Andrew Jackson - Indian Protector

Jim Webb was the Virginia Democratic U.S. senator from 2007 to 2013. Here's what he thinks of Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

One would think we could celebrate the recognition that Harriet Tubman will be given on future $20 bills without demeaning former president Andrew Jackson as a “monster,” as a recent Huffington Post headline did.

  Jim Webb @ WaPo

I'll take his word for that, but I'm no finding it.

And summarizing his legendary tenure as being “known primarily for a brutal genocidal campaign against native Americans,” as reported in The Post, offers an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.

Well, that's an interesting take, How does Jim get there?

Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege.

[...]

Far too many of our most important discussions are being debated emotionally, without full regard for historical facts. The myth of universal white privilege and universal disadvantage among racial minorities has become a mantra.

So white privilege is a myth, is it? That will be news to every dark-skinned person on the planet.

Not unlike the recently lionized Alexander Hamilton, Jackson was himself a “brilliant orphan.” A product of the Scots-Irish migration from war-torn Ulster into the Appalachian Mountains, his father died before he was born. His mother and both brothers died in the Revolutionary War, where he himself became a wounded combat veteran by age 13. Self-made and aggressive, he found wealth in the wilds of Tennessee and, like other plantation owners such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, owned slaves.

Well, Webb hasn't refuted white privilege yet. Any person of color with that background wouldn't have found wealth in anything in the U.S. in Jackson's day.

As president, Jackson ordered the removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi to lands west of the river. This approach, supported by a string of presidents, including Jefferson and John Quincy Adams, was a disaster, resulting in the Trail of Tears where thousands died. But was its motivation genocidal? Robert Remini, Jackson’s most prominent biographer, wrote that his intent was to end the increasingly bloody Indian Wars and to protect the Indians from certain annihilation at the hands of an ever-expanding frontier population.

He had to kill them to protect them.

Indeed, it would be difficult to call someone genocidal when years before, after one bloody fight, he brought an orphaned Native American baby from the battlefield to his home in Tennessee and raised him as his son.

As opposed to raising him as an American Indian or placing him with a native family.

And, by the way, who orphaned the child in that "bloody fight"? Was the infant's mother a warrior?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.