by Simon Schama
It was one of the most morally repugnant moments in American history, one that ought by rights to take its prime mover, the seventh president, off the currency of any self-respecting nation. But there he is with his imperious forelock on the face of the twenty-dollar bill, the ethnic cleanser of the first democratic age. Jackson made several speeches on the subject, in which he cast himself and his policy as the Savior of Indians who otherwise would be doomed to disappear, surrounded as they were by the arts and industries of a “superior race.” They had neither the intelligence nor the inclination, he said, to transform themselves into a viable modern society, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.
It is not as if the ferocious immorality of the Removal Act were not noticed at the time. It squeaked through with bare pluralities, in the House of Representatives by just five votes, and many of the most eloquent voices of the day spoke bitterly and lengthily against it; Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey took three days to go through all the solemn undertakings given by past governments to the Indians on the implicit understanding that they had title to the land from “immemorial possession.” “If we abandon these aboriginal proprietors of our soil, these early allies and adopted children of our forefathers, how shall we justify this trespass to ourselves…Let us beware how, by oppressive encroachments on the sacred privileges of our Indian neighbors, we minister to the agonies of future remorse.” The most unlikely opposition came from a legendary figure who embodied the frontier even more emblematically than Jackson: David Crockett, like the president, from Tennessee. Crockett had fought alongside Cherokee like John Ross at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and had come to admire their tenacity and courage. He would pay at the polls for the temerity of his opposition, losing a bid for reelection to the House, though winning on a second try. Many of the greatest figures in Congress like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster spoke in indignation at the iniquity of the bill, but the orator who most grasped the enormity of what was being proposed, a people’s destruction engineered from greed and covetousness, and who attempted to summon American moral tradition against it, was Edward Everett, Massachusetts congressman, later governor of that commonwealth and president of Harvard. “The evil,” said Everett, “was enormous, the inevitable suffering incalculable. Do not stain the fair fame of the country…Nations of dependent Indians, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it; you cannot reason it away…Our friends will view this measure with sorrow and our enemies alone with joy. And we ourselves Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach and a regret as bitter as it is unavailing.”
None of this had the slightest effect on Jackson’s implacable determination to purge the Southeast of Indians. The more civilized they were, the more reason to uproot them. Nor could the Supreme Court make much of an impression. When Ross and the anti-removal party sued the state of Georgia for illegal trespass and having no standing in altering binding treaties concluded between the federal government and the Cherokee Nation, the court initially dismissed the argument. But the greatest advocate of the day, William Wirt, pleading for the Indians, had no trouble showing from the letter of past treaties that the Cherokee had indeed been treated as a nation and Chief Justice John Marshall’s court upheld their case, disallowing Georgia from, among other presumptions, holding a lottery to sell off Indian land. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley reported Jackson as saying, contemptuously, “John Marshall has made his opinion. Now let him enforce it.” Apocryphal or not, the contempt for the Constitution certainly sounds like authentic Jackson.
Jackson advertised the measure as the purest benevolence and its realization as “a happy consummation.” In his second address to Congress, Jackson finally obliterated Jefferson’s dream of being “all Americans” by boasting that removal would “separate the Indians from immediate contact with the whites” and “enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions…and perhaps cause them gradually to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilised and Christian community…Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country…To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflection…[but] what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms…and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilisation and religion?…Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they [do] more than our ancestors did or than our children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects…How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions!” All the Indians had to do to become truly American was to hitch their wagons to the religion of Moving Right On.
Everything about this was specious: the caricature of the Cherokee as still “savage,” unable to maintain themselves against the white hordes, needing separation in their own best interests, and the same kind of arguments would be heard again in the future history of ethnic cleansing in and out of Europe. America’s honor lies in the fierceness of those who opposed Jackson. They continued to do so, but were up against the most authoritarian president the United States had seen, dressed withal as a new kind of Democrat; someone who had no compunction about violating the Constitution, ignoring the Supreme Court, unilaterally rescinding treaties. When a “Treaty” was signed with a small but influential faction of the Cherokees moved to despair by Jackson’s bullying, and passed through Congress by a single vote, Everett demanded that the president go to the Capitol steps and burn the actual treaties with Washington’s, Adams’s, and Jefferson’s signatures written on them.
And for what was this monstrous crime committed? So that the myths of the homestead movement, of America’s millions moving into empty space, the “garden” that a generous Providence had bestowed on them, could be sustained. But what the white settlers of west Georgia and east Tennessee were actually doing was taking someone else’s plenty.
Ross tried everything, overplaying his hand in an interview with Jackson in 1834, that may have contributed to the relatively meager sum—$5 million—that the Cherokee were to be paid for leaving their millions of acres. The lottery went ahead, and when properties were distributed, Ross went home from negotiations in Washington to discover his had been taken and that he and his family had been summarily evicted. The lottery winner was already installed, and Ross had to leave his horse with him while he went on foot to search for his family. They moved into a two-room log cabin for the rest of their time in the territory, and no one complained.
