The powerless need a champion. The right champion.

Today in Britain we live with a government which has held wages down for the powerless while presiding over a huge explosion in “earnings” for the most powerful (the quotation marks around “earnings” are there because I really don’t believe any individual, however mighty, truly “earns” twenty or forty times what, say, a teacher earns – not if by “earn” we mean receiving a merited reward for a contribution).

The powerful are powerful precisely because they have the means to buy themselves power. They are the great contributors to political parties, particularly the Conservatives. The nakedness of the deal is clear from such steps as the reduction of the top rate of tax, in the last government, from 50% to 45%.

Economically, it made no sense: the government’s stated policy was to reduce government deficits and therefore debt, and a reduction in tax ran entirely counter to that objective; the number of individuals involved was far too small to justfiy the move even as a means to garner votes; so the only conclusion was that it was a measure to satisfy the people who donated the most to the predominant party in government at the time, now the sole party in government, the Tories.

What’s true in Britain is threatening in the United States too, where a crowded field of contenders for the Republican presidential nomination is made up of candidates committed to backing the wishes of the sadly downtrodden rich, against the pampered poor.

So it’s wonderful to read this denunciation of the kind of government such people favour. Though aimed at that abuse in the US, it applies equally well to the UK.

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions… [but] every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to … make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.

Doesn’t that have a certain ring to it? “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Apart from those who share, and indeed champion, those selfish purposes, who would dissent from that sentiment?

So it’s both refreshing and encouraging to hear a voice raised in such clear tones against that kind of abuse.

Sadly, we won’t ever actually hear that voice. The words were spoken by the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, in the 1830s. That of course only makes it all the more remarkable that they preserve all their freshness and, above all, their relevance today.

More sadly still, even if it were possible to get Jackson back, it’s far from clear it would be desirable. Jackson spoke up for the people, but he defined the people to suit his own bigotry: male, certainly, but above all white.

So when South Carolina announced it would nullify any federal laws it regarded as unconstitutional, Jackson was having none of it: he mobilised the army to bring the State to heel. But when South Carolina decided that it would block the distribution of anti-slavery literature, even though it was being carried by the US post office, a federal and not a state institution, he didn’t lift a finger – though the measure clearly conflicted with the First Amendment of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech.

He was quite picky about the issues over which he would uphold the Constitution.

The Trail of Tears
As pictured by J.J. Peabody

His view on Native Americans was nothing short of tragic. They had no role, in his view, in lands occupied by Whites. They had to go. That led to an act of barbarous ethnic cleansing, as the tribes were driven across the Mississippi, in what came to be known as the trail of tears. The Cherokees, the last to go, lost between 2000 and 6000 along the way, of the 16000 who were expelled.

No, Jackson was not particularly nice.

From which I think we can draw a double lesson. Firstly, we still need a champion of the little man against the arrogant, as much today as nearly two centuries ago, in Jackson’s time. And secondly, we need to be careful who we pick to be that champion – they’re not all quite as savoury as we might wish.

The traces of that great convenient institution, slavery

Hasn’t it been interesting to watch the recent incidents in South Carolina? First there were the killings in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church that left nine dead. And then State legislators voted to take down the Confederate flag flying outside the State Capitol.

The events reflect the greatest unresolved issue of US life, a deeply ingrained racism that has its roots in the belief that it was perfectly legitimate for one people, simply on the basis of its skin colour, to enslave another. Not that this was a specifically American abuse: the slaves were supplied to the Americas by European Whites. The cities of Nantes in France, or Bristol and Liverpool in England, owed much of their prosperity to the slave trade.

One of the benefits of the institution, for slave-owning (and therefore wealthy) white men, was that it provided what I suppose we could call comfort, on demand, on their doorstep. It’s now generally accepted that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children on his slave Sally Hemings. The practice of taking a slave as a concubine was not at all rare on the plantations. In fact, it was in that same State of South Carolina, that a lady name Mary Boykin Chestnut, quoted by Jon Meacham in his masterly biography of Jefferson, commented:

Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.

However, there was a benefit – again for wealthy white males – that I hadn’t been aware of until I read another fine Meacham biography, this one of Andrew Jackson. He talks about Colonel Richard M. Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who later became Vice President, and who claimed that he had himself killed the great Shawnee chieftain Tecumseh during the War of 1812.

He lived for a time and completely openly in a common-law marriage with a biracial (“mulatto”) slave called Julia Chinn, and their two daughters. When Chinn died in 1833, he took up with another slave, but discovered that she was being unfaithful to him. So he sold her, and moved on to her sister instead.

Richard M. Johnson
US Politician who knew how to make the most of slavery

Ah, yes. I can see how that would work. It provides a whole new meaning for the notion of a “mistress”, if she’s someone you can simply sell to someone else if she displeases you. A mistress entirely subject to your authority? Must be convenient. And it only needed her to have a small proportion of African descent (one sixty-fourth was enough to hold someone in slavery) to produce that convenience.

It’s not hard to imagine that the possession of such attitudes would leave a mark. Nor is it surprising that two centuries on, they haven’t been entirely expunged.

Again, though, don’t think that this kind of thinking applies only to the US. Today, there’s a serious problem of illegal migrants trying to get through the Channel Tunnel into Britain. And David Cameron, our Prime Minister, referred to them as “swarms” of migrants.

"Swarms" of migrants at Calais
Trying to take advantage of a strike to get into Britain

Human beings reduced to the level of insects. No wonder that back then we had no problem selling other humans to America. To provide convenient but not exactly ennobling services to their new masters.