President's Day

I'm loving the History Channel's presidential programming today:) I started commenting about it on Facebook but then I just had too much to say. Here are my thoughts after watching several hours of a documentary about the presidents starting with our first:

-George Washington was a smart man!

-It seems like no one truly loves being President...

-No wonder we only really talk about James Madison's non-presidential achievements. Poor guy. He was the first president to declare war and it was against England. It doesn't seem to have gone very well as we were so tiny and they were so huge.

-The Monroe Doctrine was actually written by John Q Adams....so interesting.

-J. Q. Adams and A. Jackson seem to have had the first really dirty political election(s).

-Andrew Jackson- not my favorite president!
-Trivia: When Andrew Jackson ran for president in 1828, his opponents called him a "Jackass." Jackson liked the image so much it became the mascot of the new democratic party.
- Also, the US was debt-free for the first and only time ever under Jackson.

-John Tyler had no vice president because he refused to name one. This was after he became president when William Henry Harrison died from pneumonia, that he got from giving a 2 hour inauguration address to prove how smart and not simple he was.

-Polk was much more influential than I remembered.

The series stopped showing and they started a drama about Jefferson. Maybe I'll catch more later. It has been such an interesting history refresher lesson.