Black Hawk and the Sac had not wanted war—they crossed the Mississippi on a hunt for increasingly scarce game—and neither were they aware of the vast cessions of Indian land. Once fighting erupted in 1832, Black Hawk waged a powerful resistance as he held off a much larger force in the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. However, at the subsequent “Battle” of Bad Axe—actually a massacre—a large federal force and hundreds of volunteers killed some 500 Indians. Many of the indigenes were “needlessly and ruthlessly slaughtered.” Some Americans tried with limited success to stop others from killing innocent women and children. One volunteer boasted that the irregular forces “killed everything that didn’t surrender” including “three squaws [who] … were naked” after having been sexually assaulted.
Consistent with other settler colonial settings, the Bad Axe massacre was neither isolated nor incidental but rather capped off the cleansing campaign. It was a “great misfortune” that women and children had been killed, a volunteer mused, but the “Ruler of the Universe” had seen fit for the battle to transpire in that way. Moreover, the Indians were “the savage enemy and the common enemy of the country” and thus deserving of their fate. Despite such demonizing discourse, many Indians, ambivalent about conflict with the Americans, rallied behind the accommodationist Sauk chief Keokuk, who opposed the war and eventually displaced Black Hawk as the leader of the tribe. Keokuk “attempted to walk a tightrope” as he strove “to placate American officials while at the same time protecting his people from both the [marauding] Sioux and unruly white settlers.”51
The federal government exploited the “savage” resistance in the Black Hawk War to rationalize extension of settler colonialism across the borderlands. As the Americans removed Indians from land in present-day Iowa, the Sac and Fox coalesced into a single tribe, migrated to Kansas, and were later forced into the Indian territory of Oklahoma. Americans continued to exploit their ambivalent Indian allies for military assistance only to abandon them once the conflict came to an end. Potawatomi and Winnebago bands had allied with the United States in the Black Hawk War but their “fidelity would be forgotten in the rising demand that all Indians be removed beyond the Mississippi.” As one Winnebago belatedly concluded, “We think the Big Father does not care for us any longer, now that he has all our best land.” Within two decades “virtually the entire region passed into the hands of the federal government,” Patrick Jung points out.52
Settler colonialists in the southeastern United States orchestrated the most well known Indian Removal program in American History. The Cherokee had long occupied mountainous regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia; the Creeks (Muskogee) had vast holdings in what became the states of Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida; the Seminole split off from the Creeks in Florida while the Choctaw and Chickasaw lived further west in the Mississippi territory. All would be subjected to a relentless campaign of state and federal ethnic cleansing and each would have its own “trail of tears.”
Though culminating in the 1830s, southeastern Indian Removal had been a gradual process driven by the settler colonial project. The Cherokee, their population already halved from 1700 to 1775 by smallpox and other diseases, suffered further devastating losses in the American Revolution. When they had joined the Shawnee and British in resistance, American settlers vowed to “carry fire and sword into the very bowels of their country.” (emphasis added). Americans conducted scorched earth campaigns against Cherokee villages, crops, and stores. By the end of the American Revolution the Cherokee population had dropped to some 10,000 and they had lost three-fourths of their homelands and hunting grounds and more than half their villages. Squatter and missionary invasions followed, backed by the Jefferson administration, which took additional land cessions in treaties of 1804 and 1806.53
All the tribes felt the effects of the Revolutionary War, disease, squatter infiltration, erosion of hunting grounds, and cultural dissolution. The Creek resisted American settler colonialism in the Revolutionary War era. Although the governor of Georgia vowed, “Your conduct towards us long since has authorized our putting flames to your towns, and indiscriminately killing your people,” the settlers could not yet carry out their palpable desire to extirpate the Creeks.54 To the west the Choctaw and Chickasaw, “nations” remained intact as well.