Jackson and the Department of War wanted the removals to be “voluntary” but Ross refused to budge from his policy of defiant resistance, urging the Cherokee at their council to stay united. So they became united in misery. The “treaty” enacted in 1836 by the majority of one provided for a two-year grace period before the removal was made coercive. Only a bare handful of Cherokee took advantage of the offer. The vast majority, listening to Ross, awaited their doom.
In the late spring of 1838, under the presidency of Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor, the deadline for voluntary removal having expired, the Cherokee, the last of the “Five Civilized Tribes” to hold out in the Southeast, were rounded up and hunted down by General Winfield Scott’s 7,000 troops assigned to the glorious mission. The traumatized and humiliated Cherokee, many of whom were children and elderly, were held in pens and corrals in conditions of the utmost squalor and deprivation. So many became sick and died of maltreatment that officers in charge of the operation resigned in abhorrence of what they were being asked to do. Thousands of the Indians were herded onto rickety boats for the first stage of the journey west. One of those, on the Arkansas River, a hundred feet long and twenty wide according to the Reve
rend Daniel Butrick who saw it, was so over-packed with terrified Indians that “the timbers began to crack and give way and the boat itself was on the point of sinking…Who would think of crowding men, women and children, sick and well together with little, if any more room…than would be allowed to swine taken to market?” Overnight they were guarded like convicts. Others were packed into railroad boxcars, the dead and dying thrown out before the survivors were made to walk, in a file miles long, the rest of the 800 miles into their new home in the Great American Desert. Appalled at the army’s treatment, Ross pleaded that he might take over the command of the transportation. He was allowed this, only to see fully a quarter of his 16,000 people perish.
In January 1839, a traveler from Maine, who published his account in the New York Observer, saw a sad caravan of 2,000 Cherokee extending for three miles, “the sick and feeble carried in wagons—a great many ride on horseback and multitudes go on foot—even aged females apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back—on the sometimes frozen ground and sometimes muddy streets with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them…we learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed that they buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping place.”
Back in Georgia and Tennessee jubilant homesteaders moved into their allotted properties. Many of those who hoped to make colossal fortunes were deceived, for there was less gold than the first excited wave of prospectors had predicted. From the time that the last of the Cherokee trudged west to the Mississippi to the end of the Georgia gold rush was just five years.
36. 1893
In early March 1893, the Reading and Pennsylvania Railroad went into receivership. The rail companies that could make no mistake in calculating their part in the American future had overestimated demand. Some of the biggest names in the business followed, burdened with credit liabilities and sharply dropping receipts. The bankruptcy of the National Cordage Company, thought solid, was another shocking blow. By the end of the year 15,000 businesses had declared insolvency, more than 600 of them banks that closed their doors. When the United States Treasury announced that its gold reserves, required to shore up the currency, had fallen below the magic figure of 100 million, on 5 May, Wall Street panicked, writing off millions of dollars of stock. The steady rain of failures turned into a downpour. By the summer most industrial cities in America had unemployment rates of 18 to 20 percent. In some of the heavy manufacturing states of the Midwest as many as one in two adult men were out of work. With surviving banks calling in loans, small businessmen were hit especially hard. One of them who owned an ironware company in Massillon, Ohio, Jacob Coxey, demanded the government use currency unbacked by gold, to finance public works. Written off as a socialist fanatic, Jacob, along with his son Legal Tender Coxey, led “Coxey’s Army,” a procession of some hundreds of unemployed in a march on Washington.
But the president was not well. Grover Cleveland, in his second term, was so nervous of the public mood that when his physicians told him he was suffering from cancer of the mouth and jaw and would need surgery, he kept the matter secret lest it roil the markets further. On the yacht Oneida, surgeons cut away a large part of his jaw as the boat steamed gently out of New York Harbor.
All of which made the 600 acres of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago more, rather than less, necessary as a bright show of faith in the American future. If half the country was stricken, the other half went to Chicago. Twenty-seven million passed through the gates at Jackson Park between May and the end of October. Westinghouse (rather to Thomas Edison’s annoyance) supplied electrical lighting; a White City with work of America’s most showy and inventive architects—Charles McKim, Henry Cobb, and Louis Sullivan among them—adorned the center with Beaux Arts cupolas and gleaming halls. In the national and “ethnic” pavilions it was possible to see hula dancers from Hawaii (the islands Cleveland declined to annex) or lacemakers from Bruges. But having done their dutiful tour of elevated exhibits, most of the crowds headed for Midway Plaisance, Sol Bloom’s pleasure grounds where they could giggle at the ethnically incorrect “Arabo-Egyptian” hootchy-kootchy, sail 200 feet into the sky on George Ferris’s Big Wheel (the first in the country), watch dumbstruck as Eadweard Muybridge showed his images of Animal Locomotion, and sample the enticing array of snacking wonders available for the very first time: Juicy Fruit gum! CRACKERJACK! If the mood took them, they could actually have listened to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declare that it was all over with frontier democracy, before going on to Buffalo Bill Cody’s show to make sure they got a sighting of Sitting Bull and bronco busters before it was too late. But amid all the ragtime honky-tonk clamor (Scott Joplin was there, as well as John Philip Sousa) and electrically charged fun, millions upon millions of the visitors lined up to see one small, quiet emblem of the America that had been and, they hoped, always would be.
