Sure, and I agree that comparing the morals of the likes of James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, and Andrew Jackson to Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, or George HW Bush is a no brainer. But the question isn’t about comparing those guys to Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, or George HW Bush. It’s about comparing them to George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. That’s a more interesting question.
One possibilty is that the 19th century presidents had little power to accomplish much unless there was a crises for them to confront. Recent presidents have had much more executive power to get things done.
Even aside from his morals as a person, Andrew Jackson was a really bad President. Even within that specific context, there’s still a distinction between “great” and “good”.
For one thing, Jackson blew up his Cabinet over a dispute about which Cabinet wives talked with each other.
He did threaten to hang John C. Calhoun, so he couldn’t be all bad.
There is that.
The Gilded Age accounts for much.
As hinted to above, that was an era of legislative supremacy. The strong presidency as we know it today wasn’t a thing. So it is not really fair to say that these guys were poor presidents. They were just doing the jobs that they were given.
I hate to think that the presidency should be a set-aside for any specific social clique, but that’s exactly what the first six presidents came from, a clubby cabal of Virginia planters and Boston lawyers, all personally vested in the Constitution as it was originally written. Andrew Jackson came from a poorer background (a cabin in South Carolina), fought in the Revolution, made his bones in the War of 1812 and the politics of the new state of Tennessee, and saw a lot of the trappings of the presidency as something he was free to take or leave as he pleased. While his predecessors might have wished the Indians would be good sports and go away to open up the Ohio valley to settlers, Jackson (nursing a grudge from the War of 1812, when lots of Indians sided with the British) forcibly removed a plurality of them to Oklahoma. The era of the aristocratic gentleman statesman was over. And while ending it was a properly American thing to do, I just wish it hadn’t been for Jackson’s benefit.
Obligatory Simpsons clip;
Yeah, and I’m actually not a Jackson fan–I did list out some of his accomplishments to explain the context for why he has often been well ranked by historians (particularly prior to the 1990s or so.) My main issue with Jackson is actually his economic policies though, he put a sort of populist, low-information (in the early 19th century sense) viewpoint on national banking ahead of what everyone who was an actual economic and finance expert at the time knew. Killing the Bank of the United States was disastrous for the country in many ways, and Jackson kind of pulled a George W. Bush in that a serious economic crisis whose origins were building during his Presidency didn’t fully hit until right at the end of his, and a lot of the blame went to his successor (at the time, more modern historians often blame Jackson heavily and appropriately for the Panic of 1837.) In truth Jackson actually has a lot more personal responsibility for '37 than W did for the 2008 crash.
Buuut, on moral issues I go back to suggesting Jackson kind of gets weirdly focused on as a “specific bad actor” when a deeper reading of history suggests all contemporary Presidents to Jackson were absolute nightmares when it came to treatment of natives. I actually think George Washington may have arguably been the “best” in terms of treatment towards them, in that he actually expressed an understanding that Native raids on settler communities were directly correlated with settler raids of Native Villages, and settlers actually continually (and illegally under signed treaties) moving into Native lands. But I would also say that the “frontier” was a little more remote to the Presidency during Washington’s 8 years than in the years that followed. As mentioned, Washington was basically in the club of gentleman farmers from Virginia, on land that had long been settled by white men going back to the 1600s. He had little direct concern with the frontier and minimal experience with it (he had done some surveying in modern day West Virginia is about as far into the frontier as he ever traveled.)
Jefferson actually made the comment once that while Natives who basically are willing to convert to the white man’s ways ought to be eligible for citizenship, any who resist white expansion should be “extirpated.” I think Jefferson’s views would be considered very mainstream and were likely shared by all early Presidents.
I think if you are going to look at presidents around 1830 you also need to consider the political landscape as a whole during that time.
Political parties were going through a major upheaval. After the war of 1812, the Federalist Party got a reputation as being cowards and traitors, causing the party to completely collapse. The Democratic-Republican Party splintered and also collapsed. After major political upheaval, political parties in the U.S. always end up resolving back down to a two party system, and in this case the two parties that emerged in the late 1820s and early 1930s were the Democratic Party and the Whig Party.
