Good Riddance Andrew Jackson

In what has to be one of the most overdue developments, the United States will finally honor a woman on paper currency. We’ve previously honored Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea, but they appeared on dollar coins, which is not that far off from having a plaque in the basement bathroom of a museum.

Harriet Tubman, who was a key figure in the Underground Railroad, which helped countless slaves escape to freedom, will be replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill. Tubman won the Treasury Department’s poll, narrowly beating out another worthy candidate, Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ll leave the praise of Tubman to others - she richly deserves the honor, and I am thrilled that she was chosen.

I want to discuss Jackson, because I think it is a travesty that he was ever placed on currency in the first place. (Oddly, even the Treasury itself doesn’t know the answer to why he ended up there…)  I also think Jackson is worth discussing because he remains somewhat of a folk hero in many Conservative circles.

Why is Jackson popular? As far as I can tell, there are a few reasons. The one makes sense: he was the first non-aristocratic president, so there is the “common man” vibe about him. Second, he opposed both Federal banking and paper currency. A bit ironic that he would be the face of said paper currency, of course. For those who hate the Federal Reserve and wish to return the world to the Gold Standard, I suppose he could be a patron saint. (He’s also revered in Libertarian circles because during his administration the Federal debt was zero...briefly.) Because of his opposition to the National Bank, he has a reputation as representing “small government” in some sense. This is ironic because in a number of key ways, he represents the closest the United States has come to a dictatorship (credit to a friend and colleague for pointing that out to me), and showed the least respect of any president in history for the rule of law. In fact, if you were to look at who caused the most death and destruction by ignoring the law and using his personal power over the military, it would be, hands down, Jackson.

In another bit of irony, his reputation as a self-made man also doesn’t bear much scrutiny.

Let’s start at the beginning. Jackson was indeed born to a widowed mother, and orphaned by age 14. He worked his way up through the army, then settled on a career as a frontier lawyer. (Back then, not much training was required…) Thus far, so good.

Things took a darker turn, though, in 1794. Jackson formed a partnership with a local judge for the purpose of purchasing lands “without as within military bounds,” a nice little euphemism for taking control of lands which had been previously guaranteed to the Cherokee and Chickasaw Tribes by treaty. Many years later, Jackson would represent the US Government in the “renegotiation” of these treaties, forcing the Tribes from the lands that would eventually become the Memphis area.

In addition to his legal career, Jackson took up cotton farming. So, these lands he stole from their rightful occupants were then turned into a plantation worked by slaves. His zeal for the removal of Native Americans and his use of slave labor were related. He believed that the land had to be “cleared” so it could be used for cotton - grown by slave labor, of course. In this way, he did much to aid the spread of slavery to new areas.

It wasn’t enough for Jackson to own slaves, however. A significant contribution to his fortune was made by engaging in slave trading. Even in Jackson’s own time, this was looked on as morally questionable. It was one thing to own slaves, but another altogether to sell and transport them, breaking up families and so forth.

Jackson served in the military during the War of 1812. He is, of course, best known for his victory in The Battle of New Orleans.

My dad used to sing this song to me when I was kid. 

Less well known are his actions regarding the Creek Indians. The prior commander had negotiated a truce of sorts with them. The terms of this were onerous enough, but Jackson unilaterally tore up the agreement once he took over. Further concessions, including vast tracts of land were essentially confiscated on threat of massacre.

Even less known than this is the incident in New Orleans. After the battle, which essentially ended hostilities, Jackson refused to release the local militia members to return home. This prompted a local legislator to write an anonymous article in the local paper challenging this decision.

Jackson would have none of this. He declared all of New Orleans to be under Martial Law, and arrested and imprisoned the legislator. After a Federal judge granted a writ of habeas corpus for the release of the legislator, Jackson had the judge and the legislator’s lawyer imprisoned as well. All of this was flagrantly illegal, of course, but not much could be done, as Jackson controlled the army.

This would not be the last time Jackson defied the law in his capacity as a general. A few years later, in another military action, the First Seminole War, Jackson decided that the way to “terminate the conflict” was to invade Florida (a territory of Spain at the time). That we were not at war with Spain, and that Congress had no intention of declaring war mattered not to Jackson. Invade first, get forgiveness later. Which is basically what he did. Still, it sparked a major international incident. 

Some modern presidents have been accused of starting wars without Congressional permission. There is some justice to this accusation. At least the President is legally "Commander in Chief" of the armed forces. 

Jackson, on the other hand, while a mere general, took it on himself to invade a foreign country. 

