Dr. David Heidler on Andrew Jackson & American Democracy

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve Podcast. I’m your host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and happy to be joined by our guest co-host, Minnesota Retired Supreme Court Justice Barry Anderson. Welcome back.

[00:00:33] Barry Anderson: Delighted to be with you and our guests this afternoon. We’re going to have a great time with this interview and our program today, and I’m very much delighted to be part of the effort. So let’s get rolling.

[00:00:45] Alisha Searcy: Let’s get rolling. Well, speaking of getting rolling, let’s start with the stories of the week. I am going to talk about a story that was in the 74. entitled Black and Hispanic Voters Say Democrats Aren’t Focused Enough on K 12 Education. And as our listeners know, I am the Southern Regional President of Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now.

[00:01:08] And so when you talk about Democrats and education and Black and Hispanic voters, you are absolutely in my lane. And this was a particularly important article for me because we’ve done at DFER a very similar poll about essentially the attitudes of voters and how they feel about both parties when it comes to education.

[00:01:30] And what we’ve learned in our work is that Democrats in particular have sort of lost the trust of voters. We used to be the party known to be strong on education, and we’ve kind of lost that. And that’s disappointing for me because education is such a critical issue for me. I’m definitely a one issue voter for that matter.

[00:01:49] And so in this poll, it’s mostly about sort of what’s happening at the congressional level, but I would argue, Judge, that This is prevalent across the country and across all races, and by races I mean political races. So, at the state legislative level, even school board, you know, all over the place. And so, what’s important here, when I think about these stats, when I think about how voters in general are feeling about education, I need one of these parties, and I’m a Democrat, so I’m going to say I need Democrats to step up when it comes to education.

[00:02:23] This poll talks about And so I think if people are going to talk about what should be on the agenda, we know that the economy is important. We know in terms of this presidential election, we know that the border is important and all these issues are certainly things that we should be talking about.

[00:02:47] I want to see education as one of the top three issues in this country. I can’t think of a more important issue as a parent. My husband and I are raising three school age kids. We’re making decisions about where they’re going to school and the quality of their education every day. We’re making sure they’re getting their homework done and all of the things, right?

[00:03:06] We’re trying to make sure that our kids are. prepared for college and career, and it worries me that voters aren’t thinking about education as one of the top three issues, but I think this poll is helpful in making that argument that those who do deem it as important want to make sure that Democrats in particular are raising education as their top issue, that they are Talking about things like public school choice that they’re talking about, it’s not in this article, but I would argue, you know, things like science of reading and accountability and making sure that we know how kids are doing so that we can give the supports that teachers and students need if they’re not performing well and that we are in the classroom.

[00:03:48] We’re offering an education system that works for all of our kids. And so great article, I think we’ve got to do better as Democrats in particular to make sure voters know that we are the leaders on these issues and that we can get things done on behalf of kids. What do you think, Judge?

[00:04:04] Barry Anderson: Before I get to my article, I want to say how much I agree with you that there, I think there is some room for bipartisanship, maybe nonpartisanship even, on this issue.

[00:04:13] Obviously, there are forces on both sides that are very political and seek political advantage, but when you talk to parents and teachers, You know, a lot of that drops away. And so particularly on the school choice front, I think there is some potential here to do something from a nonpartisan standpoint, you know, there are very few states that are doing really well on this issue.

[00:04:34] And so some humility really is in order. We need to be looking for things that work, do those things, not do so many things that do not work. And when you talk about the science of reading, I think that’s a good place to start. So, as it happens. My article is, uh, also related to an education topic, and it comes from the Omaha newspaper.

[00:04:55] Berkas, crosses, cornrows, yarmulkes are now acceptable in Nebraska schools. And more, more than that, they’re permitted according to the state board of education. The article doesn’t go into a lot of detail of some of the history here, but this has been a long running conversation in various parts of the state.

[00:05:12] Parts of the country about dress codes and what kinds of things are permitted and not permitted. And when you get to be 70 years old, you’ve seen the pendulum swing both ways. There was a time in my life experience when dress codes were very rigid and your male and female teachers showed up for, Work as teachers looking like they had just come from church.

[00:05:34] We’ve kind of moved away from that formality. Now we’re going back in a direction of giving students opportunities to express themselves. It’s interesting, the. The article doesn’t go into the underlying legal issues that are presented here, because some of these issues, of course, raise questions about religious liberty matters, and I’ll stay away from those topics except to say the article’s interesting, talks a little bit about a mom whose student is going to be moving to the Aurora Middle School in Omaha, and she characterizes the dress code as problematic, because, from her perspective, it’s too restrictive. We’ll see how this all turns out. But the one thing I can say with absolute certainty is we aren’t through talking about this.

[00:06:15] Alisha Searcy: For sure. I think that’s a very important article to talk about, too, because the world that we live in now, right, has changed a lot. You talked about what teachers dressed like when you were growing up, and some could certainly argue that we wish we could go back to those days, right, in terms of a dress code for professionals.

[00:06:33] At the same time, we want our public schools to embrace students from all kinds of backgrounds and want them to be comfortable when they go to school. When I think about school safety, people often think about, you know, violence and keeping guns out, but I also think about emotional safety, right? So if I wear a yarmulke, if I wear other head garb or or anything that’s culturally relevant to me or to my religion, I want to be able to be safe in that and be comfortable and be embraced by the adults in the building and certainly the peers. And so I think this is an important conversation and important issue to pay attention to and see how this unfolds. So, thank you for that. Well, when we come back, we’re going to have the award-winning historian, David Heidler, join us. So, stay tuned.

