Biden at Gettysburg, Biden and Trump on bipartisanship

Joe Biden gave a justifiably well-regarded speech at the Gettysburg Battleground this week (Biden delivers campaign speech in Gettysburg PBS Newshour 10/06/2020):

It's within the context of his main campaign framing of I'm Not Donald Trump rather than on building a mandate for Democratic positions. Thanks largely to the coronavirus and the economic depression it kicked off, that strategy is working well so far. Also, because of Trump's continuing personal disintegration.

Scott Destrow reports for NPR (In Election's Final Weeks, Biden Makes A Case For Unity Amid A Tumultuous Time 10/06/2020):

Speaking Tuesday afternoon overlooking the battlefield where Union soldiers tilted the tide of the Civil War in Gettysburg, Pa., the Democratic nominee tried to frame his call for unity within the arc of American history.

"Today, once again, we are a house divided," Biden said, echoing the words of President Abraham Lincoln. "But that, my friends, can no longer be."

The Gettsburg Address is not the House Divided speech. But let's not quibble. You know, Lincoln the Greatest President, honoring fallen soldiers, bringing the country together. For an establishment Democratic politician, it's a good use of historical symbolism. Of course, he was relying on the historical symbolism of a Republican politician, so I guess we can't have everything ...

I would love to see Status Quo Joe roll out this Lincoln quote from 1861:

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. ...

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ... A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.

He won't do it, of course. But it would be cool if he did.

Lincoln himself declared that his two main Presidential models were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the two major founders of the Democratic Party, both of whom today's Democratic politicians were prefer not to invoke theses days. Times change. Historical narratives evolve.

(I'll use this opportunity to make another plug for Heather Cox Richardson's lecture series on The American Paradox, which takes a sophisticated and sensibly nuanced to the development of democracy in the US. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a Hegelian in some way, but she does take the unfolding of contradictions in history seriously.)

I instantly broke out in hives when he said "bipartisan". But he did make a point of unequivocally condemning Trump's "very fine people" at the murderous neonazi marches in Charlottesville in 2017 and going after the Republican Party's current overt support for violent white supremacist goon squads. Even Joe can be "antifa" when he puts his mind to it.

Bipartisanship is only a good thing if it involves getting something constructive accomplished. If it means another Democratic Administration giving a free pass to people in government who broke the law in serious ways in the previous Republican administration, it's destructive. Trump is out there listing political opponents he wants arrested and prosecuted. We just can't afford to have a situation where Republicans are willing to pursue blatantly partisan prosecutions and the Democrats refuse to allow the Justice Department to impartially and independently enforce the law against crimes committed by Republicans. The Republicans will give their "bipartisan" endorsement to that arrangement. But it's not the rule of law.

Lindsey "we-got-thuh-votes-tuh-do-at-so-we-gone-do-at" Graham's position on the Barrett nomination is the Republicans' current position on bipartisanship. If the Democrats keep the House majority and win 50 Senate seats with VP Kamala Harris as the deciding vote - and given the current poll numbers that's a modest expectation - that means the Democrats have the votes to enact everything in their party program. Period. Joe Biden was in the Senate longer than Lyndon Johnson was before he became President. He knows how to twist arms to get key votes in line. If he wants to get a couple of Republican Senators to vote his way so a conservative clown like Joe Manchin can vote with the Republicans, well, in that case, hooray for bipartisanship!

I take it for granted that the Democrats will end the anti-democratic Senate filibuster rule. *Not* ending it would basically be a bipartisan surrender to the Republicans on issues across the board right out of the gate. I don't even want to think about what a disaster that would be.

Starting the night of Biden's Gettysburg speech, the Grand Wizard of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, had some partisan ideas (Kyle Cheney, ‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes Politico 10/07/2020):

Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

By early afternoon, Trump was letting loose his frustrations in an all-caps missive that seemed aimed at nobody in particular.

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.

Now, the FBI arrested several members of a far-right terrorist group for "a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer." And maybe murder her. The President responded by ... attacking Gov. Whitmer. Bunker Boy may be garbled in a lot of his statements. But his position on this is very clear. Here's a report from a Michigan FOX News station, President Trump tweets about Gov. Whitmer, Joe Biden responds with tweet Mid-Michigan NOW Newsroom 10/09/2020.

See also, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer slams Trump in response to kidnapping plot Guardian News 10/08/2020:

A leading Jackson historian on Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy

Daniel Feller is a historian who is the editor and director of the Andrew Jackson Papers at the University of Tennessee. In this 2018 videos, he looks at Andrew Jackson's Indian removal project.

He does a good job of defining what I've called the "Tragedy/Happy Ending problem" in looking at the history of European settler colonialism and its gruesome consequences for the native populations. Each country in North, South, and Central America has its own particular histories. But settler colonialism was the model that the colonial powers and their later successor states was how that entire area became what it is today.

Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears: Setting the Record Straight Readex 02/14/2018:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 10: John Calhoun and ... Gavin Newsom?

Bloomberg Opinion seems to be up to a bit of journalistic mischief in this piece by Francis Wilkinson, Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’ 04/09/2020.

My initial impression is that Wilkinson took what was probably a careless formulation by Newsom and treated it as the declaration of a new Confederacy.

But, no California hasn't adopted "Bonnie Blue Flag" as it's state song. This is another song from Elizabeth Knight and The Harvesters, this one being a popular Confederate song. From the liner notes to Songs of the Civil War (1960):

The two most important Rebel music-makers were an itinerant vaudevillian, Harry Macarthy, and a transplanted New Englander, John Hill Hewitt. Macarthy s best known work is "Bonnie Blue Flag" ...

This "parade of secession" song was the Confederacy's second most popular air, following close on the heels of "Dixie" in Southern affections. Macarthy was an English-born vaudevillian who is supposed to have written this stirring lyric early in 1861 while attending the Mississippi State Secession Convention.

The Bonnie Blue flag was an informal but popular banner celebrating secession, the Confederacy, and treason against the United States.

Getting back to Newsom's comment, California's Jerry Brown was the most militant of the governors in confronting Trump during the Orange Clown's first two years in office, and he was open about using California's full legitimate federalist power to resist bad and abusive Trump policies.

But Newsom is more of a showboat than Brown. No one can detract from his bold move on same-sex marriage as San Francisco mayor in 2004. And he has done a genuinely good job on the COVID-19 crisis.

Jerry, despite his occasional techie-utopian talk, was grounded in the old pro-labor, social-democratic (although the Dems didn't call it that) New Deal tradition, and in leftie-Jesuit liberation theology. He was consistently a defenders of immigrant rights and very prominently supported the farmworkers union, for instance. Yes, his fracking policy, wasn't ideal. But he was grounded.

Newsom isn't. At least not to the degree Jerry Brown is.

When Newsom became Lieutenant Governor, Jerry appointed him to head a state economic development commission. When Newsom announced that he wanted to look to Texas (!?!) as a model for state economic development, Jerry took him off the commission. And, so far as I saw, kept Newsom at a distance politically. And although in this universe, spouses differ on some political issues, when Newsom was SF mayor and doing the same-sex marriages, he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who went on after their divorce to become a FOX News propagandist and, now, of course, Don Trump, Jr.'s., girlfriend. I’m just sayin’.

The Bloomberg Opinion piece obviously makes a big deal about Newsom’s "nation-state" comment and at the end even invokes John Calhoun, the patron saint of everything vile and evil in American politics since 1832, to make it sound like Newsom is going full neo-Confederate. I'm inclined to think that the "nation-state" comment was a careless formulation, one that Jerry Brown would not have made.

But Gavin Newsom as John Calhoun and Donald Trump as his arch-enemy Andrew Jackson? No, that's insane. For all his faults, on his deathbed Jackson said that his one regret in life was that he hadn't hanged Calhoun as a traitor over his secessionist stand in the Nullification Controversy.