This determination to do whatever he wanted regardless of the law persisted into Jackson’s presidency. Long an advocate for forced removal of Native Americans from the South, he was a key advocate for the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Act narrowly passed, being considered controversial even at the time. (Many realized it was inhumane and unjust, even as others considered the extinction of the Native Americans inevitable.) In 1832, a Supreme Court case, Worcester v. Georgia effectively declared the act unconstitutional by holding that Tribes were sovereign nations with valid treaties with the United States.

This did not deter Jackson. After all, he had the military at his back. As journalist Horace Greeley would later summarize Jackson’s (more wordy) response, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" And so the trail of tears began, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths.

The deaths didn’t bother Jackson much. As he put it, “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. … But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.”

Yeah, too bad we are causing genocide, get over it…

On a related note, the Nazis took inspiration from the Trail of Tears, citing it as the pattern they wished to follow for the expulsion and intentional starvation of the Poles and Slavs in order to make way for the "superior" race. Not something to be proud of.

Jackson’s other legacies aren’t exactly great either. His economic policies - including his shutdown of the National Bank and the demand for payment in gold or silver for land purchases from the government - were significant factors in the Panic of 1837.

His most notable Supreme Court appointment was Roger B. Taney, who was best known for his majority opinion in the Dred Scot decision. You know, the one that held that Blacks couldn't be citizens and remained slaves even in free territory. The one that has nearly unanimously been deemed the worst Supreme Court decision of all time. Nice legacy. 

The other legacy, which persisted nearly until the turn of the century, was the Spoils System, wherein government employment was based on politics, not merit. His views of civil service led to decades of corruption and graft.

And about that whole “limited government” thing? If the proof that he believed he could and should do whatever he wanted, including foreign invasions, arrest and imprisonment of judicial officers, and defiance of the Supreme Court weren’t enough, keep in mind that he also allowed the US Post Office to refuse to deliver Abolitionist tracts, pushed for a Congressional resolution that Abolitionist bills could not even be discussed, and was censured by the Senate for removing government funds from the U.S. Bank without congressional authorization. In other words, he considered himself above the law, first as a general, then as a plantation owner, and finally as President.

I know a lot of people admire him, and will probably take issue with my description of him. Keep in mind, however, that the facts I have cited are part of the public record, easily discoverable with a minimum of research.

So here we have a man who built his fortune by the illegal “purchase” of land from its rightful owners, slave trading, and slave labor. A man who invaded a foreign country without authorization. A man who - in response to a critical newspaper article - imprisoned a judge, lawyer, and the author of the article. A man who disrespected the right to free speech while president.

And above all, a man who championed and ordered a genocide. 

That this man has been on US Currency for 90 years is an embarrassment. Maybe, finally, that will change.

And good riddance.

***
 

Jeremy Kaplowitz for the win...

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I can’t resist noting that we actually have a modern day analogue to Jackson.

Hmm, a man who claims to have risen to wealth on his merits, while actually gaming the system. Who speaks of committing war crimes and genocide as if necessary to “win.” Who cultivates an image of violence. Who calls for the curtailing of free speech if it criticizes him. A man who believes that governance is a matter of him getting his way through force and disregard of the law. A man whose central platform is the forced expulsion of 11 million brown skinned people.

Sound a bit familiar?

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

True story: one of my wife’s co-workers complained about someone spoiling the end of the film, Lincoln. (In case you weren’t paying attention in elementary school, Lincoln dies.) Obviously, this is pretty funny, in a disturbing sort of way, because Lincoln is pretty famous. Not so famous, though, was James Garfield, the second American president to be assassinated. 

This book tells that story, with a particular focus the actual cause of Garfield’s death: medical “treatment.” In 1880, the United States was at a turning point in medical practice. A decade and a half prior, British surgeon Joseph Lister perfected sterilization, which drastically reduced infections and the subsequent deaths. However, doctors in the United States were largely resistant to the new knowledge, clinging to their encrusted aprons, and washing wounds with unboiled water. Not long after, John Harvey Kellogg would build an empire on the theory that all ills could be cured by a bland, vegetarian diet and enemas. Oh, and by giving up masturbation, which he claimed had killed more people than war or disease. So, he was pretty much a distillation of the American obsession with diet, medical quackery, and sexuality.

Candice Millard tells enough of the background of the assassination to set the events in historical and political context. She is a bit of a pro-Garfield partisan, but one can see why she would go that direction.

