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Article snippet: President Trump mused in an interview that the Civil War could have been avoided if only Andrew Jackson had been around to stop it. Jackson had been dead 16 years and long out of office when the war started in 1861. Mr. Trump’s comments, among several he made about Jackson in an interview broadcast Monday on satellite radio, quickly drew condemnation from his critics and from historians who said they appeared to show the president profoundly misunderstanding American history. “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?” he told his interviewer, Salena Zito, a host on SiriusXM’s P.O.T.U.S. channel, who spoke to Mr. Trump for an article that was published on Sunday in The Washington Examiner. Mr. Trump has often professed admiration for the seventh president’s populism and visited his tomb in March. Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, called Mr. Trump’s comments on Jackson and the Civil War the “height of inaccurate historical revisionism.” We fact-checked Mr. Trump’s claims with the help of Jon Meacham, the historian whose 2008 biography, “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” won a Pulitzer Prize. President Trump is correct that the 1828 race between Andrew Jackson and the incumbent, John Quincy Adams, was hard-fought and often descended into ad hominem attacks on both sides. The insults leveled at Jackson’s wife, Rachel, were particularly vicious — she was accused of m... Link to the full article to read more