by Jon Meacham
As he closed, Ely rhetorically asked, “Need I apologize for this long letter? My heart’s desire and prayer to God for you is that you may have the happiest presidency, and heaven at last.”
AN APOLOGY WOULD not even have begun to appease Jackson. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, Ely was both sanctimonious and salacious, questioning the honor of one of Jackson’s dearest friends, assailing his friend’s wife in detail, and tying Rachel to the current scandal.
Jackson’s reply—immediate, passionate, precise, disputing every specific—began drily enough, with Jackson writing that “I sincerely regret you did not personally name this subject to me before you left Washington.” Jackson scribbled with rising rage, disposing, he believed, of each “slander.” His fiercest language was reserved for Ely as a clergyman and for the anonymous cleric—Campbell, Jackson’s own pastor—who had told the story of the allegedly illicit pregnancy. With a preacherlike vehemence of his own, Jackson thundered:
With regard to the tale of the clergyman, it seems to me to be so inconsistent with the charities of the Christian religion, and so opposed to the character of an ambassador of Christ, that it gives me pain to read it. Now, my dear friend, why did not this clergyman come himself and tell me this tale, instead of asking you to do it? His not having done so convinces me that he did not believe it, but was willing, through other sources, to spread the vile slander.
In a climactic passage, Jackson again referred to Ely as a friend—in politics, often a term that should put one on guard, for a warm salutation can be followed by a knife thrust:
Whilst on the one hand we should shun base women as a pestilence of the worst and most dangerous kind to society, we ought, on the other, to guard virtuous female character with vestal vigilance.… When it shall be assailed by envy and malice, the good and the pious will maintain its purity and innocence, until guilt is made manifest—not by rumors and suspicions, but by facts and proofs brought forth and sustained by respectable witnesses in the face of day.… The Psalmist says, “The liar’s tongue we ever hate, and banish from our sight.”
Your friend,
Andrew Jackson
That Jackson summoned up this particular Bible verse is telling, for the words he quoted to Ely come from the 101st Psalm, which Isaac Watts translated as “The Magistrate’s Psalm.” At the end of his first month as president of the United States, one question for Jackson was whether his obsession with defending his old friend—and his old friend’s new wife—was in fact wise. He remembered part of the psalm; could he remember, and heed, the King James Version of it, which included a prayer for the magistrate to “behave … wisely in a perfect way”?
CHAPTER 7
MY WHITE AND RED CHILDREN
MONDAY, MARCH 23, 1829, was a long day at the White House. It was the day Jackson wrote his reply to Ely’s sexual allegations, and the president’s correspondence was filled with political matters, from the reinstatement of a navy captain to the complaints of a former customs collector at Pensacola to nominees for appointments in England, in Pennsylvania, and in the District of Columbia.
But the most important paper Jackson took up on this cold Monday concerned the federal government’s policy toward the Indian tribes in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. As Jeremiah Evarts already suspected, Jackson’s treatment of the Indian issue was to be a landmark chapter in a grim two-century-old story. Jackson wanted to do for the South what previous generations had done for the North: push the Indians farther west.
The clash of interests was profound. The Southern states were anxious for more land, especially to grow cotton, and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes held rich acreage—great chunks of what would become modern-day Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. In late 1827 and 1828, officials in Georgia and Alabama moved to assert state authority over the Indian lands within their borders. The affected tribes appealed to Washington for help on the grounds that earlier treaties had guaranteed the Indians these remnants of their ancestral holdings.
In his first weeks in office, with John Eaton’s help, Jackson was direct with the Indians: either submit to state law or leave. Despite treaties signed and assurances given, he did not believe the Indians had title to the land, and he would not tolerate competing sovereignties within the nation. The Creek case that reached Jackson on the day he was busy with so much else was, in his view, a perfect example of why the Indians had to move as far from the whites as feasible. A white man had been murdered by Creeks, and the state wanted the Indians to hand over the killers. John Eaton was privately pleased about the case. The murder, Eaton said, “altho’ much to be lamented, may be turned to advantageous account, by pressing it as an inducement for the entire Creek Nation now to remove west of the Mississippi.”
Writing the Creeks, Jackson explained why he thought removal was essential. “Friends and Brothers, listen: Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace.… Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it,” Jackson wrote. “There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours forever.” The message was unmistakable: to survive, the Indians had to surrender, and go.
Jackson was hardly the first powerful white man to threaten the Indians. The beginnings of the Native Americans’ fate at the hands of whites can be traced at least to 1622, when Indians attacked settlers in Virginia who were taking tribal territory, killing a quarter to a third of the whites, and the white survivors retaliated in kind. The ideology behind the whites’ views of the Indians was driven by religious fervor and land fever.