The post-Civil War United States was an interesting place. One key fight was over the policy toward the South, and also toward the former slaves. This was also the time of the Railroads, when widespread corruption led to a looting of the public treasury by the Robber Barons. (My review of Railroaded can be found here.) Crucial to this corruption was the “Spoils System.” As in, “to the victor belongs the spoils.” Government jobs were given as a reward for service to the candidate rather than for merit, and “machines” like Tammany Hall essentially ran local - and even national - politics. Two movements within the Republican Party battled. On the one hand, reformers such as James G. Blaine (who would later run for president) sought to eliminate the Spoils System and replace it with a Civil Service law granting jobs on merit. On the other was Senator Roscoe Conklin, a party boss and thoroughly corrupt defender of the Spoils System.

At the 1880 Republican convention, no clear winner was to be found. Blaine, John Sherman, and former president Ulysses Grant were those vying for the nomination. After days of wrangling, a movement arose to nominate Garfield, who didn’t even wish to run. Nominated, he was, however, and he felt compelled to accept.

Garfield seems to have been a decent guy in person. He was well read, having a house where the books spilled out of the library into stacks around the house. Even in the bathroom. (Actually, I worry that my house will be like that by the time I reach my 50s.) He was a supporter of full civil rights for African Americans, and was a friend of, and supported by Frederick Douglass. But he wasn’t much of a politician. I consulted one of my reference books, They Also Ran, by Irving Stone - a great book about those who lost presidential races - for more information. Stone wasn’t a fan of Garfield, in large part because he didn’t do much during his Senate career, and lacked a vision for his presidency. I think these criticisms are valid, as is the one that he tried to placate the Conklin faction by appointing people of dubious honesty to posts on his cabinet. Whatever the case, Garfield didn’t get much of a chance to govern, because he was gunned down by Charles Guiteau a few months into his administration.

Guiteau was an interesting character, and his story takes up a good portion of this book. Always a bit of a ne'er-do-well, he bounced from “career” to “career” without making much money. He primarily survived off of a combination of charity from relatives and fraud on his creditors. At one point, he became involved with John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Oneida utopian colony and coined the term “free love.” Yeah, the late 1800s in America were weird times. In a really surreal twist, the Oneida colony eventually became the Oneida silverware company we know today. From utopian socialism and wife swapping to flatware. Who predicted that?

After leaving the colony - largely because they expected him to work - he spent time as a “preacher,” with a very limited audience, and then as a lawyer, never really making a success at anything. Narcissistic and self absorbed, he appears to have believed the world owed him a living, but somehow didn’t recognize his genius. He believed that he had been the person responsible for getting Garfield elected, and expected to be given a patronage in thanks. When that didn’t happen, he turned against Garfield, and shot him, expecting that he would be hailed as a hero. The turning point came after Guiteau survived a horrific steamboat accident (almost like the one fictionalized in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age), and decided that God had given him a divine mission to assassinate Garfield.

The bullet that struck Garfield in the back clipped a minor artery, broke a couple of ribs, fractured the tip of a vertebra, but didn’t hit anything vital. In our modern times, he would probably have been treated and released after a day or two at most in the hospital. In his own times, had he been shot on the battlefield and received little to no treatment beyond food and water, he likely would have survived. In fact, many Civil War veterans survived worse, and were still walking around with bullets in them 20 years later.

Unfortunately for Garfield, he was attended to on the scene by Dr. D. Willard Bliss. Bliss was one of the surgeons who attempted to save President Lincoln years earlier, and was eager to have a success to go with that failure. Perhaps because the "D" stood for "Doctor." His parents were ambitious. Bliss stuck his finger into the wound - and then a series of probes designed to find the location of the bullet. Rather than do so, they merely opened new wounds and introduced bacteria. Furthermore, Bliss would railroad the family into putting him in charge of Garfield’s care, and drove away any physicians who did not agree with him.

Garfield would linger for two and a half months after the shooting, eventually succumbing to a massive septic infection. Guiteau may have been delusional about most everything else, but he did have a point (which he made at his trial for murder) that the doctors did more to kill Garfield than he did. One great point the author makes is just how similar Guiteau and Bliss were. The both were amazingly self confident and self absorbed, impervious to the opinions and desires of others. The Garfield shooting was viewed by both as the way they were going to make their fortunes and reputations.

One does wonder what would have happened had chance gone the other way. Had Garfield been shot earlier, when Guiteau lost his nerve, Bliss would not have been on scene, and he may have been cared for instead by Mrs. Garfield’s personal doctor, Susan Edson. (Bliss refused to let Edson do anything more than give nursing care. Sexist much?) In addition, a number of younger doctors had embraced Lister’s techniques, and would have insisted on sterilizing things before probing Garfield’s wound. Had any of these happened, he likely would have survived.

