How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees › v5n4 › v5n4_reviews_white.pdf · 2013-10-31 · How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees Green Bag •Summer 2002 445 gives a far more nuanced

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Reviews

How Andrew Jackson Saved the CherokeesRobert V. Remini

Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars

Viking 2001

Richard White

ecause Americans so often claim to bethe democratic conscience of the world,American Indian policy has cast a long

international shadow. One of the darkest partsof that shadow has been Indian removal: thecoerced migration in the 1830s and 1840s of tensof thousands of Indians to open up lands forAmerican settlers east of the Mississippi River.When criticized by Americans for dispossess-ing, killing, or exiling a minority population,modern tyrants and their supporters reÔexivelypoint to the treatment of Indians by the UnitedStates as a precedent and to their critics ashypocrites. From Adolph Hitler justifying theNazi campaign for lebensraum to supporters ofSlobodan Milosevic’s policy against Bosniansand Kosovars, proponents of what is nowcalled ethnic cleansing have cited AmericanIndian policy to justify their own actions and tostymie their American critics. Why shouldthey listen to a people whose own prosperity isbuilt on land and resources plundered from

Indians? American troops are now in the Bal-kans to prevent the displacement of entire peo-ples; they once marched into the SoutheasternUnited States to displace entire peoples.

Given these claimed parallels betweenethnic cleansing and Indian removal, anyexamination of Indian removal will inevitablyinvolve discussions of ethnic cleansing. Indianremoval is an intellectual mineÕeld, andhistorians trying to traverse it had better carrya good map, otherwise they can end up wherethey would rather not go. Robert Remini in hisdiscussion of Andrew Jackson’s Indian warscarries half a map. He probably knows moreabout Andrew Jackson than any person alive.Unfortunately he appears to know as littleabout Indian peoples as most Americanhistorians. His knowledge and ignorance fuseto make Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars adisturbingly obtuse book about a man whoprobably inÔicted more pain, suÖering, loss,and death upon Indian peoples than any

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University.

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American of the nineteenth century. This obtuseness does not arise from

Remini’s refusal to acknowledge the suÖeringJackson caused. He places Indian removal atthe heart of the horrors Indians experienced.Remini never diminishes the death anddestruction that Jackson brought and neverdenies Jackson’s moral culpability. Reminicondemns Jackson and his contemporaries fortheir corruption, their racism, their greed, andtheir refusal to accept responsibility for thesuÖering they inÔicted. What is obtuse isRemini’s own conclusion. Out of this circus ofhorrors, Remini contends, there came greatgood: Andrew Jackson “saved the Five CivilizedNations from probable extinction.” It is nothard to imagine the outcry if a Germanhistorian oÖered a similar assessment of theresults of the German search for lebensraum orif the survival of the Kosovars and Bosnians ascoherent groups were credited to SlobodanMilesovic’s ethnic cleansing.

Although proclamations of the beneÕcentresults of Indian removal have not beenmuch heard since the nineteenth century,Remini’s point of departure for his surpris-ing destination is quite conventional. Likemany American historians, Remini deniesthat American Indian policy was genocidal.No matter what the results of its actions, theUnited States claimed that it was trying tosave the lives of Indian peoples andeventually to assimilate them, one by one,into the American population. But havingdismissed genocide, Remini never explicitlyconfronts the tougher question of whetherIndian removal constituted a form of whatwe now call ethnic cleansing. Although geno-cide accomplishes ethnic cleansing – theforced removal of a population from itsnative land – not all ethnic cleansing isgenocidal. Ethnic cleansers want to get rid ofminority populations, and are hardlysolicitous of their welfare, but they do notnecessarily want to kill them.

Remini’s assertion that removal saved theSoutheastern Indians is audacious and dis-turbing, but that is no reason to dismiss it. IfRemini is right and removal did secure thesurvival of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”of the Southeast – the Choctaws, Chickasaws,Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles – whocertainly have survived, then he should say sono matter how oÖensive it may be and nomatter how many unpalatable historical paral-lels it reveals. The claim, however, gives him theburden of examining Indian lives closely todemonstrate that the peoples in question owetheir survival to removal. He needs to writeabout Indians as carefully and knowledgeablyas he does about Jackson.