In the first year of the administration of Andrew Jackson, the governor of Georgia, George C. Gilmer, said that “treaties were expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people were induced without bloodshed to yield up what civilized peoples had a right to possess by virtue of that command of the Creator delivered to man upon his formation—be fruitful, multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”
Indians were viewed as savages—sometimes noble, sometimes dangerous, sometimes the children of the whites, sometimes the implacable enemy. The Indians’ only hope, many Americans thought, was to take on the ways and means of white civilization. Who was to decide when that civilizing process had produced the desired result? Whites. Time and again experience would prove that Indian lives and fortunes were secondary to white appetites and white safety. If white settlers wanted their land, the Indians were to give way. How else to explain why the Cherokees, who took on every “civilizing” custom the white man asked of them—writing a constitution, developing an alphabet, publishing a newspaper, farming, and living in peace—were key targets, save for the rich land on which they lived?
Promises, treaties, and assurances of fatherly solicitude and care were, in the end, worth nothing. For public consumption and to assuage private consciences, advocates of removal used the language of religion or of paternalism. Jackson spoke of himself as the Indians’ “Great Father” all the time—and he almost certainly believed what he was saying. He thought he knew best, and he had convinced himself long before that he was acting on the best interests of both the Indians and white settlers. But the raw fact remains that the American government—and, by extension, the American people of the time—wanted the land. So they took it.
SKIN COLOR HAS always shaped and suffused America. “Next to the case of the black race within our bosom, that of the red on our borders is the problem most baffling to the policy of our country,” said James Madison. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson thought the Cherokees and other tribes (many of which were allied with the British) should be sent west. “This then is the season for driving them off,” Jefferson wrote. George
Washington’s friend Henry Knox, the first president’s secretary of war, attempted to formulate a humane policy. “It is presumable that a nation solicitous of establishing its character on the broad basis of justice would not only hesitate at, but reject, every proposition to benefit itself by the injury of any neighboring community, however contemptible and weak it might be,” Knox wrote in 1789.
Those intentions were good, but they were defeated by realities on the ground, especially in the South and West, where Indians were seen not only as threats in their own right but as allies of hostile powers, from Spain to Britain. Power was paramount; successive presidents found it impossible to balance moral concerns with the practicalities of the white American appetite for Indian land. (As president, Washington once went to meet with senators about Indian issues and found the experience so frustrating that he said “he would be damned if he ever went there again.”) Washington’s successors pursued, in varying degrees, initiatives to teach the tribes white ways (through farming, trade, and conversion to Christianity) while seeking to obtain as much Indian land as possible. There were perennial professions of love and concern. But there was also no doubt who was in control. “We presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible, that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them,” wrote President Jefferson in 1803.
The politics of the issue as Jackson came to power in the White House reflected the ambivalence many white Americans felt about the Indians. The whites wanted the land but knew, or strongly suspected, that it was wrong to drive the Indians out. Nevertheless, by the 1820s, confronted by white settlers’ demands for land in the South and West, Presidents Monroe and Adams had drafted removal plans. They were no defenders of Indians, but neither did they see the tribes as the mortal threats to the security and inviolability of the United States that Jackson did.
Under the Jackson administration the question became more urgent, and more partisan. The states asserted their authority (Georgia, for example, said it was taking over the Cherokee land by Tuesday, June 1, 1830), setting the stage for some kind of reckoning. Meanwhile, Jackson’s political opponents suddenly, in 1829 and 1830, found themselves supportive of Indian claims that had seemed less compelling before Jackson moved into the White House.
An author of a removal rationale, Adams changed his mind when Jackson became the force behind one. Noting a conversation with Edward Everett of Massachusetts, in March 1830, Adams wrote that Everett “spoke also of the debate which will soon take place on the Indian question, and of the unconstitutional Acts of the Legislatures of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, assuming jurisdiction over the Indians within their limits. Upon which I said there was nothing left for the minority [in Congress] to do but to record the exposure of perfidy and tyranny of which the Indians are to be made the victims, and to leave the punishment of it to Heaven.”
Henry Clay was now against removal, saying that Jackson’s plan would “bring a foul and lasting stain upon the good faith, humanity and character of the Nation.” Only five years before, however, Clay had expressed very different sentiments to John Quincy Adams, who recalled that Clay had told him “that it was impossible to civilize Indians; that there never was a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization. It was not in their nature.… They were not an improvable breed, and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world.”
Jackson had no interest in debating the question. He wanted the Indians removed and believed it the right thing to do. In his mind, the time for musing and pondering was over. Removal would take an act of Congress, and Jackson planned to introduce one when the lawmakers reconvened in Washington in December 1829. Until then the pro-removal forces would not let Jeremiah Evarts go unanswered in the fight for public opinion. Thomas L. McKenney, the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, turned to New York City, to Episcopalians and members of the Dutch Reformed Church, to create the “Board for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America.” Note the first step: emigration.
