Beyond the joyous crowds, as Jackson knew, the capital city was fractious. Secretary of State Clay and others in the Adams administration pretended to yield power cheerfully, though Margaret Bayard Smith was not fooled: “Every one of the public men who will retire … will return to private life with blasted hopes, injured health, injured or ruined fortunes, embittered tempers and probably a total inability to enjoy the remnant of their lives.” The 1828 campaign had been the nastiest in decades. Jackson supporters had spent years hammering a single theme, which simultaneously smeared President Adams and turned Jackson’s campaign into a cause. The 1824 election had been stolen through the “corrupt bargain” between Clay and Adams; the 1828 election was a fight to restore liberty and limited government. Adams supporters responded with everything they had. By the evening of his inauguration, Jackson the habitual newspaper reader would have had all the opportunities he could ever want to revisit the ghosts of his past. They were all in print, having been turned into campaign literature. In 1828 a publication called Truth’s Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor reported on the execution of John Wood at Fort Strother in 1814. (“Shoot the damned rascal! Shoot the damned rascal!”) Nor was that all. A special edition of the Kentucky Reporter, linked with Henry Clay, investigated the $20,000 bribe Jackson paid to secure a treaty from the Chickasaws. Unable to document the bribe, the author described his efforts to confront Jackson and his associates, pioneering a technique that would later become known as the ambush interview. The Truth’s Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor also published an extended report of Rachel’s disastrous first marriage and her too-early remarriage to Jackson. The writer warned that Jackson’s election would result in “a degraded female placed at the head of the female society of the nation” and damage “the National character, the National interest, and the National morals.” Jackson was so bitter about these attacks in what turned out to be his wife’s final months that when he arrived in Washington, he refused to pay a courtesy call on the departing President Adams. The presidential transition did not include so much as a handshake.
The brutal campaign had finally and permanently split the old ruling Democratic-Republican Party, creating the opportunity for Jackson to begin shaping a new party of his own. To direct this effort, he had a new adviser: Martin Van Buren of New York, the former manager of one of Jackson’s rivals. Jackson welcomed this northerner who, like himself, had risen from modest circumstances to become a senator. Bald, sideburned, double-chinned, courteous, and clever, Van Buren made himself indispensable to Jackson. In an 1827 letter to a Richmond newspaper publisher, he sketched out the political coalition that would form the heart of Jackson’s new party. It was an updated version of the alliance that had borne Jefferson to power, “the planters of the South and the plain republicans of the North.” The “plain republicans” were men like Henry Baldwin, the Pittsburgh industrialist with his iron and glass works and his devotion to Jackson; the planters were men like General Jackson’s friends John Coffee and James Jackson. Van Buren traveled to court southern leaders, and made sure the party paid the necessary price for southern membership in the coalition: absolute quiet on the subject of slavery. The pro-Jackson alliance was so effective that there could be no question about the election results this time. The hero of New Orleans swept most of the nation, and Jackson made Van Buren his secretary of state.
There remained the question of what Jackson would do once in power. Letters he received overflowed with suggestions. Some solicited positions in government; one Caleb Atwater of Ohio wrote Jackson to say that the candidates for district judge in Ohio were unqualified, but that Caleb Atwater would do the job. Many of his supporters would indeed be rewarded with jobs, since Jackson proposed to fire long-serving elites and hire new employees. Jackson eventually justified this political patronage by proclaiming the principle of “rotation in office,” meaning that many citizens deserved to take a turn on the federal payroll. Other constituents expected more than a paycheck. Religious figures had lately united behind a cause, reinforcing the sacredness of Sunday as a day of rest. “The curse of God will afflict a Sabbath-breaking nation,” warned a Tennessean, who suggested that if Jackson would only stop Sunday mail delivery, he would more easily follow Rachel to heaven. Another letter quoted extensively from Lyman Beecher, a Boston preacher, who said Jackson would “distinguish himself as a patriot” by stopping Sunday mail. It apparently did not occur to Beecher that the hero of New Orleans might resent the implication that he was not already distinguished as a patriot. The new president would soon be falling out of step with clerics who claimed to represent a higher authority than Jackson, the Constitution, or the people. Before long some of the same clerics would be questioning Jackson’s treatment of Indians.
The mailbag also included warnings from the South. In 1828, the last full year of the Adams administration, Congress had approved new taxes on imported goods, and South Carolina politicians so fiercely objected to this “Tariff of Abominations” that they began talking of their power to nullify federal law. Jackson received a letter of advice from a friend who had recently traveled through the coastal South. The friend suggested that the new president should cement southerners’ loyalty to the union by making certain they saw something in return for their tax money—Jackson might commit, say, half a million dollars to public works on some “decent pretext,” such as coastal defenses for South Carolina and Georgia.