There are Indians galore in Remini’s book,but they are clearly the supporting cast. Theyare the stock Indians of American history –sometimes noble, sometimes murderous,usually tragic, and always simple. They are notpeople who will get to evaluate the results oftheir own dispossession and exile. They willnot even get the beneÕt of any detailed evalua-tion of their fate. Jackson’s opinions mattermuch more than theirs, and Jackson gets thevast majority of Remini’s attention.

To explain Jackson, Remini needs to explainJackson’s initial Indian hating, and so he beginshis narrative with what are really a set ofgeneric stories in which Jackson is, like theIndians he hates, less an historical Õgure than atype. Herman Melville captured and dissectedthe Indian hater in The ConÕdence Man. Indianhaters thirsted for revenge for Indian atrocities;they existed only to kill Indians; they becamewhite Indians more skilled in woodlore andviolence than their adversaries. They wererelentless and merciless.

Remini makes Jackson’s hatred of Indiansseem nearly inevitable, the shared mark of allbackcountry settlers. There was, however,nothing inevitable about Indian hating in theSouth Carolina backcountry of Jackson’syouth. James Merrell’s The Indians’ New World


How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees

G r e e n B a g • Summer 2002 445

gives a far more nuanced account of the worldin which Jackson came of age. The Catawbaswere an Indian people who lived near theJacksons. They were allies of whites, Õrst theBritish and then Americans, against otherIndians. There was plenty of violence, conÔict,and hatred between Indians and whites in theSouth Carolina backcountry but also enoughcooperation to indicate possibilities of agrudging accommodation. This was not a

world in which Indian hating was the solepossible outcome of contact between the races.

In Remini’s narrative the early mythicJackson gradually yields to the historic Jackson,a young man on the make in Tennessee whodid hate and distrust Indians. In a 1792 letter toJohn McKee, a commissioner sent to makepeace with the Chickamauga branch of theCherokees, Jackson condemned peace talks as“Delusions.” Experience “teaches us that Trea-

ties answer No other Purposethan opening an Easy door forthe Indian to pass through toButcher our Citizens.” Citi-zens were innocent victims ofbarbarous murderers, and theCreeks and Cherokees hadfailed to abide by existing trea-ties and surrender the “butch-ers who kill our people.” “Ifthey [the murderers] are notgiven up it is an infringementof the Treaty and a cause of warand the whole Nation ought tobe Scurged for the infringe-ment of the Treaty for as theNation will not give murderersup when demanded it is a[n]acknowledgement of theirConsent to the Commission ofthe Crime therefore all areEqually guilty.” Jackson wasnot blind. He recognized thatinvasion of Indian lands andthe murder of Indians bywhites precipitated the chronicviolence along the borders, butthis would over time becomeyet another argument to dis-possess Indians. Since whitesdesired their land – and itnever occurred to that theydidn’t deserve it – then the onlylasting solution was theremoval of Indians.

Osceola was the most effective opponent of Jackson’s Indian removal program,leading the Seminoles during the first years of the Second Seminole War until,as Remini reports, he was “tricked into attending a meeting under a flag oftruce to negotiate the release of three captured chiefs. The great chief wasseized and interned at Fort Marion in St. Augustine. After a few months hedied on January 31, 1838.”


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What Jackson believed as a young man didnot always accurately reÔect or have muchinÔuence on actual American Indian policy,but as he rose in the world, what he believedbecame more important. It still might notalways conform to oÓcial policy, but, as Rem-ini notes: “On more than one occasion … hewould simply ignore government ordersregarding the Indians and act according to hisown perception of what was the proper courseof action.”

To act on his own authority, however,Jackson had to be in a position of authority,and he quickly discovered that by tempera-ment he was happier as a soldier than as apolitician. When elected to the U.S. Senate,he was out of his depth, and he resigned tobecome a judge. His real ambition was to beelected major general of the Tennesseemilitia. He achieved this in 1802 at the age of35 and held the rank until he became a majorgeneral in the United States Army.

As a military oÓcer Jackson would oftendisobey orders, but he would not brookinsubordination in his inferiors. What Reminigives as examples of Jackson’s fairness towardIndians – his insistence that militia oÓcers notact on their own and that whites respect theboundaries of Indian cessions – seems more hisinsistence on being obeyed than any sense ofobligation to Indians. White settlers, after all,continued quite routinely to invade Indianlands and Jackson, although he might evictAmerican squatters, always insisted that theirinvasion was proof of the need for yet anothercession.

