by Ray Lyman
Clik here to view.
Andrew Jackson stands on the ramparts above the Rodriguez Canal as 8,000 British regulars, veterans of Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and Portugal, push forward across a sugarcane field and furiously storm the American field fortifications. It is among the most lopsided defeats in the annals of U.S. and British history. More than 2,000 of British attackers were killed, wounded, or captured, while Jackson’s losses amount to seven killed and six wounded. As more than 500 Britons emerge from the heaps of dead redcoats in the cane field with their hands raised in surrender, Jackson Biblically comments that he “never had so grand and awful an idea of the resurrection.”
In George Orwell’s 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, his protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, where historical events are altered to reflect the totalitarian party line and historical figures out of favor are purged from the historical record. In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, history has become a tool to control the present, and the only past that exists is one created by the state and constantly changed by the misnamed Ministry of Truth to reflect the political correctness of the moment.
America now has its own version of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, an erasing of people and events that shaped U.S. history implemented and enforced by the new authoritarians of political correctness, identity politics, and an educational system which has instilled historical amnesia in much of the population under the age of 30. The latest, but almost certainly not the last, target of this war against America’s once-proud past is our seventh president, Andrew Jackson.
Once honored as among the greatest of American figures from the past, portrayed in Hollywood films by the likes of Charlton Heston (who starred as Jackson in The President’s Lady and The Buccaneer), Andrew Jackson managed to get his image on the paper currency, which he despised, and to be remembered fondly by the Democratic Party at their annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner as the founder of America’s oldest and largest political party. All that is coming to an end for our seventh president, who is now being consigned to the manure pile of history as a slave-owning, genocidal murderer who spent his life as a soldier and politician taking land away from Native Americans and Latinos so that white slave owners could settle on it. State Democratic Party organizations are removing his name, and Jefferson’s as well more often than not, from their annual dinners in the face of pressure from the party’s identity politics base, who are notoriously ignorant and indifferent to objective history as it was once understood. In the next few years, Jackson’s face will be moved from the front of the $20 bill to be replaced by Harriet Tubbs, who benefits according to the rules of political correctness from being African-American, female, and an opponent of slavery, or some other woman or women who played minor roles in the American narrative.
All of this is only the beginning. Memorials to Confederate war dead are being removed from public parks, buildings, and streets named for Indian fighters or capitalists are being changed in college towns, and academics eager for tenure are racing to readjust Jackson’s place among U.S. presidents from the top tier to the company of the leaders of the Third Reich. As the demographics of the country continue to change, it will be increasingly difficult to honor any American leader or hero who lived before the election of Barack Obama and the rise of identity politics. All of them will be found guilty of some kind crime against minorities or some attitude that would be labeled today as David Duke–style racism. Nine of our presidents owned slaves, including Ulysses S. Grant; Theodore Roosevelt was an unrepentant imperialist who believed that it was the white man’s burden to expand civilization; Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal bureaucracy; Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the bill to intern ethnic Japanese on the West Coast; Dwight D. Eisenhower deported million of illegal Mexican immigrants; John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, suspected that Martin Luther King had Communist sympathies and authorized FBI wiretaps of the civil rights icon; and Abraham Lincoln, until the last year of his life, favored resettling freed slaves in African and Central American colonies. None of them will be able to withstand the inquisition of political correctness. A century from now, the father of our country may well be Barack Obama, not a Virginia slave owner and aristocrat who may suffer the same fate as Andrew Jackson.
Why should we be concerned who is portrayed on our inflated paper currency or honored with a monument? If a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest is removed from a public square by pressure from left-wing activists or the defenders of the Alamo, nearly all of whom were proponents of slavery as well as Texas independence, denigrated in school textbooks as land-grabbing Anglo racists, what does it matter to the future of our nation?
It matters because a nation’s history and historical heroes, along with a common language and cultural traditions, form the foundation of what a nation is . . . its national heritage. Take away the national heritage from a country and you no longer have a nation. What you have left may still be a country with frontiers defined on a map, but it is no longer a nation, just a collection of competing identitarian groups — racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, ideological — whose loyalty will be first to that identity and second, if at all, to the country. Mexico, for example, unapologetically honors it national heroes —Montezuma, Father Hidalgo, Los Ninos of Chapultepec, Benito Juarez, Francisco Madero — on the face of its pesos and in impressive monuments and has no tolerance for those who denigrate those national heroes. Mexico also discourages almost all immigration to maintain the cohesion and nationalism of the Mexican nation.