• • •
Jackson at least had wide latitude to act. He was associated with no specific policy agenda. Even his inaugural address offered hints rather than commitments, though it was a good speech for those near enough to hear it. Standing behind a table draped in red cloth, Jackson promised to remember the “limitations” of presidential power. This could be read as a note of skepticism about Henry Clay’s American System; whereas Clay believed in a government that used its power to develop infrastructure and promote economic growth, Jackson often saw development projects as unconstitutional insider schemes. He promised “a strict and faithful economy” in federal spending. He pledged to honor states’ rights, trying to conciliate the firebrands of the South. (An early draft of his speech went further, pledging that “I … shall be the last to cry out treason” against those who disagreed with him about the limits of federal power.) His solicitude for the states may have sounded ominous to natives, who were depending on federal protection from encroaching states, but Jackson offered kind words to the Indians too. “It will be my sincere and constant desire,” the new president said, “to observe toward the Indian tribes … a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people.”
In this way he signaled respect for both the Indian map and the U.S. map without saying how he would resolve the conflict between them. He could have said; he already knew. Van Buren later recalled that Jackson had a few objectives in mind “from the first moments of his elevation to power.”
First, the removal of the Indians from the vicinity of the white population and their settlement beyond the Mississippi.
This was the president’s clearest goal, a signature domestic policy, which he meant to pursue just as later presidents would become known for a single overriding goal such as a tax cut or a health insurance plan. Jackson got to work on it promptly, and by late 1829 it would be the first major initiative he sent to Congress for action. Why was it Jackson’s first big priority? In part, it was what he knew. He had strong opinions about banks and taxes and federal spending, which he would also act upon in time, but he had experience with Indians. Almost twelve years had passed since he believed he had accomplished the removal of the Cherokees with his treaty of 1817, which included incentives for their voluntary relocation. Cherokees spurned this offer, but Jackson was not a man inclined to quit. Even if he had wanted to put off a confrontation, the contending parties would not have allowed him to. The C
herokees’ constitution of 1827 had announced they wouldn’t surrender their land, and the Georgians escalated their pressure in December 1828. Georgia declared its state laws would soon extend over Indian territories within Georgia, effectively erasing the Indian map. The Georgia laws included measures that specifically targeted Indians, forbidding them from establishing their own governments, and adding: “No Indian, and no descendant of an Indian not understanding the English language shall be deemed a competent witness in any court.” A white man could turn an Indian out of his house or even kill him, and no Indian witness could testify against him. Elias Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, understood the purpose of such a law: “expulsion.”
Georgia’s act compelled the federal government to choose sides. Jackson chose. “The course pursued by Georgia is well calculated to involve her & the United States in great difficulty, unless the Indians can be got to remove west of the M,” Jackson wrote his friend John Overton in June 1829. He was already facing a delicate situation with South Carolina, and did not need another fight with other southern states. Less than three weeks after his inauguration, he composed a letter to the Creeks who still possessed parts of Alabama, which was also applying state law to Indian land:
March 23rd. 1829
Friends & Brothers,
By permission of the Great Spirit above, and the voice of the people, I have been made a President of the United States, and now speak to you as your father and friend, and request you to listen.
Jackson informed the Creeks that “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,” Jackson said. “My white children in Alabama have extended their law over your country. If you remain in it, you must be subject to that law.”
This is a straight and good talk. It is for your nation’s good, and your father requests you to hear his counsel.
Andrew Jackson
Jackson, of course, was not ordering them to depart. He left them the freedom to choose, and merely set the conditions so that they would have only one choice.
• • •
The principal chief of the Cherokee Nation did not seem to understand at first what Jackson was doing, though he was in Washington at the time. When Jackson promised “a just and liberal policy” toward the Indians, it is likely that John Ross was in the crowd. He was staying at Williamson’s Hotel, which faced Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Within a few years Williamson’s would be rebuilt and rechristened the Willard, a seat of luxury and political intrigue for generations to follow. It was an ideal location, a little more than a mile from the inauguration, a straight walk down Pennsylvania toward the green copper Capitol dome. After the inauguration, Ross’s walk back to his room would have led him on the same path as Jackson, meaning that he would have been walking among those masses (“boys, women and children, black and white”) who trailed after their new president on his way to the Executive Mansion. Even if Ross did not continue all the way to the reception at the president’s house, he surely knew of the chaos there, and might have heard it from Williamson’s, two blocks away.
Ross, like Jackson, had arrived in Washington after a tragic end to the year. The Cherokee’s family tragedy is difficult to detail, for he was never as personal in his letters. His only known comment on this disaster came in the final phrase of a short letter to Cherokee lawmakers on an unrelated subject.
I return herewith the resolutions of the Committee passed on this 28th inst. regulating the issuing of permits, which I am of opinion requires some alteration. Circumstances prevent me at present from stating the objections I have to approving it in its present shape; being compelled to return home immediately in consequence of the death of my infant child on this morning.