Where Jackson’s beliefs and actualAmerican policy converged was on the issue ofnational security. Jackson did not invent thepolicy of Indian removal. Voluntary removalhad been a goal of American policy sinceJeÖerson, but Jackson gave the policy a militarycast. Remini stresses Jackson’s conviction thatIndians were a threat to American security incase of foreign invasion. In the Southeast, the

United States feared both the Spanish, whoretained Florida, and the British, who while nolonger perched on the American bordermaintained ties with various Indian peoplesthat persisted from the days when WestFlorida was a British colony. The threat of aEuropean-Indian alliance against the southernUnited States was both real and potent. It wasthe national security argument that madeJackson an early convert to JeÖerson’s idea ofremoving the Indians west of the Mississippi.

Remini’s emphasis on national security asthe heart of Jackson’s conviction that removalwas necessary is both convincing and original,and it strengthens the parallels between Indianremoval and modern ethnic cleansing. Theappeal to the right of the nation state tohomogenize its population in the name ofnational security has been, according toNorman Naimark’s Fires of Hatred, thejustiÕcation used by virtually all those whosupport ethnic cleansing. In appealing tonational security and the necessity of a loyaland homogeneous population to justify remov-ing Indians, Jackson thus anticipated thejustiÕcation for modern ethnic cleansings.

Jackson cultivated the image of the furiousIndian hater, outraged at Indian depredationsand utterly devoted to the security of thefrontier. He would Õght Indians in a cold-blooded fury, and the fury was usually triggeredby a murder. In 1812, some Creeks led by LittleWarrior killed two of Martha Crawley’schildren and took her captive. “My heart bleedswithin me,” Jackson thundered, “on the recept[sic] of the news of the horrid cruelty andmurders committed by a party of Creeks, onour innocent, wifes and little babes. … Theymust be punished – and our frontier protected.”

Jackson’s rage was sincere, but Reminislights the ways that it was also strategic. LittleWarrior’s murders did not lead to war becausethe Creek chief Big Warrior attacked LittleWarrior’s band, killing eight of them, andnegotiations led to the release of Mrs. Crawley.




In Sacred Revolt Joel Martin has put Jackson’srhetoric of revenge within the context of land-hungry Tennessee planters and speculatorswho welcomed border hostilities that, in thewords of the Nashville Clarion, “have supplied uswith a pretext for dismemberment of theircountry.” These planters were considerablymore bloodthirsty than many of the actualborder settlers who hoped for negotiations inthe wake of the Crawley murders.

In 1812 the Creeks were on the verge of civilwar. On one side were the Red Sticks, the pro-phetic faction of the Creeks, angry over,among other things, the continual loss of landto Americans. On the other side were theirwealthier countrymen, many of whom were ofmixed Indian/white descent, and their alliessuch as Big Warrior. Those Americans whodesired Indian lands feared that the brewingcivil war would remain strictly a Creek aÖair,and that the Red Sticks would not attackAmericans, thus denying the United States apretext for war. The Red Sticks were quitestrategic in their threats. They were more thanwilling to attack Americans but only undercertain conditions: if they invaded Indiancountry, or if the Red Sticks received Britishaid, or if Tecumseh, the great Shawnee leaderof a pan-Indian alliance, succeeded in his waragainst the Americans in the north. Failingthese conditions, they were not about tolaunch a suicidal war against the UnitedStates.

War between the Americans and theCreeks began at Burnt Corn when the Missis-sippi militia joined the Creek métis to attack aRed Stick caravan bringing in Spanish arms.Spanish arms going to Red Sticks certainlybuttressed Jackson’s fears about Americansecurity, and when the Creek War blendedinto the War of 1812, such fears became evenmore credible. Unfortunately for the Creeks,British aid did not materialize until they hadsuÖered catastrophic losses at the hands ofJackson. Jackson, in alliance with the Creek

métis, the northern Creek chiefs, and theCherokees, ravaged the Red Stick towns. “Weshot them like dogs,” Davy Crockett boastedof the destruction of Tallushatchee, and it wasdogs that ate the mangled and burnt bodies ofthe dead Creeks. One hundred and eighty-sixCreeks and Õve Americans died. Jacksonadopted a baby boy found in the arms of thechild’s dead mother.

