"It Cannot Be Blindly Quoted, as a Visionary Paean to Simple Virtues"

"And yet it's easy to forget that Democracy in America was not written under President Lincoln, but under President Jackson, in the America of the Trail of Tears, and it can only feel strange that a book from this moment in time is the one frequently hailed as capturing some of America's finest characteristics. True, Tocqueville, an abolitionist, both condemned African-American slavery and Native American dispossession, and did so eloquently. Yet his democracy stops long before them, in his elegiac passages of the happy slaves at work in the fields, or in his conviction that 'the Indians will never civilize themselves, or that it will be too late when they may be inclined to make the experiment.' One would happily toil, one would quietly vanish—that was Tocqueville's shrug."

Ben Judah at The American Interest questions blithe understandings of Alexis de Tocqueville.

Dead on the Fourth of July

"The importance of July 4 might have surprised some Founding Fathers. The Continental Congress declared freedom from Britain on July 2 and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4. Most members signed the document in August.
"Adams thought Americans would remember July 2 as their 'Day of Deliverance' from Britain. In a letter to his wife, Abigail, he wrote, 'It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Melissa Etehad in the Los Angeles Times discusses the deaths of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe.

"Trail of Fears"

"Like Jackson, he is a wealthy Washington outsider posing as a champion of the people. He does not recognize the legitimacy of the political system, as Nixon did, because he is not a creature of it. He will not go quietly, if it comes to that. We may be fast approaching another 'question of public faith,' in the words of Archibald Cox's great-great-great grandfather. But as in Jackson's time, there is no political center to curb the power of the president. There is only extremism and chaos."

Kevin Baker at The New Republic argues that "Donald Trump operates in a political landscape that is far more similar to Andrew Jackson's than to Richard Nixon's."

Writ with Lightning?

Leslie M. Alexander in The Nation, Vinson Cunningham in The New Yorker, and Danielle McGuire in The Hollywood Reporter react to 2016's The Birth of a Nation.

"Nothing Short of Ethnic Cleansing"

"More than 46,000 Native Americans experienced this horror brought about by Jackson’s brand of populism. While Jackson did not personally supervise the extermination of tribes, according to Watson, he 'encouraged the atmosphere of callousness and indifference to Indian welfare that culminated in those deaths.'

"Jackson 'always insisted he was not an Indian hater, he just felt the presence of Indians on land that ought to be white people’s was a barrier to the development of the white country,' Watson said."

Ari Rabin-Havt in The American Prospect argues that the Democratic Party should stop honoring Andrew Jackson.

How Much Money Will It Bring In?

"The contradictions Tocqueville found in Cincinnati fed into his larger conclusions. America, he found, was a nation of paradoxes. It proclaimed that all men were created equal, yet was suffused by racial prejudice. It placed unparalleled faith in the individual yet was conformist and controlled by the majority. It was materialistic yet deeply religious, commercial but puritanical."

David S. Reynolds in The New York Times reviews Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville Discovery of America.

"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"

Censure and Sensibility

"Still, history shows that [Russ Feingold] ought to move carefully. While many have compared the censure proposal to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, there is a more relevant precedent: In 1834, America's most famous political orator, Henry Clay of Kentucky, arranged the Senate's only successful censure of a president, Andrew Jackson — and he never stopped paying for his accomplishment."

Historian H.W. Brands in The New York Times assesses the legacy of presidential censure.