Andrew Jackson, ein Indianer-Krieg, ein adoptiertes Kriegswaisenkind, und wie seltsam die Kombination von Geschichte und politischer Symbolik sein kann

Dies ist ein weiterer in meinen gelegentlichen Beiträgen über meine Vorbehalte zu dem, was ich als dogmatische und fehlgeleitete Behandlungen der frühen amerikanischen und antebellum Geschichte halte. (Eine englische Version dieses Beitrags findet man hier.)

Dies geschieht sowohl in der populären als auch in der akademischen Geschichtsschreibung. Aber die bizarr wirksame Kooptierung des Bildes von Andrew Jackson durch Donald Trump und seinen populären Anhängerhaufen hat einen düsteren Effekt auf dem Image des siebten Präsidenten und seiner Ära gehabt. Da Jacksons Bewegung und der größere Kontext der sogenannten Jacksonschen Demokratie eine Ausweitung der demokratischen Rechte beinhalteten und den Einfluss des organisierten Geldes und die Konzentration von Reichtum und Macht in Frage stellten, ist es wirklich eine traurige (und bittere) historische Ironie, dass sich der krasseste oligarchische Präsident der Geschichte erfolgreich mit Jacksonschen Imagen identifiziert hat.

Ein unter sehr vielen Beispielen des aktuellen Zustands der oligarchischen Herrschaft in den USA findet man hier: Graham Rapier, Ivanka Trump made nearly $4 million from the President's DC hotel last year Business Insider 06/15/2019. Selbst wenn man Andrew Jackson für einen Comic-Buch-Bösewicht hält, ist Trumpismus ungefähr so un-Jacksonian, wie es sein kann. (Und wenn man denkt, dass Jackson ein größerer Bösewicht als sein Erzfeind John Calhoun ist, tut es mir leid, Sie sind schon jenseits der Grenze.)

Ein Autor der Washington Post, Michael Rosenwald, spricht über Jackson in Andrew Jackson slaughtered Indians. Then he adopted a baby boy he’d orphaned. ("Andrew Jackson, der Indianer geschlachtet hat. Dann adoptierte er einen kleinen Jungen, den er verwaist hatte.") 06/16/2019.

(Alle Übertragungen aus dem Englischen in diesem Beitrag sind meine.)

Nicht zuletzt, weil die Demokratische Partei keine Anstrengungen unternimmt, um ihre eigene historische Parteisymbolik zu verteidigen - Jackson ist einer der Gründer der Partei - verurteilen zentristische und linke Kommentatoren ihn schnell als Täter des Völkermords an den Indianern. Dies ist eine relativ junge Entwicklung. "Jefferson-Jackson Dinners" waren traditionelle Fundraising-Veranstaltungen für die Demokratische Partei. Jarrett Stepman nutzte die Gelegenheit, dass die Demokraten in Louisiana 2017 den Namen dieser Ereignisse änderten, um über Jackson und Jefferson als Parteigründer zu sprechen. (Why Are Democrats Purging the Memory of Jefferson and Jackson? Newsweek 07/20/2017)

Der Sinn von Rosenwalds Artikel ist es, die Vorstellung zu entlarven, dass es irgendetwas konstruktives oder anständiges oder sogar mehrdeutiges in Jackson, das ein indianisches Waisenkind adoptiert, geben könnte:

Während des Britisch-Amerikanischen Krieges von 1812, etwa zwei Jahrzehnte bevor er Präsident wurde, schrieb General Andrew Jackson seine Frau Rachel vom Schlachtfeld nach Hause.

Obwohl er müde und eingebuchtet war, fühlte sich Jackson auch stolz. Er hatte gerade eine weitere erfolgreiche Schlachtung von Indianern geleitet.

Obwohl er müde und eingebuchtet war, fühlte sich Jackson auch stolz. Er hatte gerade eine weitere erfolgreiche Schlachtung von Indianern geleitet.

"Ich habe General John Coffee mit einem Teil seiner Kavallerie- Brigade und berittener Männer getrennt, um Creek Town zu zerstören", schrieb er und bezog sich auf ein Gebiet im heutigen Alabama.

Der General, schrieb Jackson, habe dieses Gemetzel im "eleganten" Stil durchgeführt. Mehr als 170 Indianer wurden getötet. Dennoch gab es noch mehr zu töten. Er war entschlossen, weiter zu marschieren, schrieb er, "das Herz der Creek Nation". ...

"Ich schicke einen kleinen indianischen Jungen", schrieb er.

Die Familie des kleinen Jungen war ausgelöscht worden. Jackson ließ ihn auf seine Plantage, die Eremitage, transportieren, wo er als Rachel und das Adoptivkind des künftigen Präsidenten aufwuchs.

Ich würde nicht unbedingt Rosenwalds Kritik von sentimentale Drehungen der Geschichte, in Frage stellen. Aber seine historische Umrahmung lässt einige wichtige Merkmale aus.

Ich gehe nicht davon aus, dass die Autoren von WaPo ihre Eigenen machen. Aber ich bezweifle, dass die meisten Leser einen Unterschied zwischen dem Titel und dem Text bemerken würden. Er stellt fest, dass Jackson "von einigen Kritikern als Völkermord bezeichnet wird", und schreibt: "Jetzt nahm Jackson dieses Baby auf, dessen Eltern auf seine eigene Befehle getötet worden waren."

Jackson-Biograf Robert Remini beschreibt dieses Ereignis in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). Es war eine Episode im Creek-Krieg von 1813-1814. Dies war ein Moment in einem jahrhundertelangen Prozess der europäischen Mächte und der Vereinigten Staaten, die Kontrolle über den nordamerikanischen Kontinent zu übernehmen. Aber in dem Moment, als es passierte, war die James Madison Administration an der Macht, die USA hatten den Louisiana Purchase erworben und hatten so Territorium, das sich bis zum Mississippi River erstreckte, und befand sich mitten in einem Krieg gegen ein einmarschierendes Großbritannien. Florida war noch spanisches Territorium und Großbritannien betrieb einen Marinestützpunkt in Pensacola. Es gab verschiedene Indianerstämme und Clans und Gruppierungen im südöstlichen Teil des Kontinents. Ihre Bündnisse und Rivalitäten untereinander und mit der US-Regierung und verschiedenen amerikanischen Siedlungen veränderten sich ständig.

Aus Sicht der amerikanischen Madison Administration kam das initiierende Ereignis im Creek-Krieg 1812:

... Little Warrior, der eine Gruppe von Creeks anführte, die von einem Besuch der Shawnees an den nördlichen Seen zurückkehrten, "massakrierte" am 12. Mai 1812 mehrere Familien, die in der Nähe des Duck River lebten. Sie nahmen Martha Crawley gefangen und "ermordeten" zwei ihrer Kinder, die auf dem Hof spielten. Marthas Mann war zu dieser Zeit weg, und sie schaffte es, ihre beiden jüngsten Kinder in einem Kartoffelkeller unter dem Boden ihres Hauses zu verstecken. Die Indianer brachen die Tür auf und zerrten Martha mit der Absicht, sie zu töten, aber beschlossen stattdessen, sie gefangen zu halten. Sie zwangen sie, für sie zu kochen, als sie nach Tuckabatchee aufbrachen, aber sie begingen "keine andere Gewalt" gegen sie.

