by Jon Meacham
106 the postmaster of Albany, New York Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, 110–11.
107 “General Jackson, I have come here” Ibid.
108 “the next day Messrs. Van Buren” Ibid.
109 “I take the consequences” Ibid.
110 “The proscriptions from office continue” Memoirs of JQA, VIII, 144.
111 “During the reign of Bonaparte” PHC, VIII, 45.
112 “Is there any difference” Ibid.
113 voting down several nominees Parton, Life, III, 277.
114 “Let Congress go home” Ibid., 277–78.
115 “the vital center of action” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (New York, 2002), 120.
Chapter 6: A Busybody Presbyterian Clergyman
1 “I was elected by the free voice of the people” Correspondence, IV, 21.
2 “I was making a Cabinet for myself” Ibid.
3 “I did not come here” Ibid.
4 the same day the Calhouns TPA, 75.
5 Ely sat down at his desk in Philadelphia Papers, VII, 101–5.
6 “Christian Party in Politics” Ezra Stiles Ely, The Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect Christian Rulers (Philadelphia, 1828), 8.
7 should join forces to keep “Pagans” Ibid., 11.
8 “Every ruler should be” Ibid., 4.
9 dating back to Jackson’s days when he had business interests Papers, VI, 545.
10 added his own warm exchange Ely, Duty of Christian Freemen, 30–32.
11 “Amongst the greatest blessings” Papers, VI, 358–59.
12 “All true Christians” Ibid., 358.
13 a quotation from the American Sunday School Union Ely, Duty of Christian Freemen, 18.
14 to end the federal delivery of mail on Sundays Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 136–40. See also Foster, Errand of Mercy.
15 “We have always viewed it” Andrew, From Revivals to Removal, 56.
16 one of the more intriguing politicians of the time Mark O. Hatfield, with the Senate Historical Offices, Vice Presidents of the United States, 1789–1993 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 121–31. I am indebted to Hatfield’s work for the description of Johnson’s life and career.
17 “It is not the legitimate province” Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 139. In her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York, 2004), Susan Jacoby points out that there was ultimately a reduction in Sunday mail delivery, but “for non-religious reasons, after the 1844 invention of the telegraph provided a more efficient form of business communication” (ibid., 80).
18 “The advance of the human race” House Report on Sunday Mails, Report of House of Representatives, 21st Congress, 1st session, 262. The report also made this point: “Why have the petitioners confined their prayer to the mails? Why have they not requested that the government be required to suspend all its executive functions on that day? Why do they not require us to enact that our ships shall not sail; that our armies shall not march; that officers of justice shall not seize the suspected or guard the convicted? They seem to forget that government is as necessary on Sunday as on any other day of the week. The spirit of evil does not rest on that day. It is the government, ever active in its functions, which enables us all, even the petitioners, to worship in our churches in peace” (ibid., 261).
19 a “busybody Presbyterian clergyman” Memoirs of JQA, VIII, 184.
20 a faithful supporter of Rachel Jackson’s Papers, VII, 101.
21 “recommended the appointment of Major Eaton” Correspondence, IV, 50.
22 the Reverend John N. Campbell TPA, 93–95. There is also an interesting, if adoring, sketch of Campbell in the history of the church he ultimately came to lead in Albany, New York. See J. McClusky Blayney, History of the First Presbyterian Church of Albany, N.Y. (Albany, 1877), 31–36. See also Alfred Nevin, ed., Encyclopedia of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1884), 123. There is some very interesting detail about Campbell to be found in another volume: “He was genial, and often jovial, in his intercourse, and was almost sure to be a commanding spirit in any social circle into which he was thrown. He had mingled much with the world, and, with his uncommon natural shrewdness, was an adept in the knowledge of human nature. He saw both clearly and quickly; and when his mind was once made up on any subject, though he could still consider and appreciate adverse evidence, he was not very likely to yield his first conviction” (Presbyterian Reunion: A Memorial Volume, 1837–1871 [New York, 1870], 167–68).
23 Mrs. Eaton was “a woman of ill fame” Papers, VII, 101.
24 a “sad catalogue” Ibid., 103.
25 He reported a rumor Ibid., 102–3.
26 brought Rachel Jackson into the conversation Ibid., 101.
27 “Need I apologize” Ibid., 104.
28 began drily enough Ibid., 113.
29 disposing, he believed, of each “slander” Ibid., 113–18, is the full text of the letter.
30 from the 101st Psalm Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (Philadelphia, 1828), 165.
Chapter 7: My White and Red Children
1 the president’s correspondence was filled Papers, VII, 695–96.
2 this cold Monday Diary of John Quincy Adams, March 23, 1829, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 91 the federal government’s policy Papers, VII, 112–13.
