Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (7 page)

Unsurprisingly, it is whitewash time for Democratic historians and pundits. This whitewash takes several forms. First, the Democrats accuse “America,” not Jackson and his successors, of abusing the Indians. Specifically, they blast the earliest Europeans to arrive on the American continent, and the Founders, for dispossessing the native Indians. The goal is to treat Jackson as simply a bad white American, instead of a bad Democrat.

Second, the Democrats pretend to have no connection with the thievery of Jackson and his fellow Democrats. They might acknowledge that Jackson cleared the Indians out of several states in order to build constituencies of grateful whites who then settled those states. Faced with facts, they may also concede that Jackson enriched himself and his cronies through his land stealing.

Even so, today’s Democrats profess to be shocked, shocked to see their fellow Democrats engaged in such behavior. That was then, they suggest, and this is now. What does this have to do with us today? What does it have to do with Hillary? No resemblance to the current frontrunner of the Democratic Party is even suspected.

Yet as we saw with the Clintons in Haiti, the tradition of Jacksonian piracy is alive and well in today’s Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders may have the same Jacksonian objectives as Hillary, but only Hillary seems capable of pulling them off. Part of the reason Democrats prefer Hillary over Bernie is that she is a more effective Jacksonian, which is to say, a more ruthless and successful thief.

BLAMING AMERICA

Returning to Jackson, let’s examine the progressive narrative that faults the white man in general—rather than this specific one—for dispossessing and oppressing the native Indians. Democrats begin their tale of Indian tears with two calumnies, the first aimed at the first Europeans to arrive in America, the second aimed at the American Founders.

So what about the settlers? The first settlers—famously christened the “white man”—are accused by progressive Democrats of wiping out
large segments of the native population, even to the point of genocide. Genocide, however, implies an intention to exterminate a population. Did Columbus or the early settlers attempt this? They did not. Certainly there were sporadic clashes between the white Europeans and the natives. But there was also a good deal of cooperation between them. The historical record is mixed.

How, then, did the natives perish in such large numbers? Reportedly the native Indian population declined by more than 50 percent in the first century of exposure to the white man. The reason, historian William McNeill shows, is because native Indians contracted from the white man diseases to which they had no immunity.

This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it’s not genocide. In his book
Plagues and Peoples
, McNeill points out that just over a century earlier the white man himself contracted the bubonic plague and other diseases that wiped out a third of the population of Europe. These diseases came from Asia, and the white man had no immunity to them.
¹⁷
No one calls this genocide—because it isn’t.

What about the Founders? Interestingly we see that white attitudes toward the Indian in the eighteenth century were largely sympathetic. The Founders did not consider Native Americans to be inherently inferior to the white man. Rather, they held that the primitive circumstances of the native were responsible for what was perceived to be his barbaric state. They were confident that education and civilization would raise the typical Indian to the level of the white man.

In his
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Jefferson praised the intelligence, courage, and integrity of the Indians. They are, he wrote, “formed in mind as well as in body on the same model as Homo sapiens Europaeus.” Jefferson rejected proposals to dispossess the Indians of their land on the pretext that they were savages or barbarians. Rather, Jefferson urged that whites include the Indians in American civilization. He expressed the hope that the Indians, rather than clinging to their old ways, would “incorporate with us as citizens of the United States.”
¹⁸

Indeed, several leading figures of the founding period, such as Patrick Henry, John Marshall, and Thomas Jefferson, proposed intermarriage between whites and Indians as a way to integrate the natives into the American mainstream. “What they thought impossible with respect to blacks,” political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, “was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians.”
¹⁹

America’s first president, George Washington, respected the Indians. As a military officer defending the Virginia frontier, he considered the Indian tribes he encountered so formidable in warfare that in his view only other Indians could defeat them. Whenever possible, he did his best to ally with Indians.

As president, Washington was not opposed to trading with Indians or the purchase of Indian land, but he wanted these acquisitions to be secured by treaty, not by conflict. He insisted that white settlements bypass Indian territories, leaving them unmolested. “It was a vision,” historian Joseph Ellis writes, “in which the westward expansion of an American empire coexisted alongside the preservation of the original Americans.”
²⁰

As president, Jefferson openly coveted Indian land for settlement by whites moving west. But Jefferson too sought to obtain this land through treaty and trade. He said, in effect, that they have land and we have merchandise and so both sides can benefit from the other. In one of his public messages, Jefferson commended “the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.” So, concluded Jefferson, let’s make deals with the Indians to buy their land in exchange for food, medicine, clothing, and cash.

Jefferson knew, of course, that his administration had the power to seize the land. Treaties can be made; treaties can be broken. But Jefferson was unwilling to do that. His mindset in this respect is not pure. Jefferson in private correspondence admitted that Indians were reckless with money, and they had little estimation of the real value of their land. They were susceptible to going into debt, which might then compel them to sell land to settle their obligations. If he was unwilling to openly
contravene existing treaties, Jefferson was not above obtaining land by exploiting the ignorance and profligacy of Native Americans.
²¹

BARGAINER VS. THIEF

Still, Jefferson appears as an angel when we set him beside Andrew Jackson. The difference is one between a hard bargainer and an outright thief. Jefferson was a wheeler-dealer but he was not a murderer. Jackson seems to have had little aversion to killing Indians, especially when they stood in the way of his acquisitions. Finally Jefferson didn’t enrich himself through his policies; Jackson used them to become one of the wealthiest men in the country.

Jackson’s net worth when he died is estimated at $100 million in today’s dollars. Since Jackson always stole in large quantities, it would be more fitting to have him on the $100 bill rather than the $20 bill. Jackson must be counted as one of America’s richest presidents, almost as rich as the Clintons. Democrats today host an annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, but if they were doing truth in advertising they would drop Jefferson and stick with Jackson.