Remini zeichnet kein schönes Bild von der militärischen Zusammenstoß, an der das Baby verwaist war und an der der legendäre David Crockett teilnahm:

[Jackson] und seine Armee lagen nun etwa dreizehn Meilen östlich des feindlichen [Creek] Dorfes Tallushatchee. November 1813 umzingelte die Brigade von General Coffee Tallushatchee und schlachtete systematisch die meisten Krieger. Es war eine schnelle und blutige Operation. "Wir haben sie wie Hunde erschossen", prahlte Davy Crockett. Die Tötung war so grausam, dass Leutnant Richard Keith Call übel wurde. "Wir fanden bis zu acht oder zehn Leichen in einer einzigen Kabine", erklärte er. "Einige der Hütten hatten Feuer gelegt, und die Hälfte der menschlichen Körper wurde inmitten der rauchenden Ruinen gesehen. In anderen Fällen hatten Hunde die verunzierten Körper ihrer Herrchen zerrissen und gefressen. Herzkrank wandte ich mich von der abscheulichen Szene." Die Stadt brannte daraufhin nieder.

Die Amerikaner verloren fünf Männer und 41 Verletzte bei dem Angriff; etwa 186 [Creek] Red Sticks wurden tot aufgefunden. In diesem Krieg der unsäglichen Barbarei blieb nur das Leben von Frauen und Kindern verschont, aber 84 Frauen und Kinder wurden in dieser Begegnung als Gefangene gefangen genommen. "Wir haben Vergeltungsmaßnahmen für die Zerstörung von Fort Mims ergriffen", berichtete der jubelnde General Jackson dem Gouverneur Blount.

Bei der Inspektion des blutigen Schlachtfeldes stießen Soldaten auf eine tote Indianerin, die noch immer ihr lebendes zehn Monate altes männliches Kleinkind umklammerte. Das Kind war der einzige Überlebende seiner Familie. Einige Indianerinnen "wollten ihn [toten], weil die ganze Rasse & Familie seines [Blutes] wurde zerstört", berichtete Jackson. Doch in einem beispiellosen Akt der Barmherzigkeit, den nicht alle Milizionäre billigten, griff einer der Dolmetscher, möglicherweise James Quarles, ein und hob das Kind aus den Händen seiner toten Mutter. Er trug das Kind zum kommandierenden General. Als Jackson erfuhr, dass die anderen Indianerinnen das Kind töten wollten, überstimmte er sie sofort. Plötzlich, sagte er, habe er ein tiefes Gefühl für den Jungen erfahren. "Wenn ich bedenke, dass er in Bezug auf seine Beziehungen so ähnlich ist wie ich, spüre ich eine ungewöhnliche Sympathie für ihn." [meine Hervorhebung]

Dieser Version bietet ein anderes Bild als das WaPo. Konkret, nach Remini:

• Die amerikanischen Soldaten unter Jacksons Kommando töteten alle erwachsenen Männer im Dorf.
• Die Frauen und Kinder wurden nicht gezielt getötet.
• Es gibt keinen Hinweis darauf, dass die beiden "Eltern [des Babys] durch seine eigenen Befehle getötet wurden", wie Rosenwald behauptet, obwohl der Vater des Babys vermutlich unter den Toten war.
• Einer der Dolmetscher in Jacksons Befehl rettete das Baby vor dem Tod durch Indianerinnen, die den Angriff überlebt hatten.
• Jackson traf eine konkrete Entscheidung, das Baby zu verschonen, von dem er guten Grund zu glauben hatte, dass es von den überlebenden Mitgliedern der indischen Gruppe getötet werden würde.

Deshalb benutze ich den Namen "Contradicciones" für diesen Blog. Die Geschichte ist kompliziert und die "Lektionen der Geschichte" passen nicht sehr gut auf einen Stoßstangenaufkleber. Und historische Analysen von momentanen und oberflächlichen politischen Marketing-Modeerscheinungen angetrieben zu lassen, kann ich nicht empfehlen.

Was ist der Unterschied zwischen diesen Erzählungen?

Ein sehr offensichtlicher Unterschied zwischen diesen beiden Berichten, die sich mit dem gleichen Ereignis befassen, ist, dass die eine Zeitungskolumne, die andere eine akademische Geschichte ist. Verschiedene Methoden, verschiedene Arten von Geschichtenerzählen, unterschiedliche Zielgruppen.

Die beiden Berichte konzentrieren sich auch auf verschiedene Narrativen rund um das gleiche historische Ereignis. Rosenwalds Kolumne scheint sich auf eine Metanarrative zu verlassen, dass die Vertreibung der einheimischen Bevölkerung ein schrecklicher, destruktiver, moralisch verwerflicher Prozess war. Das ist eine "fundamentale" Kritik, die auf einen grundlegenden gesellschaftlichen, ja zivilisatorischen Fehler hinweist. Und es gibt eine breite Übereinstimmung über diese Metanarrative, obwohl man die Trumpisten nicht sehr hart drängen muss, um zu der Annahme zu gelangen, dass die europäische Expansion in Amerika ein grundsätzlich wohlwollender, zivilisierender historischer Segen war. Aber eine Position der "fundamentalen" Kritik ist kein Produkt der letzten Jahrzehnte. Der dominikanische Missionar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) wandte sich gegen die spanische Politik in Amerika und veröffentlichte Kritik an der Politik, die darauf abzielte, "die 'Sünde' der Herrschaft, Unterdrückung und Ungerechtigkeit, die der Europäer anrichtete, zu begehen. auf die neu entdeckten Völker. Es war Las Casas' Absicht, Spanien den Grund für das Unglück zu offenbaren, das es unweigerlich erliegen würde, als es zum Gegenstand der Strafe Gottes wurde..." (Enrique Dussel, Las Casas, Bartolomé de Britannica Online; abgerufen am 18.06.2019)

Remini hingegen liefert eine akademische, empirische Darstellung eines bestimmten Moments an einem bestimmten Ort während des jahrhundertelangen Eroberungsprozesses, den De Las Casas (verstehungsweise) aus christlich-religiöser Sicht als "Sünde" beschreibt. Und wie so oft in solchen empirischen Berichten enthält sie viele Merkmale, die in dem Sinne chaotisch sind, dass sie nicht bequem in eine breitere, umfassende, fundamentale kritische Perspektive passen. Mit anderen Worten, "es ist Sünde und ich bin dagegen" kann eine gültige und nützliche Perspektive sein. Aber die von Remini beschriebene tatsächliche Situation bringt konkretere Entscheidungen und konkretere Fragen mit sich. Haben die Amerikaner gegen geltendes Recht verstoßen, indem sie alle erwachsenen Männer im Dorf hingerichtet haben? Wie war das im Vergleich zu zeitgenössischen Praktiken, einschließlich indianischer Militärpraktiken? Gab es praktische Alternativen zum Mord an den Crawley-Kindern und zur Gefangennahme der Mutter? War es akzeptiert unter den Creek-Indianern, ganze Familien einschließlich Kinder in dieser Situation zu ermorden? War es eine übliche und ausgenommene Praxis unter den Creeks, kleine Babys, die unter solchen Umständen verwaist waren, zu töten? Gab es Gesetze, die Anleitungen darüber geben, wie US-Soldaten in dieser Situation reagieren sollten? War der Dolmetscher gut oder schlecht, das Baby zu retten? Hat Jackson nach den Gesetzen und moralischen Standards jener Zeit und seines Ortes korrekt und legal gehandelt, als er das Baby adoptierte?

