The White House circulated this photo
from last night’s televised speech. What’s behind President Trump’s affinity
for Andrew Jackson? I cannot read the president’s mind—but I share the
following letter from President Jackson, written in 1835, while he was
president. I see similarities in the two presidents' tone and treatment of
non-citizens—and also their propensity to use violent rhetoric in making political arguments.
Here is the background: In 1835, Northern
abolitionists sent propaganda to the South.
U.S. postmasters refused to deliver many of these letters; and Southern
whites destroyed letters, in violation of federal law. President Jackson
responded by attacking the abolitionists who used the mail service legally and
peacefully:
“I have read with sorrow and regret
that such men (abolitionists) live in our country— I might have said monsters— as to be guilty
of the attempt to stir up amongst the South the horrors of a servile war. Could
they (the abolitionists) be reached, they ought to be made to atone for this
wicked attempt, with their lives. But we are the instruments of, and executors
of the law; we have no power to prohibit anything from being transported in the
mail that is authorized by the law... [The postmaster should] deliver to no
person those inflammatory papers, but those who are really subscribers for
them... The postmaster ought to take the
names down, and have them exposed thro the public journals as subscribers to
this wicked plan of exciting the negroes to insurrection and to massacre.”
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