Most of the war was equally lopsided. Thetaking of the Red Stick stronghold of Horse-shoe Bend resulted in more than 800 RedStick deaths. The Americans counted theirvictims within the fort by cutting oÖ theirnoses. They could only estimate those whodied seeking to escape across the river thatsurrounded the fort on three sides. Eventowns that surrendered to Jackson were notspared. The Hillabees came to terms withJackson, but Jackson did not protest when helearned that his subordinates had sacked andburned their towns and killed more than 60warriors. In all, about 15% of the Creek Nationdied in the struggle. Jackson defeated the mainbody of the Red Sticks just as a British armyappeared along the Gulf Coast. Jacksonwould, of course, defeat this army of Welling-ton’s veterans at New Orleans and become anational hero.

Jackson, whom the Creeks named SharpKnife, won the war and then helped negotiatethe peace. In negotiations he proved as relent-less an opponent of his Indian allies as of hisIndian enemies. He demanded land cessionsfrom his Creek and Cherokee allies as well asfrom his Creek enemies.

There were certain obstacles in interna-tional and national law to the speciÕcs ofJackson’s treaties, but he cavalierly brushedthem aside. The treaty with the Creeks atFort Jackson, for example, which ceded landsclaimed by the Cherokees, Choctaws, andChickasaws, presented problems for a nationpledged by law to “utmost good faith” innegotiations with Indians. When the United


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States restored to the Cherokees part of theCreek cession and compensated them forproperty seized by Jackson’s troops duringthe war, Jackson exploded. The Tennesseemilitia, he declared, would not enforce thenew treaty. It was the work of “designing half-breeds and renegade white men.” The “realIndians” did not care about this land. TheUnited States backed down and delegatedJackson to negotiate a new treaty invalidat-ing the agreement with the Cherokees. Thegeneral employed what would be hisstandard tools of treaty making: bribery andthreats of overwhelming violence by theUnited States. When the Treaty of Ghent,ending the War of 1812, mandated thatboundaries with the Indians go back tostatus quo ante, Jackson ignored it, enforcedhis own treaty, and neither the United Statesnor Great Britain did anything to stop him.

By 1816 Jackson had contempt for the wholetreaty making process. Indians, he said, weresubjects of the United States and the UnitedStates could dictate to them and take theirland with compensation decided by theUnited States at its pleasure. Such dictationwas, he argued, also best for the Indians.Unless restricted, supervised, and forced tobecome “civilized,” they would become extinct.Their civilization and survival, he had alreadyconcluded, demanded their removal across theMississippi, where portions of the Choctawsand Cherokees had already settled.

The treaties Jackson and other representa-tives of the United States negotiated in 1816extended American settlements towardMobile and Florida and the new president,James Monroe, rejoiced that soon “Florida,will hardly be considered by Spain, as a part ofher dominions.” Jackson, according to Remini,understood this quite literally – Florida was tobecome part of the United States – and heacted accordingly.

Florida became the symbol to Jackson andhis supporters of the dangers that the combi-

nation of Indians and foreign powers posed tothe United States. The defeated Red Stickshad Ôed to Florida, which was already home tothe Seminoles. The Seminoles were Creekswho had been migrating into the region foryears and were becoming a distinct people.Florida was a haven for runaway slaves as well,some of whom became Seminoles living intributary villages. All of these groups weresupplied by British traders and had the sym-pathetic attention of some British oÓcialswho resented the American Ôouting of theTreaty of Ghent.

The destruction of the so-called NegroFort in 1816 by General Gaines was the open-ing volley in a rapidly escalating series ofconÔicts: Õrst the attack on the runaway slaves,then war with the refugee Red Sticks, and,Õnally, the First Seminole War. In 1818 Jacksoninvaded Florida, largely on his own authority.Jackson, who thought the root of the problemwas Spanish possession of Florida, initiallypretended that the United States and Spainwere allies against the Seminoles, but as thewar went on he dropped this charade. Heseized Pensacola and the Spanish Fort Carlosde Barrancas. He did all of this without thebeneÕt of a declaration of war and amidstlegitimate confusion, according to Remini,over what exactly the president had autho-rized him to do. His actions became more andmore arbitrary. Without consulting Monroe,he hanged British citizens for inciting Indiansto war against the United States. Congres-sional leaders began to fear that the UnitedStates had produced a man on horseback, itsown Napoleon, who was a graver danger tothe republic than the enemies whom hedefeated. And like Napoleon, Jackson wasimmensely popular.

