Oct 6, 2019 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

In November 1832, a convention of South Carolina political activists approved a measure whereby the state might reject any law passed by the Congress in Washington.

The activists’ immediate concern was the high protection tariff Congress had imposed four years earlier. The tariff, which advanced the interests of Northern manufactures at the expense of Southern planters, was deemed unconstitutional by the South Carolina convention.

Because the South Carolinians considered the tariff illegal, they went on to say that any attempt to enforce the law in the state would be met by force. The state of South Carolina was at the tipping point of open rebellion against Washington.

The Union of states was verging on dissolution.

Into this beech stepped the president of the United States. Today, Andrew Jackson is remembered as the man who forced the removal of thousands of native Americans from their ancestral homes. The Trail of Tears was real and terrible, and Jackson’s Indian policy was opposed by a good many people in the 1830s who considered it both cruel and, yes, illegal.

To still other contemporaries, however, Jackson was something more: he was the first “man of the people” president, the first true small-d democrat to reside in the White House. To latter day historians such as Jon Meacham, Jackson was a blunt, plain-spoken individual who could also be subtle, temperate, measured.

He exhibited all these characteristics during the Nullification Crisis. His initial reaction to the South Carolinians was rage.

As the historian H.W. Brands writes in his Heirs of the Founders: “When a South Carolina congressman asked if the president had any message for the people of his district, Jackson replied, ‘Please give my compliments … and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on … upon the first tree I can reach.”

In the early days of his presidency, we were led to believe that Donald Trump was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson. He placed a wreath on Jackson’s grave in Tennessee.

Now, it’s not hard to imagine what Jackson’s reaction would be to the tweet by pastor Robert Jeffries copied by the president, which raises the specter of a “Civil War like fracture” in connection with the possible impeachment and removal of Trump from office, a matter assigned to Congress by the Constitution.

As Meacham makes clear, Jackson was a champion of the law and the Union in perpetuity. The jury on Trump is still out.

“American politics is organic,” Meacham writes, “power fluid…. The president and the people of a given moment are not always right, but Jackson believed ‘the intelligence and wisdom of our countrymen” would provide ‘relief and deliverance’ from the ‘difficulties which surround us and the dangers which threaten our institutions ‘ – in every era.”

The historian George Bancroft paid a call on Jackson in the White House in 1831, later writing that Jackson “declares that our institutions are based on the virtue of the community, and added that the moment ‘demagogues obtain influence with the people our liberties will be destroyed.'”

The question, one supposes, is Trump a demagogue? Is Uniontown a small town in western Pennsylvania?

Will our liberties be destroyed? Stay tuned.

As a rule, we pay scant attention to what historians have to say about current events and personalities. One reason, undoubtedly, is that historians don’t often speak out.

In 2016, hundreds of academic and popular historians broke with tradition and organized themselves into a chorus warning about the prospect of elevating Trump to the White House.

Their commentaries on Trump are preserved on Facebook. Some were prescient.

Stacy Schiff, who won a Pulitzer Prize for biographer in 2000, cleverly noted that Trump “seems to have quarantined himself from the past. He is borne back ceaselessly to himself.”

Ron Chernow, whose big book about Alexander Hamilton became, remarkably enough, a big Broadway musical, lamented “especially” Trump’s disconnect from the American past.

“We are all products of an epic saga,” Chernow said, “that has made us who are as a nation. When that American past is scrubbed clean, Donald Trump or any other demagogue can come along and write on it what he wants. Please, please, don’t let it happen here.”

David McCullough, the best-selling historian from Pittsburgh, stated that Trump “is unwise” in addition to being “unprepared, unqualified and, it often seems, unhinged.”

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.