[Carl Byker is the producer of "Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency."]

After his pastor came under attack last week and before his historic speech on Tuesday, Barack Obama put his finger on the crux of the issue: "We've got a tragic history when it comes to race in this country," he said. "We've got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding."

Recently, I spent most of a year in one of the places where such emotions have created the "racial stalemate" that Obama spoke of Tuesday. I was in Tennessee making a PBS biography of President Andrew Jackson, and while we were filming at the Hermitage, Jackson's home and plantation outside Nashville, I discovered that the exhibits were being updated. One thing being changed was how slavery was discussed.

For decades, the 200,000 school kids, retirees and vacationing families who visit the Hermitage each year have been told that Jackson was a "good slave owner." The historical justification for this description was that Jackson did not sadistically abuse his slaves or sell their children.

But today, there's little support among historians for any "good slave owner" designation. In Jackson's case, the fact is that he owned more than 140 human beings. And as historian Bobby Lovett of Tennessee State University puts it: "To enslave another human being, you can't be a good person. You have to be a pretty tough, vicious, mean person to hold another person or another 140 people in slavery for all of their lives."

And so, in 2007, the Hermitage began focusing on how brutal and hopeless the lives of the slaves who lived there were, instead of on how "good" their master was. And that's when things started to get ugly.

For years, Dave McArdle loved dressing up as Andrew Jackson, and visitors to the Hermitage delighted in McArdle's folksy way of bringing "Old Hickory" to life. McArdle is also the spitting image of Jackson, and we cast him as Jackson in our film. But just after we finished shooting, startling news arrived: McArdle had resigned from the job he loved -- the job for which he was seemingly born -- because he refused to work for an organization that made Jackson look bad because he owned slaves.

Soon after, we found out that McArdle held something close to the majority view in Tennessee. Our PBS biography of Jackson, which shared the Hermitage's new approach to slavery, has been attacked by white Tennesseans at screenings, in letters to newspapers and e-mails to PBS stations. One viewer wrote: "I am outraged at the way you and professor Bobby Lovett, who appears in your show, portray Jackson's ownership of slaves as 'evil.' That kind of thinking is what I call 'present-ism,' applying the standards of today to Americans who lived in the past."

And there it is. Bitterness and misunderstanding. A racial stalemate. Lovett is black, and I'll hazard a guess that most black Americans would consider his statement that it takes a "vicious, mean person" to enslave another person for their entire life pretty obvious.

But it's not so obvious to many white Americans. Even the lead academic advisor to our film, Daniel Feller of the University of Tennessee, doesn't think it's fair to see all slaveholders as "vicious, mean" people. ...

David G McArdle - 4/24/2008

A death bed confession is legal in a court of law in our country.Andrew Jacksons last words on this earth as he looked up from his death bed where something like "Oh im sorry to disturb you children ,do not cry ,we will all meet in heavan both Black and White."fiends servants and family crying .To me as ignorant and misguided Mr.Jackson may have been ,and i do deplore he Thought "his people"where his personal property,I sincerely doubt Mr.Jackson meant harm and abuse to His people .People who he gave firearms to i mind you.would you give fire arms to people you would abuse with your family living in close proximity?? i doubt very much this terrible hate was so deep as he did not recognize those poor souls,as fellow chidren of our Heavanly Father.A wonderful Black proffesor has assured me,she understands my feelings for This Great Leader and reminded me that all historic leaders have had thier blind spots ,it confuses us to see them in people we admire and respect.i am but a humble enactor ,and student of history .Proffesor Ajuan Mance,has now encouraged me to return to portraying the Great General and hope we can all bennift from lessons sad,and factful and more sophisticatedly see the truth leading to this aweful condition we humans seem to be so concerned about.I thank Carl Byker and the educators for this heartfelt acknowledgement.and will promise to all my black and red brothers and sisters to see thier concern and have concessions for my views on this most sensetive issue.right will allways be right and wrong wrong .to face this no matter how meaning well or not as abusive as others can not be an excuse to ignore the truth .

John McCoy - 3/31/2008

It would be incorrect, I believe, to describe Jackson as "vicious" simply because he owned slaves. My reasoning is that he was not unique in this fact as there were many other large landholders who also did so. In the absence of mechnization, large numbers of people were necessary to get the job done and Southern cotton and other products were sold throughout the world. One point to also consider is that Southerners were not the only ones to own slaves, some in the Northern states did too. Additionally, Southerners did not go and get the slaves --that was done by Northerners. "Vicious" would only be true if he mistreated them; i.e., sadistically abused his slaves or sold their children. Apparently, he did neither.

R.R. Hamilton - 3/30/2008

The second-to-last word in the prior post should be "condemned", not "committed".