The American victory in the War of 1812 eroded the ambivalence toward the indigenous people and paved the way for the Indian removal campaign. Most Americans agreed with John C. Calhoun, whose grandfather Patrick Calhoun had been killed in a Cherokee raid at Long Cane in the Carolina backcountry. Calhoun declared that victory over Britain and its Indian allies in the War of 1812 had brought an “important change.” With the British ally driven out of the west, Indians had now “ceased to be an object of terror,” hence there was no longer any need to negotiate with them. Instead, “Our views of their interest, and not their own, ought to govern them.” In 1824 Calhoun placed the new Office of Indian Affairs under his supervision within the Department of War.55
Divisions within the tribes facilitated the emerging American cleansing campaign. By the 1790s the Creeks had split into rival Upper and Lower bands, the former more acculturated, mestizo, economically well heeled, and by now “deeply alienated from most Creek traditions and the vast majority of the Creek people.” The most prominent representative of this group was McGillvray, the son of a Scotsman and a Creek woman, who upon his death in 1792 left a landed estate with some 300 heads of cattle and worked by 60 slaves. In an effort to preserve their own privileged position, the Upper Creeks embraced “civilization” over Indian ways and “ceded to the United States the very hunting grounds that most people depended on for survival.” During the “hungry period” of the 1790s, “wealthy Creeks continued to fare well, while hunters and hoers suffered without relief.” Accommodation to Euro-American culture thus brought class conflict and “an astounding degree of inequality” to Indian country. The arrival of Tecumseh into Creek country on the eve of the War of 1812 sowed further divisions, as the Upper Creeks disdained the Shawnee leader’s efforts to mobilize pan-Indian resistance to the Americans while the Lower Creeks embraced it.56
A “devastating civil war” within the Creeks unfolded in concert with the War of 1812, a reminder that savage conflict was not limited to clashes between whites and indigenes. The Lower Creeks—now called Red Sticks for the red clubs they carried in solidarity with Tecumseh’s pan-Indian cultural revival—attacked settlers and mixed bloods viciously and indiscriminately. On August 29, 1813, the Fort Mims Massacre north of Mobile marked the apogee of this violence, as the Red Sticks slaughtered some 500 mixed-blood Creeks and white settlers. On March 27, 1814, in the culmination to a scorched-earth campaign through Creek country, General Jackson led a 2,500-man force of Tennessee militia, Upper Creek, and Choctaw allies against the Red Sticks. After hemming them in at Tohopeka or the “Horseshoe Bend” of the Tallapoosa River, Jackson’s forces slaughtered more than 800 Red Sticks—557 in the battle and some 300 more who plunged into the river and tried unsuccessfully to swim to safety. “To make the body count accurate,” Andrew Burstein notes, “the Tennesseans sliced off the tips of the dead Creeks’ noses one by one.”57
In the Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on August 9, 1814, the US war with the Creeks formally ended with a massive annexation of more than half of all Creek land, a huge swath of colonial space across the American southeast. Thus, as with its Indian allies in previous wars, the United States had no intention of rewarding the ambivalent Indians for their wartime alliance by allowing them to keep their land but instead would take it for the benefit of land speculators and settlers. Although the Upper Creeks eventually received compensation for destroyed property, the war within had fatally compromised the Creeks as a whole.
Like Jefferson, Jackson embodied ambivalence toward the natives, an ambivalence that easily gave way to indiscriminate killing and removal. Jackson allied and fought side by side with Indians, sometimes spoke admiringly o
f them, yet he had long viewed the indigenes as a menace “constantly infesting our frontier.” Writing to Harrison after the Battle of Tippecanoe, Jackson declared, “The blood of our murdered countrymen must be avenged … That banditti must be swept from the face of the earth.”58 An unapologetic slaveholder, whose first purchase as a single man was a 19-year-old slave girl, Jackson had become a self-made borderland elite in Tennessee but needed military heroism on his resume in order to realize his national political ambitions. Following Horseshoe Bend, Jackson became Major General in the US Army, the highest rank in the nation. His victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 made Jackson the country’s most popular military hero since the venerable Washington. Well representing American ambitions, Jackson set his sight on Florida and characteristically would brook no opposition in his determination to “liberate” the peninsula from the Spanish and the Indian “banditti.”
