by Rod D. Martin
April 20, 2016

Yes, Democrats just dumped the founder of their own party and replaced him with a gun-toting Republican. No kidding.

Not shockingly, Facebook and Twitter enjoyed the heck out of that.

harriet-tubman-meme

What I will say about Andrew Jackson — a remarkably awful man in some ways — is that were it not for Andrew Jackson, the British would have taken New Orleans and with it the mouth of the Mississippi River.

And had that happened, American history would have played out very, very differently.

The British would not have given up the mouth of the Mississippi River, the most strategic point on the North American continent, under any circumstances. They would have exacted a toll on American agricultural and mineral exports for more or less the entire 19th century unless forcibly dislodged, and would forced whatever concession they wished, anytime they wished, by virtue of their ability to turn off the lion’s share of American commerce at will.

Indeed, it is perfectly possible that America might never have built sufficient military power to dislodge them. Ensconced at New Orleans, British tentacles would have reached unimpeded into every part of America, as they came to do in the same era in China and India. The America we know might never have been at all.

Thankfully, we never had to face that prospect, because of Andrew Jackson’s astonishing, history-changing defense of New Orleans. So regardless of whatever else he might have been guilty, Andrew Jackson is owed a great debt by the American people. Whether or not he ought to be on the $20, he shouldn’t be unceremoniously dumped out of our history just because he’s a dead white guy who was wrong about some things. Especially since most of the dumpers are people who have never done diddly for their country.

I would add that no one should be “dumped” from history. The left seems to have become very Orwellian in this regard of late, flushing people and ideas routinely down the “memory hole” to conform our memory of the past to their vision of the present. This is both alarming and, well, totalitarian. It must be resisted.

But it doesn’t need to be resisted with regard to the perfectly wonderful Harriet Tubman. She was, after all, a gun-totin’ Republican who spent her life helping people escape the tyranny and oppression of the Democrat Party.

And that most certainly deserves acclaim.