AP Photo Opinion Lincoln, Not Jackson

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

Donald Trump is trying to do for Andrew Jackson what Lin-Manuel Miranda did for Alexander Hamilton.

Trump, like Miranda, is out to restore the reputation of a great American figure once threatened with removal from U.S. currency. Trump is merely the president of the United States, so doesn’t have the cultural pull of the writer and star of “Hamilton.” But his salvage job has a chance to be influential with Republicans, to the party’s peril.


Trump visited the Hermitage in March and said of Jackson in a riff at the end of his tribute, “We build on your legacy.” His Jackson boosterism caused a brouhaha this week when he mused in an interview about Jackson, had he been around a few decades later, perhaps preventing the Civil War.

The Jacksonian tradition in America has, until recently, been neglected and Trump is firmly within it. It deserves to be part of the tapestry of the Republican coalition, but the GOP should curb its enthusiasm. It already has a perfectly acceptable — nay, altogether superior — 19th century champion in the person of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln is a more suitable Republican hero, not just because he was a founding figure in the party; not just because he was on the right side of slavery (Jackson once offered a cash reward for a runaway slave with a promised bonus “for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred”); and not just because he actually, not just hypothetically, saw the Civil War through with determination, principle and wisdom.

Lincoln is also an unsurpassed exemplar of the GOP’s core values of personal responsibility and striving.

Jackson, for all his flaws, belongs in the American pantheon. Trump’s comment about the Civil War occasioned much obloquy, but he was right about Jackson’s stalwart unionism.

In the midst of the nullification crisis with South Carolina in the 1830s, Jackson told a South Carolina congressman before he headed home, “if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.” When South Carolina Sen. Robert Hayne doubted the old general would follow through, a colleague replied, “when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes.”

There’s a reason Lincoln reviewed Jackson’s proclamation against nullification when composing his first inaugural address.

There are other similarities. At the Hermitage, Trump talked of Jackson’s rise from backwoods obscurity: Lincoln traced the same path. Trump noted Jackson’s regard for common workers; Lincoln felt the same way (“Whatever is calculated to advance the conditions of the honest, struggling laboring man,” he said, “I am for that thing”). Trump celebrated how Jackson challenged the powerful and connected; Lincoln targeted the Southern planter class as a corrupt establishment. Trump remarked on all the abuse Jackson endured; Lincoln got as much or more.

So, why wasn’t Lincoln himself a Jacksonian? This would have been the easy choice given how Jacksonian Democrats dominated the areas where Lincoln grew up and made his first forays into elected politics. He instead became a Whig — and then a Republican — largely as cultural choice.

The Whigs disdained Jackson as representing “the passions.” He was a slave owner, gambler and duelist, and therefore, according to the Whigs, lacked the cardinal virtue of self-control.

They preferred Henry Clay, who said, “All legislation, all government, all society, is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy.” Lincoln identified as a Whig, in the words of one historian, “because he preferred what Whigs believed to be a more civilized way of life.” Self-improvement was the watchword for Whigs, who believed deeply in discipline, lawfulness and reason.

And this is the rub. This Whig ethic was passed into the DNA of the Republican Party, but risks getting lost in a newly Jacksonian GOP.

First, in the course of defending Trump’s tweets and various other wanderings, the party could begin to argue that words and proprieties don’t matter.

This would be a turning away from Lincoln. He had a savage wit, and was a brutal insult artist early in his career. Then, he got more serious. His most famous speeches are models of precision, logic and historical knowledge. Certainly, this is how we should want our leaders to speak and think.

Second, there is the factor of new Trump voters. In the 19th century, the different cultural emphases of Democrats and the Whigs tracked their different constituencies. To simplify, the Democrats were the party of the subsistence farmers and the Whigs the party of the people most integrated in the commercial economy. Not coincidentally, the Democrats believed in the natural goodness of the people, while the Whigs preached constant striving.

With Trump having won the loyalty of a white working class that is, among other challenges, beset by social dysfunction, the temptation for Republicans will be to forget their message of personal responsibility — to emphasize what has allegedly been done to working-class voters rather than what they can do to help themselves.

Democrats have long wanted ownership of Lincoln (the late Mario Cuomo wrote a book about this), and now the GOP’s hold on the Great Emancipator is getting cross-pressured by a Republican president. If a swap of Andrew Jackson for Abraham Lincoln is on offer, the Democrats — already scurrying away from their once signature Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners — would be foolish not to take it.

The Party of Lincoln should, despite the enthusiasm of President Trump, keep Old Hickory at a healthy arm’s length.

