Still Liking the Crazy Old Tennessean, Harsh Facts Notwithstanding

The way we used to teach it in History and Government classes, there were two basic categories of Presidents: Loose Constructionists and Strict Constructionists.

A Strict Constructionist is a nail-biter, always playing by the rules, always afraid of going too far, never daring to take very many chances. He builds his presidency STRICTLY on what Article 2 of the Constitution says he can do. If it doesn't say he can do something, he assumes that he can't do it.

The Loose Constructionist is, well, loose! He doesn't particularly care what the Constitution says he can do. He won't restrict himself unless the document specifically forbids him to do something. Even then, he might step over the line, if he thinks it's for the good of the nation. Take for example, Mr. Lincoln. He has often been vilified for his suspension of the right of Habeus Corpus. No charges . No trials. If he believed that someone was a threat to the Union which he was trying to restore, then they were off the streets in a hurry. "More rogues than honest men find shelter under Habeus Corpus" he explained.

Thomas Jefferson is another example of a Loose Constructionist, which is quite funny when you reflect that he'd always criticized the first two presidents for doing anything that was not specifically spelled out as alright under the Constitution. Imagine his embarrassment when Napoleon stole Spain, put his little brother on its throne, and then offered to sell us the Louisiana Territory for about 3 cents per acre. Did it say anywhere in Article 2 that the President can double the size of the country in a private deal and with a stroke of his pen? Well, no, but you see, this is the deal of a lifetime. Congress would only blow it. We don't have time to wait for those idiots. We have to act right now. We have to be, er, uh, loose constructionist about this.

Poor guy. I've always felt bad for him about that. I'll always recall an episode of that show called Family Ties (wasn't that the title?) in which Michael J. Fox plays a conservative teenager in a family of liberals or apathetics. His gorgeous sister, almost as old as him, doesn't care at all about politics, past or present. But her lovely blonde History teacher insists that she be able to describe verbally why it was so hard for Jefferson to face the Louisiana Purchase problem. She eventually got it right, but her first try was a joyfully funny failure. She was a slave to fashion, so she said something like, "Considering it was from France, it was a steel." Or something like that. I recall laughing until I cried.

The loosest of the loose constructionists was probably Andrew Jackson, although arguments could be made for Mr. Lincoln or either Roosevelt. Jackson approached every problem with his mind already set on a solution he thought was best for the country. He could turn his intimidating anger on and off as though with a switch. It was part of how he got his way around Capitol Hill. I think it was Van Buren who told the story of how he was in the oval office with General Jackson one day when a congressman was shown it who had opposed one of Jackson's bills in the House. Van Buren said that Jackson had been reclining on the couch, but, upon seeing the hapless representative, he shot up into a fully erect stance of righteous outrage and shouted and cussed the fellow black in the face. When the trembling man was shown out, the chief executive reclined again, grinning at Van Buren, and saying, "He thought I was mad."

Nobody ever felt nothing about Jackson. You either hated his guts or you loved him like God. In his war with "the Monster Bank" as he called The Second Bank of the United States, he pulled no punches. Vetoing a new recharter act for it was not enough. He wanted to kill Nicholas Biddle's bank. So, without asking anyone whether it was alright, he gave orders for all the deposits that the Federal government had in that bank to be moved out of it and placed, instead, in 89 little state banks. People came to call them Jackson's "Pet Banks." With its chief depositor no longer a customer, the bank died pretty quickly, and in its desperate efforts to save itself, it began doing what it had done to cause the Panic of 1819, namely calling in all its loans from the little "wildcat banks" who, in turn, began calling in all their loans to farmers and land developers. This resulted in the Panic of 1837. But that didn't happen until after Andy Jackson was safe back at home in the Hermitage, outside Nashville, Tennessee.

I was reminded tonight by an interview with a Lamanite woman who teaches History at a University back east, just how much some American Indians hate Jackson. Several other presidents before and after him had favored moving various tribes and nations against their will to the western territories which eventually became Oklahoma. But Jackson was the one who made it official and pushed out several tribes at bayonet point, forcing them along what became known as "the Trail of Tears." She and another interviewee both pointed out that lots of Indians to this day would rather have two ten dollar bills than one twenty. She even compared Jackson to Hitler, a statement which made me wonder whether she'd ever spent much time studying the history of National Socialism in Germany.

Still, it sort of makes sense. Many died of exposure, exhaustion, and disease along the trail. Others died, it is said, of a broken heart at being uprooted by force from ancestral lands, lands which had been promised to them by government "agents" who had little authority and were never in office later on when it was convenient for the U.S. Government to alter or even abbrogate the treaty. I took a course once called "Jacksonian America." After doing all the textual and outside readings on the subject of the Trail of Tears, I came to the sad conclusion that Jackson had little or no choice in that horrendous affair. What, after all, were his choices at a time when whites were greedily grabbing at lands which had already been promised to such nations as the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Seminoles? If he ignored the situation, the whites would have started a war anyway, as some of them were already starting to do. He couldn't very well send in the army to shoot the greedy whites. They were his constituents and many had been his neighbors. He didn't want to go in with the army and kill ALL the Indians. So, for some historians, he was doing the only thing he could do, the lesser of two atrocities, you might say. Still, some hate him for it to this day. I just don't happen to be among them.

The shootout with the bigmouth Dickinson in 1806, has been offered as an example of how bloodthirsty Jackson was, but he was standing there with a .70 caliber round ball in his chest when he squeezed the trigger not once but twice (after the first try had seen the "cock" only fall to the half-cock safety position.) Knowing little details makes some men instinctively love Andrew Jackson. As he walked from the field that day, for example, his boot sloshed with the blood that had filled it when he was hit. And he kept on walking. When his second asked him about the squishy sound, he replied, "Oh, I believe that he pinked (nicked) me."

His gun fight in 1814 with the Benton brothers is a classic of western fare. He wound up stepping into a hotel doorway where his eyes needed time to adjust, time he didn't have. He caught a round ball in his shoulder which had to be removed many years later in the White House. The hilarious exchanges of letters between himself and his by-now friend, Thomas Hart Benton, as Jackson attempted to return his "property" to him after the surgery, are enough to make a brass monkey chuckle.

And who could not admire a President who knocks down his own assassin and then belabors him about the neck and ears until congressmen and cabinet members have to pull him off the insane Brit so something would be left to arrest? Richard Lawrence "got off" on a plea of insanity. But getting off on such a plea in 1835 wasn't quite as good as it might be today. Asylums back then were places of horror almost beyond imagining. He might have been better off hanging as the prosecutor, Francis Scott Key, had originally designed.

And then there are his military successes. Mere extra-constitutional adventurism I think I hear some liberals saying. Tough! He stole Florida at just the right time to make it ours with no real expense, at least none that left the country. He beat the Creeks in 1814 and the Brits in 1815. He was a winner, and if there's anything the people of this country have always loved it's a winner. He had nerve and physical courage. He was everything that Americans knew they wanted to be. He was a self-made man who had been born on the dirt floor of a log cabin in South Carolina to a desperately poor Irish widow. He had felt a British saber on his head when he was still small, had fought men of every color, had defended his wife's honor from insults both real and imagined, and had won the popular majority in three elections, although a thing he called a "corrupt bargain" had kept him from getting the Electoral College majority in the 1824 contest.

Why should I feel that I have to apologize for loving this old coot? Only because it's no longer politically correct to love people like him. But he defined the American character for more than a century. In many ways, we still see ourselves as being like him. And we like it. No, I don't think I can apologize this time. Andrew Jackson goes down in the plus column in my opinion.