Re: "Abraham Lincoln, the man who said 'Yes!' to the largest mass hanging in America...of Native Americans, of course.."

I'm no hero worshipper of Lincoln (see Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals), but every time I look at a $20 US bill, I see the evil bastard, Andrew Jackson. Two generations ahead of Lincoln, hero of the War of 1812, he presided over the Trail of Tears, responsible for the near-total annihilation of tribes of the eastern US. The ones who cooperated were the "civilized tribes." The rest were "savages," whom settlers, army, priests, and others "cleansed" using smallpox infected blankets, diseases for which they had no immunity, considered not fully human, not to mention the "lead poison" pumped into them across the country as the Monroe Doctrine spread west.

Andrew Jackson was a despicable human being. That he was such a hero is testimony to the collective gullibility of a blood-thirsty, uneducated populace.

In my home county in Alabama, Limestone, we like to remember how Nathan Bedford Forrest blew up the train trestles between Nashville, the frontier capitol at the time, and Atlanta. For several weeks, the Union army could not send ahead the food and ammunition Sherman would need to continue his march to the sea.

I live in Indiana now. Eli Lilly, founder of the largest employer here, commanded the battalions of white and black Union solders, trapped inside their own block houses and stockades on each bank of Sulphur Creek. I can't help myself -- even though I see the outcome of The War and the end of slavery as the superior outcome -- I can't resist a chuckle when I realize the chemist had to rebuild the trestles again again because of the brilliant guerrilla leader, spending a fortune while making no forward progress.

Tragic, the insanity of that war remains in the consciousness of white Southerners in such detail -- I think due to the story-telling history of the tragic Scots-Irish settlers of our county. My forebears on both sides were Scots and Irish, some were starving peasants, some displaced aristocrats, all proud, and many owned slaves. Sure, the oppressed became oppressors. Taking all of that history seriously will bring humility if you're lucky and you don't forget.

Abraham Lincoln is the hero because once he did see the light, he did not back away from liberation, and tried to reason with those who would have the South not just vanquished, but utterly destroyed. Would the South have suffered in Reconstruction so quickly, deeply, and for so long (even now?) if Abe had survived? The spineless bastards who followed him could not lead the country in a noble direction.

But of all the Presidents, the one whose memory should never die for its cruelty and avarice, aside from the future Truman murders, is Andrew Jackson. May his memory live forever in infamy.

McWilliams