Jackson and Trump have a lot in common. Pictured: President Andrew Jackson.
In the second part of this examination into America’s first populist president, the reasons for understanding President Donald Trump as heir to the President Andrew Jackson legacy will be further affirmed. In the first piece of this series, reference was made to the Free Press podcast called Breaking History. The author owes credit to Eli Lake for large portions of this article.
Jackson’s rise to power coincided with the expansion of the vote to landless white men. The immigrants who lived in East Coast cities and those who farmed the frontier land loved Jackson like the working-class minorities and white tradesmen have been drawn to Trump. Jackson fought for the forgotten folks, those overlooked by the elite. That rhymes with what Trump means to millions across America.
While different in their backgrounds, Trump’s rhetoric sounds familiar to Jackson’s references to class consciousness. Jackson, a son of poverty gained his chops from war and came to the presidency after serving as a judge, a general, a member of Congress and a senator. Trump’s first political job was the presidency. On banking and money, they would have found little common ground. They would have joined forces when upending the complacent and condescending elite. As this author mentioned in part one, Alexis de Tocqueville called Jackson “the spokesman of provincial jealousies.”
What Jackson called the corrupt bargain, Trump referred to as stop the steal. In the 1824 election, four candidates emerged, all from the same party. Jackson won the most electoral votes but fell short of a majority sending the election to the House of Representatives as per the 12th Amendment to the Constitution. (The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President).
Jackson believed that having secured the popular vote he should be allotted the victory. Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, and the third candidate, supported John Quincy Adams. Later, after Adams assumed office, Clay was named Secretary of State. Jackson objected and his supporters felt stiffed. Clay was accused of putting personal ambition ahead of the nation. This unresolved grievance powered Jackson’s 1828 campaign much like Trump supporters convinced themselves (with no legal evidence) that the 2020 election was stolen.
Four years later Adams knew Jackson would be back, but he and his campaign believed they had something in their back pocket as insurance. Jackson married Rachel Robards in 1791 following her divorce from Louis Robards in 1790. However, the divorce did not become legal until 1793. The Jacksons had to marry again creating a scandal for those in the East. David Brown, author of The First Populist, The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson wrote, “It did not cost him votes, though, in the West, probably parts of the East as well, like much of upstate New York or Pennsylvania. I think that these communities, they recognize that in the West, customs were different, that amenities were different, and Jackson and Rachel, they did what they did because that’s how people in the West lived, which is not knowingly and big of me. So, you can look at this in a number of different ways.” An East versus West rivalry arose and questioning his marriage meant undermining his wife’s honour. The only way to deal with that was a duel.
Jackson loved to duel, a tradition originally from Europe where disputes could be settled in an officiated gunfight. Jackson challenged Charles Dickinson to pistols at dawn because Dickinson had accused Mrs. Jackson. Duel rules allowed anyone to shoot first, but then the opponent could shoot. Dickinson fired first and grazed Jackson’s ribcage and lung. Lake reports, “And then Jackson squeezed the trigger and fired at Dickinson’s heart. He didn’t miss.”
Filling a rival’s heart with lead did not go over well with the Eastern elite but the voters felt differently. They didn’t care about bigamy or duelling, just like they didn’t seem to care about Trump being convicted of paying hush money, being charged with sharing classified documents or being found guilty of sexual harassment of a woman 30 years after the event where even the accuser could not remember the details of the encounter.
Sadly, instead of this being Jackson’s apex, the period turned bittersweet because his beloved Rachel died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve, 1828 after seeing a pamphlet that accused her of adultery. Jackson blamed his opponents and began his term wanting retribution. He targeted the government and banks like Trump targeted the media and the deep state. Jackson fired 919 civil servants to start his term, a huge number at the time, appointing his vice-president, Martin Van Buren (who succeeded him in 1837) to divide up the “spoils of government jobs to the victors in the President’s new coalition.” Jackson understood his mandate to be reform with little need to be polite.
Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s first-term advisors, observed “…populism’s restrictions is always the ruling class or the established order. They’re not going to give it up and they think they can wait you out because history shows they can wait you out. They control the institutions, they control education, they control the money centers. This is just about in every populist revolution.”
Trump will go to war with the deep state, the media, and maybe with Canada and Mexico. Jackson’s war was against the Second National Bank of the United States and the Hamiltonians, a fight that goes back to the nation’s founding. In the third part of this series, Jackson’s fight and how Trump picked up the torch will reveal populism’s enduring presence in American politics.
Dave Redekop is a retired elementary resource teacher who worked part-time at the St. Catharines Courthouse as a Registrar until being appointed Executive Director at Redeemer Bible Church in October 2023. He has worked on political campaigns since high school and attended university in South Carolina for five years, earning a Master’s in American History with a specialization in Civil Rights. Dave loves reading biographies.