[00:07:33] Dr. David Hedler is an award-winning historian and retired professor on the early American Republic, the Jacksonian democracy and the civil. Along with his wife, Dr. Jean Heidler, is co-author or editor of 12 books, including Old Hickory’s War, Andrew Jackson and the Quest for the Empire, Henry Clay, The Essential American, and most recently, The Rise of Andrew Jackson, Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics.

[00:08:02] Dr. Heidler has been interviewed by numerous radio, television, and print media, including C SPAN’s Q& A, Book TV, and NPR. He received his PhD in United States History from Auburn University. Dr. Heidler, it really is an honor to have you on the show today and looking forward to some great conversations. Important discussions, even though Jackson could be a thorny figure, but we’re looking forward to learning about history because we know knowing our history is very important. And so, I want to talk about from the time of 1829 to 1837, the age of Jacksonian democracy was marked by dramatic political changes in the United States. So can you talk about some of the major historical touchstones, speeches or big themes that people should understand about this era of radical reforms, if you will, sectionalism, slavery, Indian removal, and geographic expansion?

[00:09:01] David Heidler: Yes and thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here with both of you. I’m interested in the dating of Jacksonian democracy from 29 to 37, because that is the date of the Jackson administration, the political expression of the Jackson philosophy as applied in government during his two terms as president. But Jacksonian democracy, or the Age of Jackson, extends on both sides of that, possibly.

[00:09:31] Even from the period right after the end of the War of 1812, which ended in 1815, all the way up until the sectional crisis becomes especially pertinent and bothersome to the political process in the late 1840s and 50s, and we begin to see the Jacksonian consensus, such as it was, break down. The great big touchstones of this time start with the war.

[00:09:59] With Britain, the Anglo-American War of 1812, the conclusion of which saw a great massive surge of national unity, probably more so than the country had experienced, even during the revolution or immediately afterward. And from that spurred a drive for internal improvements as a move for national defense.

[00:10:21] The great problems of national defense had been exposed by the war with Britain. And revealed the need for some sort of national organization of credit and currency because of the great economic burdens the war placed, and also the need for a fundamental role. accord to protect American industry, promote American manufacturing.

[00:10:46] That period, which is the precursor of the age of Jackson, established a really more remarkable drift in the American experiment away from the concept of decentralized government, and in that we see a reaction. The reaction and the resistance of that, that is accelerated by the economic panic of 1819, in which a group of people who were quite disparate and in fact made little sense of political coalition, nevertheless found agreement in the sense that the federal government had lost touch and was pursuing policies that were actually harmful rather than helpful in promoting the from that emerged Jackson as a Simple.

[00:11:34] And in that he was. There’s a great question of whether he was a progenitor of the movement or a beneficiary of it. And probably a little bit of both, and possibly more weighted to the beneficiary of it. Because it is in Jackson that a lot of the hopes and fears and possible solutions concentrate and focus and account for his remarkable popularity.

[00:12:01] And from that, we have an era that is quite turbulent. As you mentioned, there are many reforms that are in embryonic form. They don’t really realize themselves. so much during this period as they have their origins in it and will blossom later.

[00:12:20] Alisha Searcy: So, we know that Andrew Jackson was a lawyer, planter, general, and statesman who served as the seventh president of the United States. And as the book you co-authored with your wife, Jean, The Rise of Andrew Jackson, Myth, Manipulation, and Making of Modern Politics notes, Jackson was volatile and prone to violence and well into his forties, his sole claim on the public’s affections. derived from his victory in a 30-minute battle at New Orleans in early 1815. Can you talk about the forceful, controversial Andrew Jackson, as well as how his inner circle of political managers shaped his image and charted his ascent?

[00:13:00] David Heidler: Well, yes, Jackson was enormously popular and became that way immediately upon the end of the War of 1812, when he was able to defeat the British in an astonishing victory outside of New Orleans in January of 1815, and from that derived a popularity that was virtually unassailable.

[00:13:21] I mean, a genuine American hero. on the level that the country had not seen since the days of George Washington. And on the basis of that, there were people around him who began to think that this was a popularity that could translate into a political force. Originally, this was the elevation of a regional hero who had national identity through the victory at New Orleans but was a regional figure.

[00:13:48] In late middle age, but nonetheless vital and possessed of something that is quintessentially American to his fellow country. For instance, his appearance was of a type that is perhaps more familiar to modern Americans in the form of, say, Abraham Lincoln, meaning by that, it was said of Lincoln that by no stretch of the imagination could you picture, let alone place him into a European court, or particularly on a European throne, that is an American sense of an Americanness that had great power, that you would not find someone like that in Europe, given power, or even And He was shaped by the frontier, and he was shaped in such a way to associate hardship and peril with survival, accustomed to grueling work.

[00:14:40] He was accustomed to great deprivation. He was a wilderness tamer and a bringer of law, order, security, stability. That was another. aspect of him that was quite appealing. One of the things that’s interesting about Jackson, too, is that he was perennially underestimated by his political enemies. Most of them thought in the period after the War of 1812 that he was popular, but spent, and that he did not have the necessary political instincts or experience to mount any sort of national standing.

