Who's that man being moved to the back of the $20 bill?

When death beckoned 78-year-old Andrew Jackson in 1845, he was physically worn out but spiritually enlivened. On May 29 he told visitors, “Sirs, I am in the hands of a merciful God. I have full confidence in His goodness and mercy. … The Bible is true. … Upon that sacred volume I rest my hope for eternal salvation, through the merits and blood of our blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

Three days later, to those who saw how badly he was hurting, Jackson said, “When I have suffered sufficiently, the Lord will then take me to Himself—but what are all my suffering compared to those of the Blessed Savior, who died upon that cursed tree for me? Mine are nothing.” He made sure that the first clause of his will contained a strong theological legacy: “The Bible is true. … I bequeath my body to the dust whence it comes, and my soul to God who gave it, hoping for a happy immortality through the atoning merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

On the day of his death, June 8, Jackson left a political legacy. “That book,” he said, referring to the Bible, “is the Rock upon which our republic rests.” Then, speaking to the family members and servants he had called to his bedside, he left a racial legacy: “I am my God’s. I belong to Him. I go but a short time before you. … I hope and trust to meet you all in Heaven, both white and black.”

All that may seem strange to those who know only that Jackson was—in addition to being the seventh president of the United States—a slave owner and set in motion the process that eventually led to Cherokee misery on the Trail of Tears. Based on those two pieces of evidence, we might go along with Slate’s 2014 article “Kick Andrew Jackson Off the $20 Bill.” Writer Jillian Keenan argued—it turned out successfully—for Harriet Tubman to replace him, and recalled, “My public high school wasn’t the best, but we did have an amazing history teacher. Mr. L, as we called him, brought our country’s story to life. So when he taught us about [Jackson and] and the Trail of Tears … my classmates and I were stricken. But then it was lunchtime, and we pulled out our wallets in the cafeteria. Andrew Jackson was there, staring out from every $20 bill.”

“Mr. L” may have been amazing, but if that’s all his students learned, he did them a disservice. Let’s look at some other incidents in Jackson’s life, not as part of an attempt to restore him to the front of the bill—Tubman is a wonderfully worthy replacement—but to suggest he does belong on the back side. He and Tubman make a strong Christian duo.

FIRST, LET’S LOOK AT WHAT MADE JACKSON A NATIONAL HERO: his successful defense of New Orleans against British invaders in 1815. Jackson won by overruling local officials and welcoming into his scraped-together army Jean Lafitte—a part-Haitian, part-Jewish, all-trouble pirate—and his corsair followers. Lafitte’s men and cannon were much needed, and Jackson also believed God could redeem even buccaneers. During the weeks leading up to the Battle of New Orleans, while others panicked at the thought of fighting British regulars who had defeated Napoleon, Jackson prayed ardently and told others, during and after the battle, that they should fear neither life nor death because “the unerring hand of Providence” is always active amidst the “shower of Balls, bombs, and Rockets.”

Jackson’s theology enabled him to overcome prejudice in one other crucial way as well. He worked to raise black battalions from among the freemen of New Orleans. When a paymaster refused to pay the new recruits, Jackson told him to obey orders and “keep to yourself your opinions.” Jackson spoke of the black soldiers’ “intelligent minds and love of honor” and offered them assurances that they would not be exposed to “improper comparison, or unjust sarcasm.”

Jackson’s preparations and British arrogance were elements in an astounding U.S. victory. When the British marched in close order toward earthworks defended by Jackson’s rifles and pirate cannon, London’s losses were 700 dead and twice that number wounded. American losses were seven killed, six wounded.

SECOND, JACKSON WAS ALWAYS A DEFENDER OF EVANGELISTS and a vigorous one himself. Because he was known for fighting duels, 19th century evangelists such as Peter Cartwright at first believed Jackson placed his own will above God’s. In 1816, when Cartwright was preaching in Nashville, Tenn., and Jackson had become famous, a local pastor, Brother Mac, pulled Cartwright aside and said excitedly, “General Jackson has come in, General Jackson has come in.” Cartwright knew of Jackson, but he was so irritated at the emphasis on a celebrity sighting that he said loudly, “Who is General Jackson? If he don’t get his soul converted, God will damn him.”

After the service Brother Mac hurried over to Jackson to apologize for Cartwright’s remarks, but Jackson later that day saw Cartwright and told him, “You are a man after my own heart. I was very much surprised at Mr. Mac, to think he would suppose that I would be offended at you. No, sir; I told him that I highly approved of your independence; that a minister of Jesus Christ ought to love everybody and fear no mortal man. I told Mr. Mac that if I had a few thousand such independent, fearless officers, as you were, and a well-drilled army, I could take old England.”

