Many are happy that Jackson is being ousted, because he was a slaveholder and a racist because of his role in enforcement of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and non-enforcement of the Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v Georgia in favor of the Cherokees' claim in Georgia. The practically forced removal of the Cherokees from their ancestral lands became known as the Trail of Tears. Some people have even called the forced marches in which hundreds of thousands of people of different tribes died as ethnic cleansing. One has to believe that the President was operating between a rock and a hard spot from a weak position as the leader of a very new nation facing those strong states'-rights-Second-Amendment militia. Also, Martin Van Buren was in office before the really bad incidences in 1838 occurred. Mind, I am not saying that the Trail of Tears as well as many forced relocations before then were not awful and somewhat unfair if not illegal, but it is always easier to know in hindsight what should have happened.
As for being a slaveholder... I become annoyed with people today wanting to rewrite history to condemn men who might have been jerks, but were very much like their fellow law-abiding Americans. Slavery was legal then in many states, even northern ones and Jackson was born somewhere in the vague border between North and South Carolina! It would have taken a very brave and very enlightened father or grandfather or extreme poverty in those times to result in someone like Jackson never to have had black slaves.
While Hamilton remains on the obverse of the $10 bill and Abraham Lincoln ("Illinois's native son ") remains on the face of $5 bill, the back will be changed to have several different women:
Lucretia Mott and only learned of Alice Paul recently (thank a google doodle). Last Saturday, a number of male customers were discussing the plight of history in the United States, that even teachers did not know who Herbert Hoover or George Patton were. Just wait when they start talking about Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I know I learned about them in school. Did you?
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