[00:15:16] They were quite wrong about this. Jackson had really very shrewd instincts, as is obvious by his ability to suppress in himself impolitic behavior. which he was prone to do. He was able to take a fame that was derived exclusively from a military career and transform it into something else that was less troubling to Americans.

[00:15:38] He served in the Senate, which was a calculated bid to make him appear as a statesman. And he was also able to put together a coalition of these disparate elements because of a general dissatisfaction with Washington and the government there. A sense that the government there was pursuing policies that were harmful to the ordinary Americans.

[00:16:03] So ordinary Americans found in Jackson someone as an outsider, who had the fortitude and resolve and the bona fides to clean up an otherwise insoluble mess. And there’s a good deal of nostalgia in that for the virtues of the revolution transplanted into a modern setting for those Americans in the 1820s.

[00:16:26] We really did see their country in something of a malaise. The Panic of 1819 was a terrible economic catastrophe that gave rise to a lingering depression that was a source of material misery for large swaths of the population. And as a result, the idea that Jackson was a person who could do something about that.

[00:16:49] It was also a very forceful part of his personality. Political managers were able to calm his temper down or shield the public from it. They were able to. Burnish his images where the things were admirable about him and downplay those things that weren’t. They were able to make him all things to all people, which is the art of the political genius is all things to all people.

[00:17:12] He was able to appeal to manufacturers in the North. And Stace Ryder is in the South, and that is a kind of coalition that was built around him that made him incredibly electable in the sense of governing with that coalition, as would turn out was another question.

[00:17:31] Alisha Searcy: Very interesting. And so, speaking of elections, John Quincy Adams was elected president by the House of Representatives in 1824, after Andrew Jackson won the most presidential popular and electoral votes, but failed to receive a majority. And so can you talk about this election, Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1828 and 1832, and how his political party, the democracy, appealed, as you talked about, to a coalition of Poor Farmers, City Dwelling Laborers, and Immigrants.

[00:18:04] David Heidler: Sure, yeah, that’s an interesting perspective, and again it plays into the idea that the people you’ve just named, the groups of Poor Farmers, City Dwelling Laborers, and Immigrants, were people who felt themselves to be marginalized.

[00:18:20] By the political system that was catering to large manufacturing interests and creating, by that, protective tariffs that made domestic sale of goods much more expensive for people who are already struggling under the yoke of the economic depression. The election of 1828, the campaign for that, begins immediately after.

[00:18:43] The House vote that gave Adams the presidency in February of 1825. On February 29th of 1825, the House chose the top three candidates from the Electoral College, Jackson. Adams and William H. Crawford and gave the election to Adams largely as a result of Henry Clay’s influence in the House of Representatives, where he was a speaker and had been a candidate himself until eliminated by the 12th Amendment’s provisions for the House of Representatives selecting the president.

[00:19:21] The anger over the election. The winning of the majorities in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, or rather the pluralities in those separate votes, seemed to people that Andrew Jackson had been cheated out of the presidency, and not just cheated, but had been corruptly edged out. By a backroom deal between Adams and Clay, Clay became Adams Secretary of State.

[00:19:49] And that gave rise to the charge of the corrupt bargain. And from that corrupt bargain smear, the art of the smear, the corrupt bargain was able to paint probably the most probative and honest man who’s ever been in the presidency, was John Quincy Adams, paint him as a scheming conniver. And in that battle for the character of the presidency, Jackson emerged as a clean outsider who was going to go into Washington and clean out these algae and stables.

[00:20:23] The democracy, which was an epitaph similar to mobocracy, became a badge of honor for these people who said yes, indeed, that’s what we are. We are the voice of the people. And the idea of translating that into the voice of government, if not God, it was irresistible, and the momentum that mounted was irresistible, and Jackson was assured victory in 1828.

[00:20:49] 1832 is a little more difficult, and Jackson actually tested the limits of popularity by vetoing the Bank of the United States, the bill to recharter that. When it was brought for him against some advice, among his political advisors said this was hardly unpopular and would put the real powers in the country against him.

[00:21:11] So much so that his challenger, who happened to be Henry Clay, would actually be able to defeat him. But Jackson vetoed it anyway and proceeded on a course that was known as the Bank War that was, it turned out, enormously popular with the folk. Who felt that the bank was responsible for many of their ills.

[00:21:31] And in that, Jackson was vindicated, probably more so than in 1828. He was vindicated on a policy that many had found to be quite dangerous and too controversial. And he forged ahead with it, nonetheless, and with his veto, pretty much secured his reelection.

[00:21:50] Alisha Searcy: It’s very striking how some of these things repeat themselves over history, right?

[00:21:55] Yes, it is. So, I want to turn to some of the most troubling things that we know about Jackson. By the time he was president, we know that he owned nearly 100 enslaved people, while an estate inventory following Jackson’s death counted 161 enslaved people. And between these troubling historical facts and events like Nat Turner’s 1831 Slave Rebellion in Virginia, can you talk about the larger role of slavery in the age of Jackson and how we should be talking about and teaching slavery in schools?

[00:22:33] David Heidler: Well, this is a thorny subject, and one that is almost impossible to approach in the absence of an emotional response. But having to do so is really imperative to put aside the emotions that come with gazing upon what was an obvious moral abomination. And here’s the irony, slavery as an institution had weighed heavily on the consciences of both Northerners and Southerners during colonial times and during the Revolution, especially after the enunciation of the fundamental principle of human equality.

