Old Hickory wouldn't have stood for it

I hate to agree with Trump, but indeed there probably wouldn't have been a civil war if Andrew Jackson was president in 1860. (headsup Anne Althouse)

History has been rewritten since then to emphasize slavery, but actually back then, people saw themselves as citizens of their own states, not of the United States. That was why Robert E Lee refused to stay in the Union army: Because he would have had to kill his neighbors in Virginia.

but the civil war was about saving the Union. True, the south tried to leave because of the slavery issue, but that was only part of the industrial north vs agricultural south tensions that was upsetting the Southeners and had been for decades.

The issue of federal law nullification by states first came up when the Jackson vs Calhoun fight when he was president, and this showed Jackson felt the federal government and the union should outweigh the desires of individual states.

VOA article about this can be read here.

read the whole thing.

it was about tariffs, and South Carolina said it could nullify the law that they didn't agree with, and would withdraw from the Union if they weren't allowed to do it.

Jackson said no, and he sent in the military to emphasize this, while offering a compromise which was later passed by congress.

But southerners continued to believe they didn't have to obey federal law, and tried it again in 1860.

and this time, with a nicer guy as president who was too slow at nipping it in the bud.

The BBC hand picked historians disagree, of course. But to them Jackson, like Trump, is a bad man, and everything is about race and slavery. And of course, it was not. They are interpreting this as modern men. I mean, one even states

 Blight: Jackson had absolutely no vision of any kind of racial egalitarianism.

uh, whatever that means.

Yet Jackson did manage to fight the Battle of New Orleans with a multi racial and multi cultural army that included "free men of colour", French pirates, and some local AmerIndians.

so here, it sounds like Trumpie boy is again upsetting the press, and if anyone in the press can google, maybe they can figure out what he means, and maybe even find he is right, instead of asking politically correct historians their opinion.


all of this has resonance with California and other Democratic states refusing to obey the federal laws and eve talking about seceding.