For Sioux: Andrew Jackson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

 

‘If only I can restore to our institutions their primitive simplicity and purity, can only succeed in banishing those extraneous corrupting influences which tend to fasten monopoly and aristocracy on the Constitution and to make the government an engine of oppression to the people instead of the agent of their will, I may then look back on the honors conferred on me with just pride – with the consciousness that they have not been bestowed altogether in vain.’

‘The preservation of the Union is the supreme law.’

‘Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is, to remove to the West and join your countrymen, who are already established there.’

Andrew Jackson lived a truly epic life. Born to hardy Scotch-Irish stock in the Waxhaws, a backcountry region in the then-disputed border between the Carolinas, the boy Jackson became a man in the brutal guerrilla warfare between the British, the Tories, and the Patriots. Jackson joined the local militia as a courier, and when captured by the British was scarred by the sabre of a haughty officer. His father having died before he was born, his mother dead from cholera contracted treating wounded soldiers, and his two brothers dead from battle and a diseased British prison, Jackson came out of the American Revolution an orphan. By drastically staking his life, fortune, and sacred honour on battles, horse races, and duels, Jackson rose from his humble beginnings to become the victor of the Battle of New Orleans and ultimately President of the United States. His name defines an entire age of American history – ‘The Age of Jackson’ – and ‘Jacksonian democracy’ is a term still used today to describe a sort of libertarian egalitarianism or populist Jeffersonianism.

More @ The Abbeville Institute