Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State 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 hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.

The hair seems familiar

In his first term some people noted that President Trump had hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office and some speculations were made from this.

It fitted with Trump’s pugnacious attitude towards enemies – both foreign and domestic – and the whole concept of America First, sticking it to international forums and forms.

Actually there is much more to America’s 7th President than just dueling, fighting in general, telling the Supreme Court to get stuffed, and being more than willing to wage war on a Southern State that was defying him and the Federal government (over tariffs, amusingly enough), twenty years before Lincoln’s great test.

His father died shortly before he was born. His widowed mother was left to raise three sons, one a newborn, alone. When the American Revolutionary War reached the Carolinas, the Jacksons paid a high price. Andrew’s older brother Hugh died of heatstroke in 1779, after a battle. In 1781, Andrew and his brother Robert who had joined the patriot cause, were captured by the British. Andrew was only thirteen.

During their captivity, the Jackson brothers were mistreated and contracted smallpox. Robert would not survive. He died shortly after Mrs. Jackson had arranged for their release. Andrew had been slashed by a British officer when he refused to polish the officer’s boots. Young Andrew would survive, but soon after he was well, his mother volunteered to aid sick soldiers in Charleston where she contracted cholera and died. Orphaned at age fourteen, Andrew Jackson unsurprisingly would hold a lifelong hostility towards Great Britain.

With rather a piecemeal form of education, as many at the time had, young Andrew Jackson apprenticed with a saddle-maker, taught in the local school a bit, and then worked in the law office of Spruce McCay where he learned enough law to be admitted into the North Carolina bar in 1787.

He was tough and he was smart. That piece on his self-education following his being orphaned at the age of 14 should be compulsory reading today, especially for the down-and-out of America, though it would likely be described as “White Privilege” now.

But the point to be made here is that President Andrew Jackson is very relevant today, which was Trump’s message in 2017 and again in 2025 as he brings his portrait back into the Oval Office – and as John Ringo explains in this X-thread:

Wilsonians [President Woodrow Wilson (D), 1913-1921] are the Clinton wing of the Democratic party. They are also all through the State Department and to a great extent the ‘permanent bureaucracy’ in DC. (Though they’ve lately been overtaken by Jeffersonians in that.)

Madisonians [James Madison, 4th President and “Father of the Constitution” ] are the Bush wing of the Republican party. They’re all about ‘Government exists to create a better business climate especially for my friends.’

Jeffersonians [Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President and primary author of the Declaration of Independence.] for a very long time were sort of in the background of the Democrat party, pushing it left but not controlling it, then started to take over under Obama and are the ‘woke’ part that’s controlling it now.

Jacksonians have ALWAYS been the silent majority in the US political system. They mostly were ‘leave me alone and I’ll just vote D/R whichever.’ And, like Jeffersonians, often didn’t vote because neither party represented them very well. (Nor cared much about them at all.)

Read the whole thing, and especially note this.

Trump is the first fully Jacksonian President and JD Vance is the poster child for Jacksonianism. This is what has everyone in the establishment confused. They had no clue the Jacksonians even EXISTED. Most of the Jacksonians were checked out because no party really represented their interests.

The two revolutionary, reactionary, head banger elements of American politics are finally going at it hammer and tongs and the Jeffersonians are losing badly. (Currently.) This is also MASSIVELY confusing on the international front because NOBODY ever lets the Jacksonians near international politics. They are strictly invisible.

Which has led to this…

The unwashed masses have illegally wrested power from the wise Olympians. It really is the ‘end of democracy’ because democracies ALWAYS end when the people rise up and overthrow the wise Olympians who direct them. That things might be different this time or that they might not be ‘Wise Olympians’ or that their ‘expertise’ is mostly in accruing and growing power does not occur to them.

UPDATE: And as reader Andrei has pointed out, Ringo has spelt coup d’etat wrong. 🙂

Amid all this power-to-the-people it should be understood that Jackson was lukewarm on “states rights”, despite being a Southerner himself and having as Vice President, none other than a man, John C Calhoun, clearly identified with the nullification movement, a fight in the 1820’s that argued states could “nullify” certain Federal laws they did not agree with (the spark in that case being not slavery but tariffs). The nullifiers in the South had thought Jackson was on their side, worked hard to get him elected, and overwhelmingly supported him in the 1828 election.

But Jackson said nothing about the tariffs once elected and after a couple more years, presented a toast directly in the presence of the nullifiers during the annual Democratic Party celebration honouring Jefferson’s birthday:“Our Federal Union: It must be preserved”, which shocked them. After that things settled down with a modified tariff that answered most of the complaints and the end of nullification talk. Jackson had the final word a few days later, when a visitor from South Carolina asked if Jackson had any message he wanted relayed to his friends back in the state. Jackson’s reply was:

Yes I have; please give my compliments to my friends in your State 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 hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.

It’s lucky for the South that Jackson wasn’t President during the Civil War.