Rebel of this Week in History: President Andrew Jackson

For ROTW today, we’re going back in time to this week in history. This Monday in 1835 Andrew Jackson, who was 67 years old at the time, defended himself from a failed assassination attempt with a misfiring gun on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, using his bare hands and his walking cane to beat down his assassin. Oh yeah, then Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee joined in because the assassin pulled a second gun out (which also failed to fire correctly). Then President Andrew Jackson and Rep. Davy Crockett proceeded to beat the living daylights out of the would-be killer on the floor of the House Chamber.

Seriously. This really happened.

And after reading about it this Monday at the link above, I couldn’t help but admire these rougher, tougher gentlemen from a rougher, tougher time. I’ve already expressed on this blog my delighted admiration for an 11-year-old girl and an 18-year-old single mother who defended themselves from violent attacks with guns, so why not a long-dead, then 67-year-old President of the United States? But there really is a lot more to the steely confidence of Andrew Jackson as exemplified by his hard-as-nails self-defense on the House floor. “Old Hickory” as he was called, used that same unshakable fury and aggressiveness to defend his country from “financial assassination.” Andrew Jackson is famous for tirelessly opposing and abolishing the central bank of his era.

The Second Bank of the United States was America’s central bank at that time, the “Federal Reserve” of the Jackson era. It was authorized with a 20 year charter during James Madison’s administration. The charter was set to expire during Jackson’s tenure, and the powerful interests behind it fought Jackson in an epic struggle to renew the bank’s charter. Andrew Jackson believed that central banking was evil because it concentrated too much power in the hands of a financial elite, made America vulnerable to domination by foreign financial interests, only made the rich richer on nothing, and enriched states where the finance industry was concentrated at the expense of other states.

Like Thomas Jefferson before him, Andrew Jackson had a vision of America as an agricultural republic, not a financial powerhouse like England. In other words, Jackson and Jefferson wanted Americans to prosper by actually producing things. In the end, Andrew Jackson’s fight against the central bank was successful. The bank’s charter expired when Jackson vetoed Congress’ bill to renew it. When asked about his greatest accomplishment as president, Andrew Jackson reportedly answered, “I killed the Bank!” He understood that it was the central political issue of his day and the greatest threat to the future prosperity and liberty of his country.

Like so many other presidential assassins and would-be assassins, the man who attacked Andrew Jackson this week in history seems crazy. Historians believe he was delusional and thought that the government owed him large sums of money. A jury found the man not guilty by reason of insanity. But Andrew Jackson always believed that the rival Whig Party and the financial elites it represented sent the man to kill him on the House floor that day. I’m not taking a position on the issue because I wasn’t there, but I can’t help but point out that it is automatically a little suspicious that the very first assassination attempt on a president in U.S. history (which this was) would happen to a president who was an avowed foe of the financial, central banking establishment. People have killed for far less throughout history. Until then the idea that anyone would attempt to murder the president of a democracy with regular elections was unthinkable to Americans. They thought that democracy solved that problem, that it was an old, European problem that monarchs faced. The Secret Service wasn’t even charged with protecting the president until 1901.

Now Andrew Jackson wasn’t perfect. He was definitely a rebel– the good kind– for his fight against the financial establishment, but he also smacked down a few other good rebels by force when it suited him, including tax protesters in South Carolina and Native Americans in the Southern states through the infamous Indian Removal Act. At least the man who came to Jackson’s aid earlier this week (in history), opposed the removal act. Davy Crockett, though a Jacksonian Democrat, passionately opposed the act, even losing his seat in Congress for a time because of his opposition to party and president, saying: “I bark at no man’s bid. I will never come and go, and fetch and carry, at the whistle of the great man in the White House no matter who he is.”

Pretty rebel, huh?

Despite their flaws, which we should certainly take seriously and condemn– history and human beings are complicated, messy things– these two men had something inside of them, a certain kind of fire in their stomachs that made them capable of great things, and they used that fire to do a lot of good. For their bravery this week in history, and for the other things that bravery allowed them to do, opposing the central bank in Jackson’s case, and opposing Jackson’s own forced removal of human beings from their property in Davy Crockett’s case, we award these Southern, dashing, assassin-smashing politicians today’s Rebel of  the Week award for their respective efforts to expose and fight tyranny where they saw it.

(And putting Jackson’s face on a central bank note the following century– that is some seriously passive aggressive, grudge-holding blowback from the central-bankers. Goes to show you just how deep of an impression Jackson left with this industry.)

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