Old Hickory

Andrew Jackson was a hero. While still a boy and a prisoner of war captured by the British, he stubbornly refused to clean an enemy officer’s boots, suffering instead a retaliatory slash with a sabre, which left scars on his hand, face, and psyche which he bore all his life.

Orphaned at he age of 14, he educated himself, reading law while working at a saddle-maker’s shop. He taught school, practiced law, and his extraordinary abilities soon manifested themselves. He rose, even as a young man, quickly to every kind of leadership position in frontier Tennessee. in 1796, he became that new state’s first representative in Congress, and the next year was promoted to the Senate. He became commander of the state’s militia in 1801.

In 1814, he defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. And in January of 1815, he won perhaps the most astonishing and decisive American military victory of all-time at New Orleans. Outnumbered by more than two-to-one by veteran elite British officers and regulars fresh from the Peninsular War, where they had defeated the same French infantry which had conquered all of Europe, Jackson carefully deployed an extremely mixed force made up of American regulars; Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana militia; and even Baratarian pirates behind three hastily constructed lines of earthworks. Jackson successfully obliged the British to attack frontally, and arranged to take the advancing British under indirect fire before they were even within sight of his position. The results were astonishing. The British took more than 2000 casualties. Both the Commanding General Pakenham and his second-in-command were mortally wounded. The American side had 62 casualties, and only 13 killed. Never elsewhere in history did such an apparently disadvantageous mismatch of forces deliver such a one-sided victory for the underdog.

Later, in national politics, Jackson led a libertarian, populist revolution, capturing the presidency, reining in Federal expansion in favor of individual and state’s rights, facing down nullification and secessionism, shutting down the second US Bank, and establishing a long 30 years of political dominance by his party, which ended only with the election of Lincoln, Civil War, and the armed conquest of the Southern states by the Federal government.

Barack Obama is proving himself once again the vengeful upstart of mixed race determined to punish white America by supplanting its heroes and symbols with black replacements and icons of the radical left.

Jackson is to be set aside in favor of Harriet Tubman, an unprofitable and unsaleable family servant from Maryland who preferred to decamp from her domestic chores to New York State, where she could instead give speeches, be fawned over, and live on the bounty of Northern radicals. Tubman was illiterate and the few factual details known of her life did not prevent the publication in recent decades of a whole series of hagiographic biographies intended to inflate her into a major national figure. It has been remarked, more than once, that school children today are likely to hear a lot more about Harriet Tubman than about George Washington.

The announcement that Tubman’s unattractive visage would be replacing General Jackson’s on the $20 was widely hailed by Quisling conservatives, eager to avoid becoming the objects of racial accusation, as a victory for private gun possession (apparently, when leading some of her relatives out of Maryland, Harriet Tubman carried a revolver which she used to threaten to execute on the spot any of her liberated beneficiaries who happened to try to change their minds about relocating to the North) and Republicanism, carefully overlooking the obvious fact that the Republican Party of the 1850s was the party of radicalism, statism, and leftism, precisely what the Democrat Party is today; while today’s Republican Party is the party of limited government, of individual and states’ rights, of strict constructionism, in fact, the true heir to the philosophy of Andrew Jackson.

Nobody in the Conservative Movement is defending President Jackson these days, except for Pat Buchanan and, deep, deep in the fever swamp, Alexander Hart at Peter Brimelow’s VDare.