’s Federalist Party) won the vote in Congress after the Electoral College deadlocked. Jackson and his supporters always insisted that this selection was the result of what they called the Corrupt Bargain.
Jackson, however, did not send his supporters to attack the Capitol to compel Congress to select him. Unlike on January 6, 2021, the memory of the British imperialist burning down the Capitol was still pretty fresh. We could find some historical echoes of “Hang Mike Pence!” in Jackson’s career, though. Literally on his deathbed at his Tennessee plantation, the Hermitage, Jackson said that his only regret in life was that he hadn’t hanged his former Vice President John Calhoun. To understand the context, though, we have to remember that during Jackson’s Presidency, Vice President Calhoun was the mastermind of South Carolina’s “Nullification” scheme, a trial run for the secession that the Confederate states later culminated. Calhoun was and is the Evil Spirit of American history, with Donald Trump as the worst of his political spawn after Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.
It was after 1924 that the Democratic-Republican Party started calling itself just the Democratic Party. And Jackson did stand for an expansion of the power of ordinary citizens, although it’s important to remember that the American system, which was considered a radical democracy by most of the world during Jackson’s Presidency of 1829-1837, was based on only propertied free white men being able to vote. It was a hallmark of the Jacksonian movement that they expanded the franchise to include basically all free white men – a radical democratic advancement at the time. “In 1831 [in Britain], only 4,500 men could vote in parliamentary elections, out of a population of more than 2.6 million people.” (4)
(In the early 20th century Britain first enacted universal suffrage for men 1918 and universal suffrage for women in 1928.) (5)
When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about America and the egalitarian spirit there in his famous Democracy in America (1835–1840), he was basing it on observation from his travels in the US in 1831-32, i.e., during the so-called Age of Jackson. Jackson is also regarded as a “proto-populist,” because of his movement push for wider voting and more popular participation in government and also because of his successful fight against what he called the “Money Power,” i.e., the Bank of the United States of the time. That institution was not a central bank in the present-day sense, it was a private bank that benefited from deposits of government funds and its ability to bribe members of Congress. The Jacksonians were right to view it as an instrument of corruption dominated by the wealthiest Americans and operating to the disadvantage of the majority.
Jacksonian political symbolism
Jackson was a slaveholder who nevertheless took a strong stand against Calhoun’s secessionist politics in defense of the slavery system. In opposing Nullification, he argued on patriotic grounds for national unity but added a particular notion that American patriotism was not just loyalty to a national entity but also to the American constitutional system, i.e., democracy and the rule of law. Jackson did not oppose slavery or support the rising antislavery movement. But it’s fair to say that when forced during the Nullification Controversy to choose between defending slavery and defending the American Constitutional system, he came down hard on the side of the latter.
Abraham Lincoln, who became the Presidential candidate of the definitively antislavery Republican Party in 1860, declared his two major models for his Presidency were the two slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The kind of democratic reform and Constitutional patriotism that those two Presidents represented became central to the new Republican Party and to Lincoln’s Presidency.
There were still many old Jacksonians active in politics in 1850s and 1860s, such as Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton (he pronounced his name as “Bane-ton”) and Pennsylvania’s David Wilmot who supported the “Free Soil” movement against the expansion of slavery. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote, “the old Jacksonian most clearly in the apostolic succession [to Jackson], with the retirement of Van Buren and the death of Wright, was Thomas Hart Benton.” Schlesinger also describes the antislavery Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who was literally beaten nearly to death on the floor of the Senate by a cane wielded by a cowardly, pro-slavery Southern punk Congressman, as a “neo-Jacksonian.” (6)
But political legacies can evolve in surprising ways. Lincoln’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1864, the Unionist Democrat Andrew Johnson, who was also a Tennessee Senator, considered himself a Jacksonian. But as the first President during Reconstruction, he opposed democratic reforms in the South and sympathized heavily with the Southern planter class who wanted to hold on to their power and much as possible and to restrict democracy in the South as much as they could.
