The decision to place Harriet Tubman on the $20 instead of the $10 has generated expected – and in many cases, lamentable – criticism. Thankfully, much of it is focused on defending Jackson rather than criticizing Tubman. Still, those who wish to keep Jackson’s place on the currency have arguments that need to be addressed, in no small part because they are mistaken. The arguments tend to overlap, but I’ll attempt to address them in turn.
First, there is the “political correctness” argument, which by itself is the easiest to dismiss. I fear that many who throw this out don’t really understand how PC damages the body politic. As we argue over the latest Trump charge at supposedly PC behavior (including the Tubman-for-Jackson decision, which he has ripped), actual incidents of PC damage – such as the hideous child-molestation cover-up in Rotherham, England – are barely noticed here. Those who insist Jackson remain to “remember history” are not in fact remembering history, but rather remembering a certain historiography that no longer holds. Why should the 20th Century opinion of Jackson (who was placed on the $20 in 1928 – WaPo) hold anymore credence than the 21st Century opinion of him?
To be fair, most of Jackson’s defenders are instead looking to the contemporary opinion of him, and complaining that it is unfair to take the seventh president out of his time and to judge him by ours. Not only do I sympathize with that argument, I actually agree with it – as far as it goes. However, it assumes that Jackson was widely acknowledged in the 1830s as a positive force for the American republic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jackson’s critics were numerous, widespread, and quite vocal in their anguish – and I humbly submit that they have been proven right.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: was Andrew Jackson’s record worthy of honor – on our currency or otherwise? Here Jackson’s defenders’ arguments finally fall short.
The most intellectually meaty argument for Jackson was that his rise to power helped democratize the American Republic. A review of the period undermines this notion fairly quickly. Contrary to the assertion of Old Hickory’s defenders, democratic reforms of state consitutions in the East began even before Jackson’s first run for the presidency in 1824. Moreover, western states entering the Union not only made their own electorates larger than in the East, but in doing so forced more democratization on said East to prevent population depletion via emigration. Where Jackson did influence democratization was in whom he left out: namely, anyone who wasn’t white. Lest we forget, Roger Taney was Jackson’s loyal Treasury Secretary before he was the author of the poisonous Dredd Scott decision (we should also remember that Jackson himself placed Taney on the bench in 1835). States that fell under Jackson’s political spell moved toward what Sean Wilentz (himself a Jackson apologist) called, “Master Race democracy”, whereas states more resistant to his charms were also more willing to include people of color on their voter rolls. I humbly submit that was no accident of correlation, as Jackson’s opponents were far more racially enlightened than we remember them to be (and certainly more than he was).
As Daniel Walker Howe noted in his seminal work, The Political Culture of American Whigs…
Two prominent Whig journals, examining certain racial theories that were beginning to be discussed at midcentury, emphatically maintained that, although different races of mankind could be distinguished, “their unity is incomparably more prominent than their diversity.” The National Intelligencer simply dismissed Demcoratic talk of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and “America’s destiny” as “political clap-trap.” When John C. Calhoun came out against the conquest of territory from Mexico because the inhabitants were racially incapable of liberty, the Whig American Review welcomed his stand but not his grounds. “Free institutions are not proper to the white man,” it insisted, “but to the courageous, upright, and moral man.”
This dovetails to the issue of slavery – and Jackson’s role as one of its most prominent defenders. Much of Jackson’s defense here centers around the supposed “wide acceptance” of slavery, badly confusing acceptance for frightened tolerance. Contrary to modern thinking on the subject, abolitionists were far from the only opponents of slavery in America. It is due to their own power of voices on this issue in combination with pro-slavery attempts to tar all critics of the “peculiar institution” as extremists that we have fallen for this mistake. In fact, slavery opponents included those determined to stop its expansion but not quite ready to tackle it where it already existed; these were “free soilers,” and included in their number Abraham Lincoln right up until 1862. Less known were as those who felt allowing slavery west of the Mississippi would spread it thin enough to be more easily removed from America; they called this “diffusion” – and the tactical error in their thinking has made them largely and understandably forgotten. None other than Henry Clay pronounced himself an opponent of slavery (quoted by Wilentz in 1839, “(t)he searcher of all hearts knows that every pulsation of mine beats high and strong in the cause of civil liberty” to use the phrase of slavery opponents of the time), despite being neither an abolitionist nor a free-soiler.
Finally, we get to the hideous Trail of Tears, which was a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which Jackson strongly supported and signed into law. Jackson’s defenders have insisted that, as terrible as this was, it was part and parcel of the racist, anti-Native-American sentiment of the time. They are flat out wrong. Opposition to the act from National Republicans (as Jackson’s opponents called themselves before adopting the Whig label) was near unanimous, and nearly enough to defeat the bill in Congress. From Wilentz:
Despite intense pressure from Jakcson, twenty-four Jacksonians in the House…voted “nay,” while twelve others absented themselves…northerners broke two to one against the bill and, along with a handful of southerners, nearly defeated it. Only a solid turnout for the administration by (Jackson loyalist and future successor Martin) Van Buren’s New York delegation, along with a recovery of three Pennsylvanians who had begun to waiver, saved the measure – a move that Van Buren later said was so unpopular with New York voters that it nearly killed the Albany Regency (the term for MVB’s machine in NY).
Naturally, Jackson assumed anyone who was genuinely concerned for the to-be-displaced tribes was an opportunist who couldn’t really care about them. Indeed, as Wilentz notes:
The attacks echoed those against (Jeffersonian) Republican antislavery advocates as designing Federalists during the Missouri crisis in 1819 and 1820. Recast in the political fires of the 1830s and after, this turn of mind would complicate the Jacksonian variant of political democracy, by rendering all kinds of benevolent reform as crypto-aristocratic efforts to elevate blacks and Indians at the expense of ordinary white men.
The consequences of this are still with us today – not surprisingly, with Trump himself. It didn’t have to be this way. National Republicans and Whigs repeatedly opposed Jackson’s racialism, even if neither he nor they held opinions on race that we consider acceptable. Removing Andrew Jackson from the $20 validates those critics of him – and that is a validation they deserve.