[00:23:08] There was the incongruity of that. That it simply was impossible to reconcile. What you see in the aftermath of this was the North gradually phasing out slavery, but circumstances in both sections caused a divergence in that. The Northerners were able to phase out slavery because it made increasingly little economic sense in the North.

[00:23:33] The nature of labor. Combined with a moral condemnation and the economic reality of labor, with the latter having to do with an alternative labor supply for a relatively limited labor scale. In the South, however, it was different. Increasingly, they had to rely in the South on slavery to plant, cultivate, harvest crops.

[00:23:55] They were extremely labor intensive, such as cotton and tobacco, and this on a relatively vast scale. That economic necessity seems to have been the driving force that tended over the years to diminish the qualms of conscience, until it gave rise to a previously unthinkable argument that slavery was not a blight on the land, but was a positive good, mutually beneficial.

[00:24:20] Beneficial to everyone, to all concerned. And of course, this is a moral abomination. It is a, it is a the skewing of the moral compass that is, simply untethers people from any sense of reality. It also, because it was a moral abomination, became a philosophical and political incongruity, which was obvious to some before it was to others.

[00:24:46] The period begins with one of the most serious instances of this emerging as a real national problem. And that was the admission of Missouri under the Missouri Enabling Act. And there was an attempt to extirpate slavery, not abolish it, but extirpate it, with restrictions that would emancipate in a gradual way on the condition of Missouri being admitted to the Union.

[00:25:11] And it was late enough in the day for Southerners to see this as a threat to their livelihoods, as well as their way of life. And as a result It alarmed the political system and caused a controversy that was quite resonant and resounding in the political world, not so much in the popular world, in the political world.

[00:25:31] But those in the political world saw it, as Jefferson did, as a fire bell in the night. That was his phrase. And the question then came down to, can slavery They phased out everywhere. Or can it be kept out of places where it never existed? Is that possible? And it’s an interesting idea, because what Lincoln did, his view was that slavery was like a rattlesnake in a bed.

[00:25:57] with children, and that it would be quite wrong to find this condition and then rile up the rattlesnake and endanger the children. The great solution was to find some way to get rid of the rattlesnake without it harming anyone. The question of whether slavery existed in territories or not, this was what brought on the war, the Civil War in the mid-19th century, was the question of whether you could keep slavery out of those territories.

[00:26:21] Lincoln said, no, what you’re doing is you’re not trying to remove the rattlesnake from the bed with children, you’re putting it in the bed with the children. And that was the anti-slavery argument that came to resonate with so many in the North and more than a few in the South, that it made the institution’s continuation less and less viable.

[00:26:47] And it’s horrible that we had to have a civil war to do it. But that was the price, that was the price that was paid, as Lincoln said, for every drop of blood drawn by the lash, there should be one drawn by the sword.

[00:27:00] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. And so, speaking of a price to pay, can you talk more about Nat Turner and the 1831 Slave Rebellion?

[00:27:09] David Heidler: Yeah. These were obvious. Eruptions that were especially troubling because they could be discerned as the tip of an iceberg. That what, uh, we have the blips and, uh, Turner’s, uh, probably the most, uh, the most successful in the limited way, but as being the most violent and the most widespread, most difficult to put down.

[00:27:29] Involved all levels. of the slave population, including house servants, which were the most trusted of, you know, regarded as family members. On these occasions where the Turner Rebellion reached into households, It was absolutely terrifying, and you’re dealing with a society that is really becoming, comes to resemble the Spartan Helot dichotomy of a ruler and enslaved, and the necessity to have slavery not As merely an economic engine of supplied labor, but also a method of social control for a population that can be discerned as seething and simmering beneath the surface.

[00:28:15] The rebellions were horrible events that in the respect that they heartened Southern resolve to any talk of emancipation, they were counterproductive. They were obvious expressions of rage, understandable in their anger and also in the violence of them. But they were ultimately very, very harmful to the cause of the abolitionists and certainly of the gradual emancipationists.

[00:28:40] Alisha Searcy: Interesting. In antebellum America, the U. S. Senate, with its great triumvirate of Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John Calhoun of South Carolina, was often at the center of political questions regarding National Authority and States Rights, Slavery and Abolition, and Protective Tariffs. So can you talk about Andrew Jackson’s political relationships with these key American statesmen? The Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Bank of the United States?

[00:29:12] David Heidler: Sure, Jackson had a very simple view of the world, and it wasn’t terribly complex in terms of politics. Society or anything else, Jackson separated the world, as most frontier people did, into those who were against him and those who were for him.

[00:29:31] And the questions of loyalty often distilled down to family as being what you trusted. The political alliances that Jackson made were opportunistic, and none more so than say with John Calhoun. Who was a rival in 1824, became an ally during the Adams administration, despite the fact that he was John Adams, John Quincy Adams vice president.

[00:29:58] Calhoun threw in with the Jacksonians, brought his followers in as part of the coalition that was built for 1828. But Jackson didn’t trust Calhoun, and he didn’t particularly like him. And as soon as he ceased to be of any use to him, he He threw him away. He got rid of him. He knew all the things that later came out that worked.

