Posted on 03/05/2014 4:40:55 AM PST by C19fan
My public high school wasn’t the best, but we did have an amazing history teacher. Mr. L, as we called him, brought our country’s story to life. So when he taught us about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to force at least 46,000 Cherokees, Choctaws, Muscogee-Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles off their ancestral lands, my classmates and I were stricken. .......................................................
But then it was lunchtime, and we pulled out our wallets in the cafeteria. Andrew Jackson was there, staring out from every $20 bill. We had been carrying around portraits of a mass murderer all along, and had no idea.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Being half-Cherokee, he has always been a villain in my eyes, but I agree, he was a significant figure in American history and should stay on the bill.
Hey Slate, who cares, we in Dixie have to live with Grant on the $50.
Harriet Tubman?
Hell, I nominate Mumia.
Slate focusing on the big issues of the day.
If anyone needs to be removed from the money, it’s Grant. What did he do? Yes, he was a Civil War general, but he’s at or near the top of most expert’s Worst U.S. President lists.
Still, it’s such a minor thing.
Marxist “multi-culturalism” blowing in the wind.
I wonder whether we would have had a civil war if Jackson (or someone just like him) had been president instead of Lincoln during those years.
There was a secession movement during Jackson’s presidency and he basically told the hotheads in South Carolina to shut up and sit down - and they did.
I don’t know a lot about Santa Anna, but I do know that in those days, when a battle was over either by outright victory or surrender, it wasn’t the habit of the victor to summarily execute officers.
Officers surviving a defeated battle always had the chance to come back another day.
Agree about his significance. I live in Jackson county Michigan in a town named after Michigan’s first senator next to a town named after a French dictator (Napoleon).
He was a true democrat. His political payoffs and gamesmanship showed where the party was headed. He gave the much more valuable Toledo strip to Ohio if they could deliver the vote for the Democrats in the next election. Michigan got that “worthless” upper peninsula with.
I agree he was no saint. I don’t relish in any brutality or injustice. My point is basically is, in the period of history, his actions did not appear so severe as they do from the vantage of OUR point in history.
There can be no doubt that this ‘nation’ is no nation at all. We have huge irreconcilable differences that are becoming more evident everyday.
Last, Really! Allen West, Tim Scott, E.W. Jackson, (Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia). Any of these men would do not only a better job than Obozo, but an outstanding job. And you can bet West would not allow the cuts to the military that Hagel is implementing.
lwet’s get real... ceasar chavez will replace him evenmtually
That was Sam Houston, not Andrew Jackson. At the time, Texas was still a Republic and not part of the United States.
The libtards know this and in their minds that is reason enough.
He was also the victorious general at the Battle of New Orleans, one of the very few American victories over Britain during that war and key to holding the entire Mississippi valley without dispute (OK, it happened several weeks after a peace treaty had been signed ... details, details). As an icon of the Democratic Party, and being of Cherokee ancestry myself, I have no great love or admiration for Jackson. In many ways he was a genuine bas***d and tyrant. But the fact is he was an important and pivotal figure in our history, the first common-man to ever gain the presidency.
I recall reading that someone took a shot at him with a pistol when he was President. He chased the man down and tried to beat him with a cane. I don't recall if he actually caught the man or not.
While Jackson was indeed repugnant because of his ethnic cleansing, far worse was his refusal to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, and his “specie circular”, that plunged America into its worst depression until the Great Depression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837
Throughout his term, he could have mitigated much of this disaster, but instead he waited until just before leaving office to pull the rug out from under the US economy.
Importantly, this just destroyed his successor, a man he hated, his own vice president Martin Van Buren, also a Democrat, because he was pro-business and had wealthy friends, whom Jackson bitterly hated and wanted to destroy.
The Andrew Jackson depression lasted seven years.
And true to form, in his efforts to hurt and harm the wealthy, most of the people who were ruined were the middle class and poor.
It has been said that Mark Twain’s character Pap Finn, father of Huckleberry Finn, was pretty much a typical Jacksonian Democrat: he had never had $50 in his pocket, and hated anyone who ever had, because he was convinced that he had to have made that $50 by ‘keeping him (Finn) down’, so he wanted the government to take that $50 away.
We should return to the ‘old’ standard...Lady Liberty and the like. Such beauty and art in those days.
Of course, then it would make it difficult to know the difference between REAL $$ and fiat currency
He actually had two attempted assassinations, which is what would also happen today if someone had the balls to take on the rat’s nest of crooks that compose the triumvirate of the federal reserve, the US Treasury, and the Wall Street elite.
He had a $20 bill for lunch? What neighborhood was he raised in?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.