Old Hickory and the Indians

A review of Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars by Robert V. Remini (Penguin; New York; 2001)

It is difficult for contemporary readers to place ourselves in the mindset of the antebellum South. There was a pervasive Southern code of honor, which dictated the conduct of both gentlemen like Andrew Jackson and the "ruffians" who would become his most enthusiastic admirers and political supporters. Descriptions of the honor code's actual practices may strike readers today as more like what we read of "honor killings" in remote parts of southern Asia than movie images of stoic Confederate generals.

And, given the enormous changes in attitudes toward race that have occurred since Jackson's time, it's hard to conceive that "race" at the time he was growing up was commonly used to refer to what we would call nationality: the French "race," the English "race," etc. "Scientific" notions of racial superiority were largely in formation during the later years of Jackson's life. Unquestionably, Jackson and his contemporaries viewed the "Red race" as inferior to whites. But even the Southern notion of "white supremacy" had not yet achieved the status of a "sacred institution" which Southern gentlemen had bestowed on it by the time of the Civil War.

This history by Jackson's best-known contemporary biographer focuses on his participation in the Indian conflicts in what is today the Southeast, although what is now Mississippi and Tennessee were known as "the West" at the time. Some of the conflicts recounted are little more than skirmishes. But others are known as more notable conflicts: the Creek War and two Seminole Wars. Remini also recounts the story of the Indian Removal Act of Jackson's Presidency and it's implementation.

Those who are not particularly fond of military history will find the descriptions of battles blessedly brief.

My particular interest in this book was to get a better understanding of Jackson's personal perspective on the Indian problem, as it was known. One thing that becomes very clear is that he did not consider it practical or desirable that the native peoples would either live in independent political entities in the midst of the Americans or that they would integrate into the American culture. The solution to conflicts with the Indians in his mind involved moving them away from the Americans.

The points of conflict involved conflicting desires for the same land, national security issues, mutual attacks by each side on the other, and the presence of the Indians as a haven for runaway slaves. (I use "Americans" rather than "whites" here partly because of the latter factor.)

Remini makes it plain that Jackson shared in the greed for Indian land that was general among the Americans near them. Jackson profited directly from land speculation made possible by treaties he negotiated with native tribes on behalf of the United States.

I also find Remini's argument credible that Old Hickory's main motive in trying to remove the Indians had to do with national security. Quoting from Jackson writing to President James Monroe, he says:

Jackson's obsession - and surely it had become that - centered on replacing red with white men in order to "give to that section of the country a strong and permanent settlement of American citizens, competent to its defence." Such a settlement would provide safety and peace along the frontier and lessen the possibility of foreign invasion augmented with Indian warriors. For General Jackson it was never his paramount wish to take the land from the Indians because of its intrinsic economic value, although he conceded it would bring vast sums to the government. National security was always his primary concern. (p. 113)

It's certainly tempting today to regard this as a cynical dodge on the General's part. But the national security factor was very real. With the Seven Years War (known as the French and English War in the American colonies) fresh in the minds of his fellow Americans, Thomas Jefferson included in the Declaration of Independence the accusation against the British kind that he "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose know rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

The harsh American policy toward the Indians was certainly a major factor in the tribes' willingness to ally themselves with the British, French and Spanish in preference to the Americans. But the threat was real, however strange it may sound to us today.

Jackson didn't hesitate to use threats, intimidation and bribery in his negotiations with Indian leaders, though he continually claimed to be disgusted by the latter practice in particular. And he was conscientious in trying to enforce treaty obligations to protect Indians from marauding whites.

The massive removal of Indians to the west under Jackson's Presidency does not look good by today's standards. And not only by today's standards. Opponents of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 in Congress, one of Jackson's major Presidential achievements, made humanitarian and religious arguments against the measure. Church groups were active in opposing it.

Remini doesn't sugar-coat the ugliness of the actual Indian removal, probably best known today from the name Trail of Tears, which refers more specifically to the Cherokee removal from the Southeast in 1838, an action which was based on a subsequent Congressional decision late in Jackson's second Presidential term. Remini's description of the first of the removals under the Indian Removal Act, the relocation of the Choctaws, gives a glimpse at what happened:

[F]rom start to finish the operation of the removal policy was a horror. Deliberate fraud, corruption, mismanagement, and theft marked almost every step in the process. The Indians were abused and mistreated. Indifference and exploitation characterized white behavior toward these unfortunate people. The Choctaws requested General George Gibson as the guide to their new location, a man they trusted and admired. Bureaucrats deemed otherwise. Little sympathy was shown for the needs and wishes of these émigrés.