[00:30:19] Supposedly the cause of their breach, long before he made them public and made them the ostensible cause. But he and Calhoun were at odds after 1830 31, and he and Henry Clay, who had never really had any reason to dislike each other, Clay became a mortal enemy after Jackson invaded Spanish Florida, and Clay delivered a speech in January of 1819.

[00:30:50] And on the floor of the House in which he condemned Jackson’s invasion of Spanish Florida is a violation of constitutional order, of the international law of basic human decency. In fact, because of the way he had treated the native populations in Florida. This was the break point, which Jackson despised Henry Clay after that, and would have, as he later said, maybe not so jokingly, one of his greatest regrets was not hanging Henry Clay.

[00:31:19] The fact of it, though, is that Jackson reveals how much he wanted to be president, by the fact that when he was in the Senate in 1823, he actually had dinner. with Henry Clay, invited him to dinner, and they had a very convivial evening with a strange bedfellow, indeed, in that regard. But after 1824, we have Clay as part of the corrupt bargain charge, and their mortal enemies again, never to reconcile.

[00:31:46] Webster is interesting because Webster became an ally of Clay. Jackson’s during his second term, very briefly because Jackson had put down the nullification movement in South Carolina, which was seen as a dire threat to the union. And Webster was a firm patriot and adherent to union, and so he threw in with Jackson on the hopes that he could use that association to promote himself for even the formation of a new political party that would have him as its leader.

[00:32:17] Standard bearer. But the relationship Jackson had with the Bank of the United States broke that because, as I mentioned, Jackson’s bank veto sort of answers that part of your question in that he was against it and he destroyed it. And when he did that, Webster found him too unpalatable to continue. And so Webster broke away from him, too.

[00:32:41] So each in their turn, these three great statesmen, who, by the way, didn’t much get along with each other very much, one another very much, except on occasions when one or two of them would ally with one or two of the other to do something. They were each On the receiving end of Jackson’s ire, the Supreme Court is most famously involved in the court’s attempt to protect the rights of the Cherokee Nation against the removal policies that began before Jackson took office and removal policies that were begun by the state of Georgia.

[00:33:20] To drive the Cherokees, make life so uncomfortable for them that they would leave. And several court cases brought before the Supreme Court on the basis of the Cherokees being a sovereign nation, and hence in dispute with a sovereign state, and then the sovereign nation of the United States. And in the most famous of those, John Marshall, And the court ruled in favor of the Cherokee, and this is the occasion when Jackson was supposed to have said, it’s Mr.

[00:33:50] Marshall’s law. Let him enforce it. He stoutfully ever said that, but it essentially captures his, his attitude. The court can make all the rulings it wants, but the enforcement arm of the court and Congress is the executive. And Jackson simply ignored that particular decision, which he found distasteful and proceeded with removal.

[00:34:16] The question, again, comes down to Jackson’s view of the world being those forces which he can depend on and those which he finds in opposition. And the shifting tides of politics changes the players on those two teams.

[00:34:34] Barry Anderson: I’d like to talk a little bit about some of the more philosophical questions centered around the Constitution. So, I turn to Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who called the United States Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. And meanwhile, John Calhoun, uh, who we’ve discussed at great length already today, repeatedly criticized the federal structure of the government that the Framers had constructed.

[00:35:00] And, uh, I’m just wondering if you have a view on, you know, these are some really fundamental questions, and how and why did we get such divergent but historic political figures rejecting what are widely accepted as basic elements of the Constitution?

[00:35:16] David Heidler: Well, this is an excellent question, and I think it’s best to strip away the context of it, because these were philosophical questions. Disagreements in terms of an applied fundamental law and let’s take it out of the context and see if we can see a little bit with more clarity where each of these individuals was standing and What they were talking about. So, we strip away the abolitionist motives of Garrison, and we strip away the pro slavery motives of John Calhoun and regard them this way.

[00:35:56] So Garrison is a moral idealist. Repelled by the compromise of political accommodation, which as we all know from basic, basic history, the Constitution itself is a bundle of compromises. Kyle Hewn, on the other hand, was a political idealist. Repelled by a system that he saw as prone to corruption. So, they both had a point, and they do from a utopian perspective.

[00:36:26] So here’s that perspective. Morality in Garrison’s world should always inform the law, especially the fundamental law as it was manifested in the Constitution. Hence, Garrison can probably be best summed up by the inversion of the moralist view versus That’s the legalist view, which is things should not be wrong because they are illegal.

[00:36:51] They should be illegal because they are wrong. Now for Calhoun, government should serve limited ends and only those ends, not just because government has, as James Madison warned, a kind of creeping power. It’s an oozing way to control and ultimately tyranny. Calhoun saw it as much more basic than that. He said government can only serve limited ends and only those ends because to exceed that role makes government vulnerable to tyranny.

[00:37:25] to multiplying corruptions as the powerful or the wealthy or even just the numerous, the majority, seek to bend it to selfish purposes, always at the expense of someone else, usually the weak, usually the impoverished, or usually the numerical minority. So, taken purely on their merits, Both of these positions make perfect sense, and they point to the way to a moral and honorable ordering of human affairs.

[00:38:00] But the context, it seems to me the context has blinded us to the value of both of these, as they can be practically applied. The result, I guess, has been a concept of morality as grounded in law. Which is an exact reverse of Garrison’s ideal. In other words, things are wrong because they’re illegal. And the belief that government is always the solution and never the problem is the reverse of Calhoun’s formula.

