Good response...

I wasn't surprised by your post, though. Let's see if I understood it completely...

Andrew Jackson did do "bad" things, but the "good" he accomplished and represented as a general, Senator and President of the United States outweigh them in their impact on American history.

You also state that Jackson can't be held to the same moral standard as someone living today, nor can anyone not living today. Isn't this the very definition of "moral relativism"? Jackson's moral standard during his life was determined by the society he lived in and the experiences he lived through... not by a universal understanding of absolutes. That is a text book explanation of relativism.

I'm not saying you are wrong. Rather than struggle to find family members that can act as examples, let's look to other revered members of our Presidential past. Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that will last forever as a defining notion of equality and liberty: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." He wrote these words while owning slaves, perhaps as many as 200 over the course of his life. To the modern eye, this must seem the height of contradiction and hypocrisy, but if I were to say that Jefferson had borrowed the money to buy and keep the slaves and never managed to relieve the debt and thus couldn't "free" them legally, even though his conscience told him it was the "only moral course of action" available to him, does that mitigate the wrong? Does it remove the contradiction and explain the hypocrisy? Jefferson was the first President to work towards the abolition of slavery, and ended the slave trade in America in 1807... but "owned" slaves until his death in 1826.

Jefferson owned slaves because to do so in the late 18th Century in Virginia was the status quo, and to argue otherwise is revisionism at its worst, but he had the moral fiber to raise his voice against the practice from as early as 1767 when he took his seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses. This tells me that, regardless of circumstances and financial concerns, Jefferson knew that slavery was immoral and that he wasn't the lone voice in the wilderness when he spoke out against it. Had this not been the case, he never would have penned the words quoted above in the manner he did, which was a point of contention with many of the Southern delegates to the Continental Congress reviewing the initial drafts of the Declaration.

Isn't it true that to argue that "the norms of society dictate the moral standard" is to justify such patently immoral actions as the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs Sanford? Doesn't this relative interpretation of ethical and moral understanding negate the argument that there is a "universal" understanding of right and wrong, and that our society has developed to the point it has because we learned from our "mistakes" rather than dooming ourselves to endlessly repeat them?

Andrew Jackson was an accomplished military leader, a statesman, and a politician. He was a devoted husband and father (as Ryan pointed out, he adopted an Indian boy orphaned by one of his own Indian War battles). He paid off the national debt, something no other President has ever managed to do... ever. He preserved the Union when South Carolina threatened to secede over the question of nullification. He fought the corrupt system behind the Bank of the United States with every fiber of his being, and won.

He also signed into law an act that removed the individual and minority freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution to 47,000 US citizens based solely on the fact that they were living under the authority granted them by ratified treaty as sovereign governments within the United States of America. He ordered the forced removal of these US citizens from their homes, farms and plantations and had them relocated to a barren, undeveloped territory as far as 1,000 miles away. He authorized the US Army to use force in the removal of these people, with no regard for the means by which adequate supplies, transportation or care could be assured, which resulted in nearly 12,000 deaths between 1830 and 1837. He then seized the millions of acres of Indian reservations in the east and sold them to generate revenue for the Federal Government.

Among those removed were judges, doctors, wealthy plantation owners, lawyers, and two Representatives to the Georgia House... all of whom had fought the passage of the Removal Act from their homes all the way to Washington DC. These weren't illiterate savages living as nomads in teepees, these were the Five Civilized Tribes, with organized central governments, schools, hospitals, roads and postal services living on land that was promised to them exclusively by the Federal Government.

Isn't this exactly the same kind of infringement on individual liberty that so terrifies conservatives today? If we can dismiss the evil and immoral nature of this sort of tyranny then as "relative to the era" then where is the defense against it today? How are we supposed to revere the people responsible for this past injustice, which is far greater than anything we face now, if we are to fight against government infringement on rights and freedoms that may occur tomorrow?

Now, I'm not trying to make this a defense or argument for compensation or restitution. We cannot give back that which was lost in 1830, because what we lost was something we can never get back, no matter how much money we spend or effort we make: we lost a portion of our national honor. We get that lost honor back by acting as a nation that recognizes the difference between right and wrong, even when it is our own actions we are judging, and working to ensure that such a travesty never happens again.

That is my opinion. We cannot change what has already occurred, but we can recognize our past for what it is, and we can recognize our leaders for what they were... human... and not for what we want them to have been... ideal. I'm simply not sure that there is a defense for what occurred after Jackson signed that act into law, even if we assume that some kind of mitigation need be assigned due to the standards of society at the time. If there is no defense, then perhaps we do need to review which five Presidents grave the face of our national currency. After all, we have 43 faces we can choose from, and there are far better candidates than Andrew Jackson, I am sure, among them.