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Trump Thinks Andrew Jackson, the Slaveowner with the ‘Big Heart,’ Could’ve Stopped the Civil War

Posted byBy Kiersten Willis | Published on: CommentsComments (0)

President Donald Trump believes Andrew Jackson could have stopped the Civil War from happening had he not died in 1845 and questioned why it happened in the first place, leading to a chorus of historical answers from Twitter.

“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump said to the Washington Examiner. “He was a very tough person but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw with regard to the Civil War, he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’

“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

But by the time the Civil War erupted in 1861, there was no chance of a reconciliation.

“It was much, much harder to compromise as the Civil War broke out in 1861 because the nation was more squarely confronting [slavery],” Steve Inskeep, author of “Jacksonland,” told NPR Monday, May 1. “Northern votes had just elected Abraham Lincoln, a president from an allegedly radical new party that insisted that slavery was wrong and must be contained to the South. Southerners saw this as a threat to their property and tried to secede from the Union. … People did try, desperately, to “work out” that problem before the shooting started in 1861, but it was, in the end, an irreconcilable difference.”

Trump’s claim that Jackson had a big heart is also questionable as Jackson owned about 150 enslaved Africans.

“Although I hate chains, [I was] compelled to place two of them in irons, for safekeeping until an opportunity offers to sell or exchange them,” Jackson said of recapturing four of the Black people he enslaved in 1832.

Twitter also reacted to Trump’s statements.

https://twitter.com/MrDane1982/status/859087076612079616

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