There are many who will argue that the United States, unique among all the nations that ever existed, is a propositional nation that does not require a common heritage or history. They say it is the Jeffersonian ideas expressed in the first few paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence; a Constitution, the meaning and subtleties of which our courts and people have passionately argued over for more than two centuries; and the spirit of entrepreneurship and opportunities that make America great, and not a past that is best forgotten anyway. If that is truly the case, then we have nothing to worry about. We can raise generation after generation that has no knowledge of the founding fathers, the Civil War, the World Wars, and former American heroes — such as Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, James Madison, David Crockett, Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Jackson — with no fear that it will lead to disunited nation.
My own view is that we are not so unique. Throughout history men and women have seldom sacrificed and died just for a proposition, no matter how ennobling that proposition might be. Democracy is a great principle, one that Andrew Jackson believed in and did more to advance than any president in our history, but it is not enough. The Athenian phalanx at Marathon did not go into battle just to save their democratic form of government, but to preserve the people, culture, and heritage of Athens. The ragged and shoeless veterans of the Continental Army did not freeze, starve, and die from smallpox and fevers during the 1778 winter at Valley Forge for the principle of opposing taxation without representation, but to create an independent American nation. The Army of the Potomac did not bleed itself in attacks through the Cornfield, Bloody Lane, and Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam for the cause of anti-slavery, but to preserve the American union. Soviet Russians in World War II did not fight, struggle, starve, sacrifice everything, and die in horrific circumstances by the tens of millions for the ideology of Communism, but to preserve Mother Russia and the Russian people, something well understood by Russian leaders today.
Andrew Jackson was the last American president with a living memory of the Revolution. As an adolescent in South Carolina, Jackson experienced the dark underside of America’s War of Independence, not the gentleman’s war in the northern colonies between armies of uniformed professional soldiers, but a dirty, eye-for-an-eye civil war between Tory irregulars and American guerrillas that defined the character of the war in the Carolinas. At age 13, the future president defied a British dragoon officer in the notorious Banastre Tarleton’s Loyalist Legion who ordered him to shine his boots, earning a saber blow across the forehead and a scar he carried to the end of his life. Condemned as a rebel, along with his brother, Andrew Jackson spent months in a concentration camp where his brother died from smallpox and he very nearly did, leaving this veteran of what was in many ways America’s first civil war, one the great haters in American history. That hatred lasted his entire life, making him the wrong kind of enemy to make, whether that enemy was British, Native American, a political opponent, or a local rival who insulted his very prickly sense of honor. He killed at least two men on the dueling field, always aiming for a fatal shot, and carrying an opposing duelist’s bullet near his heart for the last 30 years of his life.
Jackson grew to manhood and maturity in what was then thought of as the West in the frontier settlements of Tennessee. He probably never spent a day of his life in a school house, but, like Lincoln, was an autodidact who became a self-educated lawyer, carrying law books and a rifle as circuit lawyer on the trans-Appalachian frontier, ready at any moment to either practice law or defend himself against a Shawnee raiding party looking for scalps to adorn their lodges. Jackson’s life always seemed to attract violence and controversy, then as now. Even his marriage to his beloved wife, Rachel Donelson Robards, led to violence and was used as a weapon to attack Jackson’s reputation and character. Her divorce to her previous husband had not been officially granted by the Tennessee state legislature before her marriage to Jackson, leading to accusations against his wife of bigamy and illicit behavior, which Jackson responded to on numerous occasions with a cane or a dueling pistol. In this era when the American character was defined, Jackson embodied it as a self-made man with a penchant for violent action and a strong belief in the egalitarian notion that the common man — the common white man anyway — should enjoy universal suffrage and choose the nation’s leaders and legislators. It was quite a radical idea at the time, when the vote was usually limited to property owners and the -residents had all been either Virginia aristocrats or Massachusetts graduates of Harvard.