In the face of Jackson’s popularity, Congressrefused, albeit narrowly, to censure him for hisactions. Spain, seeing the writing on the wall,ceded Florida to the United States in 1821. Asfor Jackson, he negotiated new treaties with




the Choctaws and Chickasaws with morelarge cessions of land. His threats becamemore blunt. If the Chickasaws refused to makea cession, he told them, the Americans wouldtake the land anyway. These treaties allowedJackson to make considerable money throughland speculation, but his speculative proÕtswere secondary to his desire for security andhis continuing push for removal.

A quest for secure borders may very wellexplain Jackson’s actions up until 1821, whenSpain ceded Florida to the United States, butit doesn’t seem to explain the geography ofactual Indian removal in the 1830s and 1840s.With foreign powers eliminated from Ameri-can borders in the Southeast, it is hard to seehow security concerns could have motivatedthe Õnal push to remove the so-called “FiveCivilized Tribes” during the 1830s and 1840s.It was with Canada in the north that theUnited States still shared a border with terri-tory controlled by a European power – GreatBritain, which was then the greatest imperialpower in the world. And yet it was the tribesclosest to that border, among them most of theIroquois and the Ojibwa, who would be mostsuccessful in resisting removal.

To explain this geography – to understandwhy some tribes removed and others did not– demands a knowledge not just of Ameri-can policy but of Indians. But like Jackson,Remini has little interest in Indians per se.He sometimes displays a glaring ignoranceabout them. Remini writes of the Seminolesspeaking the Creek tongue, Muskogean.Many, perhaps most, Creeks, however, werenot native Muskogee speakers; the Creekswere a multilingual confederacy whoselanguages included Hitchiti and Yuchi. Andalthough Indian/white negotiations are

central to Remini’s argument, he is naivelyastonished at the kinship language of fathersand children that was basic to European andAmerican negotiations with Indian peoples.He doesn’t bother to explore why suchlanguage was used even though there is now aconsiderable literature on this diplomaticlanguage, including an incisive article byPatricia Galloway that explains why thematrilineal tribes of the Southeast were morethan willing to treat the whites as “fathers.”1

In their matrilineal families uncles hadauthority; fathers were expected to be gener-ous, but they lacked the ability to command.

In an odd way, Remini mimics part ofJackson’s own world view even as he criticizesits moral poverty. In Jackson’s view only a smallelite of mixed descent who manipulated themajority of their tribespeople desired to livelike white people. “Real” Indians were huntersand would willingly remove to the West.Remini largely concurs: “most Indians at thattime had no burning desire to become culturalwhite men.” Framing the question as a choicebetween, for example, living as Choctaws andbecoming “cultural white men” is, however,misleading. These nations were changing andchanging rapidly: they were becoming Chris-tian, men were turning to farming and stock-raising, matrilineal descent was giving way topatrilineal descent, and tribal governmentswere becoming centralized. As WilliamMcGloughlin has noted, the Cherokees werein the midst of their own process of evolvingfrom an ethnic nation – deÕned by shared lan-guage and similar culture – to a nation state.2

Christian revivals swept the Choctaw nation.Missionaries established schools. Indiansmade all these changes and more not to become“cultural white men” but to remain in their

1 Patricia Galloway, “‘The Chief Who Is Your Father’: Choctaw and French Views of the DiplomaticRelation,” in Peter Wood et al., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 254-78.

2 William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1986).


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homelands. Such sweeping changes divided the Indian

nations of the Southeast, and these divisionswere critical to the complex tribal politics ofIndian removal. Successful resistance toremoval and land cessions bolstered the pres-tige of Christian, educated leaders of mixeddescent – reformers such as David Folsom andPeter Pitchlynn among the Choctaws. It alsogave them the authority to push far reachingpolitical, cultural, and economic changes.Remini gives no indication of how the failureof the Americans to wring all the land theywanted from the Choctaws at the Treaty ofDoak’s Stand buttressed the standing ofemerging Choctaw leaders of mixed descent.These “sons of white men” gained followerswithin the nation by reassuring other Choc-taws of their patriotism. On the other hand,Choctaws who opposed the erosion of olderpractices that the reformers demanded weresometimes willing to make cessions inexchange for treaty provisions that weakenedthe reformers and the reformers’ missionaryallies. The old chiefs, men such as Mushu-latubbee, smarting from their loss of powerand their revulsion at the new policies, becamemore willing to cooperate with removal.

