The Washington Post had an fun piece on Sunday about the somewhat friendly fight between North Carolina and South Carolina over the right to call their state the birthplace of Andrew Jackson:
For a century, the two Carolinas have quarreled over which can claim to be the birthplace of the seventh American president.
Dueling monuments sit within miles of each other south of Charlotte. For decades, one high school in Lancaster County, S.C., and another in Union County, N.C., played a football game in which the winner got to claim Jackson for the next year. And don’t look to the White House for the answer; its Web site lists Jackson’s birthplace a “backwoods settlement in the Carolinas.”
As the story notes later on, it doesn’t matter much where Jackson was born. He’ll be forever known as a Tennessean, perhaps the quintessential Tennessean. He was the then-frontier state’s first congressman, a judge on the Tennessee supreme court, and served twice as a U.S. senator. His estate near Nashville, the Hermitage, is where he lived much of his life, and it’s where he died.
But the mystery and dispute over Jackson’s birth state brings about some thoughts about presidential states. Take Jackson and his fellow Tennessean presidents, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson. Disregarding the Jackson dispute, all three were born in North Carolina and of Scots-Irish stock, yet they are most remembered for their adopted home state across the Smoky Mountains.
Similarly, the Connecticut-born George W. Bush is thought of almost exclusively as a Texan, where he was a businessman and governor. (It’s not likely many in blue state Connecticut want to claim Bush anyway!) Similarly, Woodrow Wilson, as governor of New Jersey, is considered a northeastern, Ivy League progressive, even though he was born in genteel Virginia.
Most presidents are simply homers, though. George Washington was born, lived, and died a Virginian; the same goes for both Roosevelts with New York (although FDR died in Warm Springs, Georgia). The Boston-accented, Harvard-educated JFK as well as the Unitarian John Adams were undoubtedly from Massachusetts. Lyndon Johnson is a Texan, through and through, and Jimmy Carter the peanut farmer has his Georgian credentials—though as a native Georgian myself, I’m not thrilled at this fact.
Other presidents have a much more complex state profile. Illinois, the self-declared “Land of Lincoln”, has largely taken ownership of Abraham Lincoln, although the famous log cabin in which our 16th president was born was located in Kentucky. A national historical park commemorating Lincoln’s birthplace exists near Hodgenville, Kentucky today.
Similarly, Ronald Reagan represented the California of the mid-20th century as a movie star and later its governor, but his home state of Illinois back east has recently tried to grab back some of the Reagan mantle. As Fred Barnes wrote last month, there’s a school of thought that the Great Communicator was more a man of the Midwest than of the Golden State of his professional career.
The jury is still out on the state of the state of our current president, Barack Obama, will be most associated. He’s commonly referred to as “Hawaii’s favorite son”, and there’s no doubt the youngest state in the union wants in on the action associated with having birthed a president. But Obama is consummate Chicagoan, a former Illinois state legislature and U.S. Senator from the state. His close political allies and confidantes are a Chicago gang, and Illinois is what he calls home when he’s not in Washington. Let’s just hope Illinois doesn’t revamp its motto to become the “Land of Obama.” That would be a sad state of affairs indeed.