It cannot be overestimated how important Andrew Jackson as a military commander was to the survival and expansion of the United States and its growth into a great power. If he had never been elected president, he would still rank as among the greatest of Americans. As a white man on the frontier, Jackson hated Indians, especially Shawnees and Creeks, who had allied with Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. The Native Americans would have been regarded in Jackson’s time the same way as we regard terrorists today and the response to their atrocities would have been the same as ours was to 9/11. After the massacre of more than 500 whites, including hundreds of women and children, at Fort Mims in the Alabama territory in late August 1813, General Jackson commanded the force of Tennessee militia and U.S. Army regulars, among whom were a young army lieutenant named Sam Houston and backwoods scout named David Crockett, that pursued the southern Creeks for seven months and finally cornered them at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where the Creeks were slaughtered with the same lack of mercy they had shown at Fort Mims. The Creek leader, a half-breed named Billy Weatherford, signed a treaty, agreeing to what were draconian terms that effectively made it possible for Alabama to enter the union and the territory to be opened to settlement. Under the treaty, the Creeks were moved west, eventually to Oklahoma, where they are today.
Clik here to view.
In this daguerreotype photograph taken near the end of his life, the years of hardship, rough living, and old wounds are revealed in the Scotch-Irish features of our seventh president. Andrew Jackson is largely responsible for the western expansion of the American nation beyond the Mississippi River. If New Orleans had fallen in January 1815 and Britain had gained control of the mouth of the Father of Waters, a third Anglo-American war would have been all but inevitable. After its bloody repulse at the Rodriguez Canal, Britain gained new respect for the lethality of American riflemen and exercised restraint in the many confrontations with the United States throughout the 19th century, avoiding war and ensuring that the two nations would form a special relationship in the 20th century.
The myth, often asserted as fact, about the Battle of New Orleans is that it was fought after the war had officially ended. The Treaty of Ghent had indeed been signed on Christmas Eve 1814 in Belgium, but the U.S. Senate would not ratify it until February. Until then, Britain and the United States remained at war, and the war flourished at sea and on land well into 1815, the last shots fired off the coast of Dutch Java in a naval action that summer. The invasion of Louisiana and occupation of New Orleans was not to be a raid, as had been the capture and burning of Washington, D.C., (including the White House and the Capitol) only four months earlier. This was an invasion by an army of 10,000 veteran troops who came to stay, the largest overseas expeditionary force outside Europe organized by the British Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. Britain had never recognized the Louisiana Purchase and, in fact, regarded the sale of that 800,000 square miles by Napoleon to Thomas Jefferson as illegal and a violation of the rights of their ally Spain, which had governed the territory from 1763 to 1801 and returned it to France on the condition that Napoleon would not transfer it to any other nation. Well, Napoleon had many virtues, but keeping his word was not really one of them. So, peace treaty or not, France had no intention of leaving once the Americans were swept aside and British troops raised the fourth national flag in 15 years to fly over the city.
Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law to the Duke of Wellington and veteran of the campaigns against the French in Spain and Portugal, had likely never heard of Andrew Jackson. Pakenham had no experience in fighting the Dirty Shirts or the Jonathans, as the American enemy was known in the British Army, but he did know they were inclined to break and run when confronted by professionals, as they had done at Bladensburg in Maryland and in battles along the Canadian frontier. Pakenham was not expecting serious opposition, and he intended to be dining in New Orleans before the middle of January and assuming the office of British military governor of Louisiana. Few military opponents in history speaking the same language have been so dissimilar in life experiences and character as Pakenham and Jackson — the former an English gentleman and landed aristocrat who had purchased his way up through the ranks and married into the most illustrious family in England and Ireland and the letter a self-made backwoods lawyer and natural soldier immersed in hatred of anyone wearing a red uniform and filled with a determination to win at all costs. One of them was bound to die in this battle for control of the North American jugular: the mouth of the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans. At the end of that decisive day, 8 January 1815, it was Pakenham and more than 400 of his soldiers who lay dead, with another 1,600 or more wounded and taken prisoner. The would-be military governor of Louisiana went home in a cask of sailor’s rum to preserve the body for his family to bury.