[00:38:27] That, you know, government should be limited so that it, a government becomes corrupt in direct proportion to the amount of its influence. This is perhaps not a very satisfactory response to the question, but I think it’s probably a pretty realistic one.

[00:38:42] Barry Anderson: The other way to look at this, and I’m not asking for your response, but I can’t help but offer my comment, which is some of those philosophical arguments that you are outlining here, they were there at the Philadelphia Convention, and they remain with us today.

[00:38:55] David Heidler: Yes, exactly.

[00:38:56] Barry Anderson: I want to go back to the Indian removal. Issue. You’ve talked a little bit about some of the politics of that and the Supreme Court decision. Just for our listeners who may not have recalled the entire story, we have the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of approximately 60, 000 people of the five civilized tribes beginning in 1830. Additional thousands of Native Americans later relocated to other places within the United States. What do we know about Jackson’s role in shaping these events, and maybe if I could expand on this a little bit, do we have any indication that Jackson had any concern about the moral issues that this Indian removal process raised?

[00:39:37] David Heidler: Well, there’s a school of thought that sees Jackson as in a kind of avuncular role in this, that he was a kindly presence. that accommodated Indians as much as he possibly could but found those who were resistant were to be dealt with in varying degrees of harshness. The issue of Indian removal occurs in a tangled web.

[00:40:01] It’s in ever changing conditions, and evolving reactions to what the political system came to see as an insoluble problem. I’ll put it to you this way. There are three stages of Indian removal, and the third is the most contemptible because it was the final one. But it is the final one because it is part of a rather unchanging process.

[00:40:24] Rule of the administrative state, no matter where you find them, it’s either ancient Greece or Rome, whether it was the French dynasties dealing with Huguenots or Cromwell’s roundheads dealing with royalists, it is always the same. One, the idea is posed as a suggestion. Second, it becomes a recommendation with incentives.

[00:40:50] And third, it becomes mandatory with coercive enforcement. That is inescapable. When the administrative state, no matter where it occurs, comes up with an idea, it will pursue that with those three steps. And this is exactly what happens with Indian removal. We have the original civilization of program.

[00:41:11] That was begun in the Washington administration, that attempted to assimilate Indians into the white community. That by becoming neighbors, there would be less threats and less impediments. There was resistance to that, to the sufficient, but cultural resistance on the part of the Indians, to the extent that by the turn of the century, there were people who were saying, this isn’t working.

[00:41:34] The civilization program’s a great enlightenment idea, but in practical application it doesn’t work. So, we have our first removal attempt, which is around 1808. It is the suggestion. And it is done in that spirit, and is rather ineffective, because it is a suggestion to people who don’t want to do it. So, after the War of 1812, we have the second attempted Indian removal with a recommendation, with incentives.

[00:42:05] In other words, land, land, land. You can go to this land, west of the Mississippi. If you don’t want to go, you can stay here. But the incentive to staying here is to become a United States citizen. And by doing so, eliminate all tribal affiliations and loyalties. Well, the second phase is not very effective.

[00:42:25] It’s more effective than the first one. There was a large number of Cherokees that actually went to Arkansas, and that was very well managed. It was well supplied, provisioned, boats, people were given the implements necessary to start their new lives, they were staked out in the West, and they prospered.

[00:42:43] The second phase, as much as it was possible to have a pleasant experience in this, was relatively pleasant. The people who went did so voluntarily. And the people who stayed were angry about being asked to leave, but nothing happened. And as a result, we go into the 1820s with this situation still hanging fire.

[00:43:06] Calhoun, who was Secretary of the War at the time in 1819, actually negotiated a fairly Significant treaty with the Cherokees who remained and wanted to become citizens in 1819, much to the chagrin of a lot of states, Tennessee in particular, who thought that Calhoun had kind of sold them out. When this stuff doesn’t work, and in 1820s, it becomes evident.

[00:43:31] As early as 1825, during the end of the Monroe administration going into the Adams administration, we see Georgia, for instance, becoming increasingly belligerent and aggressive toward the Indian population in the northern part of the state, the Cherokee. And despite the fact that the Cherokee were the most assimilated, they had adopted the ways of the white man with more enthusiasm and agreement than anyone else.

[00:44:04] And yet they were being treated Just as bad, if not worse, which is why they appealed to the Supreme Court. Now, the undergoing and constant view of this is that something was going to have to be done. And in 1830, it is indeed done. Highly controversial. There was a significant portion of both the political class and the American people who found this distasteful and wrong.

[00:44:29] And the people on the ground in removals took place, the Trail of Tears being specific. To the Cherokee, who were extremely, extremely harmed by the migration. About a third of their number perished in one of the more shameful instances of American policy being implemented. But here you have the idea that if the suggestion fails, the recommendation and incentives don’t work, then you go mandatory and you enforce with coercion.

[00:45:03] And that happens. It will happen in any state, any sovereign entity with an administrative apparatus intent upon pursuing a particular policy. It is as night follows day. So, the third mandatory removal enforced by the military is a shameful, shameful act. And cautionary tale that what we have here is a pattern, not an incident, but a pattern of apparently inescapable human behavior that is played out in this instance, in this episode, with remarkably tragic results.