Cartwright became a friend who vouched for Jackson’s theological firmness and told of how he was once eating dinner with Jackson when a lawyer at the table started to make fun of Cartwright’s Christian beliefs. Cartwright responded patiently but, as he wrote in his autobiography The Backwoods Preacher, “saw General Jackson’s eye strike fire, as he sat by and heard the thrusts he made at the Christian religion.” The conversation became more intense when the lawyer asked, “Mr. Cartwright, do you believe there is any such place as hell, as a place of torment?” Jackson stirred in his seat as Cartwright answered affirmatively and the lawyer responded, “I thank God I have too much good sense to believe any such thing.”

That’s when Jackson could no longer hold his tongue. Cartwright reported that Jackson said heatedly, “I thank God that there is such a place of torment as hell.” The lawyer, startled by Jackson’s “great vehemence,” then earned his spot in the hall of fame for dumb questions by asking, “General Jackson, what do you want with such a place of torment as hell?” Jackson quickly responded, “To put such damned rascals as you are in, that oppose and vilify the Christian religion.” According to Cartwright, the lawyer fled the room.

A THIRD POSITIVE ABOUT JACKSON IS HIS FAITHFULNESS TO ONE WOMAN, Rachel Donelson, whom he married in 1791 after her previous husband abandoned her. Jackson loved her deeply through 37 years of marriage. They had no children but adopted three, including two American Indian boys, and were guardians for eight more. But two weeks after Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828, joy turned to sorrow as Rachel died from heart disease that Jackson thought the stress of the campaign had worsened.

Her death was a real test of Jackson’s faith. Some men, not seeing God’s sovereignty over ballots as well as bodies, might have crowed about their success at men’s hands and raged about their loss at God’s. But Jackson wrote, “We who are frequently visited by this chastening rod, have the consolation to read in the Scriptures that whomever He chasteneth He loveth, and does it for their good to make them mindful of their mortality and that this earth is not our abiding place; and afflicts us that we may prepare for a better world, a happy immortality.”

Rachel had urged her husband to greater piety over the years, and it would have been unsurprising for Jackson to turn away from the rectitude she and God required, had his faith been more in her than in Christ. That was not the case: Jackson continued his pattern of Bible reading and prayer, although he did it in a way that remembered Rachel as well as God. One night when Jackson was a widower and his private secretary, Nicholas Trist, needed guidance for a letter, Trist knocked at Jackson’s bedroom door, was admitted, and found Jackson partly undressed and sitting at a table, reading his nightly chapters from Scripture. Jackson had a miniature portrait of Rachel that he usually wore over his heart propped up before him.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF CHARACTER AND PUBLIC POLICY was most apparent during the biggest fight of Jackson’s presidency, the battle over the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a public-private partnership, with vast, government-backed financial power in the hands of a few. It was a monopoly, the only bank chartered by the United States, and the repository for all deposits of U.S. government revenues—deposits that did not draw interest. From its headquarters building, a marble faux Greek temple in Philadelphia, the bank bought influence through bribes and favoritism in making loans.

The bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, was a suave steward much admired by European visitors to America. One British traveler, comparing Biddle to the rough-hewn types he often met, called him “the most perfect specimen of an American gentleman that I had yet seen.” Biddle had also gained influence in Congress by dispensing loans and favors. As Henry Clay once told him, “You hold a large flask of oil and know well how to pour it out.”

The bank’s friends were powerful. Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts was brandy’s poster boy, since without it his eloquence stayed home, but with it he was spellbinding. When asked about taking bribes from the bank, he related that when he was a child his hands were so dirty that a disgusted teacher looked at one of them and said, “Daniel, if you can find me another hand in this school that is dirtier than that, I will let you off.” Daniel promptly held out the other hand, and she had to let him off.” The grown-up and fleshed-out Daniel Webster held out his hand to Nicholas Biddle and dirtied it with payoffs, but he could always point to another hand that was dirtier.

That did not make him clean, however—either objectively or in Andrew Jackson’s eyes. Jackson believed it was fine to build fortunes through private dealing, but wrong for those with wealth to get more by wielding governmental power as Biddle did. He knew the political danger in taking on the bank and its well-oiled supporters, but he said, “Until I can strangle this hydra of corruption, the Bank, and I will not shrink from my duty.”

On July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed a bill to recharter the bank that had slid through a greased Congress. His veto message laid out the principle that “In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law.” He argued that government should “confine itself to equal protection, and as Heaven does its rain, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor.”