The case can be made, and I’ll make it, that American nationalism was born at New Orleans on 8 January 1815. Jackson commanded the first truly national army in U.S. history, composed of a handful of U.S. Army regiments blooded in battle against the Creeks, Tennessee and Kentucky militia who marched down the Natchez Trace to join Jackson in New Orleans, French creoles with less love for the English than the upstart Yankees, Free African-Americans organized in a well-drilled militia company, and an odd assortment of Cherokee Indians, bayou Cajuns exiled from Canada a half century earlier, and volunteer gunners under General Dominique You from Jean Lafitte’s pirate kingdom on Barataria Bay fighting for Jackson in exchange for a pardon for past crimes. Lafitte himself was nowhere near the battle that day. This composite force of adventurers, long hunters, West Pointers and militia captains, scoundrels, patriots, and volunteers from assorted races and ethnicities represented the new America that was emerging west of the Appalachian Mountains.
As news of the extraordinary one-sided victory swept the country as fast as men on horseback could carry the news, Americans celebrated from New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston to the settlements in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and for maybe the first time saw themselves as Americans rather than as Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or New Englanders. The embodiment of this new American nationalism was Andrew Jackson, and already there were those urging the 48-year-old plantation owner to seek the presidency. Jackson, however, was content for the moment to return to his wife Rachel and his plantation home, the Hermitage, a tourist mecca today, and declined to run in 1816.
It was the Era of Good Feeling, the first and only time since George Washington’s presidency when partisan politics briefly were not a part of American life. The Federalist Party, which had opposed the War of 1812 and threatened the secession of the New England states during the darkest period of the war after the burning of the White House and Capitol, disappeared after Jackson’s victory at New Orleans branded them as the party of treason. It was the first major American political party to fade into oblivion, running its last candidate in 1816 and losing all but three states in the electoral college, winning barely 30 percent of the popular vote. Former Secretary of State James Monroe, a member of Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, won the presidency and the fifth straight election in a row by the Jeffersonians, which pleased the still-living former president at Monticello. It was, in effect, the only political party in the United States and would remain so for more than a decade.
Recalled to the colors by President Monroe in 1818 to suppress the Seminole Indian raids into U.S. territory from Spanish Florida, General Jackson invaded Spanish territory without permission to take the war to the Seminoles and British agents who were arming them. Much to the outrage of Spanish sensibilities, he captured Pensacola and occupied the Florida panhandle, effectively ending the Seminole incursions into the United States. Never missing an opportunity to hang an Englishman, Jackson captured two British agents and, after giving them a perfunctory military trial in which the verdict was never in doubt, strung them up as an example to others who might be inclined to provide rifles and powder to the Indians. The lesson was not lost on the Spanish, who made a strong diplomatic protest about the unprovoked aggression but declined to resist the victor of New Orleans with armed force. President Monroe and Congress would have removed Jackson from command, except for the popularity of his actions among the people of the South and West. The occupation of the Florida panhandle was as much a fait accompli as Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in the 21st century, and it had the same effect. The Americans were there to stay, and Spain, which had fallen from the ranks of the great powers, accepted the inevitable and sold all of Florida to the United States the following year. It was a very neat little land grab, from which the country has derived great benefit ever since.
The First Seminole War (there would be two others lasting from the 1830s until the middle of the 1850s) would be Jackson’s last war as an active participant. He was over 50, and this was a time when that age was the average life span for most men. War was then, and is today, an occupation for young men, and Florida had taken its toll on his health, as it did for most people before the invention of air conditioning and hotel swimming pools. The great general ran for and easily won a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee and then entered the 1824 presidential race. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans was fracturing along sectional and class lines with John Quincy Adams representing what we would call today the establishment wing and Senator Jackson, Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, and former Treasury Secretary William Crawford challenging that party establishment in a four-way race. Jackson won a plurality of the popular and electoral college vote but not enough to constitute a majority, which threw the election into the House of Representatives, as provided for in the 12th Amendment.
In what was widely called the “corrupt bargain,” Henry Clay, who famously said that “killing 2,500 Englishmen (a slight exaggeration) did not qualify Jackson for the various, difficult, and complicated duties of the Presidency,” threw his support to John Quincy Adams in return for an appointment as Secretary of State. The Never Jackson movement of the 1820s was every bit as elitist, recalcitrant, and doomed to fail as the Never Trump movement in 2016. As Richard Nixon once told Patrick Buchanan, “When you see a movement to stop X, bet on X.” The election of the “corrupt bargain” ended with Jackson as bitter enemies of Adams and Clay, and the feeling was mutual. One of Jackson’s great regrets at the end of his life was that he had not killed Henry Clay.
