Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars
By Robert V. Remini
Viking, 317 pages, $26.95
Of all Andrew Jackson’s actions as president, the least defensible to the modern eye was his forced removal of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee and Seminole Indians from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern U.S. to unsettled areas in what is now Oklahoma.
Jackson did not invent the idea of relocation. Land-hungry whites had shoved Indians aside since the 17th Century, and, starting with Thomas Jefferson, Jackson’s predecessors as president had sought, with little success, to induce Eastern tribes to exchange their lands for equivalent acreage west of the Mississippi River.
Jackson’s accomplishment was twofold. He secured congressional legitimacy for the removal project by browbeating his Democratic supporters into passing the Indian Removal Act in March 1830. And once that law was enacted, he insisted on its immediate and relentless implementation, despite pleas from Indians, including some former allies in earlier wars, and protests from religious and humanitarian groups in the North. Indians had only two alternatives, Jackson and his agents coldly told them: Either they moved west immediately, or Jackson would allow white men’s state governments to extend their legal jurisdiction over them and their land, thereby subjecting them to cultural obliteration.
The result, as Robert V. Remini’s vividly written and often harrowing new book makes amply clear, was one of the shoddiest episodes in American history. Following the example of Jackson, who personally negotiated the Treaty of Franklin with Mississippi’s Chickasaw Indians in August 1830, government commissioners used liquor, threats and bribes to persuade chiefs to sign away their people’s lands and move them to the unfamiliar wilderness. Then, promised payments of food, blankets, utensils, muskets and annual cash annuities to individual Indian families were either stolen or supplied in defective goods by corrupt government contractors and Indian agents. Worse still, the physical transplantation of tens of thousands of men, women and children was often marked by poor planning, logistical ineptitude and immense human suffering, most notably along the infamous Trail of Tears, when at least 4,000 Cherokees died during their forced trek from Georgia.
An emeritus professor of history and humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Remini has written many books about Jackson, including a magisterial, three-volume biography that won the National Book Award upon its completion. In this new book he pulls together material from those volumes to explain why Indian removal happened and why Jackson, of whom Remini has always been an unabashed admirer, was so determined to make it happen.
To a large extent, he attributes it to the inevitable growth and westward migration of a racist white population that feared and hated Indians and insatiably coveted their lands. Thus a major goal of this book is to make modern Americans “understand the fear and mistrust that existed between the white and red people during the early years of the Republic.” Jackson emphatically shared his contempories’ attitudes toward Indians, and thus Remini also intends the book to teach modern Americans that “in the past a great many normally decent and upright Americans have repeatedly mistreated other people.”
Yet Remini also portrays Jackson’s exceptional determination to bring about removal as a product of lessons he learned and attitudes he developed during the first 50 years of his life, when he almost continuously lived near, fought against, or negotiated treaties with the Southeastern tribes who would be the targets of his later removal policy. Therefore Remini devotes more than two-thirds of the book to the years from Jackson’s youth on the South Carolina frontier in the 1770s and 1780s to his resignation from the Army in 1821 — to the period, that is, before Jackson’s Tennessee political allies ever dreamed of pushing him for president.
Even as a teenager in South Carolina, where Indians slew one of his kinsmen, Jackson learned “hatred, mistrust, and fear” of Indians and “accepted as indisputable fact that Indians had to be shunted to one side or removed to make the land safe for white people.” Subsequent battles against the Chickasaws, Creeks and Cherokees as a member of the Tennessee militia in the 1790s and early 1800s reinforced these lessons and taught still others. So did his service during and after the War of 1812, when he achieved the fame as a military hero that initially powered his presidential prospects.
Remini recounts Jackson’s exploits during these years with the riveting narrative prose that has always characterized his writing. As commander of the Tennessee militia from 1812 to 1814, Jackson led campaigns against the Creeks, whom he crushed at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in March 1814. During these years Jackson also earned two sobriquets that accompanied him the rest of his life. Awed by his physical toughness and unshakable determination during a particularly grueling march from Nashville to Natchez in winter 1813, his appreciative militiamen named him “Old Hickory.” Stunned by his skill in combat and his ruthlessness when imposing peace terms on defeated Indian foes, Indians called him “Sharp Knife.” This title proved especially apt, for in all the treaties Jackson personally negotiated with Indians from 1814 to 1820, he always sliced away hundreds of thousands of acres of existing Indian lands and put them in U.S. possession.
