Story highlights Trump has heaped praise on Andrew Jackson

But the controversial Nineteenth Century president might not have felt the same way about Trump, according to a biographer

Washington (CNN) In an interview with SiriusXM's Salena Zito that aired Monday, President Donald Trump repeatedly made reference to Andrew Jackson as a sort of North Star for his own presidency. He also suggested that Jackson had foreseen the Civil War and could have stopped it. (Jackson died in 1845; the Civil War began in 1861.) I reached out to historian and author Jon Meacham, who wrote "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," for some straight answers on Jackson, the Civil War and Trump's version of history. (As the New York Times' Maggie Haberman noted, Trump has been reportedly reading Meacham's Jackson book.) Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.

Cillizza: Donald Trump said the following over the weekend: "Had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn't have had the Civil War." How much of the claim -- if any -- is defensible? Could or would Jackson have worked to prevent the Civil War?

Meacham: I'm with William Seward, who, in 1858, referred to the existential tension between free states and slave states as the "irrepressible conflict." The Civil War might have been delayed, but not avoided, if the South had agreed to Lincoln's condition in the winter of 1860-61 that slavery could exist but not expand. But the Slave Power, as it is sometimes called, felt isolated, even bereft, after the rise of the Republican Party and Lincoln's narrow victory in 1860. And so, as Lincoln would say, the war came.

What would Jackson have done? Impossible to say, of course, but here are two ways to think about it.

The first is that Jackson was fundamentally a man of the Union. His mother and his brothers had died in the Revolutionary War; I think he believed their blood had sanctified the nation — not a section, but a nation. We were, as he put it in 1832, "one great family." In this light, Jackson would have fought as hard as he possibly could (and that was pretty damned hard) to avert a civil war.

Read More