The rematch between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828 was one of the dirtiest and most vile in U.S. history, with far more mudslinging than honest debate of the issues. Adams and Clay had formed the National Republican Party out of the establishment wing of the Democratic-Republicans, which soon became known as the Whigs, a national party that would run presidential candidates through the 1852 election and win the White House twice. The Democratic-Republicans under Jackson had become simply the Democratic Party, which it remains today, much changed in character but still the oldest political party in the United States. Jackson stood for the interests of the rising new America in the South and the West, creating a national coalition of Southern planters, Western small farmers, supporters of tariff nullification, frontiersmen, land speculators, former soldiers, Western expansionists, and common people who had long been disenfranchised, ignored, and taxed by the Virginia and Massachusetts establishment that had run the country since the end of the Revolution.
The primary target of the anti-Jackson press and the mudslinging hecklers at Jackson’s speeches was Rachel Jackson, who was accused of being a prostitute and bigamist, among other old slanders that were revived in an effort to derail Jackson. If Ted Cruz thought his wife’s appearance was being insulted by Donald Trump and Trump thought Melania had been slandered by the Cruz campaign, they have no idea what it really means to have your wife attacked in a political campaign. The onslaught against Rachel Jackson by the Adam’s campaign was unprecedented before and since. Jackson had to be physically restrained on several occasions from attacking hecklers throwing insults against his wife. The extraordinary aspect of the campaign was that Jackson won the election without killing a single person. The emotional strain affected his wife’s fragile health, and Rachel died soon after the election, never spending a night in the White House. President Jackson never forgave his political enemies, blaming them, not without cause, for his wife’s death; and politics became a blood sport from then until the end of the Civil War, when there was a very brief respite.
Jackson won the 1828 election with a popular and electoral college vote landslide, becoming the first American president not from Virginia or Massachusetts and the first to be born in poverty. It was one of the half dozen watershed elections in U.S. history that fundamentally transformed the political center of gravity in America. Political power in the United States moved from New England and the mid-Atlantic states to the Western and Southern states. The franchise was universally expanded to include all white males, with more people voting than ever before, and the country entered a period of expansion in population, economy, and territory. Much of the credit must go to President Jackson, and the era rightfully came to be known to historians as the Age of Jackson. Only Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan have been as successful as presidents in influencing the period in which they served in office and the legacy that followed their departure from history.
It is not my intention to write a history of the Jackson presidency. Robert Remini and Arthur Schlesinger have done that far better than I ever could. I will just say that of all Jackson’s accomplishments as president, the most far reaching was his great ambition to make the United States a transcontinental nation that would extend from sea to shining sea. Jackson dispatched his protégé Sam Houston to the Mexican province of Texas, where a majority population of American settlers chafed under authoritarian Mexican rule, to organize a revolution when the time came. Houston, who had resigned from the governorship of Tennessee in the wake of a failed marriage scandal, turned out to be the right man for the job. A veteran army officer and adopted member of the Cherokee nation, Sam Houston had two qualities that impressed every person who met him: an unquenchable thirst for whiskey and a talent for leadership over men in times of crisis. Like Andrew Jackson, he was one of the great men of American history.
President Jackson did not seek war with Mexico, only the annexation of Texas, but, as it turned out, the two aims proved to be irreconcilable. When the Texans did rise in October 1835 Jackson stood by while companies of American volunteers, including the New Orleans Greys and a small detachment led by ex-Congressman David Crockett, entered Texas to fight for Texas independence and land grants. At the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, Texans paid the price in blood and won their independence, electing Sam Houston, the victor of San Jacinto, as first President of the Lone Star Republic. Aware that British and French eyes also coveted Texas, Houston immediately petitioned for U.S. annexation and statehood, as Jackson expected him to do. For almost a decade the slavery issue kept Jackson’s dream from becoming a reality, but it finally happened a few months after the former president’s death. Mexico never recognized Texas independence, and war with Mexico soon followed, resulting in the annexation of all the sparsely populated northern Mexican provinces and increasing the territorial size of the United States by one-third. We became a transcontinental nation (the only other on earth being Russia), which set us on the fast track to wealth and world power beyond the dreams of the founding fathers.