Eine dritte Möglichkeit, den Unterschied zwischen den beiden Erzählungen zu betrachten, ist, dass Rosenwald aktuelle politische Symbolik verwendet, in der Jackson (sei es so seltsam!) weithin als Maskottchen für Trumpismus angesehen wird. Und er nutzt diese Symbolik, um eine symbolische, polemische, zeitgenössische Kritik an den rassischen blinden Flecken der Trump-Basis zu machen. Obwohl Remini vermutlich den Kontext der historiographischen Arbeit zu der Zeit berücksichtigte, als er schrieb, konzentriert sich sein Bericht nicht darauf, einen unmittelbaren politischen Punkt zu machen. Und offensichtlich ging er in einem Werk aus dem Jahr 2001 nicht auf die momentanen politischen Bilder des Jahres 2019 ein. Vor 18 Jahren gab es keine allgemeine Identifizierung von Andrew-Jackson-Symbolik und republikanischer Rassenpolitik. Obwohl der konservative Gelehrte Walter Russell Mead bereits die Idee der "Jacksonschen" Politik als militanten Militarismus förderte. (Z.B., The Jacksonian Tradition And American Foreign Policy The National Interest Winter 1999/2000) Das war immer noch eine seltsame Vorstellung. Aber ich nehme an, dass dies Teil jeder Mischung aus Propaganda und schlechter Geschichte war, die uns an den Punkt gebracht hat, an dem Jackson zu einem Symbol für Donald Trump geworden ist.

Andrew Jackson, an Indian war, an adopted war orphan, and how strange the combination of history and political symbolism can be

This is another in my occasional posts about my reservations on what I see as dogmatic and misguided treatments of early American and antebellum history.
(A German version of this post is here.)

This occurs in both popular and academic history. But the bizarrely effective cooptation of the image of Andrew Jackson by Donald Trump and his popular mob of followers has had a grim effect on portraits of the seventh President and his era. Since Jackson's movement and the larger context of what came to be known as Jacksonian democracy involved an expansion of democratic rights and challenged the influence of organized money and the concentration of wealth and power, it really is a sad (and bitter) historical irony that the most crassly oligarchic President in history has successfully identified himself with Jacksonian imagery.

For a recent example among very many illustrations of the current state of oligarchical rule in the US, see: Graham Rapier, Ivanka Trump made nearly $4 million from the President's DC hotel last year Business Insider 06/15/2019. Even if you think of Andrew Jackson as a comic-book villain, Trumpism is about as un-Jacksonian as it gets. (And if you think Jackson is a bigger villain than his arch-enemy John Calhoun, I'm sorry, you're just beyond the pale.)

Washington Post writer Michael Rosenwald discusses Jackson in Andrew Jackson slaughtered Indians. Then he adopted a baby boy he’d orphaned. 06/16/2019.

Not least because the Democratic Party makes no effort to defend its own historical party symbolism - Jackson is one of the founders of the party - centrist and left commentators are quick to condemn him as a perpetrator of genocide against Indians. This is a relatively recent development. "Jefferson-Jackson Dinners" were traditional fundraising events for the Democratic Party. Jarrett Stepman used the occasion of Louisiana Democrats changing the name of those events - in 2017 - to talk about both Jackson and Jefferson as party founders. (Why Are Democrats Purging the Memory of Jefferson and Jackson? Newsweek 07/20/2017)

The point of Rosenwald's article is to debunk the notion that there might be anything constructive or decent or even ambiguous in Jackson adopting an Indian orphan child:

During the War of 1812, roughly two decades before he became president, Gen. Andrew Jackson wrote home to his wife, Rachel, from the battlefield.

Though he was tired and banged up, Jackson was also proud. He had just presided over another successful slaughter of Native Americans.

“I detached Genl John Coffee with part of his Brigade of Cavalry and mounted men to destroy Creek Town,” he wrote, referring to an area in what is now Alabama.

The general, Jackson wrote, had performed this slaughter in “elegant” style. More than 170 Native Americans were killed. Still, there was more killing to do. He was determined to march on, he wrote, to “the heart of the creek nation.” ...

“I send on a little Indian boy,” he wrote.

The baby boy’s family had been wiped out. Jackson arranged for him to be transported to his plantation, the Hermitage, where he would grow up as Rachel and the future president’s adopted child.

I wouldn't necessarily take issue with Rosenwald's criticisms of how the story has been given a sentimental spin. But his historical framing leaves out some important features.

I don't assume the writers at WaPo compose own their headlines. But I doubt most readers would notice any difference between the title and the text. Noting that Jackson is "called genocidal by some critics," he writes, "Now Jackson was taking in this baby whose parents had been killed by his own orders."

Jackson biographer Robert Remini describes this event in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). It was an episode in the Creek War of 1813-1814. This was one moment in a centuries-long process of European powers and the United States of taking control of the North American continent. But in the moment it occurred, the James Madison Administration was in power, the US had acquired the Louisiana Purchase and so had territory extending to the Mississippi River, and was in the middle of a war against an invading Britain. Florida was still Spanish territory and Britain was operating a naval base in Pensacola. There were various Indian tribes and clans and factions in the southeastern part of the continent. Their alliances and rivalries with each other and with the US government and various American settlements were constantly shifting.

From the American/Madison Administration point of view, the initiating event in the Creek War came in 1812:

... Little Warrior, leading a party of Creeks who were returning from a visit to the Shawnees on the northern lakes, "massacred" several families living near Duck River on May 12, 1812. They took Martha Crawley captive and "murdered" two of her children, who were playing in the yard. Martha's husband was away at the time, and she managed to hide her two youngest children in a potato cellar under the floor of her home. The Indians broke open the door and dragged Martha outside with the intention of killing her but decided instead to hold her captive. They forced her to cook for them as they headed for Tuckabatchee but committed "no other violence" on her.

Remini does not paint a pretty picture of the military encounter in which the baby was orphaned and in which the legendary David Crockett participated:

[Jackson] and his army were now about thirteen miles to the east of the hostile [Creek] village of Tallushatchee. On November 3, 1813, General Coffee's brigade surrounded Tallushatchee and systematically slaughtered most of the warriors. It was a quick and bloody operation. "We shot them like dogs," boasted Davy Crockett. The killing was so gruesome that Lieutenant Richard Keith Call became nauseated. "We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin," he declared. "Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters. Heart sick I turned from the revolting scene." The town was then burned to the ground.

The Americans lost five men and forty-one wounded in the attack; some 186 [Creek] Red Sticks were found dead. In this war of unspeakable barbarity only the lives of women and children were spared, but eighty-four women and children were taken as captives in this encounter. "We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims," reported the jubilant General Jackson to Governor Blount.

While inspecting the bloody battleground, soldiers came upon a dead Indian woman still clutching her living ten-month-old male infant. The child was the sole survivor of his family. Some Indian women "wanted to k[ill him] because the whole race & family of his [blood] was destroyed," reported Jackson. But, in an unprecedented act of mercy that not all militiamen approved, one of the interpreters, possibly James Quarles, intervened and lifted the child from the hands of his dead mother. He carried the infant to the commanding general. When Jackson was told that the other Indians wished to kill the infant, he immediately overruled them. Suddenly, he said, he experienced a deep feeling for the boy. "In fact when I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him." [my emphasis]

This account presents a different picture than the WaPo's. Specifically, according to Remini:

• The American soldiers under Jackson's command killed all the adult males in the village.
• The women and children were specifically not targeted for killing.
• There is no indication that both the baby's "parents had been killed by his [Jackson's] own orders", as Rosenwald claims, although the baby's father was presumably among the dead.
• One of the interpreters in Jackson's command rescued the baby from being killed by female Indian survivors of the attack.
• Jackson made a specific decision to spare the baby, who he had good reason to believe would be put to death by the surviving members of the Indian group.

This is why I use the name "Contradicciones" for this blog. History is complicated and the "lessons of history" don't fit very well onto a bumper sticker. And letting historical analysis be driven by momentary and superficial political marketing fads isn't something I can recommend.

What is the difference between these accounts?

One very obvious difference between those two accounts dealing with the same event is that one is a newspaper column, the other an academic history. Different methods, different types of story-telling, different audiences.