3 a grim two-century-old story As noted below in the Bibliography, I found the following works essential to understanding both the history of the United States’ treatment of the Indians and of Jackson’s role in it: William L. Anderson, ed., Cherokee Removal: Before and After (Athens, Ga., 1991); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman, Okla., 1972); William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1992); William G. McLoughlin, with Walter H. Conser, Jr., and Virginia Duffy McLoughlin, The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789–1861 (Macon, Ga., 1984); Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty (Norman, Okla., 2004); Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. in 1 (Lincoln, Neb., 1995); Francis Paul Prucha, The Indians in American Society: From the Revolutionary War to the Present (Berkeley, Calif., 1985); Francis Paul Prucha, “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment,” Journal of American History 56 (December 1969), 527–39; Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln, Neb., 1974); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York, 1993); Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2d ed., rev. (Norman, Okla., 1986); Mary E. Young, “Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes and Jacksonian Justice,” American Historical Review 64 (October 1958), 31–45.
The shifting scholarly and biographical view of Jackson and the Indians is intriguing, and says a good deal about the Indians’ ambiguous place in the imaginations of many white Americans. The first major work on Jackson, James Parton’s trilogy, published in the 1860s, accepted removal as a sad but necessary historical development. “The philanthropic feelings of the country were aroused. The letter of many treaties was shown to be against the measure. The peaceful Society of Friends opposed it. A volume of the leading speeches in opposition to the removal was widely circulated. The opinions of great lawyers were adverse to it. It was, indeed, one of those wise and humane measures by which great good is done and great evil prevented, but which cause much immediate misery, and much grievous individual wrong. It was painful to contemplate the sad remnant of tribes that had been the original proprietors of the soil, leaving the narrow res
idue of their heritage, and taking up a long and weary march for strange and distant hunting-grounds. More painful it would have been to see those unfortunate tribes hemmed in on every side by hostile settlers, preyed upon by the white man’s cupidity, the white man’s vices, and the white man’s diseases, until they perished from the face of the earth. Doomed to perish they are. But no one, I presume, has now any doubt that General Jackson’s policy of removal, which he carried out cautiously, but unrelentingly, and not always without stratagem and management, has caused the inevitable process of extinction to go on with less anguish and less demoralization to the whites than if the Indians had been suffered to remain in the States of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. To this part of the policy of General Jackson, praise little qualified can be justly awarded. The ‘irrevocable logic of events’ first decreed and then justified the removal of the Indians. Nor need we, at this late date, revive the sad details of a measure which, hard and cruel as it was then thought, is now universally felt to have been as kind as it was necessary” (Parton, Life, III, 279–80). In The Age of Jackson, published in 1945, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., barely addresses the topic, but other historians were already at work on recovering and reconstructing the story of removal from the perspective of the Indians and as a fundamental part of Jackson’s life and legacy. See, for instance, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Jackson (Boston, 1899), 220–29. A good historiographical survey is Regan A. Lutz, “West of Eden: The Historiography of the Trail of Tears,” Ph.D. diss., University of Toledo, 1995.
4 anxious for more land Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail, 5.
5 to grow cotton Ibid., 6–11.
6 A white man had been murdered Papers, VII, 113.
7 “Friends and Brothers, listen” Ibid., 112.
8 Jackson was hardly the first Norgren wrote: “A backward glance at history shows that Jackson’s Indian policy recommendations did not constitute an abrupt departure from the policy direction taken by his predecessors, James Monroe (1816–1824) and John Quincy Adams (1824–1828). Monroe and the Senate had authorized the use of removal provisions in the 1817 treaty with the Cherokee and subsequent agreements, including the 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand with the Choctaw. Adams adopted ever harsher Indian policies and increasingly ignored binding obligations to them under international law. He ended his presidency by dispatching American soldiers to intimidate the Creek, whom he hoped to force to remove, and then by refusing to condemn Georgia’s jurisdiction legislation. During the Adams presidency Congress had seriously considered a removal bill. A continentalist, as President, Adams was not uncomfortable with policies of national expansion and empire” (Norgren, Cherokee Cases, 80–81). See also Feller, Jacksonian Promise, 179–83.
9 can be traced at least to 1622 Prucha, Great Father, 13. The incident involved Indians led by Opechan-canough: “Soon after, in New England, the Pequot War of 1637 began formal conflicts between the Indians and the English. The Pequots, moving into the Connecticut River Valley, met Puritans migrating into the same region and posed a threat to the peaceful expansion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Pequot harassment of the settlements brought war as the English attacked the hostile Indians in order to protect the nascent colony in Connecticut. Such conflicts set a pattern. A new surprise attack by Indians in Virginia in 1644, which killed five hundred whites, brought new reprisals, and Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 had strong anti-Indian origins. In 1675–1676 King Philip’s War in New England furnished still another case of warfare instigated by the Indians in a desperate attempt to stop the advancing tide of English settlement” (ibid.). At the beginning of his book on the removal of the Southern tribes, Foreman was terse but decided in his judgment: “It is not intended here to indict the people of the South for mistreatment of the Indians. Whatever may be charged against the white people in this regard is not sectional. The Indians have suffered at their hands throughout the country from north to south and from east to west” (italics mine) (Foreman, Indian Removal, 16).
