Symbolic gestures such as replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 dollar bill with Harriet Tubman don’t change the past, present, or future one iota; they make some people feel good and some people feel bad. It doesn’t change the relative important of either figure in US history. The small-minded preoccupation with feelings and gestures will continue among a vocal and vociferous segment of the US populace; the rest of us will focus on more important matters in our own lives. From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s “The Oxford History of the American People,” there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman.
“An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.”
Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington, that pivotal figure between the Founding Fathers and the Civil War — Andrew Jackson.
Slashed by a British officer in the Revolution, and a POW at 14, the orphaned Jackson went west, rose to head up the Tennessee militia, crushed an Indian uprising at Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, in the War of 1812, then was ordered to New Orleans to defend the threatened city.
In one of the greatest victories in American history, memorialized in song, Jackson routed a British army and aborted a British scheme to seize New Orleans, close the Mississippi, and split the Union.
In 1818, ordered to clean out renegade Indians rampaging in Georgia, Jackson stormed into Florida, seized and hanged two British agitators, put the Spanish governor on a boat to Cuba, and claimed Florida for the USA.
Secretary of State John Quincy Adams closed the deal. Florida was ours, and Jacksonville is among its great cities.
Though he ran first in popular and electoral votes in 1824, Jackson was denied the presidency by the “corrupt bargain” of Adams and Henry Clay, who got secretary of state.
Jackson came back to win the presidency in 1828, recognized the Texas republic of his old subaltern Sam Houston, who had torn it from Mexico, and saw his vice president elected after his two terms.
He ended his life at his beloved Hermitage, pushing for the annexation of Texas and nomination of “dark horse” James K. Polk, who would seize the Southwest and California from Mexico and almost double the size of the Union.
Was Jackson responsible for the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears”?
Yes. And Harry Truman did Hiroshima, and Winston Churchill did Dresden.
Great men are rarely good men, and Jackson was a Scots-Irish duelist, Indian fighter and slave owner. But then, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were slave owners before him.
To remove his portrait from the front of the $20 bill, and replace it with Tubman’s, is affirmative action that approaches the absurd.
Whatever one’s admiration for Tubman and her cause, she is not the figure in history Jackson was.
To continue reading: Dishonoring General Jackson
I attended Andrew Jackson High School in Jacksonville.