During his first term in office, Donald Trump adorned the Oval Office with a portrait of our seventh president, Andrew Jackson. And for four years, Trump praised the precedent Jackson set as a populist and as a spirited fighter.
Now as he enters his second, non-consecutive term, Trump would behoove himself to adopt another lesson from the Age of Jackson: the tearing down of military idolatry.
It may be a surprise to laymen that General Andrew Jackson, the man who came to national prominence as an Indian fighter, the hero of New Orleans, and the conqueror of Florida was someone skeptical of a military establishment.
But Jackson, as part of the second-generation of American leadership, inherited the Founding Fathers’ fear of the threat that a standing army could pose to republican liberty. Like in so many things, the Founders learned wisdom from the ancient republics.
“The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1814. “Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.”
Unlike today, in the 18th and 19th centuries professional career soldiers were seen more like mercenaries, primarily interested in a paycheck. It was the civilians who volunteered and organized during moments of crisis who were the real patriots, loftily motivated by high ideals of the responsibility of citizenship. This viewpoint extended to military leadership as well, and the theory of the “amateur general,” men not formally trained in the art of war but whose natural leadership exerted itself to success on the battlefield.
“Service in the army was neither particularly remunerative nor honorable; in a democratic culture that upheld freedom and independence and precious American rights, soldiers were considered overly servile,” writes Amy S. Greenberg, professor of History and Women’s Studies at Penn State University.