It fitted well the old Jeffersonian idea of how to handle the Indians, by bringing them into “civilization.”
From 1814 to 1824, in a series of treaties with the southern Indians, whites took over three-fourths of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson played a key role in those treaties, using bribery, deception, and force to get more and more land, and giving jobs to his friends and relatives.
These treaties, these land grabs, laid the basis for the cotton kingdom, the slave plantations. Jackson’s work had brought the white settlements to the border of Florida, owned by Spain. Here were the villages of the Seminole Indians, where some escaped black slaves were taking refuge. Jackson began raids into Florida, arguing it was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and for marauding Indians. Florida, he said, was essential to the defense of the United States. It was that classic modern preface to a war of conquest.
Thus began the Seminole War of 1818, leading to the American acquisition of Florida. It appears on classroom maps politely as “Florida Purchase, 1819,” but it came from Andrew Jackson’s military campaign across the Florida border, burning Seminole villages, seizing Spanish forts, until Spain was “persuaded” to sell. He acted, he said, by the “immutable laws of self-defense.”
Jackson then became governor of the Florida Territory. He was able now to give good business advice to friends and relatives. To a nephew, he suggested holding on to property in Pensacola. To a friend, a surgeon-general in the army, he suggested buying as many slaves as possible, because the price would soon rise.
Leaving his military post, he also gave advice to officers on how to deal with the high rate of desertion. (Poor whites—even if willing to give their lives at first—may have discovered the rewards of battle going to the rich.) Jackson suggested whipping for the first two attempts, and the third time, execution.
If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history you will find Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people—not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians.
After Jackson was elected president in 1828 (following John Quincy Adams, who had followed Monroe, who had followed Madison, who had followed Jefferson), the two political parties were the Democrats and Whigs, who disagreed on banks and tariffs, but not on issues crucial for the white poor, the blacks, the Indians—although some white working people saw Jackson as their hero, because he opposed the rich man’s bank.
Under Jackson, and the man he chose to succeed him, Martin Van Buren, seventy thousand Indians east of the Mississippi were forced westward. In New York, the Iroquois Confederation stayed. But the Sac and Fox Indians of Illinois were removed, after the Black Hawk War. When Chief Black Hawk was defeated and captured in 1832, he made a surrender speech:
[Black Hawk] is now a prisoner to the white men.… He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands…. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives.…
The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse—they poison the heart.… Farewell, my nation!… Farewell to Black Hawk.
The removal of the Indians was explained by Lewis Cass, who served variously as secretary of war, governor of the Michigan Territory, minister to France, and a presidential candidate:
A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature.… We are all striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts constitutes the advance of society. But there is little of this in the constitution of our savages.
Cass, pompous, pretentious, honored (Harvard gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1836, at the height of Indian removal), took millions of acres from the Indians by treaty when he was governor of the Michigan Territory: “We must frequently promote their interest against their inclination.… A barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase, cannot live in contact with a civilized community.”
If the Indians would only move to new lands across the Mississippi, Cass promised in 1825 at a treaty council with Shawnees and Cherokees, “The United States will never ask for your land there. This I promise you in the name of your great father, the President. That country he assigns to his red people, to be held by them and their children’s children forever.”
Everything in the Indian heritage spoke out against leaving their land. An old Choctaw chief said, responding, years before, to President Monroe’s talk of removal: “I am sorry I cannot comply with the request of my father.… We wish to remain here, where we have grown up as the herbs of the woods; and do not wish to be transplanted into another soil.” A Seminole chief had said to John Quincy Adams: “Here our navel strings were first cut and the blood from them sunk into the earth, and made the country dear to us.”
Not all the Indians responded to the white officials’ common designation of them as “children” and the president as “father.” It was reported that when Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison, Indian fighter and future president, the interpreter said: “Your father requests you to take a chair.” Tecumseh replied: “My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon her bosom.”
As soon as Jackson was elected president, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to extend the states’ rule over the Indians in their territory. Indian land was divided up, to be distributed by state lottery. Federal treaties and federal laws gave Congress, not the states, authority over the tribes. Jackson ignored this, and supported state action.
He had now found the right tactic. The Indians would not be “forced” to go west. But if they chose to stay they would have to abide by state laws, which destroyed their tribal and personal rights and made them subject to endless harassment and invasion by white settlers coveting their land. If they left, however, the federal government would give them financial support and promise them lands beyond the Mississippi. Jackson’s instructions to an army major sent to talk to the Choctaws and Cherokees put it this way:
Say to the chiefs and warriors that I am their friend…but they must, by removing from the limits of the States of Mississippi and Alabama and by being settled on the lands I offer them, put it in my power to be such—There, beyond the limits of any State, in possession of land of their own, which they shall possess as long as Grass grows or water runs. I am and will protect them and be their friend and father.
That phrase “as long as Grass grows or water runs” was to be recalled with bitterness by generations of Indians. (An Indian GI, veteran of Vietnam, testifying publicly in 1970 not only about the horror of the war but about his own maltreatment as an Indian, repeated that phrase and began to weep.)
As Jackson took office in 1829, gold was discovered in Cherokee territory in Georgia. Thousands of whites invaded, destroyed Indian property, staked out claims. Jackson ordered federal troops to remove them, but also ordered Indians as well as whites to stop mining. Then he removed the troops, the whites returned, and Jackson said he could not interfere with Georgia’s authority. The white invaders seized land and stock, forced Indians to sign leases, beat up Indians who protested, sold alcohol to weaken resistance, and killed game that Indians needed for food.
Treaties made under pressure and