The bank, he went on to argue, proceeded on a different principle: It did not help some people to become wealthy by “natural and just advantage,” but lobbied “to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” Once favors are handed out, Jackson stipulated, then those without political pull “have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

Jackson also emphasized the constitutional framework: “Some of the powers and privileges possessed by the existing bank are unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive of the rights of the States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people.” The goal of statesmen, Jackson argued, should not be to increase their own power, but to stress “Leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves.”

FINALLY, LET’S LOOK AT THE DARKEST MARK ON JACKSON, his action toward the Cherokees. The governmental problem began late in the 18th century, when the federal government entered into treaties with the Cherokee Indians that guaranteed them their lands in perpetuity. In 1802, however, Thomas Jefferson gained support in Georgia by promising that the federal government would purchase Cherokee land and transfer it to the state. The contradictory promises were not a problem while Cherokees freely sold their lands to the federal government, but in 1819 the Cherokee Nation declared it would give up no more land.

By 1827 the Cherokees, who had adopted “the white man’s way” of farming, towns, schools, and churches, also had a newspaper, Elias Boudinot’s Cherokee Phoenix, and a written constitution. Cherokees owned, in Boudinot’s compilation, 10 sawmills, 31 gristmills, 62 blacksmith shops, and nearly 6,000 spinning wheels and plows. Sadly, some powerful Georgians coveted the Cherokees’ land, despised their racial identity, and tried to push them out. The Georgia legislature in 1828 stated that Georgia, regardless of federal treaty, had dominion over Cherokee land, with all Cherokee “laws, usages, and customs” null and void. The Cherokees could not even try to hold onto their rights in court, for the new Georgia law stated that no Indian “shall be deemed a competent witness, or a party to any suits … to which a white man may be a party.”

Jackson, faced upon assuming office with the issue of upholding state sovereignty or federal guarantees, sided with states’ rights. His first annual message to Congress, in December 1829, noted that the Cherokees’ “present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies.” But he also stated, “It is too late to inquire whether it was just to include them and their territory within the bounds of new states, whose limits they could control. That step cannot be retraced. A State cannot be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power.”

Jackson offered the Cherokees two alternatives. One was, “submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property.” That was overly optimistic, since Georgia had just denied Indian protection. Furthermore, that outcome would not be desired by some Cherokees, since Jackson’s expectation was that “they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population.” The other alternative assumed that integration would not work: “I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi.” That alternative received popular support, at least in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The Cherokees responded by sending a delegation to Washington in 1830 and publishing an appeal to the nation. A few Cherokees would voluntarily move west of the Mississippi, the delegation declared, but most “cannot endure to be deprived of our national and individual rights and subjected to a process of intolerable oppression.” The delegation asked “the good people of the United States” to remember that many of “their fathers were compelled” to leave Europe. Pressuring Indians to head west would hardly be remembering to “Do to others as ye would that others should do to you.”

That appeal, sadly, did not move Jackson. In this situation he came to believe that animosity between Indians and whites made further clashes unavoidable unless the Indians became wards of Washington, and that he would not allow.

The outcome of the impasse is one of the ugliest episodes of American history. In the mid-1830s, Cherokees such as John Ridge and Elias Boudinot accepted what had become inevitable and decided to head west. Ridge found the land of eastern Oklahoma good and wrote to the recalcitrant, “The soil is diversified from the best prairie lands to the best bottom lands, in vast tracts. Never did I see a better location for settlement and better springs in the world. God has thrown His favors here with a broad cast.” But when most Cherokees refused to go, the talk of “voluntary” movement ended.

Soldiers rounded up 12,000 Cherokees and placed them in detention camps. Somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 Cherokees died there or on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, opponents of any agreement took revenge on Ridge and Boudinot, murdering both. Had Jackson offered leadership in pursuit of fair treatment of the Cherokees within state law, he might possibly have pointed the way toward an integrationist option. Given the tide of antebellum thought that seems most unlikely. Jackson was not pleased with the outcome of his decision, but he never counted Cherokee removal as one of his sins.

I’m not going to try to tie up Jackson’s career with a bow. The Trail of Tears was a great tragedy. Jackson did not anticipate it and did not want to happen, but his decisions certainly precipitated it. It happened during the administration of his successor, Martin Van Buren, but Van Buren was following Jackson’s lead. Other questions could be and have been raised about Jackson as a slave owner. But Jackson’s era was different from our own, with some sins then that shock us now, and some sins now that would shock our predecessors.

Additional material about Andrew Jackson and other American leaders can be found in Marvin Olasky’s The American Leadership Tradition (Free Press, 1999; Crossway, 2000).