Spain had occupied Florida for three centuries but American settlers, filibusterers, and the federal government strove to bring an end to Spanish colonialism in the southeast. Spain had lost Florida once, after the French and Indian War in 1763; got it back in the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then allied with Britain and the Florida Indians against the Americans in the War of 1812. In response to American filibustering expeditions into Spanish East Florida on the eve of the War of 1812, Spain encouraged Indian assaults and guerrilla attacks on American settler enclaves.
The Spanish and the southeastern tribes fully grasped the US intent and attempted to band together to ward off an American takeover. The indigenous tribes proved willing to recognize Spanish possessions in exchange for recognition of their own. In contrast to the aggressive Americans, Spain recognized lands that “legitimately and indisputably” belonged to the tribes. Spain pursued indigenousstyle kinship ties, offered the Indians “lavish tribute,” and no longer sought to convert them to Catholicism. In a culminating treaty at the Fort of Nogales in 1793, the Alabama, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Tallapoosa accepted Spain’s “protection” and in return the tribes recognized Spanish Louisiana and Florida.59
Americans damned the Spanish “Dons” as dishonorable for taking on “savages,” but even more disturbing than colluding with the Indians was Spain’s deployment of runaway slaves, so-called “maroons” that Americans considered “the vilest species” of opponent. Ambivalence and mixed loyalties still prevailed in Florida, where the settlers had long traded and interacted with Indians. But as the indigenes began “setting fire to their plantations, and ravaging their farms,” Americans set out to drive the Indians and the Spaniards from the land in the wake of the War of 1812.60
Under Jackson’s hyper-aggressive masculine drive, Americans launched their assault on Spanish Florida in the so-called First Seminole War. The reference to the Seminole was generic, encompassing Creeks who had migrated south to Florida but also Alachua, Miccosukee, Tallahassee, and Apalachicola Indians. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson sent the Seminole and Red Sticks in flight to the Apalachicola swamps of West Florida. The United States built Fort Gadsden and other military posts and laid siege to the so-called “Negro Fort” where blacks and Indians were holding out along the Apalachicola River. On July 27, 1816, a red-hot cannonball fired from a US gunboat hit the magazine at the fort, blowing to pieces at least 40 defenders and forcing the remaining resistance to disperse.61
The explosion and burning of the “Negro Fort” carried important symbolic value to the Americans, who may have inflated the body count in using the figure of 300.62 As to the fatal bomb, “The great Ruler of the Universe must have used us as instruments in chastising the blood-thirsty and murderous wretches that defended the fort,” a brigadier general explained. Jackson took as a green light (not that he would have heeded a red one) James Monroe’s non-response when he informed the president that he could take all of Florida from the Spanish within 60 days. After razing several Seminole villages, Jackson, on April 6, 1818, seized Fort Marks from the Spanish, hanging two British subjects in the process. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams provided Spain a face-saving diplomatic gloss through the subsequent Adams-Onîs or Transcontinental Treaty (1819), which formally turned over Florida and, significantly, also recognized US boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. Once again Europeans had signed over to the Americans land inhabited by tens of thousands of indigenous people. Americans would learn, however, that the indigenes would not go from Florida (or the West) without a long and bitter fight.63
Jackson’s regenerative violence opened new lands for settler colonialism and slavery and propelled him to the White House, where he made Indian Removal his top priority. Characteristically, nothing would deter him: Indian resistance, political rivals, weak-willed eastern reformers, even the Supreme Court, all would be swept aside. Yet Jackson was the agent not the progenitor of the removal program. Indian removal inhered in the structure of settler colonialism, which began evolving long before Jackson or the United States itself had come to exist. The style may have been Jackson’s but the substance represented continuity with previous American and Euro-American history of advancing “civilization” by driving indigenous people from the land.64
