For his April 20 selection, Edward Sebesta provides a quotation from a 1913 issue of the Confederate Veteran praising the Ku Klux Klan as having played a key role in "preserving civilization in the South, which ... came near being engulfed in the unfathomable abyss of negro rule..."
But for my entry today, I'm going to another Jefferson Davis speech, this one eulogizing Andrew Jackson, who died June 8, 1845. Davis' speech was on June 28, 1845, in Vicksburg MS.
As I mentioned in the Introduction to this Weblog, Jackson was an heroic figure, a champion of the common people and of American patriotism. But he was also a deeply flawed hero, a slaveowner who - unlike Thomas Jefferson - defended the institution of slavery and displaced the Indian tribes of the Southeast in a way that any American today would find it difficult to defend.
Davis as one of the leading proslavery Democratic Senators had to deal also with that contradictory nature of the General's political heritage. The Democratic Party was the Jacksonian Party. But the Jacksonian legacy was primarily one of expanding democracy, increasing economic opportunity and defending the Union. At the same time, Jackson continued a tradition of entrenched Southern power in the Presidency, which was used to defend slavery.
Jackson was a popular figure in the rural South, including Jefferson's Mississippi. So he had to find some way to praise Old Hickory's political legacy, which he would betray and attempt to destroy in the most serious way when he chose to become head of the Confederate rebellion.
Here is how Davis presents Jackson's struggle against the Calhounites of South Carolina in the nullification controversy, which had been nominally about a tariff:
Early in his administration the country was convulsed by deep dissatisfaction against an impost law, (the tariff of 1828) placed on the statute book before he came into office. President Jackson viewed that law with no favor, his friends generally desired its repeal, but his was not the department of government which could repeal a law or judge of its constitutionality, however unjust, impolitic, and unequally oppressive it might be, his duty was, whilst it remained a law to see it faithfully executed. His whole power over the subject of modification or repeal, was exhausted in his messages to congress. Resistance to the laws it was his duty to suppress by all the means at his command, and when loud and deep were heard threats of disunion, the destruction of that confederacy, the establishment of which had cost him all except his honor and his life, he resolved, cost what it might, to save it.
The agony with which he viewed the prospect of fraternal strife, and on the land where lay the bones of all his kindred, speaks forth in these few word[s], "The Union, it must be preserved." Long live that maxim, and may our Union ever be preserved by justice conciliation and brotherhood, without a spot, without a stain of blood that flowed in civil war.
It obviously wasn't the twentieth century that politicians' weasel-words came on the scene! While it's true that the General compromised on the tariff, the key issue and the one of enduring importance in that controversy was whether Southern slaveowners would be able to defy legitimate national authority in defense of their "peculiar istitution." Davis creates a pitifully phony image of Jackson tragically obligated to enforce the laws and doing so only with extreme relectance. Ole Hickory was never reluctant to fight Calhoun and the South Carolina "fire-eaters" over the issue. He fought and he won. (I posted on this controversy last October, with particular reference to how it's treated in Lost Cause dogma.)
Davis' description of Jackson's battle with the national bank - at least the portions of the speech presented at the link above - do not describe that struggle as what it was, a contest between a democratic government and centralized economic power that was corrupting and blocking the operations of democratic government. Instead, Davis presents it as an instance of Jackson exercising his duties under the code ofSouthern honor.
This speech was designed to make a nod to the ordinary voters who still reverenced Jackson's memory, while not saying anything to upset the slaveowners in the least.
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