The Idaho Pavilion was at its heart a log cabin; admittedly the grandest and most richly decorated log cabin imaginable, glowing with richly woven rugs and tapestries, all with western and Indian themes, heavy turned tables and sideboards in the oddly separated Men’s and Women’s Reception rooms. Some of its designs in wood and metalwork inspired the beginnings of the American Arts and Crafts movement. But its message, appreciated by the millions, was that amid modern wonders and sumptuousness, the true America was still log cabin simplicity, and for all the daunting immensity of a New York or a Chicago, the heart of the country beat in the most rudimentary shelters. “The children who come here,” one account said, “should see these rooms as they teach the lesson of the growth of our national civilization and how step by step men have made their way in life as well as something of the costs of the luxuries we now enjoy. When the foundations of a national civilization are bared to our eyes we are apt to judge them with greater acumen…the foundation is here in the cabin and the log hut.” The sense that there was still something solid to hang on to while the American economy disintegrated around them could not have been more important for the millions who wondered whether there would be plenty in their own American future. Was the dream of the pioneering homestead, 160 acres of good earth for every family willing to bend their backs in tillage, lost forever?
The thousands lined up on the dusty empty plain of the Cherokee Outlet on the morning of 16 September certainly didn’t think so. Right across the neck of land called the Cherokee Strip, reporters looking to pump up a nice round number for their readers back East claimed 100,000; certainly a whole lot more than the 42,000 parcels that were up for allotment that day. It was going to be, they said, the last great Run. There would be nothing left of the Indian Territory after the Strip had gone, so this was their last crack at plenty. If they were fast and lucky and got to make their claim at one of the land offices, they would move their family out to the plain, cut themselves a sod house, raise some corn, and stay maybe five, six years, just until they had enough to move on again. Who knew how long the good times on the prairie would last; when the next big drought would come?
The railroad companies had scooped up the best land as the government had sold off millions of acres and then had promoted westward migration and farm life on the plains just as hard as they could. Come to Kansas, their papers and flyers had said, the rainiest place in America, fertile and green. On came the greenhorns from the cities; anything to escape the tenements, and the railroad had them in its power. The farmers would need the railroad and the country banks they owned to advance them money for tools and seed and a team of oxen. They would need the company dry-goods stores for their provisions, and they would need the railroad itself to get their crops to mills and markets.
Here was one last chance to get a piece of land the railroad people hadn’t put away. So they couldn’t turn their back on the Run, everyone waiting, fidgeting at the line ready, once the cannon fired, to charge hell for leather. Lined up on the prairie was every kind of conveyance to get a man where he needed to
go fast: wagon teams, buckboards, buggies, every kind of horse too, including the iron one, a train steaming on its tracks, loaded with men hanging out of the cattle cars, whooping away.
But no Indians. The Cherokee Strip Run would be another farewell, but this time they were not shedding tears. With demand, first for cattle pasture and then for tillage, the nation had leased and then gradually sold off most of its remaining acres on the Outlet, the ungenerous, tight-packed sod that had never done much for them anyway. The 12,000 who survived the Trail of Tears under the leadership of John Ross had their worst fears about the Great American Desert confirmed. The landscape could not have been more different from the hills and valleys they had left behind in Georgia and Tennessee. All there was here was an endless high plain, covered with tough, short buffalo grass. No trees broke the force of the winds that blew from the north, cutting them like knives in the winter, burning them in the summer. They could graze cattle and hunt bison, but tribes already there—the Osage in particular—saw that as their preserve and were none too happy with the arrival of a foreign people in their midst. All too soon mass slaughter by the Americans had finished off the buffalo herds anyway, their skeletons littering the prairie. The deer and beaver were nowhere to be seen. They became reduced to bow-hunting jackrabbits and prairie chickens. Most difficult of all, they had lost the streams and waterfalls of their old world, the water sent by the Great Spirit to make their crops grow. This place was dry. When it rained, which it seldom did, the water ran away against the hard, grass-packed dirt; an earth so tight that to dig it was to make war on it.
The years after 1840 were grim for the Cherokee. They went from the inconsolable loss of their uprooting to the impossibility of replanting in Oklahoma. The Ghost Dancers came among them again, and with their pipes they smoked dreams of the rain-swollen white clouds that hung over their lost green mountains of the East. From Washington they learned to expect nothing but merciless betrayal. So when in 1861 they had to make a choice, they chose for the Confederacy, for the one thing some of them still had were their slaves. The fateful decision compounded their calamities. In 1866 they ended up with neither slaves nor mastery of the acres they had been promised in perpetuity by Jackson for their removal. Now they had to make a treaty all over again, which gave the government the right to settle other Indians—how many were they bringing to this wilderness?—whenever they chose; and to insist that they relinquish title for sales should that need arise. They signed virtually at the point of a gun and continued to eat their bitter meal. One by one their councils were set aside until by the 1890s there was virtually nothing left of their old freedom; save their language, their religion, and their horses and dogs. But that little meant at least they were still Cherokee.
