The First Democrat: Andrew Jackson Part 1

The real founder of the modern Democratic Party was Andrew Jackson. Jackson, an orphan from Appalachia, rose from obscurity to become America’s most celebrated general and military hero after George Washington. He won the presidency by a landslide in 1828 and an even bigger one in 1832. His proteges dominated the Democratic Party for half a century, until the Civil War. During his lifetime Jackson was immensely popular with ordinary people, earning him the reputation of being the common man’s president.

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Not only do many on the Left refuse to acknowledge Jackson’s founding role in the Democratic Party, they also want to kick him off the $20 bill where his face currently appears. Progressives want to see him replaced on the currency with the woman who ran the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

To some degree, the progressive objective seems clear. Jackson, after all, owned some three hundred slaves during his lifetime. At one time he ran a plantation that had 150 slaves.

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The progressive media is not comfortable with a female black abolitionist representing the Republican Party while a white male slave owner represents the Democratic Party.

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[Jackson stole] land from the native Indians and then making it available for cheap purchase by white people, thus making those people beholden to Jackson and his Democratic Party.

Now it is shameful enough to use military power, political intimidation, and trickery to seize and occupy other people’s land. It is even more disgraceful to do so while pretending to be the friends of those you are stealing from, giving them the impression you are helping them. Jackson mastered the art of posing as the ally of Native Americans while robbing them blind.

Today’s Democrats in this sense are heirs of Jackson. They too appropriate resources from others and distribute them among Democratic constituencies, trading favors for votes. They too pose as the friends of those they are stealing from, justifying their confiscations as good for the victims and good for the country.

Jackson started this racket by seizing Indian land and then using it to make white settlers a bargain they could not refuse. He was, in a sense, a merchant trading in stolen goods. In this respect he exposes the low, disgraceful origins of Democratic success with the common man. No wonder Democrats are eager to bury this record, or at least foist it on someone else.

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[Jackson] didn’t really go around the law; he made the law. He was a law unto himself. That’s because he had the troops and the guns to make the Indians do his bidding. Of course Jackson wasn’t getting the Indians off their land simply because he wanted to help poor whites to have their own land. What Jackson also wanted was the votes of those people. He was willing to make land available to them knowing that this would make them into his lifelong supporters and constituents.

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Jackson’s Horseshoe Bend massacre could be considered a case of frontiersman “excess” but in this case Jackson intended to go too far. He wanted to terrorize the Indian tribes in the region, and he largely succeeded. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson found the other tribes much more pliant.

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While Jackson had few qualms about using force, he preferred, like his successor Democrats today, to rely on intimidation and deceit if he could thereby get the results he wanted.

Source: Hillary’s America. The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016) by Dinesh D’Souza.

Just like a Leftist.