by H. W. Brands
To his surprise at the social customs of the capital, Reid appended his shock at the cost of living there. “Have our horses attended to and fattened; my expenses can’t be less than forty dollars a week! Most monstrous!! What must the General’s be? Our stay can’t be long.”
It really wasn’t long, compared with the month in transit either way. Jackson enjoyed—or, increasingly, endured—more dinners. He visited Mount Vernon. “Judge Washington was not at home,” Reid wrote of the nephew of the general. “But from Mr. Custis and the rest of the family we received the utmost hospitality and kindness.” Jackson consulted with the new secretary of war, William Crawford, about a plan to divide the nation into two military divisions, one for the North and the other for the South, and confirmed to the administration that he would accept command of the southern division. In doing so he put the minds of Madison and Monroe at ease that he wouldn’t upset the succession so carefully arranged. They, in turn, made clear that they sided with him against anyone tempted to reopen his dispute with Judge Hall and the federal courts.
By late December he was ready to leave. “I had the pleasure of seeing all the great men at the city, was friendly greeted by all, and was obliged to flee the proffered hospitality of the surrounding cities to restore my health and preserve life,” he wrote from the safety of Lynchburg on the last day of the year. “I therefore am retracing my steps to avoid the various pressing invitations.” Snow had fallen and was complicating travel west. “Tomorrow we move on for Nashville, where we will arrive as early as our horses and the season will permit. Our horses are thin and the depth of snow is very fatiguing to them.”
The war was over and Jackson was the nation’s hero, but the struggle continued. For Jackson the struggle always continued. Since his father died—which was to say, since before he was born—Jackson’s life had been a struggle. He knew nothing else, and never would. In private life he found, or made, enemies; in public life as well. As he matured in office, from judge to militia general to major general of the army, his enemies increasingly became the enemies of his country. The British were an abiding foe, from the Revolution to the recent war and beyond. His anglophobia grew reflexive. On learning a few months after New Orleans that Napoleon had broken his exile and again challenged the British in Europe, Jackson applauded the Corsican. “The wonderful revolution in France fills every body and nation with astonishment, and the tricoloured cockade being found in the bottom of each soldier’s knapsack tells to all Europe that Napoleon reigns in the affections of the soldiers.” Bad news for Britain was good news for America. “What will be the effect of this sudden revolution on the relations with America? Will it not give us an advantageous commercial treaty with Great Britain?”
When the wonderful revolution ran out at Waterloo and Napoleon was cast into final exile on St. Helena, Jackson had to look elsewhere to discomfit England. Spain was a likely target. Despotic, Catholic, proximate (in Florida), and in obvious trouble (from the continuing revolts around the Americas), the Spanish provided an outlet for the aggressiveness that never let Jackson rest. Not that he lacked cause to complain against them. As before his departure from Mobile to New Orleans, the Spanish failed to keep Florida clear of enemies of America’s peace. British warships and British troops no longer prowled the harbors and shore of the region, although British traders and agents did. But various Indians who refused to reconcile to American authority in the South made Florida their base for actions inimical to the peace of mind and hearth of Americans in Mississippi Territory.
The Seminoles were the worst offenders in this regard. In the early nineteenth century the Seminoles weren’t a tribe in the traditional sense but rather a recent agglomeration of refugees from the American South, including a substantial portion of Africans and their descendants, some held as slaves by the Indians, some held by other Africans, and some simply runaways from the plantations in Georgia and Mississippi. In both a technical and a practical sense they were outlaws, living by geography outside the law of the United States and by Spain’s weakness outside the law of Spanish Florida. For this reason a man like Jackson, charged with defending the southern borders of the United States, could easily conceive them a threat. Their mere existence provided a magnet for further runaways from the plantations and farms of whites and friendly Indians. Their camps and villages afforded a haven for those Creeks and other Indians who still resisted American control of Mississippi. Worst of all, in Jackson’s view, they tempted the British to continue meddling in American affairs. Behind the Seminoles, behind the Spanish, Jackson saw the specter of Britain in Florida. So long as Florida remained beyond American control, it was a potential base for British adventurism. The law of life—the law of constant struggle—kept it from being otherwise.
Had the Seminoles been model neighbors, Jackson would have distrusted them; that they weren’t models made his animus easier to justify. And it won him allies in the government at Washington. Before long Jackson would despise William Crawford, but for now, on the subject of Florida and the Seminoles, the Tennessee general and the Georgia politician found themselves in agreement. During the war some escaped slaves and unfriendly Indians had constructed a makeshift fort on the Apalachicola River in Florida, where they defied the authority of both Spain and the United States. By the spring of 1816 they numbered perhaps three hundred and were, in Crawford’s description to Jackson, “well armed, clothed, and disciplined.” More fugitives arrived regularly. “This is a state of things which cannot fail to produce much injury to the neighbouring settlements and excite irritations which may ultimately endanger the peace of the nation.” Crawford directed Jackson to warn the Spanish governor or commandant at Pensacola to clean out the “Negro Fort” or let the United States do so itself.
