Kühner reflections on Andrew Jackson
A “combative, quick-tempered, and thin-skinned” man
“A charismatic figure, Jackson was combative, quick-tempered, and thin-skinned. To his friends he was generous, considerate, and above all loyal; to his enemies, mean-spirited and spiteful.” — DeGregorio (1984)
The seventh President of the United States was born in the “Waxhaw Settlement” of the Carolina Colony in 1767, fifteen years after my sechster Urgroßvater (Casper) was granted land about 40 miles northwest of there by George II — in what was then Anson County, later Tryon, and now Lincoln County. The Waxhaws had been the home of the Waxhaw Tribe who were apparently under the authority of the larger Catawba people from which the Catawba Valley gets its name.
However, by the time the Kühner and Jackson families arrived in the area, the Waxhaw natives had already been decimated by smallpox and war with the colonists (1715–1717). With revolution slowly brewing in the New World, the main threat to the colonists remained the Cherokee when these German and Scots Irish settlers arrived in the region. As Präsident, Andrew Jackson would later instigate a constitutional crisis and play a major role in the forced removal of the Cherokee from the region between 1830 and 1850.
By 1720, most of the Waxhaws had been wiped out by the dreaded diseases brought over by European settlers, particularly smallpox. The rest were decimated during the Yamasee Wars, which pitted them against South Carolina colonists and larger, more powerful, tribes. The majority of Waxhaws who survived are believed to have been absorbed into the neighboring Catawba tribe. Others joined the Seminole tribes in Florida. — Museum of the Waxhaws and Andrew Jackson Memorial
Andrew (Sr) and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson emigrated from Ireland two years before their son Andrew was born. Vater Jackson died in an accident just three weeks before his son was born during Elizabeth’s perilous journey back to the Waxhaws following his burial. The Presbyterian Scots Irish (my maternal ancestors) “were a combative people back home [in Ireland], always ready to take up arms against the Catholics, and they did not mellow in American air” according to Joseph R. Conlin (Second Edition, 1987). According to SparkNotes (Barnes & Noble), “fighting the British was more of a personal affair than a political one” for the Jackson family.
Andrew’s older brother, Hugh, joined the poorly trained local militia and died of heat exhaustion at the Battle of Stono Ferry near Charleston in June of 1779. After the Siege of Charleston in May of 1780, the Waxhaws Settlement was leveled by the British. Later that summer, Andrew and his brother were captured by British troops and imprisoned in Camden after my fünfte Urgroßvater (Abraham) — a Tory Captain — was captured by Patriot militia at the Battle of Ramsour’s Mill on June 20, 1780. The young Andrew Jackson contracted smallpox while imprisoned and almost died while walking 40 miles back home with his mother after she arranged a prisoner exchange with the British. His brother, Robert, died two days after they returned to their home. Andrew’s mother left for Charleston a short time after his recovery, and she died of cholera while caring for captured soldiers held aboard ships in Charleston Harbor.
“At this time the country was overrun with Tories and the neighborhood in constant alarm.” — Henry Wakefield, Patriot soldier in the Carolina backcountry (as quoted by Austin William Smith, 2010).
An orphan at age 14, Andrew blamed the British for the loss of his mother and brothers and helped the local Patriot militia informally as a courier. However, with the decisive defeat of Loyalist militia at the sixty-five minute Battle of Kings Mountain in October of 1780, most local Tory forces by this time were either hanged, imprisoned, or allowed to return home defeated to be dealt with later. Andrew would eventually teach and study law in Salisbury before moving to Jonesborough (now in Tennessee) and becoming a country lawyer and large cotton plantation owner with as many as 150 slaves. He would serve in the Tennessee militia during the War of 1812 and the First Seminole War and eventually serve, uneventfully, in both the U.S. House and Senate before being nominated for Präsident in 1822 by the Tennessee legislature.
After losing to John Quincy Adams in 1824 in what his supporters denounced as a “corrupt bargain," Jackson would defeat Adams in a re-match in 1828 and become Präsident and founder of the modern Democratic Party. Jacksonian Democracy would feature more democracy for white males, more geographical expansion for their still young nation, and the forced relocation of Cherokee and other Native populations from their remaining land in the southeastern United States. In what one Choctaw leader portrayed as “A Trail of Tears and Deaths,” Jackson would ignore a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the Cherokee and physically remove them from the region by force. Thousands of Cherokee perished along the way.
Later, another descendant of Casper Kühner named Joseph “Joe” Keener would sell large tracks of land back to the Cherokee for the creation of their reservation in western North Carolina. His brother, Rev. Ulrich Keener, was appointed to teach at Cherokee United Methodist Church in 1850. Ulrich’s is buried near his cabin, which still stands near the church where you can go today and hear das Gebet des Herrn in Cherokee (which I’ve written about previously).
Another descendant of Casper Kühner was apparently named after Andrew Jackson. Not much is known about him, but Andrew Jackson Kenner and his wife are buried in the Kenner Cemetery next to the gift shop and visitors’ center at the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview, Kentucky. His “keenest regret in death was loving his children.”
As Mark Twain apparently didn’t say, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Herr Drumpf has been favorably compared to Andrew Jackson by multiple members of his inner circle, and he recently hung a portrait of the seventh Präsident in the Oval Office the same day on which he signed an executive order to expedite the approval process for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) — a potential threat to clean water and ancient burial grounds for the Standing Rock tribe in the Dakotas. You can see the portrait of Jackson hanging behind Herr Drumpf in the photo included in Maya Kosoff’s piece in Vanity Fair (January 30, 2017) about yet another Präsidentschafts order in the works to overhaul our work-visa program. So while we can’t encore the past, we do sometimes make tragic mistakes that sound eerily familiar. ☹
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