In spring 1814, Jackson was appointed a major general in the Army and commander of its Southern Division. In that post he launched a campaign against Creeks and their Seminole allies in Florida, scored his famous victory over the British at New Orleans in January 1815, and undertook his controversial invasion of Florida in pursuit of Seminoles again on the warpath in 1818. Jackson failed to kill many Seminoles during this last campaign, but the invasion was controversial at the time and has remained so to this day because Florida was then owned by Spain. Jackson ousted the Spanish authorities and raised the American flag over the capital of Pensacola, and with especially meticulous scholarship, Remini shows that this action, contrary to what many historians have written, probably had the sanction of the Monroe administration. Without question, it helped persuade the Spanish to cede Florida to the U.S. in the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, thus adding it to the millions of acres Jackson extracted from cowed or bamboozled Indians in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.
During these years, Jackson also learned four crucial lessons that shaped his later Indian-removal policy.
First, his frequent negotiations with Indian chiefs taught him they could most effectively be induced to sign away tribal lands by intimidating them with military might, numbing them with copious booze and especially bribing them with gifts, cash and promises of private land reservations, so they always increased their personal landholdings even as their people lost land.
Second, in these years Jackson became convinced that it was delusory and ridiculous to deal with Indians as sovereign nations, to insist that treaties with them had supremacy over state laws, and to require the national government to enforce those treaties by protecting the Indians’ legal and geographical autonomy, which they guaranteed. In the 1830s these beliefs became all-important, for despite protests from Indians, religious groups, national Republicans and the Supreme Court that treaties must be enforced, Jackson repeatedly refused to stop Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi from extending their laws over the Indians within their borders.
Third, Jackson also became convinced that the federal government lacked the manpower to prevent white squatters from encroaching on Indians’ lands and that the only way to spare Indians from inevitable cultural annihilation was to relocate them in the West. To his dying day, Jackson thus believed he was doing the Indians a favor by forcing their removal. And so does Remini. In his final paragraph he tells us that however “monstrous” the assertion sounds, Jackson “saved the Five Civilized Nations from probable extinction.”
Fourth, and most important in explaining Jackson’s behavior, his almost-continuous warfare against the Southeastern Indian nations convinced him they went on the warpath only because they were egged on and supplied by the British and Spanish. What is more, the likelihood that Indians would be potential allies induced the British to attack New Orleans, and the U.S. would remain vulnerable to a European invasion along the gulf coast until those Indians were relocated. In short, for Jackson, national-security interests above all else justified, indeed necessitated, Indian removal as soon as humanly possible.
Perhaps because of his well-known admiration for Jackson, Remini announces at the start of this splendid book that his intention is not “to excuse or exonerate” Jackson. And he certainly admits Jackson’s racism, his contemptuous disdain for Indians, his frequent betrayal of former Indian allies in treaties and the deplorable consequences of removal’s implementation. Yet he also judges Jackson primarily in terms of the sincerity of his convictions, and not the validity of those beliefs. One might legitimately ask, for example, whether there was any realistic prospect of a European invasion of the U.S. after 1820. One notes as well that while several chiefs, who had actually seen the western lands to which Jackson insisted on moving them, protested that they were decidedly inferior to the lands they already inhabited, Jackson never wavered from his insistence that lands in the West were just as fertile and bountiful as those in the East. Certainly Remini himself never makes any attempt to assess the quality of the Western lands to which the Indians were consigned. And was Jackson really as powerless to contest the extension of state laws over the Indians and enforce the existing treaties as he repeatedly maintained? Others at the time did not think so, and one wonders if Jackson’s real motive here was not perceived inability but the need to prevent Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia from siding with South Carolina in the impending crisis over nullification.
In sum, while Remini has largely succeeded in his goal of explaining “what happened and why” during Indian removal, it remains, in his words, a “highly controversial subject.”