There was one progressive person who was allowed to assist with Garfield, and that was Alexander Graham Bell. Newly famous for his telephone, Bell was determined to find a less invasive way of locating bullets than the knife and probe. “Science should be able to discover some less barbarous method,” he said.

Bell did in fact invent a metal detector that could have done the job. But Bliss again interfered, forbidding Bell to use the device freely. Bell was permitted only to scan where Bliss believed the bullet was, rather than the other side of Garfield’s body. (Can’t allow one’s self to be proven wrong…) Needless to say, Bell’s experiment failed. It was not until the autopsy that the truth came out, and Bell realized that it wasn’t that his device had failed, but that he had been prevented from using it effectively.

It is easy sometimes to forget, living in the times we do, just how recently medicine has been revolutionized. Germ Theory was first proposed in the 1500s, based solely on observation of disease transmission. However, the great breakthroughs of Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lister, and Koch didn’t occur until the middle of the 19th Century. Really, we have had a mere 150 years of understanding of a seemingly basic reality.

One small biographical detail really drove this home. Garfield lost two children to disease during their infancy. His first daughter died of diphtheria, and his youngest son of whooping cough. Both of these used to kill thousands of people - mostly children. But now, they are preventable. However, efforts to eliminate these and other diseases are hampered by many who seem to prefer to follow the Kellogg approach. The more things change…

There are some other details which are really intriguing in this book as well. For example, Garfield was extremely popular with African Americans because of his support for civil rights. Thus, when Guiteau was being held in jail, one of the lynch mobs that tried to have at him was largely African American.

Another bit that the book discusses is the legal rule regarding insanity. Guiteau never had a chance, of course, of proving his insanity. The nation would have lynched him if the justice system didn’t execute him. But in hindsight, he does appear to have suffered from a significant disconnect with reality. While this book discusses the legal side of things, a much more detailed look at the neurobiological side of things can be found in Sam Kean’s outstanding book, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons.

It was also interesting to see what happened after the assassination. Vice President Chester Arthur was considered to be Roscoe Conklin’s errand boy when he was elected. However, Arthur somehow grew a spine after he became president, largely through the letters he received from Julia Sand, an invalid woman who encouraged him to be better than everyone expected him to be. Inspired by this encouragement, he rebelled against the machine, cutting Conklin off completely. Even worse, he supported and signed into law the Pendleton Act, which established the Civil Service Commission, effectively making government jobs the merit-based employment they are today. No more would a postal worker be out of a job when his party lost power. Say what you will about the bureaucracy, but it is far better than the Spoils System. Ironically, it was Garfield’s death that paved the way for civil service reform. It was widely (though wrongly) believed that Conklin had masterminded the assassination. When Guiteau shot this suggestion down, the belief switch to one that the Spoils System itself had given Guiteau his motive. And thus do unintended consequences make vast changes.

One more historical bit deserves a mention. Garfield had the support not just of African Americans, but of the large immigrant population, who saw in his hardscrable beginnings a bit of their own lives. When we think of immigration, we often forget the massive immigration between 1850 and 1930. This is the period when my own ancestors came to the United States. (In my case, between 1880 and 1895.) By the end of that period, there would be no fewer than 14 million living in America who were born overseas. Not only is this more than the number now, but when adjusted for population is incredible. In fact, the greatest immigration by percentage of the population occurred between 1845 and 1855. And there was a lot of bigotry and panic then too. Something to keep in mind when discussing the issue today. 

As I mentioned earlier, I found Garfield to be personally quite likeable. He rose from poverty to become highly educated across a wide range of disciplines, from literature to mathematics. (He even published an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, to the astonishment of everyone that someone in Congress could do it. Politicians haven’t changed much either, apparently…)

Garfield had a great affection for science as well, believing that it had done more good in the world than any other study. He has my respect for being both devoutly Christian and yet open to new discoveries, even when they changed longstanding religious superstition and tradition.

The scientific spirit has cast out the Demons and presented us with Nature, clothed in her right mind and living under the reign of law. It has given us for the sorceries of the Alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the Astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of Cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of Diabolism, the laws of God.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

This is a fascinating and well written book. It is a good example of how even forgotten details of history can hold unexpected interest and truth.

Candice Millard also wrote The River of Doubt, about Theodore Roosevelt’s ill-fated South American trip, which also sounds interesting.