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The fundamental question for all of history is: What were they thinking?  When I'm trying to figure out what Jackson was thinking, one of the things I have to impress on my readers is how different life was in Jackson's age from life in our own day.  For example, it's very easy for us in the first decade of the 21st century, when we know that the United States is the world's most powerful country, and furthermore that the United States has been the world's most powerful country for the last 100 years, to assume that it was always that way or that it was somehow always destined to be that way.  When I make the point in my book on Jackson that Jackson spent his entire life fearful for the future of the United States -- fearful that the United States would fall victim to the British, the French, the Spanish, the Indians, or internal dissension -- these were real fears.  In fact, he was absolutely correct to fear for the future of the American democratic experience because fifteen years after he died the country fell apart in Civil War.

It's incumbent upon the biographer to try to recreate the stakes of the battle.

I have never yet met a person who said, "Andrew Jackson is my favorite president."  If school children know anything about Andrew Jackson, they know first of all that he was a slave holder, and secondly that he was the one that drove the Cherokees out of Georgia.  On both of those counts, Jackson has some explaining to do.  To us, he's come down on the wrong side of these issues that are morally clear.  How can I justify the time writing about this guy who was such a ferocious ogre, who spent his time enslaving African Americans and killing Indians?  It's a job.  It's not that easy to do.  Jackson, in the case of slavery, doesn't give me much to work with.  Thomas Jefferson owned twice as many slaves as Andrew Jackson ever did, but Jefferson had the good grace for historians and for his biographers to at least feel guilty about it.  With Jackson, there's no sense that he feels guilty about it -- slavery was part of Jackson's world, just the way war was part of Jackson's world.  He hadn't designed the world, he hadn't designed slavery, he hadn't designed war.  But if slavery existed, if war existed, he was going to deal with both of them as best as he could.

It is the hardest thing in the world to make students today understand that sincere, well-meaning people who considered themselves religious -- basically good people -- could live in a world that allowed slavery, could own slaves themselves.  How does one make that understandable?  It's a delicate task.  Sometimes a draw an analogy.  The analogy I've been using lately is to war.  There are very few people today who say that war is a good thing.  I think it's apparent that there is a majority in the United States who would say that as evil as war might be, sometimes it's necessary.  I think for many slaveholders in the 18th and 19th century, that was the attitude they took: slavery is an evil, but as far as we can tell it's a necessary evil.  We can argue with them across time, but my point is that the historian has to try to make these folks understandable to a modern audience, in particular to get at this question of: What were they thinking?

As for Jackson and the Indians, here's another one where Jackson comes down on the wrong side.  We know how the Indians were mistreated over all those years and generations, so what was Jackson doing demanding that the Indians leave the eastern part of the United States -- although to him it was the western part of the United States -- and cross the Mississippi River into what was called the Indian territory.  Here's one where I have to make Jackson understandable.  I don't have to make modern audiences agree with him, but I would be not doing my job if I didn't try to make it understandable.

The argument I could make is Jackson's argument -- modern audiences are free to agree or disagree.  The Cherokees wanted to stay in Georgia, they wanted to continue to live as an organized tribe, and Jackson said to their leaders, 'you can stay in Georgia but not as a sovereign tribe, or if you're going to remain as a sovereign tribe you have to leave Georgia -- you can't have it both ways.'

Part of his reasoning was his concern over the security of the United States.  He had lived during 40 years when foreign countries had used American Indian tribes as ways of weakening America on the frontier.  The War of 1812 was as much a war between American and Indian tribes in the Southeast as it was a war between Americans and the British.

The other thing was that Jackson knew his contemporaries, he knew his countrymen, and he knew the folks in Georgia who were insisting that the Cherokees leave.  He knew that the alternative to leaving Georgia, for the Cherokees, wasn't remaining peacefully on their ancestral lands.  The realistic alternative was that they were all going to be killed.  He wasn't going to kill them, the U.S. Army wasn't going to kill them, but he knew the people in Georgia and he knew that they would kill them.  How did he know this?  Because he had lived with people just like that for most of his life in Tennessee, and it was a world in which there was a constant struggle for survival.

This is another one where, for modern audience, how do I convey the stakes of the struggle between the settlers in Tennessee and the various Indian tribes, including the Cherokees?  Each party to this conflict thought it was fighting for its land and its lives.  We could say, if we feel so inclined, 'well the settlers shouldn't have been there.'  It was the Indians' land and therefor the settlers had no place.  Well, maybe in some cosmic sense that was true.  But after they had been there for a generation or two, then all they knew was that their uncle and their cousins had been killed by raiding Indians.

So what's a modern analogy to this?  It seems to me that a reasonable analogy is the struggle for control of the West Bank today, where there are two people who both have this firm belief that this land is theirs.  Who got there first?  At this point it doesn't make any difference because at this point there have been two or three generations of Israelis there and it's their land, in their point of view.  And for the Palestinians, of course, 'It was ours first.'  I can't say that one side has the moral high ground or the other.  This is one of those cases where history is really messy.

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