US History Cheat Notes: Andrew Jackson (not the same person as Abe Lincoln)

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Andrew Jackson was born in March, 1767.

Jackson was about 9 years old when the Revolutionary War started.

The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were two different wars. There was another war in between called the War of 1812. It was approximately in 1812.

Andrew Jackson was a lawyer, a judge, and a congressional representative, before he was President.

Andrew Jackson was an officer in the Tennessee Militia, and fought Native Americans, killing or ordering his men to kill, a bunch of them. He also sort of started one of the Indian wars he fought in. He also fought in the War of 1812.

Andrew Jackson was a big loser in 1824 when he lost the presidential election. That was one of the strange elections because the winner didn’t win either, and the US House decided the election. It was about then that they should have gotten ride of the Electoral College but they didn’t.

Andrew Jackson and his supporters were the founders of the Democratic Party. Most people don’t know that. Most people don’t even ask that.

Andrew Jackson was a Big Winner in 1828 when he ran for president again and won big league.

The big deal when Jackson was President was that the government had imposed a tariff, and the states rights people in South Carolina said they would leave the country and go back to Russia or something if it was enforced. Andrew Jackson wrote a letter that forced them to follow the law. Sad.

Later, Abraham Lincoln read Andrew Jackson’s letter and used some of it, but with attribution, in his first speech to Congress. But by that time, Andrew Jackson was long dead.

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, and he was in his mid thirties when Jackson died, yet, they were still not the same person.

Andrew Jackson is probably best known for helping gold miners in the South and others push Indians off their land so they could take it, by passing, signing, and enforcing the Indian Removal Act. Under Jackson, and his successor (who was not Abraham Lincoln) thousands of Indians died during the removals.

Andrew Jackson was a pretty good businessman and deal maker, especially when it came to buying and selling humans, which he did very well as a big league slave owner.

Andrew Jackson was vehemently against paper currency, yet his picture appears, for now, on the $20 bill. This is thought to be because not a lot of people at the US Treasury like him.

Over time, Jackson’s picture has appeared on many different bills and many different postage stamps, right up there just behind Washington, Franklin, and Lincoln (Jackson is a different person than Lincoln). No one is sure why, but it is thought by some that this is because Andrew Jackson had great hair.

One bad dude tried to assassinate Jackson, and this was the first known attempt at an assassination of a US President. The assassin had two pistols (one bullet each) and both misfired because it is so damn humid in Washington DC. It is said that Jackson then went after the would-be assassin with his cain, but this is widely thought to be alt-History.

In any event, that started a long tradition. To date, four US Presidents have been killed in office, to match the four who died in office of supposedly, but maybe we don’t really know if you know what I mean, natural causes. (So, there is about an 18% chance, given our history, that a given president will die in office.)

Finally, and in sum, Andrew Jackson was as stated not Abraham Lincoln, but he was also not Stonewall Jackson, who was an entirely different dude who fought in the Civil War and is famous for his stone walls. You wouldn’t believe the beautiful stone walls he built. We’re gonna build a beautiful wall and make Abraham Lincoln pay for it.

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29 thoughts on “US History Cheat Notes: Andrew Jackson (not the same person as Abe Lincoln)

  1. Yeah, but he still managed to say “We don’t need that” when the civil war started.

    So he did very well for a dead person.

    Almost unique! Only Horus managed it before that.

  2. Actually there were two major wars between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War: the aforementioned War of 1812 ( – 1815) and the war with Mexico. These were interspersed with various comparitively minor dustups with Barbary Pirates, Indians, Chinese, Mormons, etc.

  3. Iain, I’m pretty sure you’re thinking of the Jackson Riots.*

    * As documented by Wanda Jackson in “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine”

  4. However ask the following question, assume Jackson had been president instead of Buchanan (recall he believed he had no power to do anything about seccession). Jackson had indicate that he would use federal power to override the nullification of South Carolina during his term. I think one can conclude that he would have taken action to prevent secession before Lincoln came into office and was left with a big mess in Charleston by Buchanan

  5. Iain (#8), no, you are thinking of Log Cabin Republicans, which was started by Abraham Lincoln while he was Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President!

  6. Greg@14: Of course. After all, Lincoln was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. :p

  7. I wonder if you could troll trump by putting vaguely plausible bullshit on the internets for him to read and repeat in public.

    If you can’t change him, you can at least have fun at his expense.

  8. #17: I’m all for having fun at the Trumpkin’s expense — and maybe diverting his attention from doing more damage but I think ridicule would be a more effective goad for such a colossal egotist. I’m afraid that “vaguely plausible bullshit” would just be read and believed by millions of other people too and would therefore soon be turned into “truthiness” enough to deceive even more people. (Credit to Stephen Colbert for truthiness.)

  9. Oh, aye, but this will generate ridicule too.

    So it’s a sort of “anti-virtuous” cycle that is self-perpetuating.

  10. Make it something like “Lincoln logs are named after the log cabin Abraham Lincoln was born in, where the grandmother produced something the newborn Abe could recreate his surroundings at an early age.

  11. OK, worth a try I guess, but I’m still skeptical. When I was still teaching, I used to make up bogus lectures on April Fool’s day to see how long it would take for our geology majors to catch on, stop writing notes, and call me on it. I stopped doing that the day I caught essentially the same group of students twice on the same day. Too easy, just too easy.

    By the way, according to Wikipedia, “K’Nex, the toy’s current distributor, states the [Lincoln Log] product was named after Abraham Lincoln—famously born in a log cabin—due to patriotism during World War I. Others attribute the name to [the originator’s father] Frank Lloyd Wright’s original name, Frank Lincoln Wright, or the alteration of the name, ‘linkin’ logs.”

  12. Aye, though the difference there is you wanted better from the students and expected it. There’s no “better” option for Orangina, and there’s the added bonus that at least you get to laugh in these depressing times.

    That, however, may be one of those more british “stiff upper lip” things, where our humour being darker and celebrating the failure of the underdog than the USA’s upbeat and celebrating the winning of the underdog makes it less socially prevalent to find humour in this situation.

    Colbert’s shots recently at trumpalina were an example of a dirtyer form of humour in a desperate situation. Some USians got it, some didn’t. TYT had a commenter saying it was valid to criticise “because if someone on Fox did that…”, but the difference is that Fox REGULARLY does it, and not to one individual who can defend themselves or show reasons for it being false, but to ENTIRE GROUPS, where you can always, if the group is large and diverse enough, find an example of the “bad behaviour” being “joked” about, therefore making it NOT A JOKE. Colbert didn’t do that.

    The assininity of the left is the acceptance of rightwingnutjobs complaining about groups of people and the left just tut-tutting but going ballistic when someone they otherwise identify with does it. Because “both sides” insist that they must all be in lock-step agreement and no variation of apostatic thought is accepted.

    Atheism plus tried it.

    Atheists generally said eff-u. some were shamed into joining, some went anti-plus and some went to alt-right to double down on the effing.

    (PS yes I checked the WP just in case I wasn’t talking complete bollocks and Abe and log cabins for kids were some sort of inspiration for the product. Stranger things have happened)

  13. #22: re “stranger things have happened” True that.

    Of course, Lincoln Logs go back about a century and in those days legendary people both real and fictional influenced language and advertising much more than they do in the present information/disinformation age.

    Today a similar product would probably be given a made-up name or named after a character on the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, etc.

  14. “It is said that Jackson then went after the would-be assassin with his cain” but was not abel to?

  15. You?

    Abe Lincoln was dead long before the internet, so it’s unlikely he made a png and stuck it up on some random-ass website.

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