The two accounts also focus on different narratives around the same historical event. Rosenwald's column appears to rely on a metanarrative that the displacement of the native population was a horrible, destructive, morally reprehensible process. That's a "fundamental" criticism pointing to a basic societal, even civilizational fault. And there is wide agreement on that metanarrative, although you don't have to push Trumpists very hard to get to an assumption that European expansion in the Americas was a basically benevolent, civilizing historical blessing. But a position of "fundamental" criticism is not a product of recent decades. The Dominican missionary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) turned against Spanish policy in the Americas and published criticisms of the policy aiming at "the exposure of the 'sin' of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment..." (Enrique Dussel, Las Casas, Bartolomé de Britannica Online; accessed 06/18/2019)

Remini, on the other hand, is providing an academic, empirical account of a particular moment in a particular place during the centuries-long process of conquest that De Las Casas (sensibly) describes as a "sin" from a Christian religious perspective. And, as is often the case in such empirical accounts, it includes a lot of features that are messy in the sense that they do not fit comfortably into a broader, sweeping, fundamental critical perspective. In other words, "it's sin and I'm agin' it" can be a valid and useful perspective. But the actual situation described by Remini presents more concrete decisions and more specific questions. Were the Americans violating existing law by executing all the adult males in the village? How did that compare to contemporary practices including Indian military practices? Were there practical alternatives to the murder of the Crawley children and taking the mother prisoner? War es akzeptiert under den Creek-Indianern, ganze Familien einschließlich Kinder in dieser Situation zu ermorden?Was it a common and excepted practice among the Creeks to put to death small babies who were orphaned in such circumstances? Were there laws providing guidance on how US soldiers should respond in that situation? Was the interpreter right or wrong to save the baby? Was Jackson acting rightly and legally in adopting the baby by the laws and moral standards of that time and place?

A third way to look at the difference between the two accounts is that Rosenwald is using current political symbolism in which Jackson is (however weirdly!) widely seen as a mascot for Trumpism. And he uses that symbolism to make a symbolic, polemical, contemporary criticism of the racial blind spots of the Trump base. Although Remini presumably was taking account of the context of the historiographic work at the time he was writing, his account is not focused on making an immediate political point. And obviously in a 2001 work, he wasn't addressing the momentary political imagery of 2019. Eighteen years ago, there was no general identification of Andrew Jackson symbolism and Republican racial politics. Although the conservative scholar Walter Russell Mead was already promoting the idea of "Jacksonian" politics as militant militarism. (E.g., The Jacksonian Tradition And American Foreign Policy The National Interest Winter 1999/2000) That was an is still a weird notion. But I assume that was part of whatever mix of propaganda and bad history got us to the point where Jackson has become a symbol for Donald Trump.

Confederate Heritage Month 2019, April 26: That whole "states rights" thing in neo-Confederacy

The Kansas City Star brings us another story about a leading politician and neo-Confederate pseudohistory (Lindsay Wise, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt signed 1990 letter about how ‘states rights’ led to Civil War 04/25/2019).

The particular news here is probably a minor data point in Missouri politics. Blunt signed "a 1990 letter that discusses 'states’ rights' as a cause of the Civil War, but makes no mention of slavery." He was Missouri's Secretary of State at the time. In response to the Star's questions, Blunt admitted he signed it but claimed he didn't read it and that "it’s always been clear to him that slavery was the 'original sin' of the Constitution."

Several paragraphs into the article, Wise gives us more details on the letter which was in response to a student's letter. And it provides a good example of how Lost Cause pseudohistory about the Civil War is part of a larger narrative, based on white supremacist assumptions:

“Why did the States feel that their rights caused them to separate from the U.S.?” the student asked Blunt. “What does the Constitution say about states rights? How have states’ rights changed since the Civil War?”

The typewritten response was signed by Blunt and printed under Missouri Secretary of State letterhead. It says the debate over states rights was at the heart of the Civil War. ...

His response to the student, which runs slightly over one page, single-spaced, does not mention slavery.

It suggests the student read the writings of former Vice President and U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, “one of the most articulate and ardent supporters of the states’ rights position” and suggests studying the lives of Edmund Ruffin and Jefferson Davis “on the states’ rights side” and Republican President Abraham Lincoln, his Democratic rival Stephen Douglas and Nathaniel Lyon, a Union general, on the “national rights side.”

Calhoun called slavery a positive good. Davis, also a defender of slavery, was the president of the Confederacy. Ruffin was a Virginia slaveholder who claimed credit for firing one of the first shots of the war. He ended up killing himself, wrapped in the Confederate flag.

The letter signed by Blunt concludes with the observation that the states’ rights debate “continues to be waged in our own lifetimes.” It cites, as an example, the “debate whether or not the federal government has the right to require the state of Missouri to pay the costs of racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools.” [my emphasis]

In this example as presented by the Kansas City Star, we see the emphasis on "state rights" as the central cause of the Civil War without mentioning slavery, which is a key argument of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative. And we see how the letter connects that narrative to Republicans' opposition to "racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools" at the time.

I've done several posts this year about John Calhoun, the guiding spirit of today's American white nationalists. As he was for the secessionists of 1861.

The Nullification Crisis of 1831-2 was a conflict that was explicitly though not overtly about slavery. In this case, Calhoun defended a "states rights" position and President Andrew Jackson's position asserting federal authority won out. The Congressional lineup around that issue was broadly sectionally divided, with slave states tending to support the states-rights stance and the free states supported the national position.

The notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830 also lined up sectionally, even more clearly than on the Nullification Crisis. The Southerners favored the Act, which extended federal power in controlling territories in the area in question. The Northern opponents used the states-rights argument to oppose the Act. So even then, Southern support for "states' rights" was based on the issue immediately at stake, not on some abstract, legalistic commitment to states' rights as a basic Constitutional principle.

Between the Nullification Crisis and Lincoln's election in 1860, the controversies over slavery had the Southern slaveowners backing the use of national power in favor of slavery and against states' rights. After 1840, the Presidents were increasingly favorable to the slave states. The Fugitive Slave laws were a big point of contention during that whole period; Southern representatives demanded more use of federal power to force free states to return escaped slaves.

After the 1860 Presidential election, slave states did begin to invoke states' rights again. But as their secession ordinances and speeches of secession leaders made very clear, the purpose their secession and treason was defending slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 23: Again on the Nulification Crisis

Manisha Sinha, the historian I quoted a few days ago, also recently did a summary article, The History and Legacy of Jacksonia Democracy Journal of the Early Republic 39:1 (Spring 2019), for an issue of that journal with several article devoted to Andrew Jackson and the broad democratic movement that became identified with his name.

As she observes, "the history and legacy of Jacksonian Democracy are far more contradictory than recent populist invocations of him would have us believe." As an example of the latter, she cites a book by Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson (2018) published by the rightwing publishing House Regnery. Regnery is known for publishing hackwork. I read part of a favorable review of this book on a John Birch Society website. So I'm not linking any of this stuff because, ick!

Sinha makes the following observations about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 that are critical to the politics of slavery and secession that led to the Civil War:

Jackson’s staunch nationalism at times trumped his provincial identity as a southern slaveholder. He is a crucial figure in the development of the antebellum American state, a government of courts and parties as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called it in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). His persona and policies defined the antebellum party system. One can also trace the origins of the imperial presidency to Jackson, much earlier than the twentieth century as most historians have argued. His Whig critics called him King Andrew, and J. M. Opal in Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation (2017) draws attention to his vengeful personality against perceived enemies of the nation–state. As president, Jackson had no use for abolitionists, approving of the exclusion of their literature from the mails. But Jacksonian Democracy also included labor abolitionists like William Leggett and antislavery free-labor advocates such as William Cullen Bryant. Jackson also famously held no truck with South Carolinian nullifiers and the extreme states’-rights constitutional views of their avatar, John C. Calhoun. Jackson’s forceful proclamation repudiating nullification or the alleged right of a state to nullify a federal law and secede from the Union, which he linked to disunion and the tyranny of minority rule, laid down a precedent for Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War. [my emphasis]

This is not only a key element in the development and defense of democracy and the development of the American nation. It's also one of the key things that make Jackson himself interesting as a biographical figure. His personal outlook and his own immediate class and financial interest as a slaveowner put him on the side of slavery. But when forced to choose between the American nation and democracy, on the one hand, and the defense of slavery in the manner of John Calhoun and the later Confede4rates, he came down solidly on the side of the Constitution, democracy, and the Union.

