Zito’s interview with Trump was published on Sunday (30 April) in The Washington Examiner.
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TRUMP: I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.
US President Donald Trump took a fresh shot at his predecessor Barack Obama and suggested the US Civil War could have been avoided, in a series of media interviews broadcast Monday. Jackson had been dead for 16 years when the war began in 1861. From his late forties onward, he actually owned slaves who worked multiple plantations as he built a little empire of cotton land in Tennessee and Alabama. Slashing marginal rates would have meant so much growth for the American states’ economies so quickly that England would have yielded more revenue and kept the colonists happily calling themselves Englishmen.
Fierce disagreement over the future of slavery was a driving force behind the war, but economic issues and disputes over state rights were also factors.
Jackson supported the South’s beliefs about slavery but also held Northern views about states’ rights.
Trump also said Jackson, a slaveholder and war hero who led a relocation and extermination campaign against Native Americans, “had a big heart”. “It was not the only cause, but it was the underlying cause”.
Jackson never questioned the underlying, fundamental difference between North and South, which was on slavery.
Probably not, according to James Roark, an author and retired history professor at Emory University in Atlanta. Others have suggested that Trump was, in a roundabout way, referencing Jackson’s opposition to his VP and the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, which involved a confrontation between SC and the federal government over tariffs. “It wasn’t for a lack of talking”. “It’s a very intensive process”, Trump told his interviewer of the presidency. You do the math. Whether Andrew Jackson lived 17 years longer or not, he remained a slave owner who was not averse to the mistreatment of human lives.
Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; and by Jonah Engel Bromwich of The New York Times.
During an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito over the weekend, Trump opined about his affection for Jackson. Even President Trump has asked the question before.
So could have Trump or Jackson or some other tactful negotiator “worked out” the North-South divides and prevented the Civil War?
In his first 100 days in office, they report, Trump has made 488 false or misleading claims-an average of 4.9 a day; gone no more than 10 days, counting six on a golfing vacation, without a single false claim; and made 20 or more false claims on four separate days.
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In his famous Gettysburg Address, given on the battlefield where more than 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had died, Lincoln did not talk about winning or losing.