In order to understand Jackson’s founding shenanigans, it’s best to begin with his inauguration day in March 1829. Thanks to the rhapsodic portraits of progressive historians, from Arthur Schlesinger to Sean Wilentz, this event has gone down in American history as the “people’s day.” For Wilentz, the symbolism of the day was Jackson’s placing himself “on the side of egalitarianism and against privilege.” Wilentz argues that “therein lies his claim to historical greatness.”
²²

While previous inaugurations were sober, dignified affairs, this one was pure chaos. People broke down barriers and roamed the White House lawn, they swarmed into the ceremonial rooms of the White House, they soiled the couches and broke china, people were climbing in and out of windows, things got so out of hand that the newly-elected president had to leave and spend the night at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.

This seems like pure plebian crassness, and it could never happen today. Today’s Democrats may claim to be the party of the people but this does not extend to having them show up
en masse
to black-tie events. I cannot see Hillary at her inauguration putting up with random hordes swarming through the Blue Room, the Red Room, and the Oval Office. If you haven’t made a big donation to the campaign, you can probably forget about getting your inaugural invitation. But in Jackson’s time it was different, and some progressive historians treat his inauguration as a special democratic moment in which Jackson showed himself truly a man of the people.

But what was it about Jackson that made the people love him so much and feel comfortable enough to treat his new house as their house? Part of the answer is that Jackson was a frontiersman who had proved himself a military hero. Even though he was barely a teenager, Jackson fought with irregular troops in the Revolutionary War. Later he led an intrepid band of Tennessee militiamen, together with slaves, free blacks, pirates, and Indians, to victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

These exploits are somewhat ambiguous. As a brash fourteen-year-old, Jackson was captured by the British before he could do much fighting, and contracted smallpox soon afterward. Thus the notion that he was a “hardened veteran” in his early teens seems to be a product of hagiography, not history. Jackson surely deserved his reputation for toughness in triumph over the British in New Orleans; in this sense, his nickname Old Hickory seems fully justified.

Yet even this New Orleans triumph is vitiated somewhat when we recall that he was, even then, strong-arming his Indian compatriots to part with their land. In a manner that anticipates the intrigues and purges of the Clintons, Jackson seems to have been almost as dangerous to his allies as he was to his enemies.

Jackson’s personal life, while unexceptional for a frontiersman, was nevertheless below the standard that Americans had previously expected from their foremost citizen. Arriving in Nashville in 1788, Jackson took up with a woman, Rachel Donelson Robards. Later it turned out that
Robards was separated from her husband but due to various complications the couple had never been legally divorced.

When Jackson ran for president in 1824 and again in 1828, his opponents accused him of wife stealing and bigamy. The accusations were unfair because Jackson did not know about Rachel’s divorce complications. Eventually Rachel got a legal divorce and she and Jackson were formally married. Still, an aura of controversy surrounded this issue throughout Jackson’s presidency.

Jackson was also known as a peevish, hot-tempered man who got into fights and provoked fights when there were none to be had. Fights in the Old South could easily escalate into lethal duels. Jackson almost got into a duel with Tennessee Governor John Sevier—a veteran of the American Revolution—in a squabble over who should head the state militia.

He dueled over a personal issue with another man, Charles Dickinson, and killed him. Jackson too was wounded, taking a bullet in his chest that remained lodged there for the rest of his life. Men of this rough mettle are often admired but rarely loved, so the mystery of Jackson’s inaugural popularity remains to be solved.

AL CAPONE, MAN OF THE PEOPLE

I believe we can understand what was going on with Jackson and his inaugural mob if we fast forward about a century and envision a similar scene, this one involving the mafia chieftain Al Capone entering the Chicago baseball stadium. When Capone did this, the crowd would go into a frenetic roar, and people would throw their hats up and yell, “Big Al! Big Al! Big Al!”

Capone, of course, was a mobster, so why was the crowd for him? The reason is that he was
their
mobster. As many in Chicago saw it, Capone was merely feeding their insatiable appetite for liquor, gambling tables, and women. Prostitution and gambling were illegal at the time, as was alcohol. Still, there was a demand for those things and Capone provided them. Naturally, the people were appreciative. They wanted,
and he delivered. He may have gone around the law to do it but was there any other way to achieve the same result? Clearly not.

The reason for Jackson’s inaugural popularity was that he was a nineteenth-century Al Capone. The people celebrated in Jackson’s White House because he was responsible for them obtaining the land to build their own houses. Jackson became a “man of the people” by providing them with something they wanted that they could not secure for themselves, namely, the land belonging to the Native Americans. Jackson was the consummate thief, and his people appreciated that quality in him.

In this case Jackson didn’t do things exactly the Capone way. He didn’t really go around the law; he made the law. He was a law unto himself. That’s because he had the troops and the guns to make the Indians do his bidding. Of course Jackson wasn’t getting the Indians off their land simply because he wanted to help poor whites to have their own land. What Jackson also wanted was the votes of those people. He was willing to make land available to them knowing that this would make them into his lifelong supporters and constituents.

To restate Jefferson’s formulation, Jackson had something that poor whites wanted—namely land—and they had something he wanted—namely their political support. Jackson thus established the Democratic Party’s vote-getting strategy for nearly two centuries right up to the present day: rob Peter to pay Paul.

In order to win the votes of poor white settlers, Jackson had to prove that he was more ruthless than they were. This was necessary because Jackson had to convince them that he could deliver something that they could not obtain for themselves, namely the possessions of some very powerful and warlike Indian nations. In the early nineteenth century, the Deep South region south of Tennessee and all the way to Florida was occupied by several tribes: the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek, the Cherokee, and the Seminole.