As Sinha argues, the US at that time was a "white man’s democracy," and the Jacksonian movement pushed to expand white male suffrage, which was still significantly restricted by property requirements. By 2019 standards, it wouldn't even qualify as a democracy. Today's EU entrance requirements included universal suffrage (for citizens), including all races and women, too. The United States was very far from that in 1928, the year Jackson was first elected President. But as she states:

Careful historians of the age of Jackson have shown that the institution of white manhood suffrage preceded the election of Andrew Jackson, even though the process continued to unfold during his presidency, and that white man’s democracy in the United States was accompanied by the disfranchisement and severe curtailing of black men’s suffrage in many northern states. Jackson represented the rise to prominence of the “common man” or what I would call the common white man.

But it is also the case that in 1928, the US was a radical democracy by world standards of that time. And it was recognized as such as a model to be emulated or a menace to be avoided in Europe and Latin America.

What the Nuliification Crisis brought to public attention like nothing before was that there was a severe contradiction in American democracy between the slave system and democracy, or white men's democracy which in America then was the same thing. And this wasn't an abstraction, or merely hypocrisy in principle. (Though it certainly was the latter!) As time went on, it became more and more concrete that maintaining the slave system meant a continual restriction and retrogression of democracy for white men, North and South.

This is central to understanding the historical process by which slavery produced secession and civil war in America.

One of Abraham Lincoln's best-known quotes is from a 1955 letter to Joshua Speed, referring to the program of the xenophobic, Protestant extremist American Party, which has gone down in history by the name Lincoln and others applied to it at the time, the Know-Nothings, i.e., the Bannonites of the 1850s. And it addresses this very issue of how slavery and the Slave Power (large slaveowners) threatened democracy for everyone else:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 7: Anti-democracy reaction around the Nullification Crisis and the democratic tradition opposing it

Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle's "The Backwoods Progression," his history of the development of rural life in American history, appeared in the 1:4 (1933) number of The American Review. It sheds some light on the historical role an images of the two leading founders of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Yes, both of them were slaveowners and American reactionaries have long found good reason to hate them.

(This is a partially revised version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month's posts.

Robert Barnwell Rhett

As history, Lytle's piece is not very impressive. But it does illustrate something about Lytle's version of the Southern Agrarian ideology. His criticism of Thomas Jefferson illustrates how much Lytle's thinking falls within the tradition of late 18th century, anti-democracy thought:

The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.

The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.

I am impressed with Lytle's comments on the historical significance of Andrew Jackson. Although I approve what he finds reprehesible. Speaking of the Nullification Crisis with South Carolina, Lytle writes:

South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as [Robert Barnwell] Rhett and [James Henry] Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.

Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. (More specifically at the time, democracy for an expanding number of white men.) He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.

As Lytle says, Jackson backed "the enemy". Or rather what was considered "the enemy" in the eyes of the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of the Constitution. This is what makes the image of Andrew Jackson, despite his very real faults, especially on slavery and Indian relocation, such an important symbol of American democracy. A wealthy man, he sided with the small farmers and the urban workers against the concentrated economic power facilitated by the Bank of the United States. A slaveowner and a supporter of slavery, when forced to choose between Calhoun's anti-patriotic defense of slavery in the Nullification Crisis, on the one hand, and democracy and American patriotism on the other, Jackson made the right choice. In an important sense, Lytle is right in saying that the slave South "doomed itself to ruin" in the Nullification Crisis. And to the extent that is true, to that same extent Andrew Jackson was the executioner.

Lytle, of course, sides with Calhoun. His shares the anti-democratic tradition of Calhounian thought his fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley expressed in the previous issue of The Southern Review.

Lytle explains who the Confederates were supposedly forced into their treason and their war to destroy the American government by those evil Yankees and especially by that Southerner Old Hickory:

There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Crisis] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.

At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!

When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.

And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."

John Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fighters for the workers' revolution! This is the kind of idiocy to which the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause line of thinking inevitably leads.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 3: Calhoun, Crittendon, and secession

The liberal historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the odious John Calhoun (1782-1850) in From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats Social Research 16:2 (June 1949). The Dixiecrats were the pro-segregation, anti-black "States Rights Democratic Party" split-off from the Democratic Party in 1948 that ran Strom Thurmond for President that year. Fifty-four years later, as things sometimes happen, Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy came back to haunt then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, when he gushed at Thurmond's 100th birthday party, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." (Sheryl Gay Stober, Under Fire, Lott Apologizes for His Comments at Thurmond's Party New York Times 12/10/2002)

Steve Bannon didn't exactly create white nationalism.

John Calhoun, on the other hand, would have a better claim to the title. Hofstadter's Calhoun/Dixiecrat analogy is this:

In the 1830's a cleavage between North and South became acute during a time of general social ferment in the North, and also of widespread criticism of the slave system. In the recent past, great social changes have again been telescoped within a relatively brief period. Simultaneously the Negro has again gained friends and allies outside the South, numerous enough to give him powerful leverage in changing his racial position. Again the South has reacted militantly.

Hofstadter focuses on Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," which is the cornerstone of the claim made by Calhoun's admirers for the traitor's status as a great political theorist:

At various times in his life he was identified with efforts to achieve coalition between the South and the agrarian West, and also between the South and northern capital, but he feared that inevitably the major parties would become sectional instruments. If this were to happen, he believed that in order to stay in the Union the South would first have to manifest total solidarity and then insist upon a formal, constitutional check to uphold her interests. He arrived at this conclusion during the controversy over the tariff that led to the nullification crisis of the 183o's. It was at this time that he worked out his familiar doctrine of the concurrent majority, insisting that government must be carried on not by a mere preponderance of individuals, a numerical majority, but by a concurrent majority, a concert of major economic interests, each of which would have the right to veto acts of the federal government. Nullification, the refusal of a state or combination of states to enforce a federal law deemed by the people in nullifying conventions to be intolerable violations of their interests, was one attempt to establish this principle. It was defeated by Andrew Jackson, but Calhoun did not cease to believe in the central notion of the concurrent majority. [my emphasis]

This wasn't some Burkean stroke of brilliance in political thought. It was a transparent device to give the slave states absolute veto power against any attempt to abolish the system of ownership of human beings.

As Hofstadter goes on to note, the club of secession was always at the core of what passed for Calhounian political theory: "Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power."

It wasn't ultimately about Contitutional purity, "states rights", limited government, etc. It was about slavery. The conflict took on a theoretical appearance of an argument about states rights for the very reason that Hofstadter notes. The national Consitution protected slavery but did not guarantee it. So slave states had to use secession as an ultimate threat to preserve their Peculiar Institution so along as it it couldn't be written into the basic Constitutional law.