The Democratic Party came to identify itself particularly with the Presidents considered its founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Some historians would argue that the Jacksonian Democratic Party after 1824 was essentially a new party, not a continuation of the Jeffersonian one. The later Democratic Party adopted them both as founders of the party. “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners” held in February or March became a fundraising tradition for Democrats, although in recent years, “[d]ue to controversies over Jefferson's slaveholding and Jackson's policy toward Native Americans while in office, some Democratic Party organizations have been removing Jefferson and Jackson from the title of party fundraisers.” (7)
The Republicans have tried to appropriate Jackson’s image as a defender of the “common man” – and I assume that good Trumpistas prefer the male-gendered version of the term. The one time I visited the Ronald Reagan Library, I notice in the exhibit recreating Reagan’s Oval Office that a painting of Andrew Jackson was hanging on the wall. Since Reagan was a former Democrat and used that association as a pitch to ConservaDems – “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me” – that at least makes some sense.
Trump adopting Andrew Jackson as a supposed role model or hero as a sick joke. As a war hero and a leader who fought to expand democracy, it’s hard to imagine anyone for whom Jackson would have had greater contempt than Donald Trump. Except for John Calhoun, in whose political tradition the Orange Anomaly really stands.
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832)
The Court case in question in the apocryphal Jackson quote is part of the story of the Jackson’s Indian Removal Act and the mass transfer of native peoples (ethnic cleansing) that it authorized, the particular Court order that Jackson supposedly refused to follow was not directly about Indian relocation as such. Technically, the Removal Act authorized the federal government to make voluntary treaties with tribes to relocate, but in practice it was a coercive process. Remini observes, “The experience of removal is one of the horror stories of the modern era,” referring specifically to that act. (8)
The dispute had to do with Indian tribal lands that were inside the state of Georgia. In 1802, Georgia had relinquished its control over the territories that would become Alabama and Mississippi to the federal government. And the federal government had agreed that it would negotiate with the tribes whose land was within Georgia with the aim of relocating the Indians from there, ending the tribal ownership, and allowing Georgia to take possession of that land.
But the Cherokees dug in and refused to leave. As Lindsay Robertson explains in this 2013 video from the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma, the Cherokees achieved a high level of literacy, established a representative government, and gold was discovered on the land. The latter of course, made staying even more attractive for the Cherokees – and stealing their land more attractive for Georgia. (9)
When Jackson took office as President in March 1929, he did endorse Georgia’s claim that Georgia state law was sovereign in the Cherokee Nation there. But the Cherokees contested that claim and sued in federal court, the Cherokees’ chief legal representative being William Wirt, who had served for over 11 years as US Attorney General under Presidents James Madison and John Quincy Adams. Wirt and his team brought a case directly to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) arguing that Georgia’s claim of sovereignty was invalid. SCOTUS rejected the Cherokee claim to full sovereignty but left open a way for the Cherokee Nation to bring a new challenge.
However, in a decision in a separate but related case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Court ruled that Georgia had exceeded its authority by arresting two Christian missionaries who had entered Cherokee territory and sentenced them to four years in state prison. Remini describes the situation this way, after the two missionaries sued to be released:
[I]n the case Worcester v. Georgia the Supreme Court decided on March 3, 1832, that the Georgia law [under which the missionaries were imprisoned] was unconstitutional. Speaking for the majority in a feeble voice, John Marshall croaked out the court's decision. All the laws of Georgia dealing with the Cherokees were unconstitutional, he declared. He issued a formal mandate two days later ordering the Georgia Superior Court to reverse its decision.Jackson was also facing the rising threat of nullification from South Carolina at this time. He was concerned that if Georgia persisted in defying SCOTUS on the two missionaries, they might join with South Carolina and make the crisis more serious. As Remini writes, “Nullification might lead to secession and civil war.” So he quietly pushed Georgia to release the missionaries in line with the Supreme Court’s direction, which Gov. Wilson Lumpkin did in January 1832. Remini writes that “both the problem of Georgia’s defiance and the fate of the two missionaries were quietly resolved without injurious consequences to the rest of the nation. It was one of Jackson’s finest actions as a statesman.” (p. 278)
Georgia, of course, had refused to acknowledge [SCOTUS’] right to direct its actions and had boycotted the judicial proceedings. The state had no intention of obeying the court's order. Since the court adjourned almost immediately after rendering its decision nothing further could be clone. According to the Judiciary Act of 1789 the Supreme Court could issue its order of compliance only when a case had already been remanded without response. Since the court would not reconvene until January, 1833, no further action by the government could take place. Thus, until the court either summoned state officials before it for contempt or issued a writ of habeas corpus for the release of the two missionaries there was nothing further to be done. The President was under no obligation to act. In fact there is some question as to whether the court itself could act since the existing habeas corpus law did not apply in this case because the missionaries were not being detained by federal authorities. And since the Superior Court of Georgia did not acknowledge in writing its refusal to obey, Marshall's decision could not be enforced. Jackson understood this. He knew there was nothing for him to do. "The decision of the supreme court has fell still born," he wrote John Coffee, "and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate." [my emphasis] (p. 277)
Georgia Gov. Lumpkin was of course aware that Jackson was committed to removal of the Cherokees. But despite what Horace Greeley’s version of events might lead one to think, Jackson encouraged Lumpkin to comply with the Supreme Court order. So, it really makes no sense that he would have said the “now let him enforce it” crack in that context.