10 the white survivors retaliated Prucha, Great Father, 13–14. The white response, Prucha wrote, was “immediate and vengeful; the massacre was used an excuse for a massive retaliation against the Indians, for it was looked upon as proof that Indians could not be trusted, even when professing friendship.” Such cycles of violence were to become all too familiar. By 1676 the wars in New England (see above) even provided a precedent for what came after the violence: “The terms of peace imposed on the defeated Indians were harsh and drawn up to ensure the future security of expanding white settlements,” Prucha wrote. “As in the aftermath of the Virginia massacre of 1622, the Indians were killed or forced out of the areas of white settlement” (ibid., 14).
11 said that “treaties were expedients” Ibid., 196. The remarks were made in 1830.
12 Indians were viewed as savages Ibid., 5–11. Prucha, Indians in American Society, 1–54, is interesting reading, as is Wallace, Long, Bitter Trail, 15–29, in which Wallace details the actual worlds of the tribes as they encountered the European settlers.
13 “Next to the case of the black race” Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York, 1990), 80; and James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (New York, 1865), III, 516.
14 should be sent west Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 244.
15 “This then is the season” Ibid.
16 attempted to formulate a humane policy Prucha, Great Father, 59–71.
17 “It is presumable that a nation” Ibid., 59.
18 to meet with senators about Indian issues Ibid., 55.
19 “We presume that our strength” Ibid., 31.
20 Monroe and Adams had drafted removal plans Prucha, Cherokee Removal, 3–4. The removal policy, Prucha noted elsewhere, had “begun long before Jackson’s presidency …” (Prucha, “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment,” 534). See also Norgren, Cherokee Cases, 39–40; Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era, 11–12; Wallace, Long, Bitter Trail, 39–41.
21 Everett “spoke also of the debate” Memoirs of JQA, VIII, 206.
22 Clay was now against removal Remini, Henry Clay, 362.
23 Clay had told him “that it” Memoirs of JQA, VII, 89–90. Clay also told Adams, Adams said, that “he believed [the Indians] were destined to extinction, and, although he would never use or countenance inhumanity towards them, he did not think them, as a race, worth preserving. He considered them as essentially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race which were now taking their place on this continent” (ibid.).
24 McKenney … turned to New York City Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy: 1819–1830 (Chicago, 1974), 220–22; Prucha, “Thomas L. McKenney and the New York Indian Board,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (March 1962), 635–55. The Board existed only for a year, until August 1830, when Jackson removed McKenney from office (Prucha, Great Father, 200).
25 the Indians had been “excited to war” Prucha, “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment,” 528.
26 In January 1817, Jackson told James Monroe Papers, IV, 80.
27 “The sooner these lands” Ibid.
28 pondering a complete removal Papers, VI, 192.
29 “a dense white population” Ibid., 200.
30 After a white woman was kidnapped Prucha, “Andrew Jackson’s Indian Policy: A Reassessment,” 529.
31 “With such arms” Ibid.
32 denounced a “base, cowardly attack” Ibid., 530.
33 that “there could exist” Ibid.
34 “However mere human policy” Frelinghuysen, Speech of Mr. Frelinghuysen, of New Jersey, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, April 6, 1830, on the Bill for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for Their Removal West of the Mississippi, 7–9.
35 the Iroquois in New York and Cherokees in North Carolina Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 420.
36 “This is a straight and good tal
k” Papers, VII, 113.
Chapter 8: Major Eaton Has Spoken of Resigning
1 in quarters to the right of the main entrance Seale, President’s House, I, 195 and 212.
2 ringing and ringing for him Amos Kendall, “Anecdotes of General Jackson,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 11 (1842), 273. According to Kendall, Donelson reported that Jackson thought of firing O’Neal on several occasions but could never bring himself to go through with it (ibid.).
3 to bring Emily Donelson a letter EDT, I, 184–85.
4 “You are young and uninformed” Ibid., 184.
5 “You may take it” Ibid.
6 a “little nest” Ibid.
7 “their gossiping tattle” Ibid.
8 he invoked Rachel Ibid. “When your excellent aunt arrived here in 1815 (I have heard her tell the story),” Eaton wrote, “some of those busy folks, always and everywhere to be found, undertook to tell her of the people here; and amongst other things that a certain lady was not a proper character for her to associate with. Her answer as alike creditable to her head as to her heart was, ‘I did not come here to listen to little slanderous tales, and to decide upon people’s character’ ” (ibid.).
9 “These people” Ibid.
10 “some surprise” Ibid., 186.
11 realized he had failed to ask Ibid., 185.
12 Eaton scrawled Emily a second note Ibid.
13 “… to ask you” Ibid.
14 a polite but steely letter Ibid., 186–87.
15 “totally unacquainted” Ibid., 186.
16 “Having drawn my attention” Ibid.
17 Yes, Emily acknowledged, “there were some” Ibid.
18 “As to the probability” Ibid.
19 “As you say” Ibid.
20 “I take this opportunity” Ibid., 187.
21 what Jackson called “my family, my chosen family” Correspondence, IV, 196.