In the immediate run-up to the Civil War after Lincoln's election in 1860, Kentucky Sen. John Crittendon (1787-1863), a Whig turned American Party (aka, the Know-Nothings) turned Constitutional Union Party, introduced what became known as the Crittendon Compromise, which would have meant Republicans and Northern Democrats agreeing to a vast formal extension of slavery. In their standard history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977), historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Henr Steele Commager, and William Leuchtenburg described it this way:

... when Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed to extend the old 36° 30' line between free and slave territories to the California boundary, the Republicans were willing to go so far as to admit New Mexico as a slave state if the people there chose slavery. A Peace Convention summoned by the Virginia legislature also broke on the rocks of Southern intransigency. Even the adoption of a 'never-never' proposition to the effect that neither by law nor constitutional amendment could Congress ever interfere with slavery in the states or the District of Columbia proved unavailing. All formal compromises failed to bring back the 'wayward sisters .' The repeal by several Northern states of personal liberty laws, and the breaking up of an abolition meeting in Boston to commemorate John Brown, seemed insufficient [to the pro-slavery secessionists as] evidence of a change of heart. [my emphasis]

During the war, one of Crittendon's sons served as an officer in the Union Army, another in the Confederate Army. It really was a civil war, not just a sectional one.

In understanding the problems of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, though, in which the war was about the abstract question of states' rights and not about slavery, it's important to remember that in the various major controversies over the extension of slavery between the Nullifiction Crisis of 1832-33, which did involve states rights, and the secession crisis after Lincoln's election as President in 1860, they all involved the South using the power of the federal government which they controlled to impose pro-slavery measures against free states asserting their states' rights not to cooperate with slavery in measures such as the Fugitive Slave Acts. Just as the "states' rights" of Strom Thurmond in 1848 and Trent Lott in 2002 were about segregation and racial discrimination, so was John Calhoun's "states' rights" advocacy of 1832 and thereafter about slavery and white supremacy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 2: Andrew Jackson, states rights and the South

This is a re-up (and very slight re-working) of a previous post of mine from early in this blog's history in 2003. It deals with the how the real history of early and antebellum America give the lie to basic assumptions of neo--Confederate ideology. I'll note by way of introduction, I refer at the end to the Indian Removal Act, which was the legislative authorization of what now is known as the Trail of Tears. Here, I'm not looking at the grim topic of that Act in itself, but rather at how the regional political alignments over it contradict a key part the neo-Confederate narrative.

The pro-Confederate view of history, also known as the Lost Cause ideology, insists that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. Instead, in that view, the war was fought primarily over the issue of states rights. One of the main set-pieces in this argument is the Nullification Controversy of 1831-32, during Old Hickory's first Administration.

Briefly, the federal Tariff of 1828 was extremely unpopular in South Carolina. Many South Carolina leaders threatened to "nullify" the tariff, arguing that a state could impose its authority to block the implementation of a federal law it rejected. The dispute escalated to a point where a military confrontation threatened. Through the compromise efforts of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, President Jackson secured from Congress both a reduction of the disputed tariffs and a Force Bill expressly authorizing him to use military force to put down state defiance of the federal law.

Lost Cause advocates love to point to this as a key event leading to the secession of 1861, though it occurred three decades earlier. In the Lost Cause view, this was an instance where the Southern states were grouped against a sectional bloc of Northern states, the latter using national power in the form of Jackson and the Force Act to impose an unconstitutional law on a state. And the issue here was a sectional one focused on tariffs, not slavery.

So the argument goes. But it has several obvious problems. Why does one need to go back 30 years before secession for such an example? Because every other major North-South confrontation from 1833 to 1860 had slavery as an explicit issue. Why does the Lost Cause dogma prefer to gloss over the fact that Jackson was a Southerner and a slaveowner and his movement was primarily based in the South? Because those facts are reminders that the controversy was not at all exclusively a North-vs.-South sectional issue.

Also, it's a matter of some serious dispute among real historians - not just a phony pseudohistorical issue made up by ideologues - as to whether the Nullification Controversy was really primarily about tariffs.

The South Carolina radicals certainly realized that the issue could come to a head over slavery. It had already come up in the slavery controversy settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion had scared the Slave Power into a near frenzy. And that same year, free farmers from western Virginia forced the legislature to begin what became the last serious free debate about abolishing slavery in the states that eventually joined the Confederacy. (The debate was not "free" to slaves, of course.) The Slave Power felt increasingly on the defensive.

John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory's main opponent on the nullification issue, anonymously authored a pamphlet called The South Carolina Exposition which the defiant South Carolina legislature published. In it, Calhoun argued that the tariff controversy was merely the occasion for demanding the right of nullification. The real issue was defending the "peculiar institution of the Southern States," i.e., slavery.

Jackson later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." (And you think political rhetoric today is harsh!) And Jackson was a Southern political leader who saw the issue of secession as being something other than a purely sectional issue. What Jackson the Southern President said in his proclamation to the people of South Carolina in December, 1832, was:

Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent [the] execution [of the laws] deceived you; they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. The object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?

That's what patriotic American Southerners thought of secession - in 1832 and in 1861.

No wonder old Jackson Democrats during the war used to grumble that if the General were still around, the slaveowners would never have dared to try seceding.

And no wonder the Lost Cause crowd doesn't like to recall great Southerners like Andrew Jackson very often. That part of their "heritage" they would prefer not to remember, much less "honor."

But there was another major North-South controversy during Jackson's Presidency, one in which the vote in Congress was even more clear-cut than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in which slavery figured as a very minor issue, if at all.

Yet the silence about this Act from the Lost Cause crowd is deafening, even though it involved a North-South sectional controversy and national power vs. state rights, and slavery was not an issue. Wouldn't this be a perfect example for the Lost Cause argument that the Civil War was a sectional controversy over state rights, and slavery had nothing to do with it?

Well, it would. Except for one little catch. In this case, it was the Southerners, both in Congress and the Presidency, who were pressing for the use of national power to remove Indian tribes from lands coveted by the American whites. And they were willing to override states rights to achieve it. While that wasn't a central argument in the debate, Northern opponents of the bill mocked the Southerners for their willingness to overlook states rights when it was a measure they favored.

Over the following 30 years, there would be other occasions when the Slave Power would be willing to sacrifice the principle of states rights for the preservation of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy." And for "Southern honor," of course - though not a brand Old Hickory would have recognized as such.

See: Full text of 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 1: The complicated devevopment of democracy

Every year since 2004, when I was still in my first year of blogging, I've posted daily in a counter-celebration of Confederate Heritage Month, which is one the vehicles that neo-Coinfederates have used to spread their pseudohistory celebrating treason and rebellion in defense of slavery and the white supremacist politics so closely associated with that outlook.

I started paying particular attention to the neo-Confederate ideology in the 1990s, an interest that obviously continues. One notable moment in that corner of American politics was the 2001 referndum in my original home state of Mississippi in 2001 on whether to keep the state flag that includes the image of the Confederate battle flag or to adopt a proposed alternative version without an anti-American white supremacist image on it. Sadly, the Confederate version of the state flag one out. And is still contentious in Mississippi.

Since then-South Carolina Governor Nicki Haley, a Republican, unexpectedly decided to take down the Confederate flag displayed on the ground of the South Carolina statehouse after a white supremacist mass murder of nine people in a black church, the debate over Confederate-themed monuments and symbols got more intense. Her speech on that decision (Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag New York Times 06/22/2015) treaded lightly on pro-Confederate sympathy. But her speech did give this statement of how the meaning of public symbols changes over time:

There will be some in our state who see this as a sad moment. I respect that. But know this: For good and for bad, whether it is on the statehouse grounds or in a museum, the flag will always be a part of the soil of South Carolina.

But this is a moment in which we can say that that flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state. The murderer now locked up in Charleston said he hoped his actions would start a race war. We have an opportunity to show that not only was he wrong, but that just the opposite is happening.

My hope is that by removing a symbol that divides us, we can move forward as a state in harmony and we can honor the nine blessed souls who are now in heaven.

Of course, the neo-Confederate narrative was always more about politics than an attempt to understand history. And Haley is explicit in that quote that she's making a political statement with her action. In this case, a statement against racist mass murder.