The quote that Republicans love to repeat comes from Horace Greeley’s book published in 1865, over 33 years after Jackson supposedly made it. The American Conflict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-1864 Volume 1, p, 106:
The attorneys for the missionaries sought to have this judgment enforced, but could not. General Jackson was President, and would do nothing of the sort. " Well: John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!". was his commentary on the matter. So the missionaries languished years in prison, and the Cherokees were finally (1838) driven into exile, in defiance of the mandate of our highest judicial tribunal. Georgia was permitted to violate the faith of solemn treaties and defy the adjudications of our highest court.”The following and concluding sentence of that paragraph is, “South Carolina was put down in a similar attempt: for the will of - Andrew Jackson, not the Constitution, was in those years ‘the supreme law of the land’." (10)
Yes, Jackson as President did “put down” South Carolina in its attempt to nullify the laws of the United States and to lay a major precedent for secession of slave states from the Union. At least in that passage, Greeley was defending John Calhoun’s treasonous position in that comment.
Horace Greeley and Reconstruction politics
Greeley was an important antislavery newspaper editor and a liberal member of the Whig Party. He founded and edited the New York Tribune, an influential paper which during the Civil War published articles by a famous pair of German political writers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Greeley’s New England principles included not only opposition to slavery but to gambling and alcohol, as well, and he defended the westward expansion of the US. But he took a sad turn in the later years of his life. At the time his book on the Civil War was published, he was taking a different course than the pro-Lincoln “old Jacksonians.”
After the onset of the Civil War (1861), Greeley pursued an erratic course, though generally he sided with the Radical Republicans in advocating early emancipation of the slaves and, later, civil rights for freedmen. Greeley lost much public respect by opposing Lincoln’s renomination in 1864 and by signing the bail bond of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1867.Greeley was opposed to slavery. He was also, to put it gently, opposed to equal citizenship for Black Americans. He wrote in March of 1865 shortly before the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox:
Partly out of political pique and partly from disagreement with the corruption apparent in the first administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant (1869–73), Greeley joined a group of Republican dissenters, forming the Liberal Republican Party. The party opposed Grant in 1872 and nominated Greeley for president. In the dreary campaign that followed, he was so mercilessly criticized that, as he said, he scarcely knew whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. Despite his party’s inexperience, Greeley polled more than 40 percent of the popular vote. Before the electoral college met, however, Greeley was institutionalized (perhaps as a result of the intensity of the attacks he had sustained and his loss of control over his newspaper), and he died before the electoral votes were cast. (11)
For our part, we are all ready to forget whatever it is impolitic and unbecoming to remember, and to forgive whatever crimes it is safe for the State to pardon or overlook. This we believe to be the almost universal sentiment of the North, and one from which the happiest influences and results will follow. (12)In other words, he was opposed to punishing or imposing most crimes committed in the deadly Confederate rebellion against the United States. And a couple of months after that comment, he wrote, “Clear away the wreck of slavery, dispel the lingering fear of a return to it, and we may soon break up our Freedmen's Bureaus and all manner of coddling devices, and let Negroes take care of themselves.” (Ibid.) Everyone understood at the time that this meant: leave the freed slaves to the whims of their former masters. He endorsed the kind of barriers to voting for African-Americans that the Southern states would later apply with enthusiasm and which the Trump Party is currently trying to impose: “we stand ready to agree that lntelligence, Usefulness, and Moral Worth shall be indispensable to the exercise of the Right of Suffrage. Make the rule as rigid as you please, and we agree to it, provided that you require it inflexibly of all." He didn’t need to specify “nudge-nudge-wink-wink” after it to communicate what he was advocating.
