He talks in the interview about the subject of a 2021 article of his, “The Tyranny of the Minority, from Calhoun to Trump.”
The past that changes
The title refers to John Calhoun (1782-1850), a Senator and Vice President and vile secessionist who is also known as the Evil Spirit of American History. (At least that’s what I call him.)
Kevin Levin of the excellent Civil War Memory blog recently noted that he started his blog 20 years ago, when old-fashioned Lost Cause history was enjoying a bit of an online revival among fans of slavery and Confederacy. I was ahead of him by a year or two, starting in 2003. I first called my blog “Old Hickory’s Weblog” after Andrew Jackson’s nickname. At that time, it was still common for Democratic state parties to hold annual “Jefferson-Jackson Dinners” for annual fundraisers, the name referring to the two leaders considered the founders of today’s Democratic Party.
Also, both of them were know in their time as radical reformers. Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as the Revolutionary wartime governor of the rebel province of Virginia. A very young Andrew Jackson lied about his age to join the Continental Army. Later in his military career as a general, he fought and defeated the British invaders at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Technically, the British and the US had already made a peace agreement to end what is remembered in the US as the War of 1812. (Which was the last time the US attempted the Trumpian folly of trying to take over Canada, a different part of the story.)
But if the British had taken New Orleans, they would have controlled the mouth of the Mississippi River, which was critical for American commerce and would have allowed them to keep the US in a subordinate position indefinitely. Notably, the force Jackson assembled for the Battle of New Orleans included indigenous Choctaws and free blacks. (Isabel Allende in her novel Zorro even gave the literary swordfighter and heroic bandido a side role in the drama of the Battle of New Orleans.)
The French pirates Jean and Pierre Lafitte also allied with the American forces:
But later that year, the brothers managed to remediate their reputations. British officials had asked them to serve as allies and guides for the upcoming battle. Instead, Jean Lafitte reported the offer to the American authorities, and volunteered to join Jackson. “I am the stray sheep, wishing to return to the sheepfold,” he wrote to Louisiana governor William C.C. Claiborne.Jefferson was US Minister to France 1794-1789, where he was sympathetic to the republican sentiments of leaders like Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought on the patriot side in the American Revolution on behalf of France. He even allowed some patriot leaders to meet in the American Embassy to make political plans for the events that became the French Revolution. (The first American regime-change operation?)
At first Jackson wasn’t so thrilled, calling Lafitte “a hellish banditti.” But he reconsidered because of the pirates’ much-needed weapons and knowledge of the area. In late 1814, Jackson met with the Lafitte brothers to strategize the Americans’ defense. Where they met remains a matter of contention: The second floor at Maspero’s Exchange on Chartres Street or a secret room at Absinthe House on Bourbon? Both claimed the distinction. They still do.
There is no doubt, however, that the pirates’ participation helped turn the tide of the battle. Jackson was so impressed with the artillery skills of pirate Dominique You that he said: “I wish I had fifty such guns on this line, with five hundred such devils as those fellows.”
On Feb. 6, 1815, President James Madison granted Jean Lafitte and his Baratarians full pardons for past crimes due to their role in the defense of New Orleans. That made them one of the city’s first, if not last, scoundrels turned heroes. (3)
The US at the time of Jefferson’s Presidency (1801-1809) was considered a radical democracy by world standards. As it was during Jackson’s (1829-1837). Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican Presidency who would go down in history as the Great Liberator for leading the war that ended slavery in the US, declared his two main models as President were Jefferson and Jackson.
But, as the saying goes, everything is relative. By today’s standards, the US during Jefferson’s and Jackson’s Presidencies wouldn’t even been considered democracies. Voting was restricted to propertied white males, though expanded male suffrage was a priority of the Jacksonian movement in the states. Also, slavery was legal. Both Jefferson and Jackson were slaveowners, though Jefferson professed to be against slavery. Jackson didn’t.
But when John Calhoun and his fellow traitors in South Carolina staged the Nullification Crisis to establish the right of slave states to ignore any federal effort to abolish slavery, Jackson came down hard against the attempt.
