Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  On August 3, 1,300 more troops arrived and began slaughtering men, women, and children indiscriminately. The Warrior returned as well and again opened fire. About 200 Sac and Fox Indians made it through the general chaos to the west bank of the Mississippi, only to be intercepted and killed there by white-allied Sioux.

  Black Hawk did find the Winnebagos in Wisconsin, but in exchange for a $100 reward and 20 horses, they betrayed the chief to the authorities. He was captured and imprisoned. The surviving Sac and Foxes signed a new treaty, ceding many more millions of acres to the United States, and they agreed to “remove” to lands west of the Mississippi River. In the meantime, Black Hawk was paroled to be taken on a tour of the nation as a kind of battle trophy. To the surprise and dismay of his keepers, the chief was honored in most places as a noble adversary.

  The Indian Removal Act

  As seen by later generations, Andrew Jackson is one of our most controversial chief executives. However, even his most enthusiastic admirers have difficulty justifying his role in the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This law effectively evicted the major Indian tribes from land east of the Mississippi and consigned them to “Indian Territory” in the West. In fairness to Jackson and Congress, it was reasonably enlightened legislation by the standards of the time. The act, passed on May 28, 1830, did not propose to rob the Indians of their land, but to exchange western for eastern territory and to make additional compensation, including payment of tribal annuities.

  A Hollow Victory in the Supreme Court

  In theory, and by law, Indian “removal” was a voluntary exchange of eastern lands for western lands. In practice, however, Indians were most often coerced or duped into making the exchange. Typically, government officials would secure the agreement of some Indian leaders deemed—by the government—to speak for the tribe, make the exchange, and declare that exchange binding to all members of tribe. Whether or not a majority of the tribe acknowledged the authority of these leaders hardly mattered. After an agreement was concluded, the government claimed the right to move all the Indians off the land, by force if necessary.

  Some individuals and tribes went quietly; others, such as the Seminoles, fought. Still others, including numbers of Cherokees, holed up in the mountains to evade removal. The Cherokees, a politically sophisticated tribe, also took legal action. The tribe’s majority party, called the Nationalist party, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1832 to protest state-sanctioned seizures of property and prejudicial treatment in state and local courts, all intended to pressure the Indians into accepting the “exchanges” mandated by the Removal Act. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall declared Georgia’s persecution of the Indians unconstitutional. But this judgment proved a hollow victory, because President Jackson refused to use federal power to enforce the high court’s decision. The chief executive, who had shown himself quite capable of threatening South Carolina with armed intervention during the Nullification Crisis, now claimed that the federal government was powerless to interfere in the affairs of a state. Jackson advised the Indians to resolve their difficulties by accepting removal.

  In the meantime, Jackson’s officials were directed to negotiate a removal treaty with the compliant minority faction of the Cherokees (called the Treaty party), representing perhaps 1,000 out of 17,000 Cherokees living in the South. On December 29, 1835, the Jackson administration concluded the Treaty of New Echota, binding all of the Cherokees to remove. To crush resistance, Jackson barred the Cherokee National party from holding meetings to discuss the treaty or alternative courses of action. Nevertheless, under the leadership of John Ross, the Nationalists managed to delay the major phase of the removal operation until the fall and winter of 1838-39.

  A Man Called Osceola

  While the Cherokees were being subdued and removed, federal authorities turned their attention to the always troublesome Seminoles. Like the Cherokees, the Seminoles suffered abuse from state and local governments; their suffering was compounded in 1831 by a devastating drought. Faced with annihilation, Seminole leaders signed a provisional treaty on May 9, 1832, agreeing to removal pending tribal approval of the site designated for resettlement. Accordingly, a party of seven Seminoles traveled westward. But before they returned, an Indian agent named John Phagan coerced tribal representatives into signing a final treaty, binding the Seminoles to leave Florida by 1837. Not only did the tribe rescind the signatures as fraudulent, but even the government acknowledged the wrongdoing by removing Phagan from office. Nevertheless—and despite the fact that the Seminoles’ report on the proposed new homeland was negative—President Jackson sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification. With the treaty secured, troops were sent into Florida to begin organizing the removal.

  By early in the winter of 1835, the increasing troop strength made it clear to Seminole leaders that war was in the offing. During this period, Osceola (1803-1838)—called Billy Powell by the whites—emerged as a charismatic Seminole leader. He negotiated with federal Indian agents to put off removal until January 15, 1836, hoping to buy sufficient time to prepare for the coming combat. Osceola set about organizing Seminole and “Red Stick” Creek resistance.