Adding into this chaos was the North-South divide over slavery and the growing political battle between the industrialists of the northeast and the southern plantation owners, all of which was starting to heat up significantly in the 1830s.
It was a very chaotic time politically, with a lot of different groups trying to pull the country in a lot of different directions.
To be fair, Jackson has always been controversial. During his presidency, he was loved by some and hated by others. He was very partisan and could be polarizing. Some historians would rank him higher, others agree with you that he should be lower.
It has also only been in recent decades that his treatment of Native Americans has come under harsh criticism. Also fairly recently, Jefferson and Jackson were both significant figures in the formation of the Democratic Party, but many in the modern Democratic Party have distanced themselves from this history due to both Jefferson and Jackson owning slaves.
In any event, Jackson survived the fallout of the Democratic-Republican Party and managed to help solidify the new Democratic Party that emerged from the ashes, which was no small feat considering all of the political chaos at the time.
Prior to his assassination, Lincoln’s approval rating was horribly low. Some historians have argued that if he hadn’t been assassinated, he would not have been remembered as being such a good president (same for JFK).
At what point prior to his assassination? And, his approval rating among whom?
If he hadn’t been assassinated, he’d be remembered for (among other things) how he handled the post-war reconstruction. We don’t know how that would have gone, but there’s a reasonable chance that it would have gone better than it actually did go without him.
There’s a school of thought that says McKinley was a good President (as well as a decent human being).
"We feel we’ve always been this global power,” Kenney said. “But we haven’t. The United States became one on McKinley’s watch.”
http://politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/william-mckinley-great-president-denali-213147/
Talking about “approval ratings” prior to the advent of widescale polling in the 1930’s doesn’t make any sense. The closest thing we have to a measure of public approval of Lincoln is the 1864 election, which he won with 55% of the popular vote.
Which historians? And this is a statement that doesn’t really say anything. As @Thudlow_Boink points out, he would have been judged by the totality of his Presidency, including the post-war. That could have helped or hurt his historical repuation. And getting assassinated doesn’t mean you’ll be remembered well (or remembered at all) – just ask Garfield and McKinley.
He probably was killed at the peak of his popularity - just after victory. Even the Reconstruction went better with him than without him, historians wouldn’t know how badly Johnson did, they’d just know whatever went wrong with Lincoln. Getting killed before inevitable disappointments occur is probably good for the reputation.
(how well would we think if George H. W. Bush if he had died in April 1991 George H.W. Bush Retrospective
Jackson actually finished first in 1824 both in popular and electoral votes and only a deal with Henry Clay won the election in the House. So I guess the era of what I will call the patrician presidents was coming to an end.
If nothing else Garfield should be remembered for discovering a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. I always thought that was very cool.
I’m not so sure. Although Lincoln probably wouldn’t have been as lax as Johnson, he did express an opinion of “malice towards none, charity for all” and wanted to take it easy on the southern states. The Radical Republicans were having none of that and wanted to grind them into powder. It is very likely that had Lincoln lived, he would have been impeached like Johnson.
A possibly worse scenario would have been a Congress that respected Lincoln enough not to push the “radical” agenda. Maybe we wouldn’t have a 14th Amendment had Lincoln lived.
ETA: Lincoln wasn’t Charles Sumner. Although he modified his white supremacist positions from his 1858 debates against Douglas, and it was clear even then that he hated slavery, I think it is still disputed about how much he was committed to equal rights or even black suffrage. IIRC, the furthest he went is that he thought it proper to allow black men who had served in the Union Army the right to vote. He flirted with colonization of freed slaves and so forth. Maybe he was a secret Sumner, but he fought with those guys his whole presidency because they didn’t feel he was doing enough.
I think it’s extremely unlikely that Lincoln would have been impeached. He had his disagreements and frustrations with the Radical Republicans, but he enjoyed relatively cordial relationships with them. Moreover, Lincoln was the most astute politician ever to serve as President. He was a master at being flexible when he needed to be and balancing the various factions in the Republican Party (team of rivals and whatnot). Johnson was pretty much the opposite.