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re nortex: "I get a mixed message here on FR about Old Hickory from some astute FReepers."

There's nothing "mixed" about the message from many FReepers regarding "Ole Hickory" -- he is loathed and despised by our Lost Causers second only to Lincoln himself, and for understandable reasons.

Jackson was the last of the Founding generation to become President, and despite his birth in the Carolinas and life in Tennessee, Jackson was first and last a Union man.
Whether the issue was tariffs, nullification or secession, Jackson came down on the side of Union, telling South Carolinians in 1830:

"please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach."

For that, our Lost Causers leave no tree unhung with effigies of Jackson and Lincoln...

Andrew Jackson was a firm believer in Manifest Destiny and opposing foreign interference in the New World. His hand in the Texas revolution was personified in Sam Houston, a firm Jackson man who, like the Unionists of eastern Tennessee and north Alabama and western North Carolina and Virginia, believed in Jackson's vision of an American empire, an American colossus, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Jackson was intolerant of interstate discontent and proposals to divide the Union into ideologically homogeneous republics. His response to sectional feuding was to paper over very real differences by force of personality and try to ensure that agrarian interests were not trampled by equally empire-minded bankers like Nicholas Biddle.

My own personal opinion was that he erred in thinking that the federal government would always be guided by Jeffersonians by himself (n/w/s his own two death-matches with the ineffably Yankee John Quincy Adams, who dreamed up the Civil War as a way to "reorganize" [purge] the South and Southern States' politics). He hadn't the imagination, I think, to see the consequences of a host of Quincy Adamses taking over the federal government and using it as a sword.