  Beginning in December 1835, Osceola initiated guerrilla warfare, taking special pains to attack bridges critical for transporting troops and artillery. In every respect, Osceola proved a formidable adversary, a brilliant tactician who made extensive use of effective reconnaissance, and a fierce warrior. Generals Edmund Gaines, Duncan Clinch, Winfield Scott, Robert Call, Thomas Jesup, and Zachary Taylor all failed to bring the Second Seminole War to a conclusion. Osceola himself was finally captured, on October 21, 1837, not through the military skill of the federal troops, but by deception. General Jesup requested a “truce” conference in Osceola’s camp; Osceola complied—and was treacherously taken captive. Consigned to a prison cell at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, Osceola contracted “acute quinsy” and died on January 30, 1838.

  Despite Osceola’s capture and death, the war continued from 1835 to 1842, a period during which 3,000 Seminoles did submit to removal, but at the average cost of one soldier killed for every two Indians “removed.” The Second Seminole War never really ended, but petered out, only to become reactivated during 1855-58 as the Third Seminole War. The last Seminole holdouts refused to sign treaties with the United States until 1934.

  “The Cruelest Work I Ever Knew”

  During the summer of 1838, Major General Winfield Scott began a massive roundup of Cherokees. In accordance with the terms of the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokees were to be removed to “Indian Territory,” an area encompassing present-day Oklahoma and parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Those few Indians who did not successfully find refuge in the Blue Ridge Mountains were herded into concentration camps, where they endured the misery of a long, hot, disease-plagued summer.

  During the fall and winter of 1838-39, the Indians were marched under armed escort along the 1,200-mile route to Indian Territory. Cold, short of food, subject to the abuse of their military guards (including theft, rape, and murder), 4,000 of the 15,000 who made the journey perished. Many years later, a Georgia soldier recalled: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen, men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever saw.” The Cherokees forever afterward called the experience the “Trail of Tears.”

  Indian Territory

  What awaited the Cherokees and other Native peoples removed from the East was a vast tract of relatively barren western land. Whereas their eastern homelands had been lush and green, the Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota region was arid. Much of the stubborn soil was resistant to cultivation and certainly unsuited to the type of agriculture the Indians had pursued in the East. The hardships of soil and climate, combined with the callous inefficiency and general corruption of the federal system that was obligated by treaty to aid and support the “resettled” Indians, killed many. Others, cer
tainly, died of nothing more or less than broken hearts. Yet, over time, many among the removed tribes made the best of their grim situation and, in varying degrees, even prospered.

  Contrary to treaty agreements, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reduced the area of Indian Territory. During the Civil War, many Cherokee, Creeks, and others allied themselves with the Confederates. The victorious Union forces punished these Indians in 1866 by further reducing the size of Indian Territory, confining it to the area encompassed by present-day Oklahoma.

  The Least You Need to Know

  In the Nullification Crisis, “states’ rights” confronted federal authority in a prelude to civil war.

  The Indian Removal Act was an attempt to separate Indians and whites by means of land exchanges. In practice, the act authorized the brutal exile of Cherokee, Semi-nole. Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek Indians (the “Five Civilized Tribes”) to and Indian Territory concentrated in present-day Oklahoma.

  Word for the Day

  To cede land is to give it up, usually as a condition of surrender or in exchange for something of value (money or other land). Cession is the noun form of the word and is not to be confused with secession, which refers specifically to the breakaway of 11 Southern states that precipitated the Civil War.

  Voice from the Past

  As was true of all white-Indian wars, much time was consumed in fruitless pursuit without encountering the enemy. A young Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Illinois militia in 1832. He later recalled:

  “If General Cass [Michigan’s territorial governor, who later became Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war] went in advance of me in picking whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges upon wild onions. If he saw any live fighting Indians, it was more than I did, but I had a good many bloody experiences with the mosquitoes; and although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.”

  Chains, Whips, and Heartbreak

  (1724-1857)

  In This Chapter

  A nation divided over the slavery issue

  Abolition movements, the Underground Railroad, and rebellion

  Compromises on the slavery issue

  Bleeding Kansas and the Dred Scott decision

  By the early 1700s, slavery had caught on in a big way throughout the Southern colonies. In places like South Carolina, slavery became essential to the economy, and slaves soon outnumbered whites in that colony. The Declaration of Independence declared no slave free, and the Constitution mostly avoided the issue, except for the purposes of levying taxes, determining representation in Congress (for purposes of such enumeration, slaves were deemed three-fifths of a human being), and specifying that the slave trade (that is, importation) was to end within 20 years.

  The irony was most bitter. The sweet land of liberty persisted in maintaining an institution that the rest of the world’s nations were quickly abandoning. The British Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. The emerging nations of South America made slavery illegal, and Spain and Portugal officially abolished slave trading in 1840. But America remained a slave nation, and this fact was tearing the country apart.

  Against the American Grain

  From the beginning, a great many Americans were opposed to slavery. The first organized opposition came from the Quakers, who issued a statement against the institution as early as 1724.