Universal sadness accompanied the first contingent of Choctaws as they left the land of their ancestors. And then the elements added to their agony. The winter of 1831-1832 was a "living hell." The suffering these Indians endured beggars the imagination. Those who watched their torment never forgot it. (p. 250)

If that description evokes images of "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans in the 1990s and other horrors of the century just past, so does his account of the Trail of Tears. Even though it took place under the Administration of Martin Van Buren, Remini rightly regards this as very much a "part of Andrew Jackson's legacy." (p. 270)

In a single week some seventeen thousand Cherokees were rounded up and herded into what was surely a concentration camp. Many sickened and died while they awaited transport to the west. In June the first contingent of about a thousand Indians boarded a steamboat and sailed down the Tennessee River on the first lap of their westward journey. Then they were boxed like animals into railroad cars drawn by two locomotives. Again there were many deaths on account of the oppressive heat and cramped conditions in the cars. For the last leg of the journey the Cherokees walked. Small wonder they came to call this eight-hundred-mile nightmare the Trail of Tears. Of the approximately eighteen thousand Cherokees who were removed, at least four thousand died in the stockades or along the way, and some say the figure actually reached eight thousand. By the middle of June 1838, the general in charge of the Georgia milita proudly reported that not a single Cherokee remained in the state except as prisoners in the stockade. (p. 269)

Perhaps the best that can be said of Andrew Jackson's attitude toward the Indians is that he was not as "savage" in his conduct and attitude toward them as many of his contemporaries. Or as many of those in the second half of the nineteenth century who fought the wars against the Plains Indians. Remini describes Jackson in 1814 showing the attitude toward the native peoples that he retained in some form throughout his life:

As always, Jackson was expressing the prejudices, fears, mistrust, and hatred of white people living on the frontier toward all Native Americans. Westerners knew only one thing: the Indian was a threat to their lives, and that danger must be eliminated - permanently. (p. 90)

But it would also be a mistake to try to define Jackson's approach to the Indians into a simple category of genocidal hatred. For instance, just before he became President:

Jackson ... suggested ... that a union among the Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws [the tribes to be removed later under the Indian Removal Act] might result from a general migration of these tribes, which would create "a great, powerful and happy people" so that when their children were educated they might become members of the United States, as Alabama and Mississippi are." It is an interesting commentary that Andrew Jackson fully expected the Indians to become citizens and participate in civil government, once they were educated and transformed into cultural white men. (p. 224)

One of the frustrating things about the storyof the Indian Wars in North America is that, on the one hand, there was a great deal of cruelty and injustice done to the native tribes that is impossible to excuse, either by the standards of today or the standards of the years in which they took place. On the other hand, it's also exceptionally difficult to think of what the "happy ending" might have been, of what alternative policies on the part of the Americans might have produced less destructive results.

Because when the Europeans came to North America, they brought technology and types of social organization that were drastically different from that of the native tribes, and which were certainly superior in the sense of giving the Europeans an overwhelming military advantage in any contest with the native tribes.

The difference in perspective is illustrated dramatically for me by Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux leader in the later nineteenth century who was considered one of the most successful Indian leaders against the Americans. Sitting Bull was an extremely flexible man, well-traveled in his later years. He even lived in Paris for a while and had a Parisian girlfriend. But throughout his life to the day he died, he was always very clear who the main enemy of his Lakota people were: the Crow Indians who lived to their west. (He wasn't entirely wrong; it was a Crow policeman on a reservation who killed him.)

Sitting Bull's tribal contemporary, the Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk, saw in his still-famous vision a time when the whites (Americans and British) would simply be pushed out of the world that the Lakota knew. They would just go away.

Aspects of that difference in worldview that Remini scarcely touches on in this book would include their vastly different conceptions of property in land and of the meaning of treaties.

And from the American point of view, the national security concern was very real. When the United States first gained its independence, it found itself confronting European powers that were holding, acquiring and seeking to colonize territory on all sides. None of those power were going to let concern about the Indians stand in their way, either.

Trying to become Americans, to integrate into the larger society, would have been one imaginable option. But, for the most part, the Indians did not want to do that, and the Americans did not welcome them.

Another option, which was partially successful for a limited time, would have been for the Indians to have some sort of self-governing enclaves within the boundaries of the United States. Remini's book does not describe much about the legal status of the tribes in US law in this book, though he does touch on it. But for that to have been a permanent solution, the central government in Washington would have had to be strong enough to prevent encroachments from either side. Jackson's experiences in trying to enforce India treaties against his fellow Americans show how difficult and ultimately futile a task that was under the conditions that actually existed.

The other alternative would have been for the native tribes to form large-scale alliances and unite militarily against the Americans. The most successful example of an attempt along these lines was the so-called Pontiac Conspiracy (aka Pontiac's War) of 1763-64, which took place in connection with the French and Indian War. It ultimately failed, and the factors prominent in that loss can be seen in the Indian Wars of the 19th century, as well. The tribal social organizations were unable to establish the stable military alliances of which European diplomacy was capable, or of coping with the sophisticated duplicity which was also a part of the latter. They were outgunned; the tribes had neither the technology nor the physical plant to produce weaponry to match that of the European powers. Their military experience ultimately could not match the strategic ability of the invaders. And the cultural gap was so great that the Indian tribes found it very difficult to understand their enemies' motives and goals.

None of this is to say it was impossible. History provides many examples, the American Revolution among them, in which politically united groups were able to offset the military and economic superiority of an opponent. One can find an example in contemporary (2003) news reports from Afghanistan, which describe the Americans using 2,000 lb. bombs to combat little bands of Islamic guerrillas equipped with small arms -an effort by no means assured of ultimate success.

But these "what if" games with history can quickly shade into a "blame the victim" kind of approach. Rimini in this work does not indulge in them, except for a passing reference. Instead, he stresses what actually occurred and looks at the motives and actions of various players.

The result reminds us that the grand events of history often involve considerable suffering. Romanticizing them risks forgetting the ugly lessons that need to be learned. Demonizing them can have the same result.

(Originally written March 15, 2003)

Tags: andrew jackson, robert rimini