R.R. Hamilton - 3/30/2008

If Jackson (or any other slave owner) had "hacked off an ear or two", he likely would've been hauled into criminal court even in that day. I did a minimum amount of research (five minutes) on this and found a couple of articles which shed some light on this subject. First, in general:

"The movement toward greater due process in slave trials was accompanied by changes in slave punishments. Although whipping and hanging remained commonplace, more extreme forms of physical punishment such as branding, maiming, castration, and burning at the stake gradually disappeared from the statute books in the early national period." http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/Ke-Lo/Slavery-Law.html

More specifically, while I did not see a statute on Tennessee covering this subject, I did find that in Tennessee's neighbor, Missouri, in Jackson's time, a man who maimed his slave would "stand trial as if slave was white." http://www.usgennet.org/usa/mo/county/stlouis/slavery.htm

Therefore I would conclude that because people of Jackson's era would have condemn him (even jailed him) for "hacking off an ear or two", then it is no act of "presentism" for the same crime to be committed today.

William J. Stepp - 3/30/2008

I just came across this gem from Truman:

"so-called modern art is merely the vaporings of half-baked, lazy people."

Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, _Duchamp: A Biography_. Well worth reading btw.

Truman wouldn't have been caught dead merely half-baking people. No, he wanted them fried.

William J. Stepp - 3/29/2008

There is no question that Jackson was personally a thug. He was, after all, Scotch-Irish and a politician, which is all you need to know.
Jackson also executed a soldier in Florida for desertion, if I recall.
He also called for the removal of squatters on "federal" lands, which of course are lands criminally claimed and sometimes occupied by the criminal organization known as the State.

The only two presidents whose personally thuggish tendencies approached Jackson's were Roosevelt I and Truman (recall his thuggish letter to a critic of his daughter's piano playing). The current frat boy might be fourth on the list (down let his folksy down home persona fool you for a minute--he's a thug), and I suspect FDR had some thuggish tendencies, which he cloaked with a patrician veneer. Being a cripple would have made it easier for him to pull off this act.

New York's former governor, Eliot Spitzer, is also a brutal thug, in the Jackson-TR-Truman mold. Rudy Guiliani also has these tendencies, and I suspect the Scotch-Irish politician John McCain does too, despite his nice veneer. ("Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran....")

Any I've left out? There must be a ton of other political thugs, current and deceased.
Why do voters keep electing thugs?

W. Lane Rogers - 3/28/2008

If, by chance, Jackson hacked off an ear or two as a disciplinary measure what, then, would that have made him? Would he have been just another ear-hacking master and a product of his times? Or would he have been a mean man?

John Richard Clark - 3/26/2008

The primary source accounts of Andrew Jackson's duels with John Wilkinson, John Sevier, and the Benton family are ample evidence of Jackson's vicious nature.

There is also the Indian Removal affair during Jackson's presidency.

John R. Maass - 3/24/2008

Interesting how positions here have been staked out at the poles, which doesn't allow for any shades of gray in the middle.

R.R. Hamilton - 3/22/2008

t’s not an act of “presentism” to have judged the Germans to have been “vicious and mean” to the Jews and Rom in the 1930s, because it was judged THEN to have been “vicious and mean”. And we should distinguish between the “merely vicious and mean” treatment of these groups before 1941 and the systematic murder of them afterwards. The Nazis themselves went to great lengths to hide their planned genocides of the Jews and Roma – even from Hitler, to whom murdered Jews were reported as “resettled”. So, the Nazis knew EVEN THEN that what they were doing would be morally condemned by most of the world (and maybe even Hitler!). Thus, no charge of “presentism” can be aimed at today’s critics of the Nazi atrocities towards the Jews and Rom(1) (and others).

On the other hand, when Jackson was at The Hermitage in the 1820s, slavery was commonplace all over the world (even if sometimes under different names). Moreover, it wasn’t as if Jackson, or Tennesseans, or Americans, or white Americans had invented “something new” with slavery. At that time, slavery had existed worldwide since time immemorial. Thus it IS an “act of presentism” to condemn Jackson for this.

As far as “who were the majority?” of anti-slavery thought in 1820s Tennessee, it must be recalled that in Tennessee and the South generally only ¼ of all white families owned even a single slave.(2) It is likely that most of these non-slave-holding whites (and free blacks) were anti-slavery – even if only for the same “bad reasons” for which some Americans are accused of being anti-illegal-immigration today: increased crime and depressed wages.

(1) Those concerned with the plight of the Rom should be informed about the atrocities and “ethnic-cleansing” of Rom that has occurred in Kosovo since NATO took it over.

(2) I’m relying on 1860 Census figures, but I see no reason for thinking the figures for 1820 or 1830 were substantially different.

James W Loewen - 3/22/2008

It's hard to see a practice as vicious or mean when "everybody is doing it." So we often label such a view "presentism" and charge the holder of it as expounding anachronistic views that were somehow inappropriate at the time.
But it's only hard to see it that way in our own country. We have no problem seeing the German treatment of Jews and Rom people ("Gypsies"), 1935-45, as vicious and mean, even though "everybody was doing it."
If we look at the population at and around the Hermitage in the 1820s-30s, we see that the majority of people were NOT "doing it" and indeed condemned it, the "it" being lifelong, generations-long, chattel slavery. But because most of slavery's opponents in Tennessee were black, they don't count as part of "everybody." We have to infer that the usual view of Jackson and other slaveowners is both racist and ethnocentric -- in short, limited. I look forward to your new film.