American Apocalypse

By Roselouise Smith

The deep political divide that is growing ever more apparent is a far cry from our Founder's envisioned Utopia. Whether through hate mongering, religious-political extortion, bold-faced lies, or outright treason, our political leaders are bringing forth the apocalypse of the American ethos. It is important to note that George Washington had a fixed opinion on the punishment of traitors hanging. This absolutism is exactly what he expected his successors and Congress to adhere to as they, like himself, nobly put country before self. We are infinitely removed from the glory days of integrity and honor. Reason, logic, and facts have become sacrilegious with the ever-increasing religious stranglehold on our political system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645449850

Book preview

Trump and Jackson

Mr. Trump has said, I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening 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 couldn’t that one not have been worked out?

First, as numerous others have already pointed out in the media and academia, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of books written on the Civil War. In fact, there are a plethora of historians one could turn to and ask, Why the Civil War? If so inclined, one could even turn on the history channel or perhaps watch Gettysburg or Glory to help understand the Civil War mind-set. By all means, if able, go to a Civil War reenactment and ask any one of the participants why they think the Civil War was fought. A high school history book could even give a watered-down simplistic explanation. All of these, Mr. Trump did not deem worthy to confer with before uttering his grossly inaccurate statement.

The Civil War, which is usually explained as a war to end slavery, is not so cut and dry. A multitude of factors influenced the decision of the Southern states to secede from the Union. These include but are not limited to cultural differences from the North slavery versus universal rights, economic situations—agrarian versus industrial—and a feeling that their voices were no longer being heard or considered in the federal government’s decisions.

As far back as Andrew Jackson, the states debated on revising the Constitution or allowing states to secede from the Union for their benefit. When under Jackson, South Carolina declared federal tariffs unconstitutional. Jackson enacted the Force Bill—allowing him to send federal troops into the state to adhere to Congress’s laws. This would contribute to, through the perception that they were not worthy of being considered equal to the industrial North, the belief of the southern state that in 1860, they were left with no choice but to secede.

Between Jackson and the election of Lincoln in 1860, there was a growing concern among the agrarian South that slave-run plantations which were heavily tied to their way of life would be congressionally ended leaving them in poverty and disenfranchised. New states were correspondingly contested with frenzied zest to be established as pro or antislavery states. While Jackson may have, before his death in 1845, been aware of the rise of antislavery objectives, he would have expressed the need for the continuation of the Union for the betterment of the nation. Logically one cannot know what Jackson would actually have thought about the Civil War as a whole since the war took place from April 12 of 1861 to April 9 of 1865, some sixteen years after Jackson’s death. Lacking a contemporaneous account from Jackson during the war, we only know what he irrefutably thought about states refusing to pay the taxes set by the federal government.

Jackson, while a staunch Unionist, was also a slave owner and a senator from Tennessee—a frontier state with a different mentality than that of Washington, DC. Politically and culturally, Jackson was an outsider. While it has been noted that Jackson and Trump share this similarity, it is by far the most flattering similarity they share. Dan P. McAdams’s statement in theAtlantic.com on June 2016, They saw him as intemperate, vulgar, and stupid,⁵ could equally apply to Trump as to the intended Andrew Jackson. Furthermore, McAdams adds Thomas Jefferson’s own words to describe Jackson, but this could again be interchangeable with Trump, One of the most unfit men I know of to become president of United States, a dangerous man who cannot speak in a civilized manner because he choke[s] with rage, a man whose passions are terrible.⁶ Clearly, both Trump and Jackson share a basic lack of sophistication. By Trump’s own words, he has defined himself as a crass, arguably sexist and narcissistic man, who may very well suffer from a Napoleon complex. This is to say, there is some self-perceived deficiency that drives Trump to be overly aggressive and exhibit his near constant truculent behavior. Both men also have notorious anger management problems. While Jackson was more likely to challenge you to a duel in the street over an insult, Trump would much rather defame an individual, or an entity like a newspaper or the media as a whole, in any and every forum he feels that listens to his infantile and bordering on delusional