I thought about what might’ve happened had the Civil War happened earlier, say, under President Andrew Jackson. He would not have been nearly as kind or charitable as Lincoln was in its conduction. Jackson would’ve been brutal beyond description, you’d have had a helluva lot more Shermanesque Marches across the South, and he would’ve publicly hung or shot the leaders of the Southern cause (even if he had to string them up with his bare hands). Jackson was a decided Unionist and probably would’ve made the most hard-line Radical Republicans blush. We can go by one of his contemporaries, Sam Houston, who had also been Governor of my state before a sad personal (romantic) event saw him quit Tennessee for Texas, and he was no supporter of secession there (and was nearly a de facto Republican by the start of the war as a Know-Nothing, the stand-in party of the Oppositionists opposed to the regular Democrats). Hard to imagine Andrew Jackson becoming a Republican, but he just might’ve had he lived to the 1860s (but unquestionably a Unionist or War Democrat, as was Andrew Johnson). By Azalea’s reckoning, that would’ve made the Southerner Jackson a “liberal” ! =8-0
I’m thinking I would have been for Clay and Adams against Jackson.
He was autocratic (hence the opposition choosing to call themselves Whigs). I believe you called him a whack job or something to that effect.