Andrew Jackson, whose legacy includes the genocidal march known as the Trail of Tears, was a bad man who did bad things. There is no getting around that.
Should we then remove him from the public square?
This question became especially relevant Monday evening as political activists swarmed Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., in a failed attempt to tear down a 167-year-old monument of Jackson. The statue, erected in 1853, presides over the square in front of the White House, making it a prime target for those who wish to remove memorials of divisive historical figures.
And Jackson certainly qualified as a divisive historical figure.
He was a slave owner. Jackson also championed what became known merely as “Indian Removal,” which saw the federal government forcing the mass migration of Native Americans from their ancestral lands. He promoted those policies in a manner that was as ruthless as it was lawless, acting often in flagrant violation of Supreme Court rulings and treaties with native peoples.
But Jackson also played a crucial role in securing America’s independence from Great Britain, with the high point of his military career being the defeat of British forces at the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. Were it not for Jackson’s leadership and determination in that conflict, the stage would have been set for the British Empire to shatter the union and reclaim by brute military force the American colonies it lost in 1783.
He was also a fierce advocate for a united America, reportedly going as far as to tell his pro-secession vice president, South Carolina’s John Calhoun, “if you secede from my nation, I will secede your head from the rest of your body.” Unlike the Confederate statues currently targeted by protesters, one can at least say that Jackson was no traitor to the republic.
America’s seventh president also did much to improve government accountability and services as well as the rights of the working and middle class.
In terms of understanding our history as a country, the question then becomes: Is there room to memorialize Jackson and the role he played in the nation’s founding? Yes, but it is complicated.
First, the question of whether the Lafayette Square monument should come down is one for the residents and elected officials of the District of Columbia. Lawless mobs do not get to decide these things.
Second, there is a unique danger in erasing chapters from our past, even the appalling ones. We understand ourselves better as a country when we are honest about our founding, which was messy and filled with grave wrongdoings. But if we erase even those who played critical roles in our nation’s formation, whose actions and policies were fundamental to creating the republic as we know it, because they were also grievously flawed men, we then run the risk of sanitizing our history. We run the risk of forgetting not only the good these men did but also the bad. And when we forget the wrongs, we risk repeating them.
Jackson was no mere war hero, as the Lafayette Square memorial would have one believe. His legacy is far more complicated, and darker, than that. But merely removing a statue is not going to correct his wrongs, as certain activists seem to believe.
Perhaps, then, the best solution to the Lafayette Square question is a compromise. Maybe the answer is not merely to disappear Jackson from the public square, but to replace his likeness with one that remembers his foundational contributions while also commemorating the victims of his policies. The fact that all men are flawed, some more deeply than others, is a problem to which there is no solution. But, unlike the protesters, a solution that seeks to create and address wrongdoings without also creating a new fiction is better than one that seeks merely to destroy.