Few men in our history have done as much as Andrew Jackson to make the United States what it is today. Much of what we take for granted today as American values of equal opportunity, democracy, limited government, the primacy of national loyalty, and the rights of the common man emerged from the Age of Jackson. To purge him from our history, as many on the left would like to do, would not only be an act of folly, but a renunciation of our past. What it amounts to is the delegitimization of the United States by those who believe that our past is nothing more than a compendium of genocide, slavery, labor exploitation, and imperialism. The consequences for future generations in a country increasingly made up of foreign-born peoples and competing racial and ethnic identity groups are not pleasant to contemplate. When we say good-bye to the Jackson’s Scotch-Irish face on the $20 bill, we are bidding farewell to much more. It is only the beginning, for the new ministry of truth has only begun its work to erase our past.
Yes, Andrew Jackson favored the Indian Removal Bill of 1830 that led to the Trail of Tears. If you had grown up on the Western frontier of America at the end of the 18th century, you would have approved of it as well. Jackson did not believe that whites and Indians could live side by side without conflict and, at the time, he was probably right. An estimated 5,000 people died on the Trail of Tears, a tragedy to be sure, but in my estimation not one of the great crimes of history. Today, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes expelled west of the Mississippi in the 1830s — the Creek, Seminoles, Osage, Choctaw, and Chickasaw — are the wealthiest and most prosperous of all the Indians tribes in the United States. So maybe the removal from southeastern United States was not such a terrible event in the long run —though I daresay many of them would have a different perspective on the issue.
Yes, Andrew Jackson owned more than 200 slaves and was a proponent of slavery all his life. He is guilty of being a man of his time, and only the ignorant judge people from past eras by the standards and morality of their own time. Jackson was a man of the South and a self-made member of the planter class. African-American slavery was an accepted part of his world, and it was an imperfect world to be sure, as is our own. Chattel slavery is among the oldest institutions of mankind. It was widespread at the time of Christ, and it will probably exist at the end of time. Jackson may have inadvertently sealed its doom in North America by extending the nation westward and helping to contain “the peculiar institution,” as it was known, in the South. In any case, by expanding democracy and the franchise, he made it possible for Abraham Lincoln to one day be elected president. If the deacons of political correctness remove Andrew Jackson from the ranks of our national heroes over the issue of slavery, then it is only a matter of time before George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Marion, Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, and the defenders of the Alamo follow him into oblivion.
There is the argument that we should do something to honor women on our currency. The plain fact of the matter is that there is simply no woman or group of women whose influence on American history comes close to that of Andrew Jackson. That is not to say there were not countless women who made great sacrifices, performed courageous acts, wrote works of great literature, cared for men wounded in battle, and served the nation in one way or another, but no women are among the great statesmen, soldiers, explorers, captains of industry, or inventors and scientists who made the United States the most successful republic in human history. That will likely change in the future, but it cannot change the past.
If Dolly Madison had not saved the unfinished portrait of George Washington from the British in 1814, the republic would have still survived. If Susan B. Anthony had never been born, women would still have gained the right to vote in the 20th century because a majority of men in the United States and Europe recognized the justice and rationality of that cause in the modern world. If Harriet Tubman had never existed, slavery would still have been abolished in the United States when the Union army liberated 3 million slaves in the Confederacy. If Betty Friedan had not written The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the liberation of American woman from 1950s conformity and the growth of the feminist movement with all the positive changes it wrought would have happened anyway and Hillary Clinton or some other female politician would still have ended up as the presidential nominee of a major political party.
While I personally find the concept of applying affirmative action and identity politics to national symbols appalling, it may be that I am on the losing side of this issue and that Andrew Jackson, who much preferred coinage in gold and silver over paper currency, may have to depart the $20 bill to make way for a woman or women to be so honored. In that event, I would nominate women who have so far not even been considered by the nabobs of political correctness who dictate such things. They are the Army and Navy nurses who worked under appalling conditions and at great risk on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines in the early months of the war in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. Those women, largely forgotten today, gave up everything to save countless lives in jungle hospitals on Bataan and inside the stifling, dust-choked concrete of Malinta Tunnel on the Rock and, in many cases, refused evacuation, only to endure years of deprivation in Japanese prisoner of war camps because our nation was so woefully unprepared for war. Maybe their images on our inflated currency would serve as a reminder of the dangers of not keeping our defenses in a high state of readiness. They are women who need to be remembered this Fourth of July.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.