The Jackson Portrait

Chuzzlewit Nation

The mysteries of the current Administration can be explained in a picture.

It sits in the White House, after decades of obscurity.

It’s a portrait of Andrew Jackson (right), whom the incumbent has sought to emulate throughout his public life.

Jackson was an autocrat who pretended to be a democrat. He was a white supremacist, an enslaver who launched the Trail of Tears. It was Jackson who created the spoils system, corrupt patronage employment that lasted until the 1880s and is now making a comeback.

The Jon Meacham biography of Jackson’s White House years is called American Lion, and it’s not a compliment. Jackson was a vicious, brutal man who remade America in his image. A Trumpian image.

The data center boom of Jackson’s era was the canal mania. His political opponents, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, had put together an American System in which government would direct progress using a Bank of the United States, whose charter was renewed for 20 years in 1816.

Jackson preferred a “free market” approach, speculators hawking plans to build canals wherever insiders had land. His great economic achievement was destroying the Bank, whose charter expired in 1836. Under Jackson, both economic and political power were held by crooked insiders who ground honest investors under their heels.

Almost as soon as Jackson left office, the boom busted, a lost economic decade that began with the Panic of 1837. The resulting depression was fought with war, with Manifest Destiny. It ended with the 1848 discovery of gold in California, American only thanks to a war of aggression against Mexico.

History Repeats?

This is the era we’re now recapitulating.

It was lampooned by Charles Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit, the story of a naïve Englishman stripped of his money and humiliated on the altar of American greed. (The 1994 mini-series was forgettable, despite Tom Wilkinson’s best efforts.)

Jackson stood for election three times, winning power partly on the charge the 1824 election was “stolen.” It wasn’t stolen. Jackson had the most votes, but the system of the time threw the decision to the House of Representatives, which selected Adams (left) after a deal with Clay.

But here’s the thing. Adams was right. He was right about everything. He was right about the American System. Adams was also right about the need for government to control speculation, about slavery, about all of it. It was Adams who wrote the Monroe Doctrine, not as an invitation to Empire but to South American self-government. Adams was only the second American President to not be an enslaver. The first was his father.

Adams, however, was a stern, moralistic man, from a time when the church and colleges in Massachusetts still maintained their pilgrim heritage. He entered diplomatic service at 14 and served for over 40 years. It wasn’t an image that was easy to love. Adams also represented the interests of the new Industrial Revolution, before it could compete economically with slavery.

The oligarchs of Adams’ day were the enslavers. History has yet to reckon with the economic power of slavery. The West Indies was the globe’s great source of wealth until slavery ended, and the American South quickly replaced it. These enslavers were Jackson’s base, and his shock troops were ‘pioneers’ heading west to create new slave plantations, in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

The Coming Panic

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.

Jackson used the “theft” of 1824 (it wasn’t a theft) to crush his opponents four years later. The current President used the “theft” of 2020 (it wasn’t a theft) to crush his opponents in 2024.

The difference, of course, is that Jackson could roll his program through to his retirement, while the current President remains in office as everything goes to hell. It is going to hell. The market is set for panic, and people are being pressed toward revolt.

You can’t go to war against both the whole world and your own people, and win. Jackson was popular, and his conflicts wholly domestic. This Administration has made enemies of allies and lost a war, taking the wrong side in every possible conflict.

If Jackson were still President in 1837, rather than his campaign manager, would our history have turned out differently?

I don’t know, but we may be about to find out.