Remini is also sloppy in his account of thelegal relations of these Indian nations to theUnited States. American recognition ofIndian sovereignty is one of the elementsmarking a diÖerence between AmericanIndian policy and ethnic removal. Reminielides that diÖerence. Cherokee eÖorts tooppose removal led them into the SupremeCourt and resulted in the famous Cherokeedecisions written by John Marshall, which res-onate down to this day. Remini, however,equates Marshall’s decision that the Indianswere semi-sovereign, domestic, dependentnations with Jackson’s views, which were verynearly the opposite. In 1818, while negotiatingwith the Chickasaws, Jackson had reactedangrily to Chief James Colbert’s insistence

that the Chickasaws would sell their lands forthe same price that the United States got fortheirs. “These are high toned sentiment for anIndian,” Jackson wrote, “and they must betaught to know that they do not Possess sover-eignity, with the right of domain.” Remini’sclaim that the Supreme Court conÕrmedJackson’s view is wrong. When the Courtruled that Indian nations were semi-sovereign,it decided that although they could not haveindependent relations with foreign nations,they could have treaty relations with theUnited States. They controlled their owntribal domains. What semi-sovereignty lookslike in practice has been a legal question forthe last 170 years. It is certainly, however,something far diÖerent from Jackson’s view ofIndians as subjects. American recognition of alimited Indian sovereignty remains one of thediÖerences between, let’s say, the United Statesrelation with Indian peoples and the relationsSerbia desired with the Kosovars.

This simpliÕcation of the legal relation ofIndian peoples to the United States and of theinternal political and social workings of theirsocieties are examples of the lopsidedness ofthis book. When writing about Jackson andAmerican society, Remini is alert to complexityand change. He would never write of theJacksonian era without noting the marketrevolution, the rise of democracy, and Chris-tian evangelism, but he ignores these things ortheir equivalents when he writes about Indians.He instead makes the choice a simple one:cultural preservation and independence in theWest or extinction in the East. HavingsimpliÕed Indians, he can simplify theirchoices.

In Remini’s narrative, Jackson shed hisIndian hating as he aged. Remini isn’t all thatclear why this happens, but by the time Jacksonassumed the presidency he was supposedly aman with the best interests of Indians, as wellas whites, at heart. He was forced to actbecause of his countrymen who maintained




their old Indian hating ways: “the worst inwhite culture seemed to be destroying whatwas left of Indian life and civilization.” He hadto save the tribes from extinction.

There was, however, no national consensusthat Indians and whites could not live in prox-imity to each other – albeit unequally – astribes like the Catawbas and their SouthCarolina neighbors had been doing for years.Nor, as Remini himself realizes, was thereanything inevitable about Indian removal as apolicy. Remini asserts that if Jackson had notbeen elected president, then the Southeasternnations would not have been removed. As itwas, the policy sparked bitter opposition inCongress, among Protestant evangelicals, andamong large sections of the public.

Removal may not have been inevitable, butit was, Remini insists, necessary. If removal hadnot taken place, he asserts, the so-called “FiveCivilized Tribes” would have vanished.Claiming to know what would have happenedif an action had not taken place usually giveshistorians pause. And one would expect thathaving made the claim, Remini would oÖer asystematic defense of his position. He doesnothing of the sort. His evidence of whatwould have happened in the absence of removalis largely contained in his litany of tribesdestroyed by the advance of whites: “theYamasees and Delawares,” “the Yamasees,Mohegans, Pequots, Delawares and Naragan-setts.” These are his examples of extinction.