[00:45:40] Barry Anderson: Let’s talk a little bit about literature for a moment. James Fenmore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, perhaps the greatest American novel, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and then Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This classic fiction that we probably don’t read as much as we should. But nonetheless, it’s here, as well as memoirs like Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave. How does this kind of literature help students better understand political tensions, culture, and ideas of this era of American history?

[00:46:16] David Heidler: Well, it’s interesting, and this is a great question, because it brings to bear the idea of how much can we really empathize with the past? I think fiction helps us do that, but very, in a very idiosyncratic way. Using Melville, it’s anyone who really wants to know what it was like to be aboard a whaling ship, and the rigors and demands of that life. Moby Dick is, The ticket to that adventure. It’s also a tale of obsessive monomania and, uh, brooding revenge, which are also parts of that story, which are parts of the human condition, which is the real advantage of these things is to see them, see them as part of the human condition.

[00:46:59] People ask, what is it about history that is compelling? And it is the fact that it is real, that it was a story of people’s lives. Who actually existed, who are real, and fiction can achieve only so much in that, sometimes very, very bad. I think motion pictures are a special marker of how this can go wrong, because it can be very effective, but they give the impression to people, to an audience, that they’re being educated when they’re really just being entertained.

[00:47:31] And so what you have in the best of all worlds is an idea that embraces what I think novelist E. A. Hartley said, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Now, the result of all that observation is manifold, because we hear a lot today about cultural imperialism. But Hartlett’s notion is that we should go into the past the way we do into a foreign country, that we observe and abide the customs, traditions, and the behaviors of people who are doing things as they do in their own time, in their own setting.

[00:48:14] Same with the past. We owe them. We owe them that much. The real admonition is to engage with the past. Very real people on their own terms, in their own setting, in a way that’s courteous, uh, culture traveler does when he visits abroad. So, there’s an interesting story about this that David Mamet said when he was directing a play, somebody in the play who didn’t have anything to do said, well, how do I occupy myself?

[00:48:42] He says, you do what everyone does in a room where there’s a conversation going on. You act. as they would do, which is running through their mind, when do I get to talk? And that way you will be the most obviously natural in your role of doing nothing. When do I get to talk? This coincides with Douglas Southall Freeman’s notion of when a historian can cease to research and begin to write. He says, you’ll know that you know enough. When you can hear the people talk, that’s the mixture there that is most ideal.

[00:49:20] Barry Anderson: You make reference to historians there, and that brings to mind your fellow historian, John Steele Gordon, who talks about America’s get up and go outlook, initiated as by people who got up and came. And I think that that sort of American character is something that we see expressed in the role of immigration, nativism, westward expansion, transportation innovations, steamships, the canal boom, railroads, the economic rise of the United States during the age of Jackson. And I’m just wondering, what should students know about those things? If there’s one or two things you could briefly identify that relate to that American character, what would you point to?

[00:50:01] David Heidler: Well, there was a spirit in the United States of America at the end of the War of 1812 that was extremely aggressive in terms of finance, technological innovation, and government. And that notion was highly attractive to people who were coming here, who felt the need not just to remain culturally distant, but felt the need to, while maintaining their cultural Unique cultures to enter into this great experiment, this great physical experiment of expansion, of movement, of being able to say what you believed and be able to build what you wanted to without anybody ordering you around or telling you what to do, that you had a freedom of opportunity that allowed you to exercise.

[00:50:55] Your talents, your native genius, within an individual, within a collective setting. That is one of the most remarkable things that’s ever happened in the history of man. The concept of a political unity, born of political ties that had nothing to do with blood, clan, identification with anything other than the fact that opportunity was available and that Anything.

[00:51:23] The idea, at least, that anything was possible. And so, the Horatio Alger thing was a caricature of Rags to Riches, but Rags to Riches sort of misses the point because material abundance doesn’t necessarily have to do anything with richness or affluence. It has to do with comfort, convenience, and security, and stability.

[00:51:46] In the American setting, Allowed an increasingly large orbit of security, stability, and opportunity. And when you see people building steamships, inventing them, or digging canals, where people had said it was impossible, as they did in the Erie Canal, that linked the Great Lakes. They realized, in fact, the unimaginable Northwest Passage of fiction and myth came in reality during this period.

[00:52:17] With the great Erie Canal that was a revolution in transportation, and then the railroads, which changed everything. And then at the very close of the period we might be talking about in the 40s, with the telegram, which was like lightning and magic. What hath God wrought, being the first words. Put over the lines that actually had been put up by Samuel Morse.

[00:52:44] So yeah, I think that the rise of the United States during the age of Jackson was nothing the government did. It was something the people did. And they did it in a large part because they were given the opportunity to do it in ways that were completely innovative and unparalleled in the other, other places of history. And the historical experience.

[00:53:08] Barry Anderson: Finally, Tocqueville famously observed that local, private, civic associations and religious movements were the wellspring of democratic, civic mindedness and capacity for self-government. How do we teach students about the roles of the Second Great Awakening, Transcendentalism, newspapers, telegraph? And the way these played an important role in advancing abolitionism, rights of labor, rights of women, and the radical reforms during Jacksonian democracy.

[00:53:39] David Heidler: Well, there you have a pretty broad canvas. Let me just focus on Tugville’s observation about freedom of association, which was quite unique to the United States.

[00:53:50] There was a notion in Europe, especially, especially after the French Revolution. That more than a few people getting together were up to no good. So, governments were, were very careful about the idea of letting, letting large groups or even relatively small groups get together and talk out things. They were plotting against the public good.

