The Curse of the Jacksonian Economy

Drive down I-485 from Indian Trail, NC, outside Charlotte, to Indian Land, South Carolina, and you're following two maps at once. The first, from 1838, marks the route federal troops used to march Cherokee families west. The second, from this week, shows ICE deployment zones. The routes eerily overlap. Same paths, different uniforms, same impulse: when economic anxiety rises, find someone to exclude.

This essay argues an uncomfortable point: American economic nationalism consistently produces deflation, unemployment, and social scapegoating, not prosperity. The pattern has repeated for two centuries because we refuse to learn its central lesson: protectionism protects no one.

I lived for three years near this convergence, in Indian Land, South Carolina, minutes from Andrew Jackson's birthplace. The name holds like a placeholder never meant as a destination. The Catawba Nation once held 144,000 acres here, granted by the King of England in 1763. By Jackson's presidency, they'd been reduced to 15 square miles through treaties and disease. By 1847, South Carolina's governor declared them "effectively dissolved." They weren't marched west like the Cherokee passing through their lands. Instead, they were economically strangled through 99-year leases that promised survival but delivered dispossession. Today Fort Mill next door booms while Indian Land struggles with split services and fragmented governance.

This isn't mysticism but mathematics. Communities marked by exclusion rarely flourish, even when sitting next to wealth. The curse isn't supernatural. It's structural.

As if set to schedule, 200 years ago, in 1828, Congress passed the "Tariff of Abominations," reaching 45 percent on imports. The bitter irony? Jackson was supposed to be the South's champion. A Tennessee slaveholder running against Northern elites, his own supporters engineered a political trap that backfired catastrophically. Martin Van Buren and Jackson's allies crafted the tariff to be so onerous it would fail, letting them blame John Quincy Adams. Instead, it passed, immediately devastating the very Southern economy that elected Jackson.

Jackson found himself enforcing a tariff that impoverished his own voters. Cotton prices collapsed as Britain reduced purchases. Southern farmers paid 45 percent more for tools and textiles. His own Vice President, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, secretly authored pamphlets declaring the tariff unconstitutional. By 1832, Jackson was threatening to invade South Carolina with federal troops to enforce a law that was destroying his own base.

This self-inflicted wound made Indian removal easier to execute. Desperate Southern farmers, bankrupted by their own champion's policies, needed the Native lands more than ever. The Catawba's remaining cotton fields became irresistible to farmers whose own crops couldn't sell. Economic desperation made moral opposition impossible.

The economic mechanism was simple. The 1828 tariff made Southern imports expensive. Southerners bought less from Britain. Britain, with fewer dollars, bought less American cotton. The Catawba, who'd shifted from hunting to cotton farming on their remaining lands, found their crop worthless. They leased more land to white farmers for pennies, hoping rent would replace revenue. Each country's reduced imports became another's reduced exports. Total global demand shrank in what economists now describe through the Kindleberger spiral, which arose from his researching reasons for the Great Depression.

A new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study by Barnichon and Singh proves this wasn't coincidence. Examining 150 years of tariff data, they found tariff changes weren't driven by economic conditions but by which party held power, allowing researchers to isolate true causal effects.

Their findings overturn conventional wisdom. A permanent 4 percent tariff increase lowers inflation by 2 percent while raising unemployment by 1 percent. Tariffs don't cause inflation; they cause deflation through collapsing demand. Stock prices fall, volatility spikes. The uncertainty dilutes any price effect.

This pattern holds across every period: 1870-1913, the interwar years, even post-World War II. The mechanism never changes. Neither does the scapegoating.

Consider the accounting identity that tariff advocates ignore. America's trade deficit and capital account surplus aren't separate phenomena but two sides of one equation. When we buy foreign goods, those dollars must return, either through foreign purchases of our exports or foreign investment in our assets. Tariffs can't change this arithmetic, only shift the channels through which dollars flow back, typically from productive investment to defensive asset hoarding.

Tariffs and removals pair throughout our history. The 1890s McKinley Tariff arrived with Chinese Exclusion to protect "American" workers by defining who counts as American. Smoot-Hawley in 1930 brought Mexican Repatriation—when tariffs crashed the economy, deport those you can blame. Today's trade wars accompany expanded deportations along the same Indian Trail. Each cycle promises to protect workers while destroying jobs through reduced economic activity.

Jackson's worldview illuminates the error. He believed in "bleeding enemies to give them their senses." But the enemies were phantom. His tariffs protected no one. They impoverished the South and triggered nullification. Indian removal created no security—it stole land from allies and enemies alike. The Catawba who'd aided America and the Cherokee who'd resisted both lost everything. Cooperation or resistance didn't matter when exclusion was the goal.

Modern evidence confirms the pattern continues. Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein documented how 2018 tariffs reduced stock values and raised producer costs without helping workers. The uncertainty channel the Fed researchers identified operates today exactly as in 1828.

The deflationary risk is real and underappreciated. When tariffs reduce demand faster than they raise prices, unemployment rises while prices fall, making debt increasingly burdensome. This isn't economic protection but economic suicide disguised as patriotism.

Every generation reaches for Jackson's tools thinking this time will differ. But whether 1828, 1890, 1930, or 2025, the results remain constant. Tariffs reduce growth. Governments blame outsiders. Communities marked by exclusion stagnate. The cycle repeats.

The solution isn't complicated. Recognize tariffs as taxes on your own consumers. Whether through removal, deportation, or economic strangulation: exclusion reduces productivity and innovation. Accept that American prosperity has always come from integration, not isolation.

The soil of Indian Land remembers what Washington forgets: exclusion breeds fragility, not strength. Every attempt to wall off the economy ends identically with lower demand, higher unemployment, renewed searches for scapegoats. The Catawba learned that cooperation couldn't save them. The Cherokee learned that legal victories meant nothing. We're learning nothing at all.

Jackson's mistakes weren't unique to his century. They're errors we're making right now, today, along the same roads, for the same false promises, with the same predictable results.

The land remembers. Whether we will is the only question left.