Having oÖered them as evidence of what theultimate fate of the Cherokees and the restwould have been without removal, it wouldhave been prudent to make sure that these peo-ples had actually disappeared. The Yamasees,victims of colonial wars and disease, certainlydid – their remnants were assimilated intoother peoples. The Mohegans, Pequots, Dela-wares and Naragansetts, on the other hand,remained stubbornly present. They existed ascoherent, if much diminished and besieged,communities during Jackson’s lifetime. All

exist today as organized entities, as NewEngland gamblers can attest. The last two cen-turies have not been pleasant for these peoples,but they have not disappeared.

It would have been equally prudent forRemini to discuss the obvious counterexam-ples to his thesis: those tribes who resistedremoval in the 1830s and 1840s and remained intheir homelands. Remini gives them only acouple of sentences. They deserve moreattention. To the north along the border withCanada from Maine to Wisconsin, Indianpeoples resisted removal and they continue toexist as organized groups today. In the South-east, groups of Cherokees, Choctaws, andSeminoles – among others – managed toescape removal and maintain their identity as apeople with language and cultural knowledgeintact. The Mississippi Choctaws and theNorth Carolina Cherokees and the FloridaSeminoles are all federally recognized tribestoday.

Finally, Remini’s claim that removal contrib-uted to the Indians’ survival is asserted butnever explored. The tribes that removed toIndian Territory did not Õnd Americanprotection. They were swept up in the CivilWar, subjected to further land cessions afterthe war, and then forced to allot their lands,dismantle most of their governments, andsubmit to the state of Oklahoma beginning inthe late nineteenth-century. How these catas-trophes contributed to their survival is notrevealed.

American beneÕcence in Remini’s accountis the beneÕcence of the United States in pro-tecting Indians from the American people. TheAmerican left hand was, in eÖect, trying to pro-tect Indians from the right hand. “Westerners,”Remini writes, “knew only one thing: Indianswere a threat to their lives, and that dangermust be eliminated – permanently.” Up to apoint his is a legitimate argument. Americancitizens did repeatedly disregard Americanlaws and murder and dispossess Indians, but


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Remini carries the argument too far. The American government was not only

complicit in what happened to SoutheasternIndians, but it was the primary agent of thehorrors of removal. Indians could not counterthe organized force of the states and the federalgovernment. What secured Indian land ces-sions to the United States was not the violenceof frontiersman versus warrior. Indians couldoften muster a counter force suÓcient to cowintruders. Indian retaliation is, after all, whatoften outraged Jackson. And when Indiansretaliated, American settlers usually howledfor troops to protect them. These troops werethe organized violence of the state and by the1820s Southeastern Indians could no longercounter that violence. Removal was nothingless than a modern state enforcing its will, oftenover heated internal opposition, against weakerpeoples.

In arguing that removal was beneÕcent notonly in intent but also in outcome, Reminileans heavily on the scholarship of FrancisPaul Prucha. Prucha, in a magisterial seriesof studies of American Indian policy, hasargued convincingly that American policyhas historically been in the hands not ofIndian haters but of people who denotedthemselves the “Friends of the Indian.” Theirintentions were benevolent even if theirmeans were often autocratic and arbitrary.

Prucha, however, has not contended that theoutcome of this policy was good for theIndians. Instead, his books drive home achilling conclusion that should inform alleÖorts to help Indian peoples without theirconsent: many of the horrors inÔicted onIndian peoples have come from their“friends” and not their enemies.3

“To his dying day … ,” Remini concludes,“Andrew Jackson genuinely believed that whathe had accomplished rescued these peoplefrom inevitable annihilation. And althoughthat statement sounds monstrous, andalthough no one in the modern world wishesto accept or believe it, that is exactly what hedid. He saved the Five Civilized Nations fromprobable extinction.”

Remini is wrong on nearly all counts. He iswrong because there is no evidence that it wasremoval that insured the survival of the “FiveCivilized Tribes.” It is an assertion that hedoesn’t even bother to support in any system-atic way. He is wrong that no one wishes tobelieve this. There are, unfortunately, plenty ofpeople in the modern world who would bemore than happy to believe that removalinsured the ultimate survival of the Indians ofthe Southeast. And it is a comforting lesson forthose contemplating similar policies elsewhere.His statement not only sounds monstrous, it ismonstrous. B

3 Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).


Documents

How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees › v5n4 › v5n4_reviews_white.pdf · 2013-10-31 · How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees Green Bag •Summer 2002 445 gives a far more nuanced