This infant was the only one of Ross’s six children with Quatie to die young. Whatever grief the child’s death caused them went unrecorded, as did the cause; they buried the boy and went on with their lives, Quatie bearing another boy the following year. The chief’s reticence may have reflected a stoical nature, or a stoical culture, or his feeling of responsibility as a leader. It may even have reflected the experience of a man who had grown up suspended between the white and Indian worlds, and had learned never to reveal too much of himself. Ross returned to work the day after the baby’s death. He sent another letter to Cherokee lawmakers, offering the details on his veto of legislation from the day before, and making only an oblique mention of his dead child.
The matter Ross was addressing in that letter demonstrated the intensifying emotions of the conflict between Cherokees and white men. If Georgia was moving to disinherit the Indians, Cherokees were moving to reorder relations with whites. Cherokee lawmakers approved legislation forbidding white men from working inside the Cherokee Nation without a costly permit. In rejecting this plan, Ross softened the blow by telling lawmakers only that the legislation was badly drawn, though he likely understood that it was simply a bad idea. Every white person who lived or worked in the Cherokee Nation was a resource and a potential ally, a link to the white electorate on whom the Cherokees’ fate depended.
But if Ross handled his own legislature deftly, his political instincts seemed to fail him once he reached Washington as part of the annual Cherokee delegation to the capital. His correspondence included no report of the inauguration, a revealing omission. His actions that winter suggested that he did not yet grasp the historic significance of the election. The Cherokees spent February trying to do business with officials from the outgoing Congress and administration, depressed and defeated lame ducks who would have no influence with the new powers in the capital. Ross had to start over again after the inauguration, beginning with the new president. “Respected Sir,” he wrote Jackson on March 6—addressing the president as a fellow man, not as the Great White Father—“the present U.S. agent for the Cherokee Nation … does not … inspire … confidence.” Ross complained of the agent’s “apparent incompetency” and his unwarranted seizure of a hundred acres of Cherokee land. Ross’s grievances went deeper than that: the agent had been seeking to infiltrate the Cherokee Nation with Cherokees from the western band. Some Cherokees who had been living beyond the Mississippi since 1808 had been recruited for a secret effort to persuade the main band of Cherokees to emigrate out of the east and join them. The effort produced another exposé in the Cherokee Phoenix, which somehow obtained the agent’s correspondence about his secret mission. It was all published on March 11, including the Indian agent’s embarrassing admission that despite all of his covert efforts “only a single Indian has yet enrolled” to move west. On April 6, after this well-timed scoop, Ross complained again to the president. But in the eight years that followed this complaint, as Jackson went through an unprecedented clearing out of the federal bureaucracy, he never got around to replacing the Cherokee agent.
It was only after raising these comparatively small complaints that Ross turned to the truly existential issue, the danger posed by Georgia. At Ross’s request, the new secretary of war conferred with the president to determine whether the United States would protect the Cherokees. On April 18, 1829, the answer came back: No. The United States could “never” interfere with Georgia’s legitimate exercise of its authority. Secretary of War John Eaton said it was the Cherokees’ fault that Georgia was taking their land, because “the tribe established an independent government within the territory of the state.” Cherokees must yield to Georgia’s laws if they remained in Georgia, although the more “humane” alternative would be moving to the West, where “the soil shall be yours, while the trees grow or the streams run.” This must have been the moment when John Ross fully understood the meaning of the election of 1828. Days later he acknowledged that his talks with federal officials had failed, and he left Washington for the season.
He didn’t go straight home. He went northward first, up the E
ast Coast. He intended to travel to New York and Albany, returning to the West by way of the new Erie Canal, but having remained in Washington “much longer than desired or anticipated,” he didn’t have time to see this latest wonder of the world. He made it no farther than Philadelphia, where he wrote a letter acknowledging that he had not achieved his objectives in Washington.
What will be the result of the unnatural course which Georgia has taken, or the ultimate fate of the Cherokee nation, I dare not attempt to predict—but … the nation is prepared passively, to meet the worse of the consequences; than to surrender their homes, their all and to emigrate.
It was a downbeat letter, yet it influenced future events. Just as Jackson signaled his strategy in his letter from Gadsby’s in 1825, John Ross expressed his strategy in this May 6, 1829, letter from Philadelphia. “Passively” resisting oppression, Cherokees would neither rise in arms nor “surrender.” They would remain in place and demand that the United States keep its obligations. In a later age, minority groups would commit acts of civil disobedience to highlight rights they were denied. John Ross contemplated civil obedience, following the law while highlighting rights he believed Indians already had.
Nineteen
The Blazing Light of the Nineteenth Century
In the summer of 1829 a letter reached the offices of the National Intelligencer in Washington. A bundle of papers arrived with the letter. The writer proposed that his letter and the papers should be published under a pseudonym: “William Penn.”
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 18
