Andrew Jackson focused much of his presidency on preserving the Union, fighting the hotheads in a very wealthy South Carolina. When those later hotheads fired on Fort Sumter, Jackson might have told them, if he had still been around, "You are on your own." A form of slavery with sharecropping continued after the war. It was a shame that something did not more quickly replace the dependency of manual labor to pick cotton.

Alex Wellford ’64
Memphis, Tenn.