Unlearning the American Myth (Part 3)

Make America Great Again, 1811-1828

The previous post in the series: Frontier Fantasies can be found here.

Make America Great Again, 1811-1828

To unlearn the American myth we first need to understand what it is and how it formed. Writing this series is helping me get a deeper sense for that history, and that in turn, helps me understand how we got here and what we’re up against. I hope it will support you too.

One of the themes that interests me as I explore this territory are the forks in the road, the moments the country as a whole was presented with circumstances and choices, decisive moments that put values and intentions to the test and shaped future directions, including the psychological development of the American mind and myth.

I also think of these choice points as “slippery slopes” presenting very real possibilities of slippage and decline, of failure to achieve a higher ground and live up to the rhetoric of freedom. Lots has been said about the genocide of Native Americans perpetrated by our ancestors. Here I’ll just say that expansion and the way it was undertaken was a choice. It may not have seemed like much of a choice at the time, given the white supremacy and entitlement already present in the “God given” nature of a project that was expansionist at its core. Still and all, it was a choice and a defining moral challenge—one that continues to reverberate and impact us today.

As before, unless otherwise cited, everything that follows is based on The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin.

And so we continue here in Part Three with the expansionist mindset and the decisive historical figure of Andrew Jackson, who in the words of Howard Zinn, “was the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American History” (1).

Andrew Jackson: Portrait of an Extremist

In 1811, Andrew Jackson was still seventeen years away from winning the presidency, but was already well established in Nashville. He had been Tennessee’s first representative to Congress, been elected to the state’s Supreme Court, and also headed the Tennessee militia. He grew wealthy as a lawyer, merchant, horse breeder, and planter, profiting greatly from the nexus of slavery and the taking of Native American lands. Greg Grandin offers a story about Jackson which foretells much about the nation’s direction and divided nature:

In the winter of 1811, Jackson was moving a “coffle”—a procession of enslaved people, often roped by the neck—along the Natchez Trace, when he was stopped by Silas Dinsmore, a federal agent. The Trace passed through Chickasaw and Choctaw lands, nominally protected by federal treaty, and government agents like Dinsmore were charged with checking the passports of travelers for a number of legitimate reasons. When asked if he had his papers, Jackson replied, “Yes sir, I always carry mine with me.” He meant the U.S. Constitution, which was “sufficient passport to take me where ever my business leads me.”

Unwilling to offer more than that (except, we might assume, the threat of violence), he was eventually waved through, and then proceeded to launch a campaign to have Dinsmore removed from his position, threatening vigilante justice for anyone hindering the free movement of himself and other slavers. He specifically threatened to burn “Silas Dinsmore in the flames of his agency house” adding, “The citizens say they will remove the nuisance, if the Government does not” and were “ready to burst forth in Vengeance.”

So there, on that country back road, more than half a century before the Civil War, two different, racialized definitions of sovereign liberty faced off against each other. The first, represented by Jackson, imagined “free born” to mean white born and “liberty” to mean the ability to do whatever they wanted. The second, embodied by Agent Dinsmore, authorized federal authorities to take action to provide minimal protection to the subjugated and vanquished victims of the “free born.”

Shortly after that incident, the Tennessee state legislature ordered the creation of a “sufficient force to exterminate the Creek Nation.” Jackson led the campaign and distinguished himself with his brutality, encouraging his men to “pant with vengeance” and turn themselves into “engines of destruction.” They did just that, and Jackson imposed a treaty on the Creeks that Henry Clay, who Grandin calls the last great pre-Jacksonian statesman, thought of as the most hateful document ever produced in the whole history of human diplomacy.

Jackson went on to make a national name for himself defeating the British in the 1812 battle of New Orleans, subduing Seminoles in Florida, and the Chickasaw in Tennessee and Alabama. He kept Indian skulls as trophies and his men cut long strips of skin from their victims to use as bridle reins. And throughout it all, he used the “immutable laws of self-defense” as justification (2).

The Jacksonian Legacy

Madison and Monroe distrusted Jackson. Jefferson disliked him intensely, saying he was “much alarmed at the idea of Jackson becoming president: “He is one of the most unfit I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions….His passions are terrible…he is a dangerous man.” And yet, Grandin tells us that all three of them came to depend on Jackson for their own expansionist reasons.

For his part, Jefferson believed that the “final consolidation” of American liberty wouldn’t be achieved until the surface of the continent had been occupied by white people with neither “blot” nor “mixture on that surface.” Jackson was the one willing to continue the dirty work.

And so it was that the founder’s coalition well apart. The last president to represent that coalition, although too young to be a founder himself, was John Quincy Adams. He opposed slavery and the dispossession of Native Americans. He resisted pressure to escalate tensions with Mexico. He did, however, favor expansion, claiming that the U.S. was “destined by God and nature to be coextensive with the North American continent.” Good intentions toward the Indians, blacks, and Mexicans could not be squared with expansionist aspirations, and the Jacksonians stepped in with a simple solution: remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, defend and extend slavery.

Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams in 1828 to become the seventh president of the U.S. Some still consider his two terms “the fulfillment of the promise of the American revolution’s anti-aristocratic aspirations, a moment of boisterous egalitarianism in which restless white workers armed with the vote became a political force.”

Jackson was all about limited government and promised to bring back “primitive simplicity and purity,” to “restore” government institutions to what he said was their original minimal design, and prohibit the restricting of human liberty, free enterprise, and property rights, including the right to own other human beings.

The Jacksonian consensus was powerful. It unleashed market capitalism by stealing Indian property and celebrating a minimal state, even as it increased the capacity of the state to push the frontier forward.” Up until Lincoln’s victory in 1860, a series of Jackson’s successors continued to unite slavers and settlers under a banner of freedom from restraint and white supremacy.

Some social demands were met in this era, but as Grandin points out, the cult of minimal government was designed to forestall one particular demand, one made with increasing force: the emancipation of slaves and destruction of that institution.

Conclusion

In the last post I mentioned that Jackson appears to be Trump’s favorite among past presidents (3). Despite all his lying, Trump, like Jackson, is unabashed in his racism and brutality. Like Jackson in his time, Trump pushes his extremism to the limits.

Jackson’s priorities were clear: limited government in service to the capitalist elite and continued expansion. Referring to that era, Grandin makes the important point that, “Mobilized to defend a system of racial domination, the ideal of a limited federal government is itself inescapably racialized.”

In just this much of the history we can see the extent to which white supremacy, American exceptionalism, narrow views of freedom, and the normalization of violence and its justification have been central to the American story from the beginning. Good intentions, at times, are part of the story too, but don’t tend to withstand the raw forces of power and privilege.

In the next post, we’ll jump to 1846 and the war against Mexico, which Ulysses S. Grant, who helped win the war, called, “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation.” We’ll see how this war was another slippery slope, unleashing new levels of racist violence and an expansionist mindset that knew no limits.

The next post in this series can be found here.

Endnotes

1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1990.

2. Ibid.

3. Donald Trump's Hero is Andrew Jackson, YouTube video.