Ironically - to me, anyway - this blog in its original incarnation at the now-long-departed AOL Blog function - was also affected by the changing meaning of symbols. (A full archive is available at the links on the upper right of this blog.) I originally called it "Old Hickory's Weblog" to invoke Andrew Jackson's famous nickname. For me, that was particular significant as an anti-Confederate symbol, because of Jackson's confrontation with John Calhoun and South Carolina over in the Nullification Crisis, a milestone moment in the political aggression of the Southern slaveowners. And, despite being a Southerner and slaveholder and an ideological supporter of slavery, when forced to take a side on South Carolina's secessionist stunt on nullification, Jackson stood on the side of American patriotism and democracy (such as it was then), even for a 19th-century version of "constitutional patriotism" and against the treason-minded Slave Power.

I was also aware that the Jacksonian movement was an important continuation and further development of the Jeffersonian one. And that it developed further in the antislavery movement and the then revolutionary-democratic Republican Party of the 1850s and 1860s. Abraham Lincoln cited Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his two most important models for his Presidency.

What I've learned since 2004, not least through these anti-neo-Confederate posts, has increased my knowledge and hopefully added some nuance to my understanding of the early American and antebellum periods of history. But it hasn't fundamentally changed my view of how the American Revolution established an important basis for democratic government, and how it developed through the Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and antislavery movements.

But once Donald Trump made such a big show in 2017 of adopting Andrew Jackson as a President to be greatly admired, I realized that the meaning of Andrew Jackson as a symbol could not for the moment effectively symbolize what I intended in my use of him. Not that Donald Trump knows anything about Jackson or his politics. And part of the problem is that the Democratic Party, for whom Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had been historically understood as the most sigificant founders of the party, just cheerfully let the Republicans steal their own symbol.

What I'm discussing in this post has to do with the search for a "usuable history". As Ben Alpers noted a few years ago in An Unusable Past? 06/17/2013 on the S-USIH blog, it can be kind of a tricky concept. The Carnegie Council provides a selection of comments from a conference on The Search for a Usable Past 10/10/2001, which also emphasize the complications of the notion. But it is still (excuse the pun) usuable.

This also recognizes that the construction of history involves actual empirical and academic research on what actually happened in the past, philosphical/ideological ways of framing them, and more purely instrumental uses of historical symbols in politics.

This year, part of what I'm going to do is rework some of my earlier posts, especially some on John Calhoun. Because in all three of ways I just mentioned, I see John Calhoun as the spirit that now motivates Trumpism in the US today.

John Calhoun's rancid soul goes marching on

I've always said that Trump using Andrew Jackson for his Prsidencial symbolism was historically bizarrre. The 1830s ancestor of Trumpism was Jackson's arch-enemy John C. Calhoun. Matthew Whitaker, actually supports state nullification of federal law. (Andrew Kaczynski, Whitaker said he supports state's rights to nullify federal law CNN 11/10/2018)

It doesn't get more Calhounian than that. (Cody Carlson, This week in history: John C. Calhoun and the Nullification Crisis Deseret News 12/17/2012; Nullification crisis Encyclopaedia Britannica 10/26/2018)

John C. Calhoun (1783-1850) (CC-PD)

Andrew Jackson as historical image

This segment of The Majority Report takes off on a painting that Trump has put on the Oval Office wall, Donald Trump Literally Hung This Bizarre Painting In His White House 10/17/2018:

I liked the segment on the chessy Andy Thomas painting. But it did inspire me to write them an email on interpreting early/antebellum American history. I actually have a similar painting by Andy Thomas featuring Democratic Presidents. I first saw it at a gallery in New Orleans by Jackson Square. Hey, there's kitsch and there's inspired kitsch. That one features Andrew Jackson hosting the Presidents' get-together. Shooting pool in that case.

The Majority Report clips also talks some about Andrew Jackson, which led me to write this.

I fugure it will be at least 20 years before the interpretive cycle seings back around to something like my viewpoint that in America circa 1832, reactionary, anti-democratic, pro-slavery politics was embodied in John C. Calhoun, godfather of American reaction and the guiding spirit behind today's TrumPutinist Republican Party. The most prominent embodiment of expanding democracy and restraining the seditious slaveholders and fighting for ordinary citizens back then was Andrew Jackson.

So I'll offer a few points to at least complicate the prevailing picture, which is based on what I would describe as a weird Whig view of Amreican history in which the monarchist Alexander Hamiliton, who thought democracy could only function through massive corruption, and the plutocrat John Quincy Adams are the big heroes of early/antebellum American history.

That view still allows Abraham Lincoln to be a relevant, pro-democracy icon. And I wouldn't quarrel with anything in the short conversation on him during that program. Which brings me to the fact that Lincoln the Great Liberator cited two previous Presidents as his models: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Jackson led the successful fight against the Bank of the United States, which was an institution doing what its early advocate Hamilton wanted it to do, i.e., function as the defender of concentrated economic power and as a corrupter of Congress.

The term "populism" hadn't been invented yet. But Jackson styled his campaigns as the People vs. the Bank, which stood in for the Elite in a way that fits right into the Mouffle/Laclau definition of populism. I'll settle for "proto-populist," and it was very much on the left by any remotely applicable meaning in the 1830s. Jackson's other big fight was in the Nullification Controversy, when he successfully quashed Calhoun's scheme to nullify federal laws, which the major players at the time certainly understood as a trial run for secession in defense of slavery.

Jackson's Indian policy sucked. So has every other President's, some to greater or lesser degrees, but that's no excuse. As bad as Jackson's was, I don't know of any reason to consider that the infamous Indian removal in the 1830s had a genocidal intent.. Some of the Indian tribes deported to Oklahoma were around during the Civil War to fight against the Union Army, because some of them were slaveowners. (History is complicated.)

Plus these fun facts:

• Jackson's address to Congress on the Nullification Controversy was the first time a President identified American patriotism with support for democracy and the Constitution. That's pretty much the concept that today Jürgen Habermas adovocates as "constitutional patriotism." Although I hear that the term was coined by another philosopher, Dolf Sternberger. But Old Hickory was advocating it back in the day.
• The Cabinet Secretary who spearheaded Jackson's fight against the Bank of the US was an economic radical named Roger Taney, who had done pro bono work as a young lawyer defending escaped slaves from being forcibly returned to their owners. His later career was less helpful for the cause of democracy. Although I guess we could say his Dred Scott decision did "heighten the contradictions."
• Jackson helped the pioneering American feminist Fanny Wright to set up a Utopian community actively dedicated to the abolition of slavery at Nashoba, Tennessee. It may have had less to do with shared goals than with the fact that she was the girlfriend of the Marquis de Lafayette, but still.
• Jackson as a 17-year-old lied about his age so that he could enlist in the Continental Army to fight in the Revolutionary War. So he can legitimately be considered a Founder.
• Also in the anti-British-imperialism category, winning the battle of New Orleans in 1815 prevented Britain from being able to control the Mississippi River and use it to split and weaken the US in the following years. For that battle, Jackson assembled a force that included blacks, Indians, and Jean Lafitte and his pirates.

I try to distinguish between leaders and movements that advanced democracy (Jackson) - even when the politial community was recognized as including only propertied white men - and those that opposed it or tried to push it back (Calhoun; also the entire Republican Party of 2018). But the further back in time you go, the more effort it is conceive of the context.

And 200 years from now it's extremely likely that people will look back at us in 2018, even the flaming lefties, and think we were all depraved and irresponsible. But I'm hoping the pendulum on the left/center-left will swing away from the Hamiltonian Whig view of history. Heck, the Democratic Party may someday decide they should defend their own historical symbolism, including Jefferson and Jackson, instead of tossing them to the Republicans like Trump distributing paper towels in Puerto Rico.