[00:54:13] was the notion. Well, that was completely alien to the American experience people. And what he, what he saw was a remarkable stark contrast to how civic affairs progressed as a result. What happened is that most of the problems were solved with direct action by private citizens who cooperated to achieve greater efficiency.

[00:54:36] The foundation of this concept eluded the statist Embrace of the maxim that whatever you and I can do, the government can do better. The tie that binds these social movements, uh, technological breakthroughs together was a tendency for imaginative people to perceive a problem and then put together realistic ways to solve it.

[00:55:01] Central to that process is not just seeking the solution, but a willingness, and this is the key, the willingness to abandon an experiment. It clearly isn’t working. This rarely, if ever, happens with government, primarily because a bureaucracy innately has a survival instinct. Instinct, that makes course correction all but impossible.

[00:55:28] When the administrative state encounters a problem, even one of its own makings, the impulse is summed up in the motto, more of the same. And that frequently exacerbates the problem. So, what you have in this generation that we’re talking about, that Tocqueville saw was so remarkable, where they were imbued with an Enlightenment idea about human perfectibility and social movements.

[00:55:57] They had a humility before God, the divine providence. and the promotion of spiritual rebirth that occurred spontaneously in the Great Awakening, and then finds sort of a strange mysticism and transcendentalism that is still something of a mystery as to its appeal. And then you have technological innovation along with improvements to transportation and communication which usher in the modern world.

[00:56:25] Those things all happened almost in the same time. They’re almost simultaneous in their germination, if not their realization, during this period. It really is remarkable. I’m not sure we’ll ever see it again. Perhaps closest thing is the moon launcher, the technological revolutions that we’re engaged in now.

[00:56:44] Progress is not always beneficial. Sometimes there’s a desire to make it better. to look backward and see a better time. But we move forward, and this time was moving forward at a rapid clip and accomplishing amazing things, as people like Tocqueville found when he observed it.

[00:57:04] Barry Anderson: Professor Heidler, I want to thank you for your time with us today, and I want to recommend your book, The Rise of Andrew Jackson, Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, to our listeners. And I wonder if we could close out our interview today with a brief paragraph from that book, if you’d be so kind to read it. Read that to our listeners.

[00:57:23] David Heidler: Well, we have a period here where Andrew, uh, Jackson had just been defeated, and John Quincy Adams is put into the White House under the circumstances that will be described as the corrupt bargain.

[00:57:37] But he does enjoy a honeymoon. They are always given something of a break. People are saying, well, we’ll give him a chance to see. What’s happening? Well, he ruined that with his first annual message to Congress, what is now described as the State of the Union, delivered to Congress and read by the Secretary there and by the members.

[00:57:57] It was a laundry list of things that he wanted to do. It was highly nationalistic. Highly aggressive in terms of tariffs, in terms of taxes, in terms of national initiatives like a national university, and it struck people as very, very off putting. They did not want not just what had happened, but more of the same on steroids, so to speak.

[00:58:23] And so here is the final paragraph of the section in which he has Introduce this annual message. Less than a year into his presidency, Adams had a vice president drifting into opposition, a secretary of state under constant assault for being corrupt, old Republicans angry at his federalism, and Jackson partisans accusing him of tyranny and incompetence.

[00:58:52] Meanwhile, men of thoughtful opinions Such as Nathaniel Macon were in transition from nebulous discontent over Adams vision to open support for those who opposed it. Macon would never be a Jacksonite, but Adams first annual message sent him on the road to becoming a Jacksonian. Jackson supporters perhaps could not distinguish between the partisanship stimulating the one and the philosophy animating the other.

[00:59:24] At the outset of the Adams administration, many had detected the ever so faint fragrance of blood. After his first annual message of December 6, 1825, an uncharted political sea was awash in it.

[00:59:43] Alisha Searcy: What a pleasure it was to have you. Thank you so much, Dr. Heidler.

[00:59:44] David Heidler: Well, thank you for the opportunity. It’s been a delight meeting both of you and thank you for the invitation and allowing me to participate in this valuable program.

[01:00:07] Alisha Searcy: Wow. That was as always a very enlightening interview. I love when we have historians on. I’m sure you appreciated that too as well, judge.

[01:00:15] Barry Anderson: I’ve always appreciated it, and one of the great things about this program is that we have had, just in the last six months, we’ve had several guests who were specialists, experts in the pre-Civil War era, which sets up much of what happens in the decades that follow and deals with issues that we’re dealing with yet today. And it’s a period of time almost 200 years ago. It was wonderful. I agree.

[01:00:37] Alisha Searcy: Well said. Well, now it’s time for us to get to the tweet of the week. It comes from Education Next, and it says survey data collected from September of 2022 through August of 23, indicate that nearly 6 percent of all school age children nationwide were reported as home schooled during the pandemic, during the 22 23 school year. So, we definitely want to check out that story. I think it’s quite striking that when you compare the fact that 10 percent of students in the U.S. are in private schools, 84 percent are in public schools, now 6 percent are in home schools. It’s telling us a story, which is that parents are looking for alternate education opportunities within our system. And so, make sure you check out that article. Justice Anderson, it was great to have you on with me. Thanks again for joining and of course, next week we’re looking forward to having the Houston Superintendent of Schools, Mike Miles. So, make sure you join us next week.