FOR JACKSON, THE Indian question began as one of security. To him the tribes represented the threat of violence, either by their own hands or in alliance with America’s foes. When Indians killed white settlers, Jackson tended to see England (or Spain) as the guiding force, believing Indian skirmishes and clashes meant the Indians had been “excited to war by the secret agents of Great Britain.” As a military man he added Indian lands to the country through conquest and concession from 1812 forward, and he believed the work critical to making America safe. In January 1817, Jackson told James Monroe, then the secretary of state, that the addition of lands within a Creek cession that had been claimed by the Cherokees and the Chickasaws was a cause for celebration. “The sooner these lands are brought to market, [the sooner] a permanent security will be given to what I deem the most important, as well as the most vulnerable, part of the union,” Jackson said. “This country once settled, our fortifications of defense in the lower country completed, all Europe will cease to look at it with an eye to conquest.” Ten years later, in 1826, when he was pondering a complete removal in the South, he wrote: “The policy of concentrating our Southern tribes to a point west of the Mississippi, and thereby strengthening our Southern border with the white population which will occupy their lands, is one of much importance.” He told John Coffee that “a dense white population would add much” to the security of the South “in a state of war, and it ought to be obtained on anything like reasonable terms.”
He could be both unspeakably violent toward Indians and decidedly generous. After a white woman was kidnapped by Creeks, he said he would give no quarter. “With such arms and supplies as I can obtain I shall penetrate the Creek towns until the captive with her captors are delivered up, and think myself [justified] in laying waste their villages, burning their houses, killing their warriors and leading into captivity their wives and children until I obtain a surrender of the captive and captors.” Yet if anyone harmed his occasional Indian allies (he often found elements of a tribe to join him in his Indian campaigns), he reacted with equal fury. In 1818, during the First Seminole War, Jackson denounced a “base, cowardly attack” by Georgia militiamen on a village of Jackson’s allies, the Chehaw, “whilst the warriors of that village were with me, fighting the battles of our country.” He was outraged, he said, that “there could exist within the United States a cowardly monster in human shape that could violate the sanctity of a flag when borne by any person, but more particularly when in the hands of a superannuated Indian chief worn down with age. Such base cowardice and murderous conduct as this transaction affords has not its parallel in history and should meet its merited punishment.”
The common theme: As a people Indians were neither autonomous nor independent but were to be manipulated and managed in the context of what most benefited Jackson’s America—white America. Missionaries and humanitarian reformers struggled to make the case for the innate rights of the Indians, but the white agenda—more land, fewer Indians, complete control—took precedence in the North and the South (and in the West, too, in the long run).
What are we to make of Jackson on this question, one on which he embodied the attitudes of many of his contemporaries? His was an exaggerated example of the prevailing white view, favoring removal at nearly any cost where his predecessors had spoken in softer terms of “voluntary” emigration. While he took an extreme view of Indian matters, however, he was on the extreme edge of the mainstream, not wholly outside it.
Jackson was neither a humanitarian nor a blind bigot. He thought of himself as practical. And enough Americans believed that Indian removal was necessary in the late 1820s and 1830s that Jackson was able to accomplish it politically. The moral case was not hard to make, and men like Evarts and New Jersey senator Theodore Frelinghuysen did so beautifully. In the April 1830 debates over the Indian removal bill, Frelinghuysen would say: “However mere human policy, or the law of power, or the tyrant’s plea of expediency, may have fou
nd it convenient at any or in all times to recede from the unchangeable principles of eternal justice, no argument can shake the political maxim—that where the Indian always has been, he enjoys an absolute right still to be, in the free exercise of his own modes of thought, government, and conduct.” And: “We have crowded the tribes upon a few miserable acres on our Southern frontier—it is all that is left to them of their once boundless forests, and still, like the horseleech, our insatiated cupidity cries, give, give.” And finally: “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No.”
But the answer was, tragically, yes. Indian removal was possible because enough white Americans had a stake in it, or sympathized with it, and thus the institutions of the country allowed it to go forward. Frelinghuysen and Evarts were not outliers; there was a significant anti-removal campaign across the country. And the few groups of Indians—the Iroquois in New York and Cherokees in North Carolina—who managed to carve out small spheres east of the Mississippi after removal showed that coexistence was possible. But to many, the idea that the tribes might be left alone on enclaves within states did not appear politically feasible once Georgia moved against the Cherokees. There is nothing redemptive about Jackson’s Indian policy, no moment, as with Lincoln and slavery, where the moderate on a morally urgent question did the right and brave thing. Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.
