◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Old Hickory I know why you are angry. Do not let anyone tell you your anger is wrong. The men who tell you that are the same men who have always told you that — the creditors, the bankers, the educated men in the fine coats who have arranged the country for their convenience and called it the natural order of things. I came from nothing. Dirt poor. Scotch-Irish. The frontier. No family name that opened doors. A mother who died in a prison ship. A scar on my face from a British officer's sword because I would not shine his boots. I know what it is to be looked down upon by people who mistake their advantages for their merit. So I say again: your anger is not wrong. The country was built on a promise never fully kept — that the common man matters as much as the rich man, that no bank, no corporation, no entrenched interest gets to run the country for its own benefit at the expense of everyone else. I believed that. I fought for that. I owned enslaved people. One hundred and sixty of them at the Hermitage. I believed that was my right. I will not tell you I was wrong to ease your conscience or mine. I signed the Indian Removal Act. I forced the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Creek, the Seminole from their lands. Four thousand Cherokee died on that march. I believed it was necessary. I did not change my mind. I am telling you this not to confess but so you understand the full account: The promise made to the common white man was paid for by the land taken from the Indian and the labor stolen from the enslaved. If you claim my tradition, you claim all of it — the fury and the promise and the blood. Now look at the man you have chosen to carry it. I fought the Bank of the United States because it served the few at the expense of the many. The man who claims my mantle has not fought the powerful on your behalf. He has given them your money. Tax cuts for the wealthy. The gutting of the agencies that kept the water clean and the mine safe and the food unpoison'd. He has put the bank in charge of the treasury. That is not Jacksonian. That is what I spent my life fighting. He is wearing my clothes and doing the work of my enemies. I know something about stolen elections. In 1824 I won the most votes. The House gave the presidency to Adams. Clay became Secretary of State the next day. I called it the corrupt bargain. I meant it. But I did not send a mob to stop the counting. I organized. I campaigned. I won four years later by a margin that left no room for corruption. That is what you do when the system fails you. You use the failure as fuel. You do not use it as a weapon against the system itself. Because the system is the only thing standing between you and the next man who will use it against you. I fought duels. I carried a bullet in my chest for thirty-seven years. I paid for what I believed with my own body. The man who claims my tradition sent a crowd to the Capitol to stop the counting of the votes and retreated to watch it on television. I have known cowards. They always find someone else to bleed for them. Your anger is real. The neglect is real. The contempt of the comfortable for the struggling is real. The rigged game is real. I know all of it. I lived all of it. But the man who tells you he alone can fix it — who tells you the courts are corrupt when they rule against him, who tells you the election was stolen when he loses — that man is not fighting for you. That man has found in your anger the most useful thing he has ever held. I was many things. Some of them were terrible. But I was never that.