To fully understand Jackson’s legacy, we cannot neglect the parts that might still please us in order to emphasize the parts that we abhor. In the service of pursuing Jefferson’s vision of the United States as an “empire of liberty,” Jackson conquered lands occupied by people of another race and built the world’s first mass political party on a coalition that preserved chattel slavery. Yet as a self-made man who railed against the well-born elite, he also persuaded many white farmers and wage earners—both immigrants and the native-born—that a lack of privilege should not prevent them from thriving.
Instead of splitting the two Jacksons, we should be figuring out how to understand them together—as they were in reality. Jackson’s “democracy” was clearly liberating for some and repressive for others. It was also popular: A majority of Americans supported slavery and shared his choice of adversaries and friends. In 1819, Congress held a long debate about whether to censure Jackson for his rogue invasion of what was then Spanish Florida. Here’s why, according to Opal, the lawmakers in Washington decided to back off: “Rooted in the extreme devotion of white households from enemy [Native American] country and the proliferating institution of slavery, [Jackson’s support] reached into the raucous seaports of the east coast, the camp meetings of frontier towns, and the officer corps of the U.S. Army and Navy. It included women as well as men, children as well as parents. It was…largely southern and western but also urban. It was, in a word, Jacksonian.”
One cannot appreciate Jackson, the tough-talking populist and partisan, without understanding that his popular appeal was as much due to his defense of slavery, his years of killing Native Americans, and his simplistic grasp of economics as it was to his rhetorical defense of white workers and small farmers. In truth, much of American history has epitomized this dilemma: freedom built on the backs of the enslaved and exploited, justice and injustice bound together in the hearts of the same people and institutions. Trump will never truly understand the nature of this bedeviling paradox, even as he embodies it.