  During the colonial periods, slave markets were active in the North as well as the South. However, the agricultural economy of the northern colonies was built upon small farms rather than vast plantations. Although many people in the North were passionately opposed to slavery on moral grounds, it is also true that the region lacked the economic motives for it. Therefore, an increasing number of colonists regarded slavery as unnecessary and undesirable; following independence, various states outlawed slavery. Rhode Island, traditionally a seat of tolerance, abolished the institution as early as 1774. Another bright spot existed in this early era: The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 excluded slavery from the vast Northwest Territory.

  Cotton Gin

  Just six years after passage of the Northwest Ordinance, however, a New Englander working as a tutor in Georgia invented a brilliantly simple machine that revolutionized the cotton industry; in so doing, he ensured the continuance of slavery. Eli Whitney (1765-1825), fascinated by operations on the large Southern plantations, saw that planters were vexed by a problem with the short-staple cotton raised in the lower South. The plants’ seeds required extensive handwork to remove. Even done by slaves, the labor was so time-consuming that profits were sharply curtailed. By April 1793, Whitney had fashioned a machine that used a toothed cylinder to separate the cottonseed from the cotton fiber. Each “cotton gin” could turn out 50 pounds of cleaned cotton a day—far more than what manual labor could produce.

  With cotton production suddenly becoming extremely profitable, farmers all over the South turned to it, and “King Cotton” soon displaced tobacco, rice, and indigo as the primary Southern export crop. With increased production also came a greatly increased demand for slave labor to pick the cotton.

  Underground Railroad

  As an earlier generation had been fascinated by inventions like the cotton gin, so now Americans were enthralled by another innovation, railroads, which began appearing in the United States during the late 1820s. If the railroad seemed a technological miracle, abolitionists (those who wanted to abolish slavery) were aware that they needed a spiritual and moral miracle. By 1830, the highly organized abolitionists developed a network they called the Underground Railroad.

  The system was a loose network of individuals—whites and free blacks, called “conductors”—and safe houses (“stations”) dedicated to nothing less than the secret delivery—and deliverance—of slaves (“passengers”) from slave states to free ones. In the years prior to the Civil War, 50,000 to 100,000 slaves found freedom via the Underground Railroad.

  Southern slaveholders did not suffer the Underground Railroad gladly. “Conductors” were menaced, assaulted, and even killed. Fugitive slaves, once retaken, were often severely punished as an example to others. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1842 (Prigg v. Pennsylvania) that states were not required to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 179 3 (which provided for the return of slaves who escaped to free states), opposition to the Underground Railroad became rabid.

  Nat Turner’s Rebellion

  Resistance to slavery was not always nonviolent, and the fear of slave rebellion was never far from the thoughts of Southern slave holders. Nat Turner was a slave on the South-hampton County, Virginia, plantation of Joseph Travis. A fiery lay preacher, Turner gathered about him a band of rebellious fellow slaves, and just before dawn on August 22, 1831, lie and his followers killed every white member of the Travis household. The band then swept through the countryside, killing every white they encountered during the next 24 hours—perhaps 60 whites in all. Reaction, in turn, was swift and terrible. Turner and 50 of his band were apprehended and quickly tried. Twenty were summarily hanged. The enflamed white avengers went beyond this measure, however, indulging in their own rampage of killing and torture, directed indiscriminately at whatever blacks they happened to run across.

  Although slave rebellions were hardly new in 1831, in an atmosphere of organized opposition to slavery, Nat Turner’s Rebellion created unprecedented panic in the South and hardened Southern antagonism to abolitionist efforts.

  The Liberator and the Narrative

  The year that saw Nat Turner’s Rebellion also witnessed the emergence of a new newspaper in the North. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was a genteel New England abolitionist—a native of Newburyport, Massachusetts—who became coeditor of a moderate periodical called The Genius of Universal Emancipation. But the injustice of slavery soon ignited a fiercer fire in Garrison’s belly, and on January 1, 1831, he published the first issue of The Liberator. This was a radical and eloquent abolitionist periodical that declared slaver, an abomination in th
e sight of God and that demanded the immediate emancipation of all slaves, without compromise. The Liberator galvanized the abolitionist movement, Three years after the first number was printed, Garrison presided over the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Using The Liberator and the society, Garrison embarked on a massive campaign of what he called “moral suasion.” He believed that slaver), would be abolished when a majority of white Americans experienced a “revolution in conscience.”

  Garrison grew increasingly strident in his views, and by the late 1830s, some abolitionists broke with him. In 1842, he made his most radical stand, declaring that Northerners should disavow all allegiance to the Union because the Constitution protected slavery. A pacifist, Garrison nevertheless hailed John Brown’s bloody 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry for the purpose of stealing guns to arm slaves for a general uprising.