Jackson’s Indian Policy
America: A Narrative History by George Brown Tindall & David Emory Shi
During the 1820s and 1830s the U.S. was fast becoming a multicultural nation of peoples from many countries. Most whites, however, were openly racist in their treatment of blacks and Indians. As economic growth reinforced the institution of slavery and accelerated westward expansion, policy makers struggled to preserve white racial homogeneity and hegemony. “Next to the case of the black race within our bosom,” declared former president James Madison, “that of the red [race] on our borders is the problem most baffling to the policy of our country.”
Andrew Jackson, however, saw nothing baffling about Indian policy. His attitude toward Indians was the typically western one: Native Americans were barbarians and better off out of the way. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama in 1814, General Jackson’s federal troops had massacred nearly 900 Creeks. Jackson and most Americans on the frontier despised and feared Indians- and vice versa. Jackson believed that a “just, humane, liberal policy toward Indians” dictated moving all of them onto the plains west of the Mississippi River, to the Great American Desert, which white settlers would never covet, since it was believed to be fit mainly for horned toads and rattlesnakes.
Indian Removal
In response to a request by Jackson, Congress in 1830 approved the Indian Removal Act. It authorized the president to give Indians federal land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the land they occupied in the East and the South. By 1835 Jackson was able to announce that the policy had been carried out or was in the process of completion for all but a handful of Indians. Some 46,000 people were relocated at government expense. The policy was affected with remarkable speed, but even that was too slow for state authorities in the South and Southwest. Unlike the Ohio River valley and the Great Lakes region, where the flow of white settlement had constantly pushed the Indians westward before it, in the Old Southwest settlement moved across Kentucky and Tennessee and down the Mississippi, surrounding the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Cherokees. These tribes had over the years taken on many of the features of white society. The Cherokees even had such products of white “civilization” as a constitution, a written language, and African-American slaves.
Most of the northern tribes were too weak to resist the offers of commissioners who, if necessary, used bribery and alcohol to woo the chiefs. On the whole, there was remarkably little resistance. In Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory an armed clash erupted in 1832, which came to be known as the Black Hawk War. Under Chief Black Hawk the Sauk and Fox sought to reoccupy some lands they had abandoned in the previous year. Facing famine and hostile Sioux west of the Mississippi, they were simply seeking a place to raise a crop of corn. The Illinois militia mobilized to expel them chased them into the Wisconsin Territory, and massacred women and children as they tried to escape across the Mississippi. The Black Hawk War came to be remembered, however, less because of the atrocities inflicted on the Indians than because among the participants tow native Kentuckians later pitted against each other: Lieutenant Jefferson Davis [future president of the Confederate States of America] of the regular army and Captain Abraham Lincoln [future president of the U.S.A] of the Illinois volunteers.
In the South two nations, the Seminoles and the Cherokees put up a stubborn resistance to the federal removal policy. The Seminoles of Florida fought a protracted guerrilla war in the Everglades fro 1835 to 1842. But their resistance waned after 1837, when their leader, Osceola, was seized by treachery under a flag of truce, imprisoned, and left to die at Fort Moultrie near Charleston harbor. After 1842 only a few hundred Seminoles remained, hiding out in the swamps. Most of the rest had been banished to the West.
The Trail of Tears
The Cherokees had, by the end of the eighteenth century, fallen back into the mountains of northern Georgia and western North Carolina, onto land guaranteed to them in 1791 by treaty with the U.S. But when Georgia ceded its western lands in 1802, it did so on the ambiguous condition that the United States extinguish all Indian titles within the state “as early as the same can be obtained on reasonable terms.” In 1827 the Cherokees, relying on their treaty rights, adopted a constitution in which they declared pointedly that they were not subject to any other state or nation. In 1828 Georgia responded by declaring that after June 1, 1830, the authority of state law would extend over the Cherokees living within the boundaries of the state.
The discovery of gold in 1829 whetted the whites’ appetite for Cherokee land and brought bands of rough prospectors into the country. The Cherokees sought relief in the Supreme Court, but in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) John Marshall ruled that the Court lacked jurisdiction because the Cherokees were a “domestic dependent nation” rather than a foreign state in the meaning of the Constitution. Marshall added, however, that the Cherokees had “an unquestionable right” to their lands “until title should be extinguished by voluntary cession to the United States.” In 1830 a Georgia law had required whites in the territory to obtain licenses authorizing their residence there and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Two New England missionaries among the Indians refused to abide by the law and were sentenced to four years at hard labor. On appeal their case reached the Supreme Court as Worcester v. Georgia (1832), and the Court held that the Cherokee Nation was “a distinct political community” within which Georgia law had no force. The Georgia law was therefore unconstitutional.
Six years earlier Georgia had faced down President John Quincy Adams when he tried to protect the rights of the Creeks. Now Georgia faced down the Supreme Court with that tacit consent of another president. Andrew Jackson did nothing to enforce the Court’s decision. Under the circumstances there was nothing for the Cherokees to do but give in and sign a treaty, which they did in 1835. They gave up their land in the Southeast in exchange for tracts in the Indian Territory west of Arkansas, $5 million from the federal government, and expenses for transportation.
By 1838 some 17,000 Cherokees had departed westward on the “Trail of Tears,” following other tribes on an 800-mile journey marked by the cruelty and neglect of soldiers and private contractors and scorn and pilferage by whites along the way. A few held out in the mountains and acquired title to federal land in North Carolina; thenceforth they were the “Eastern Band” of the Cherokees. Some Seminoles were able to hide out in the Everglades in south Florida, and a few of the others remained scattered in the Southeast, especially mixed-blood Creeks who could pass for white. Only 8,000 of the exiles survived the forced march to Oklahoma.
Hegemony- leadership; dominant influence.
Homogeneity-the quality of being of the same or similar nature.