Trump makes puzzling claim about Andrew Jackson, Civil War

In an interview with a reporter for the Washington Examiner, Trump made some claims that don't hold up.

Trump continued to peer in Jackson's mind, telling Zito that the man responsible for the Trail Of Tears was baffled by the Civil War: "He said, 'there's no reason for this.'" And that's actually quite believable, since again, Jackson himself owned about 300 slaves over the course of his lifetime.

Now, some pundits are mocking this statement by pointing out that Jackson died well before the actual Civil War, but in Trump's defense, he did say "had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later".

In this March 31, 2017 file photo, a portrait of former President Andrew Jackson hangs on the wall behind President Donald Trump, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington. "Why could that one not have been worked out?", President Trump said.

It would have been tough for Jackson to be "very angry" about the Civil War considering he died over a decade before it began.

In a separate interview Monday night, Meacham, who wrote a biography on Jackson, called Trump's comments "disturbing". The Civil war broke out 16 years later under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. "So I don't know why the president gets into these messes that he doesn't need to".

Jackson supported the South's beliefs about slavery but also held Northern views about states' rights.

Even Andrew Jackson, were he alive, could not have threatened the use of force that perhaps Trump thinks would have solved the problem.

Lincoln "was willing to let slavery stand in the states where it existed", Meacham said. I spent about an hour, hour and a half with him in May of 2016 talking about presidents he admired, and Jackson never came up. He said, "there's no reason for this.'" However, Trump's tweet retroactively confirms that he meant to say that he believed Jackson "saw [the war] coming" and that he might've prevented it.

US President Donald Trump took a fresh shot at his predecessor Barack Obama and suggested the US Civil War could have been avoided, in a series of media interviews broadcast Monday. "That's the counterfactual question you have to ask".

Historians argue that the causes of the Civil War are frequently discussed, from middle school classrooms to university lecture halls and in books. Jackson was the seventh president, serving from 1829 to 1837.

Barring extreme concessions by one of the sides, other Civil War historians have concurred that some form of violent conflict was practically unavoidable. Others have suggested that Trump was, in a roundabout way, referencing Jackson's opposition to his VP and the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s, which involved a confrontation between SC and the federal government over tariffs. The Civil War began in 1861.

  • Bernice Underwood