Jackson was happy to oblige. Before approaching the Spanish authorities in Florida, he directed General Edmund Gaines, to whom he had delivered command of the garrison at New Orleans upon leaving that city, to prepare for a Florida campaign. By now the killing of two Americans near Fort Claiborne in southern Mississippi provided an additional complaint against the denizens of the Negro Fort. “The growing hostile dispositions of the Indians must be checked by prompt and energetic movements,” Jackson told Gaines. “Half peace, half war is a state of things which must not exist. The murderers of Johnston and McGlaskey must be had and punished. No retreat must provide an asylum for them.” Referring specifically to the Negro Fort and its occupants, Jackson said, “If the conduct of these people is such as to encourage the Indian war, if the fort harbours the Negroes of our citizens or friendly Indians living within our territory, or holds out inducements to the slaves of our citizens to desert from their owners’ service, this fort must be destroyed.” Jackson realized that destruction of the fort would violate Spanish territory. But he had violated Spanish territory before, and he was prepared to do so again. “This fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine and plunder. . . . It ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on.”
Jackson proceeded to pressure the Spanish governor at Pensacola in much the same way he had pressured the governor’s predecessor in 1814. “The conduct of this banditti,” Jackson informed Mauricio de Zuñiga, “is such as will not be tolerated by our government, and if not put down by Spanish authority will compel us in self-defence to destroy them.”
Zuñiga had no desire to tangle with Jackson, or any particular reason to. The Negro Fort was utterly beyond the control of his undermanned garrison, and he decried the activities of its inhabitants, who also preyed on the Spanish settlements in Florida, hardly less than Jackson did. The governor was so far from resisting Jackson’s demand to see the fort reduced as to offer the American general his support in the endeavor. Jackson’s courier paraphrased Zuñiga: “If the object was sufficiently important to require the presence of General Jackson, he would be proud to be commanded by you.”
Jackson had nothing personal against Zuñiga, who seemed an honorable en
ough character. But he couldn’t help interpreting the governor’s cooperativeness as further sign of Spain’s pitiful weakness on the southern coast. Jackson might have moved at once against the Negro Fort had another issue not distracted him, one that changed his views of William Crawford. As the federal government had done for years, it sought to preserve Indian lands against illegal white encroachment. A desire to see justice done to the Indians, however belatedly, motivated the administration, but so also a concern for its own credibility. In addition, the Treasury in Washington was empty. Friction between whites and Indians might produce another war, which the federal revenues simply couldn’t sustain. In all of this, the position of the government at Washington in the late 1810s was analogous to that of the British government in the 1760s, when, after another costly war (against France), London tried to keep the Americans from settling west of the mountains. And the reaction of westerners in the 1810s was similar to that of the Americans fifty years earlier: cries of tyranny and vows of resistance.
Jackson found himself in the middle of things when Crawford ordered him to remove illegal settlers in southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Jackson was directed to post a proclamation—very much like the British Proclamation of 1763—giving squatters a brief period of grace to remove themselves. But once the grace period ended, Jackson must take action. “You will, upon the application of the marshal of any state or territory, cause to be removed by military force all persons who shall be found upon the public lands within your command, and destroy their habitations and improvements.” The order applied specifically to Indian lands. “Intrusion upon the lands of the friendly Indian tribes is not only a violation of the laws but in direct opposition to the policy of the government toward its savage neighbors. Upon application of any Indian agent stating that intrusions of this nature have been committed and are continued, the President requires that they shall be equally removed, and their houses and improvements destroyed by military force.”
Jackson was no apologist for lawbreakers, but he couldn’t escape the irony of being asked to play the role of Britain against Americans. And though he applauded fair-mindedness in principle, he thought the administration overlooked a fundamental difference between whites and Indians on the frontier: the former were citizens of the United States and almost certainly would fight for the Union against any foreign foe, while the latter were noncitizens and might well take the part of Britain or Spain, as they had in the past. Unlike many of his white contemporaries, who asserted a higher claim to the land on grounds that they were civilized Christians, Jackson rarely addressed the cosmic morality of the land question. Instead he asked whether a particular arrangement would make the Union more secure or less. And in nearly every case he concluded that white control served national safety.
