"Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?" President Donald Trump rhetorically asked Washington Examiner columnist Salena Zito. "I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn't have had the Civil War....he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'"
This much is true: Andrew Jackson, who was president from 1829-1837, helped to avert a plausible civil war, generations before the actual one. In the 1830’s, South Carolina insisted on its right to nullify, or ignore, federal law. The South Carolinians objected to taxes — federal tariffs on the imported goods they were buying from Europe. Jackson insisted that federal law reigned supreme. Through a carefully calibrated mixture of threats (a warship actually appeared in the harbor at Charleston, ready to open fire if need be) and compromises (Congress cut the tariff a little), he persuaded the nullifiers to back down. But this is also true: Jackson never questioned the underlying, fundamental difference between North and South, which was on slavery. He didn’t actually disagree with his fellow Southern leaders about that issue. It was much, much harder to compromise as the Civil War broke out in 1861, because the nation was more squarely confronting that issue.
Okay, so I think you can see why the talking head pundits weren't able to fully explain the context in three seconds or less, but Inskeep's insight speaks to why the President said what he said. He continues:
Northern votes had just elected Abraham Lincoln, a president from an allegedly radical new party that insisted that slavery was wrong and must be contained to the South. Southerners saw this as a threat to their property, and tried to secede from the Union. From the very beginning the South tried to obscure what the conflict was truly about, citing state rights, Southern theories of liberty, or the economic oppression of the North; but the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, made it plain in a speech: the United States was in “error” to believe in “the equality of the races,” and the Confederacy aimed to build on a different foundation. People did try, desperately, to “work out” that problem before the shooting started in 1861, but it was in the end an irreconcilable difference.
In other words, as Lowry points out was obviously Trump's point, "Jackson had no patience for nullification or secession."
Kudos to one media outlet for getting that.
Image Credit: WikiCommons
h/t National Review
