the Jackson rabbit-hole
Andrew Jackson. When I first learned American presidents, there he was: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Truman. why? I don't know. he caught my fancy? he, after all, was a woodsman, all dressed up and playing a fancy-man's role. he was only a teenager during the Revolution, but he served as a courier, and a prisoner of war, and was scarred by a redcoat's saber when he refused to polish the Brit's boots - or so I learned as a kid. he was a frontiersman and dirt poor, but he clawed his way into riches - partly by being a lawyer, largely by being a slave trader, which no one mentioned while I was a kid. no one also told me as a kid about the Indian Removal Act or the Trail of Tears, along which more than 4000 Indians died. as I understand it, Jackson did not enforce the Indian Removal Act but his protege and successor did, and Jackson was very influential in getting the law passed. and he signed it, of course. backtracking a little, after he became rich, he became a colonel in the Tennessee militia and Major General in the War of 1812 where he won the Battle of New Orleans and became a war hero. his became the model for presidential stories: after him, every president was born in a log cabin, dirt poor, and worked his way up as a lawyer and a slaver to become president. even Nixon used this story. some presidents have had to use variations of it, some presidents were born in imaginary log cabins set up just outside the palatial mansions on their family estates to usher them into this story. (I may exaggerate, but American history in junior high and high school sounded that way to me.) so am I missing something? let's see: log cabin, dirt poor, courier and POW, lawyer and slaver, got rich, colonel, general, Battle of New Orleans, war hero, president, Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears, what have I forgotten? oh my! so much! the first secession by South Carolina, the second Bank of the United States, splitting the Republican Party (not Lincoln's, an earlier version) into the Democrats and the Whigs, giving the Democrats the donkey symbol - from Jackass Jackson, see? the rabbit hole swirls round and round and I probably haven't begun to exhaust President Jackson's ability to amaze - oh yes! he killed a man in a duel over his wife's honor. no wonder he died tired! (I read that somewhere on the internet - maybe they meant retired.) he crammed a lot into a confusing and amazing life, and wound up on the twenty-dollar bill despite hating paper money and a central bank. whew! if he don't rabbit-hole you, who've you got?
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