Proponents of the Indian Removal Act (IRA) of 1830 overcame opposition to secure passage of a full-blown, nationally legislated program of ethnic cleansing. The legislation invoked the familiar discourse of disavowal, as it provided funding for “such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose [emphasis added] to exchange the lands where they now reside” for “districts” west of the Mississippi River that were not currently part of any state or territory. Indians of course did not “choose” removal nor did the United States keep its pledge to “forever secure and guarantee to them, and their heirs or successors, the country so exchanged with them.” Secretary of War John Eaton openly declared that treaties with Indians were never meant to be permanent. A member of the House committee on Indian affairs acknowledged that treaty making was an “empty gesture” meant to appease the “vanity of tribal leaders.”65
Indian removal dramatically underscores the zero-sum nature of settler colonial expansion, as the Americans strove to remove all Indians regardless of their level of acculturation. Indian removal targeted the “five civilized tribes” of the southeast who had done the most to appropriate the culture of “civilization.” Thousands of indigenes spoke English, lived and dressed like Americans, had adopted white gender roles, and even owned slaves. Many Americans who “thought it had been right to supplant the savage hunter with the civilized farmer” now questioned whether it was right to “remove the Indian farmer so the white farmer could enjoy his country.”66
The IRA aroused intense opposition from masses of Americans. The opponents came overwhelmingly from north of the Mason–Dixon line and many linked the defense of Indians with their growing opposition to slavery as well as to what they perceived as overweening Southern political influence over the nation. Women proved especially active in the opposition and were behind a massive anti-removal petition campaign that went before the Congress. Many of those who defended the indigenes but ultimately lost the battle went on to found organizations such as the American Antislavery Society.67
Many of the opponents of Indian Removal and of slavery were Protestant reformers who pointed out that many Indians had acculturated and converted to Christianity. Protestant missionaries, aided by the federal Civilization Act of 1819, had long been streaming into Indian country to save souls, a project that gained momentum with the spread of the Second Great Awakening. Indians were among the tens of thousands of converts in the midst of fiery Methodist revivals. Many Indians, especially mixed bloods, responded to the emotional call, which to some complemented Indian religious traditions. Other Indians merely feigned conversion as a means of getting their children an opportunity for education in the mission schools. In 1822, for example, a Choctaw leader wrote, “We wish to follow the ways of the white people. We hope they will assist us in getting our children educated.”68
Turning a deaf ear to antiremoval as well as antislavery forces, Jackson and his southern stalwarts meant to appropriate colonial space from any and all Indians. The settlers and speculators of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi wanted Indian land for themselves and together with the hero president they prevailed over the ambivalent opponents of Indian removal. The invention of the cotton gin and the profitability of cotton in the burgeoning market economy made the drive for dispossession all the more urgent. Moreover, gold had been discovered on Cherokee land in 1829. With wealth, progress, and white supremacy on the line, Georgia politicians branded Indians “useless and burdensome” and a “race not admitted to be equal.”69
Despite the blatancy of Jackson and his constituents, Americans drenched the removal program within a rationalizing discourse of benevolent paternalism. As Indians were “a vanishing race,” removal was the only means to protect these “children” from harm. Even opponents of Indian Removal such as Jackson’s rival Henry Clay dubbed Indians “essentially inferior” as well as “rapidly disappearing” and “destined to extinction.” Lewis Cass averred in a familiar refrain that removal was the “only means of preserving the Indians from utter destruction.” As a result of “popular acceptance of the theory of the Vanishing American,” Brian Dippie points out, “the humanitarian argument for removal was not easily refuted.” As the Frenchman Alexis Tocqueville sardonically observed, “It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.”70
The ambivalent among the Choctaw, who had fought with Jackson against the Red Sticks and again at New Orleans, found that their indigeneity far outweighed their acculturation and loyalty to the United States. “Jackson played into the naiveté of the Choctaws, who up to this point actually thought they were a valued ally and friend to the United States,” Donna Akers explains. The Choctaw reasoned that they had become integrated into the nation’s market economy, as they had shifted from selling deerskins in an exchange economy to successful cattle farming.71
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 15