But let’s be fair. He was willing to countenance disenfranchisement of poor whites, as well:
Say that there shall be no voter who has not paid a tax-who cannot read with understanding-who is not a good citizen-and we respond, Amen! But if you make intelligence a requirement for Blacks only, and then shut them out of your Public Schools and in every way discourage their education - if you disfranchise those among them who have acquired more than average intelligence - is not your proscription proved unjust and its pretext hypocritical? (Ibid.)Greeley ran for President in 1872 as the candidate of both the third-party Liberal Republicans and of the Democratic Party, opposing Republican President Ulysses Grant and his Reconstruction policies. Many Democrats hated him for his prewar abolitionism. But Greeley was no longer on the side of democratic reform. During the 1872 campaign, “Thomas Nast, editorial cartoonist of the Republican Harper’s Weekly, regularly portrayed Greeley reaching across the graves of Union soldiers or dead freedmen to shake hands with former Confederates.” (13) The two-party Greeley campaign positioned itself as the anti-Reconstruction choice against Grant.
And that’s who provided that favorite bogus quote of which Trumpistas today are so fond.
There are other cases in which Jackson was accused of floating the rule of law that have more substance. But he gets a bad rap over his behavior in Worcester v. Georgia (1832). (14)
Notes:
(1) Remarks by Sandra Day O’Conner 07/04/2003. Supreme Court website. <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_07-04-03.html> (Accessed: 2025-13-04).
(2) Brockschmidt, Annika (2025): Staatsstreich mit USB-Drives: Der digitale Putsch des Elon Musk. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 66.
(3) Remini, Robert (2001): Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars. New York: Viking.
(4) Rossi, Elena (2018): Universal Manhood Suffrage. National Archives (UK) 04/12/2018. <https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/universal-manhood-suffrage/> (Accessed: 2025-12-04).
(5) Basu, Chitralekha et al (2022): Democratizing from Within: British Elites and the Expansion of the Franchise. ECONtribute Discussion Paper No. 139, Feb. 2022. <https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_139_2022.pdf> (Accessed: 2025-12-04).
(6) Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur (1945): The Age of Jackson, 472, 486. New York: Book Find Club.
(7) Wikipedia (2024): Jefferson–Jackson Dinner 10/25/2024. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jefferson%E2%80%93Jackson_Dinner&oldid=1253372145> (Accessed: 2025-12-04).
(8) Remini, Robert (1981): Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832, 275. New York: Harper & Row.
(9) Cherokee Cases (2/3): Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. OU IACH YouTube channel 11/07/2013. <https://youtu.be/6BdSG-lKDZg?si=XTxCrta7vutOLZWM> (Accessed: 2025-12-04).
(10) University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ACP6793.0001.001/104> (Accessed: 2025-13-04).
(11) Editors (2025): "Horace Greeley". Encyclopedia Britannica 03/14/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Horace-Greeley> (Accessed: 2025-13-04).
(12) Quoted in: Kirkwood, Robert (1959): Horace Greeley and Reconstruction 1865. New York History 40:3. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/23153667>
(13) Slap, Andrew (2007): The Doom of Reconstruction, 202. New York: Fordham University Press.
(14) See: Warshauer, Matthew (n/d) Andrew Jackson and the Constitution. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. <https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/andrew-jackson-and-constitution> (Accessed: 2025-13-04). But Warshauer also cites the notorious now-let-him-enforce-it quote, though he qualifies it with “allegedly.” He also adds, “Although there is little evidence to support the above quotation, it certainly sounds like Jackson.” Then he immediately and accurately writes, “Nonetheless, the case required nothing of Jackson and was ultimately settled out of court.”
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