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Series Foreword In President by Massacre, Barbara Alice Mann provides a brilliant dissection of Native Americans’ forced removal, the spread of slavery, and the establishment of oligarchy as the United States’ standard style of governance during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her tools are the papers and writings on the foreign and domestic actions of three U.S. presidents: Andrew Jackson, the seventh, William Henry Harrison, the ninth and Zachary Taylor, the twelfth. While existing histories usually examine the policies of these three men in iso- lation, Professor Mann seeks common threads in a context of broader economic and social history—how it was, for example, that the forced labor of African American slaves by Taylor’s presidency was harvesting cotton from lands that had been occupied by Native peoples who had been dispossessed on the Trail of Tears and other forced marches under Jackson’s Removal policies barely a gen- eration earlier, all driven by the popular ideology of Manifest Destiny supported by a pseudoscience of racial superiority. DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES All of this was accomplished by self-declared “populists” who enriched them- selves as oligarchs by speculating in Indian land and profiting from black labor in what Professor Mann describes as a new caste system under the cover of “democracy.” Thus, writes Dr. Mann, racism became the deus ex machina of the American Dream—manufactured from Native American and black nightmares. All of this should ring a modern bell for students of history. Consider, for example, the billionaire Donald J. Trump, also a land speculator, who rails against immigrant labor while profiting from it, meanwhile representing himself as a populist defender of the “forgotten” white working class. Adolf Hitler, like- wise, was an appreciative student of United States’ westward expansion, declaring