3 Civil War historians react to Trump's Andrew Jackson comments line by line.

The BBC spoke to David Blight (Yale), Judith Geisberg (Villanova), and Jim Grossman (American Historical Association). I love the way they've broken this down into 5 individual statements, like whether Jackson was "a swashbuckler" and whether he was "tough" and had "a big heart."

1. "[Jackson] was a swashbuckler... They love Andrew Jackson in Tennessee." This statement seems trivial, but it elicits ready contempt for Trump from the historians.

2. "He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart." No one even has a guess about what might support "big heart." They go into no detail about what "heart" is and seem to assume it's love and empathy. But it can also mean spirit, will, or courage.*

3. "I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War." None of the historians goes anywhere with the idea that the war could have been avoided. It's the "wrong premise." Nor do any of them give any regard to the idea that the right person could have done better, and Blight calls it "plain nonsense" to think that "the right man with the right strength... can change the course of history." These answers strike me as doctrinaire and incurious.

4. "He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said: 'There's no reason for this.'" The historians regard this as a stupid blunder. We don't need historians to tell us that Jackson died more than a decade before the war began, but I'm disappointed (though not surprised) that they don't go into details about what events in Jackson's era could have been seen by a person at the time as a build up toward war. If we're going to listen to historians, why don't they put on more of a show of doing history?

5. "People don't realise, you know, the Civil War - if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there a Civil War?" Giesberg says the inquiry is over: "Historians have come to a consensus** that slavery is the reason." Don't be a Civil War denier. Giesberg connects Trump's puzzling over history with his "tone-deaf[ness] about contemporary racial issues." Although the historians all seem to resist the idea that we don't talk about the question anymore, they actually don't talk about it. They say "slavery," but they won't say one word about why there was no solution to the problem of slavery other than war. Doesn't that prove Trump's point?
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* That's the more masculine idea of "heart," calling to mind this masculine-as-you-can-get-while-still-being-in-a-Broadway-musical song:



** Experts rely on this word so much these days. It makes me suspect that they intimidate and discipline each other into toeing a party line. Why don't these experts perform their expertise for the people when they are invited to speak in a general forum like the BBC? It's especially bad when you add moral opprobrium. Here, the message was, the experts all agree, so you should just adopt our conclusion, because it's what we say. But on top of that there's this dire warning: And if you don't accept our consensus, you're going to look like a racist. One of the reasons Trump won was because he offered the common people liberation from that kind of bullying from the elite.