Donald Trump, who apparently thinks a lot of Andrew Jackson, recently opined that Old Hickory could have prevented the Civil War from happening. I would love to interview Mr. Trump about that, because I would be very interested in testing just how much he knows about either Jackson or the Civil War. (I would ask him sneaky trick questions like, for example, “You think Jackson could have stopped Kentucky and Missouri from taking the lead in seceding from the Union?”) But aside from that: maybe Jackson could have, but he would have had to go about it either of two ways: (1) by making more concessions to the southern slaveholders concerning protection for the expansion of slavery into the western territories, or (2) by letting the seven Deep South states secede and form the Confederate States of America, with their constitution safeguarding the institution of slavery. Either way, ending slavery would have had to be even less of a priority for Jackson than it was for Lincoln–not all that hard to imagine, considering that Jackson was a slaveholder himself. I’m not all that convinced Trump knows enough history to realize what he’s implying, but make no mistake: he is implying that it would have been better to allow slavery to continue for some more generations.
Yes, I know, there are books out claiming that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, but you know what? That’s hogwash. To be sure, it’s also not true (as the southern romanticists will never let us forget) that the Civil War was about the morally superior North being on a crusade to abolish slavery, and that the North didn’t have spotless hands when it came to either slavery or racism. But impugning the moral purity of the North doesn’t make slavery any less of an atrocity. The truth is, white northerners, even those who hated slavery, had for decades been willing up to a point to tolerate it, to leave slavery alone as long as slavery left them alone. But in the 1850s they were increasingly feeling that slavery wasn’t leaving them alone, and they were also becoming increasingly horrified by its brutality, as a number of events forced them to become more directly aware of it. And they particularly didn’t want slavery in the western territories. That–the matter of the territories–was in fact where the differences between North and South were the most irreconcilable. By 1860, at the same time that northerners were more willing than ever to take a stand for prohibiting slavery in the western territories, the southern Democrats were demanding that Congress not only allow it but actively guarantee and defend it. These differences were the bedrock of the following sequence of events:
- November 1860: Lincoln was elected president.
- Late 1860 and early 1861: The seven Lower South states seceded, starting with South Carolina, and formed the Confederate States of America.
- April 1861: Lincoln took office and, not long after, the Civil War began, not yet as a war to abolish slavery, but as a war to preserve the Union as a solid nation from which no states could secede.
- Four more states, now in the Upper South, seceded and joined the Confederacy.
- In the northern mind, the war gradually turned into a war to abolish slavery, with a strong (though of course exaggerated) sense of moral superiority on the subject.
Now, it is very true that there was an issue besides slavery that was behind the Civil War, the issue of the nature of the Union. As I say to my classes, the North and the South on the eve of the Civil War were like a fighting married couple, where one keeps threatening divorce where the other regards the bonds of matrimony as sacrosanct and needing to be preserved at all cost. White northerners had a vision of the nation as indestructible, as being much more than a league of states. And, like the party to a troubled marriage who thinks divorce is not an option, white northerners were willing to make some concessions. Some white southerners also felt the Union must be preserved, but many others regarded it as less solid. The back-and-forth argument on the subject had been rehearsed over the decades, and there had been threats of secession well before 1860.
There had also been other points of conflict over the years. However, where the white South was concerned, anybody who tries to separate the issue of “states’ rights” from the issue of slavery–that is, trying to say that they were defending “states’ rights” rather than slavery–is making a separation that the principals involved simply did not make.
Even so, when we’re talking about positions taken by the federal government and by northerners, the separation becomes more valid. In fact, that separation can be seen most clearly with a look at certain events that happened during the presidency of–that’s right, Andrew Jackson. As president, Jackson was a staunch defender of the indestructibility of the union, and of the prerogatives of the federal government to exert certain powers whether the states liked it or not. This came through in the nullification crisis of 1833: when a convention in South Carolina voted to refuse to allow high tariffs on imported manufactured goods to be collected within the state, threatening a possible civil war between state and federal militias, Jackson made sure that South Carolinians knew there was a federal militia ready to take them on. A behind-the-scenes, face-saving deal got worked out by the man who specialized in that service, Henry Clay of Kentucky, so the clash was averted (with each side in a position to feel that it had adequately warned the other to behave itself), but Jackson certainly was on record as being for the strength of the national government against a southern state’s recalcitrance, at least in that instance.
Jackson was also a staunch defender of slavery. Like numerous other early presidents, Jackson was a slaveholding plantation owner, and as president he fully encouraged the burning of sacks of mail containing anti-slavery pamphlets when the northern abolitionists undertook a massive postal campaign, to stop them from reaching their intended targets around the South. So if Jackson had been the one elected president in 1860, sure, southern slaveholders wouldn’t have felt so threatened by the federal government and probably would have viewed Jackson as a president they could play ball with–unlike Lincoln who, though fully accepting of the legality of slavery in the states, hoped to help it die out over time by keeping it from expanding into the territories. And, given that the burning question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand to the western territories had been quelled by compromises before, maybe it could have been done again if a president more palatable to the South had been elected in 1860.
Does that mean Trump had a point about Jackson? Yes, but so what? The Civil War was a horrible calamity, just as every war is, but so was the continued sweeping under the rug of the slavery problem, the great contradiction between America’s sense of itself as the land of the free and the home of the brave, and the rape and human trafficking that slavery was all about. Yes, I know the kind-master narratives too, but enslaved persons had no legal protection whatsoever from being whipped, raped, and separated from their families by sale, and there truly is no way of saying that this was not such a big deal without implying that one considers enslaved persons to have been not fully human: in other words,, it takes more than a little touch of racism to suggest that a solution to the conflict between North and South that involved allowing slavery to continue had anything to recommend it. The best that can be said for Trump, therefore, is that he does not know enough about this country’s history to have really known what he was saying.
However, even talking about what would have happened if Andrew Jackson had been the president elected in 1860 has an absurdity to it; it sounds to a historian the way that discussion of how to find the square root of a negative number would sound to a mathematician. And here’s why. In 1856, the presidential contest was between John C. Fremont of the newly founded Republican Party, with its commitment to blocking the expansion of slavery, and James Buchanan, a northern Democrat sympathetic to slavery who was glad to give the slaveholding South what it wanted. Buchanan won. Four years later, America was a completely different country. Certain events had happened, including the Dred Scott decision of 1857 which caused many northerners to feel under siege by the “slave power” of the South, and the John Brown raid of 1859 which represented the southern slaveholders’ worst nightmares coming true and caused them to feel under siege by the increasingly antislavery North. Thus, in 1860, southern Democrats would not even accept the nomination of Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who considered slavery an unimportant topic and had no intention of interfering with the expansion of slavery in the West. That wasn’t good enough by 1860, so southern Democrats nominated their own candidate who demanded that the federal government not only refrain from interfering with the westward expansion of slavery but actively guarantee and protect it. The mess was sufficiently intricate that it takes considerable acrobatics even to imagine Andrew Jackson, had he been alive, winning that year.
But if he had, and if he had averted a Civil War, it would have meant another sweeping under the rug of the slavery problem–and the continuation of rape and human trafficking that made the notion of the land of the free a sick and perverse lie. A war may not be anything to be happy about, but a war averted while slavery continues is nothing to celebrate either.