Crawford’s order caused another problem. The treaty Jackson had negotiated at Fort Jackson called for a continuous line of white settlement across the former territory of the Creeks. The war against Britain, not surprisingly, had hindered the demarcation of the line that would establish the limits of Indian territory. The survey commenced anew after the war, only to be blocked by legal action initiated by the Creeks, Cherokees, and others. Jackson deemed the survey essential to the original goal of uniting the various white settlements on the Gulf plain, and he sent John Coffee, his cavalry stalwart, to conduct it. “The line must be run,” Jackson told Coffee. He instructed Coffee not to expect any help from the Indians in determining the location of the line. “Every person acquainted with the disposition of an Indian knows they will claim every thing and any thing. You will therefore proceed on the best information you have and can obtain from the chiefs of the Cherokees and Creeks and any other sources on which you can rely and finish the line as early as possible.”
The pro-Indian policy of the government at Washington hindered the survey and thereby, in Jackson’s view, undermined American security. He told Crawford how stupid he thought the policy was. “Why the government should feel a wish to aggrandize the [Cherokee] nation at the expense of the other tribes, or against the interest of their own citizens, is unknown. In this matter the Indians—I mean the real Indians, the natives of the forest—are little concerned. It is a stratagem only acted upon by the designing half-breeds and renegade white men who have taken refuge in their country. If the course now adopted by the government is to be pursued, it is difficult to say at what remote period we may calculate on our uniting settlements and giving security to our frontiers.”
Jackson had another reason for adopting a stern attitude toward the Indians. He believed that the only real alternative to sternness by the government was not something better for the Indians but something worse. Articulating a view that would inform his Indian policies as president, Jackson argued that separation between whites and Indians offered the only chance for Indian survival. “Tennessee, I hope, will never disgrace herself by opposing the Government, but when it is recollected that, in open violation of the orders of the United States in 1794, a campaign was set on foot that broke the hostile spirit of the Cherokees and secured peace, judging of human nature it may be believed that when these people are ordered from the old Creek villages burnt by General Coffee and which they aided to conquer, they will feel disposed to wreak their vengeance on this tribe.” Jackson knew his neighbors, and he knew that abstract justice counted less with them than eighty acres for growing corn, especially when they thought those acres had been fairly won in war. And how, precisely, did Crawford propose to remove the settlers? The militia wouldn’t do it. “Their feelings are the same with the settlers.” Regular troops might be employed, but as soon as they left, the settlers would return. Anyway, did the administration really wish to send the army against its own citizens? Jackson didn’t say he wouldn’t follow such an order, but he made plain he didn’t want to—which might amount to the same thing, given his stature and popular support.
The government at Washington needed to know how deep the feelings ran on this subject. “Candour to the Government and to that administration I have admired,” he told Crawford, “compels me to be frank and state to you that the people of the West will never suffer any Indian to inhabit this country again that has been for thirty years the den of the murderers of their wives and helpless infants, and on the conquest of which, and for their security hereafter, they shed their blood and suffered every privation. I tell you frankly they never will unless coerced by Government, and when this is attempted I fear it will lead to scenes that will make human nature shudder. I might not be mistaken if I was to say it may lead to the destruction of the whole Cherokee nation, and of course civil war.”
Rachel Jackson
[UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE SPECIAL COLLECTIONS]
John Coffee
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
Henry Clay
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
James Monroe
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
John Calhoun
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Daniel Webster
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
John Marshall
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
John Quincy Adams
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Thomas Hart Benton
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
Andrew Donelson
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
Sam Houston
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
William Carroll’s map of Horseshoe Bend
[ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTORY]
Jackson and William Weatherford
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
The Battle of New Orleans
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Securing the Southeast
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
The Hermitage (Jackson in foreground)
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
The “coffin handbill”
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
; What the people actually voted for: 1828 Virginia ticket of Jackson electors
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Taking the oath (Marshall administering)
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
The People’s Day
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Peggy Eaton (many years after the scandal)
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
The Bank Veto
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Jackson vs. Biddle
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Hero
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
Planter
[TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES]
Statesman
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Patriarch
[LIBRARY OF CONGRESS]
Madison didn’t need the reminder, but Jackson’s refusal to follow orders against the settlers made plain that the Tennessean wasn’t an ordinary general. He had his own moral compass, and his popular prestige gave him freedom to chart his own course. Madison could have fired Jackson, but he didn’t want to alienate Jackson’s many followers and perhaps tempt the general into entering the political arena. And he had to acknowledge that much of what Jackson said was true: to uproot the settlers would require sending federal troops against them. Whether or not this would provoke the civil war Jackson predicted, it would certainly be controversial. So Madison backed off. Rather than give Jackson an ultimatum, the president appointed Jackson to a commission to settle the Cherokee claims. If Jackson became responsible for the problem, Madison reasoned, he would have to accept responsibility for the solution. The other advantage of the commission was that it would postpone any difficult decisions till after the 1816 election.