For that reason, Trump’s dumb pretense to take Andrew Jackson as a preferred Presidential hero was truly gag-worthy. I’m confident that the Orange Anomaly knows approximately zero about Jackson’s actual accomplishments and couldn’t care less.
But those in the cop-killing mob incited by Trump to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021? That was raw Calhoun-ism at work.
Still, democracy expanded by fits and starts in the US. And as concern for equal rights for minorities and the rise of a “postcolonial” view of recent centuries became better established, the reputations of Jefferson and Jackson began to look more tarnished. Jefferson-Jackson dinners fell out of favor even among their own long-lasting party. Jefferson and Jackson may have had some greater sense of fairness in dealing with Indian tribes than some other American leaders. But their Indian policies were bad. Nuances are important. But the J-J team would be wildly out of place if they were somehow magically transported to the US of 2025.
This blog’s current Hegelian-tinged name fits fine with the messiness of actual history and current politics.
Wilentz’ lessons from the past
Wilentz has a good appreciation of how to look at the relevance of events in the Jacksonian days to current issues. In his 2021 article, he wrote:
The deadly mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — exhorted and then cheered on by President Donald J. Trump, with accountability later stonewalled by the Republican Party —was unprecedented in our history, but then again it wasn’t. It is true that never before had a losing presidential candidate, after pounding a Big Lie about a stolen election, helped to whip up a crowd into a murderous frenzy and directed it to prevent the official congressional certification of his defeat. The last time a losing candidate’s campaign tried to overturn the results, in the incomparably closer election of 1960, Richard Nixon’s supporters, having lost by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, tried to raise a stink about massive vote fraud in eleven states. But the Nixon forces gave way, after recounts, judicial decisions, and state board of elections findings — including those under Republican jurisdiction — went against them. Trump, the Roy Cohn protégé who has long regarded Nixon as insufficiently ruthless, pushed much further, to the point of sedition.Wilentz goes on to place Tricky Dick Nixon and the incoming Cheney-Bush team with their famous dispute over the Florida ballot count in 2000 in the dark tradition of John Calhoun.
In another vaguely analogous historical example, Andrew Jackson in 1825 charged that a corrupt bargain had denied him the presidency after the uncertain electoral results of a four-way race threw the decision into the House of Representatives. Yet Jackson undeniably won strong popular and electoral pluralities, as Trump did not, his charges of behind- the-scenes chicanery were plausible if unknowable; and he raised no mob nor did anything else to interrupt the normal transfer of power. (Jackson participated in the inauguration ceremonies for the incoming administration.) Trump and his supporters have for years tried to fool the public into viewing him as the reincarnation of Old Hickory; but once again Trump’s subversive words and actions only dramatized their differences. [my emphasis]
And in a prediction that has worn well since 2021, Wilentz wrote:
The Trump Republican sedition has far from ended, and the worst may be yet to come. By helping to convince one in four Americans and more than half of all Republicans that Trump and not Biden is the “true” President of the United States [after the 2020 election], Trump and the GOP have in fact attempted nothing less than a kind of virtual secession from the American political system. Instead of founding a new country, Trump’s secession aims to stoke his followers’ intense resentments, have them withdraw any remaining loyalties they might have to the existing system of government, and re-attach those loyalties to an imagined pro-Trump nation within the nation — projects already well advanced long before Election Day [2020].Notes:
(1) Professor Wilentz: We’re No Longer Living in a Truly Democratic Regime & the Rule of Law in the US. ECPS Brussels YouTube channel 10/30/2025. <https://youtu.be/JHeJRU4WcTI?si=5X16RBu_-c9iqsnk> (Accessed: 2025-02-11).
(2) Wilentz, Sean (2021): Liberties Journal 2:1 Autumn 2021. <https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-minority-from-calhoun-to-trump/> (Accessed: 2025-02-11). (This journal offers one free article per month for anyone who registers with their e-mail,)
(3) Peck, Renée (2018): Pirates, Nuns, And The Battle Of New Orleans. WWNO website 01/04/2018. <https://www.wwno.org/show/all-things-new-orleans/2018-01-04/pirates-nuns-and-the-battle-of-new-orleans> (Accessed: 2025-02-11).
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