Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Outraged at President Madison, Jackson wrote him a fiery letter insisting the Cherokees “never had the least semblance of claim” to the land and accusing the president of “wantonly surrendering” land that was of “incalculable value” to the United States.

  Remarkably Jackson was accusing Madison of ignoring national security. His argument was that it jeopardized the security interest of the United States to have hostile Indian nations within the geographical land mass of the country where whites lived. I think Jackson was sincere in his patriotism and believed this argument when he made it. Still, it is hard to escape notice that this land was also of immense financial and political value to him personally.

  Jackson used his political connections to try to reverse the Madison administration’s ruling. He stirred up land-seeking whites from his home county to deluge the government with protest letters. This correspondence urged the Madison administration to drive the Indians farther west so that white citizens could travel without “the risk of being murdered at every wigwam by some drunken savage.”29

  BUY LOW, SELL HIGH

  Jackson was smarting from his defeat—not merely a humiliation, but a blow to his pocketbook—but the Cherokee maneuver would prove the first, and last, time he was beaten by the Indians. Soon Jackson convinced the Madison administration to give him the right to negotiate with the Cherokees to buy some of the land in question. Jackson implemented a new, and this time successful, rip-off scheme.

  Jackson’s first step was to bribe the Cherokee chiefs. Each of them received “presents” from Jackson that ranged from $50 to $100. Jackson also used threats and intimidation against Cherokee holdouts. He and his associate John Coffee warned Cherokee leaders that if they failed to sell their land, then white settlers would take it for nothing.

  Jackson obviously had no intention of offering military protection to the Cherokee against these white intruders. Jackson’s offer to the Cherokee was: take my money and leave, and then your safety will be guaranteed. Many Cherokee dejectedly agreed to depart from the lands on which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds if not thousands of years.

  As soon as this happened, Inskeep reports, “Jackson and his friends moved to take advantage. The scale of their gain has rarely, if ever, been calculated. Many real estate records from the era have been lost. But records that survive show that after 1816, the names of Andrew Jackson, his relatives, and his two closest business associates appeared on the titles to more than forty-five thousand acres of newly opened Alabama land. Most was in the Tennessee Valley.”30

  The U.S. government opened a land office in Huntsville, Alabama, to sell the newly acquired land. Jackson was ready, along with his associate John Coffee. While both were already quite wealthy, they needed more money to make the large purchases they coveted. So they went to a wealthy investor named James Jackson, a longtime friend of Coffee and Andrew Jackson, and together the three of them formed a business partnership “to purchase or enter lands in the Alabama Territory.”

  Jackson also teamed up separately with his brother-in-law, John Donelson, who brought a group of Philadelphia investors. While Jackson certainly intended to enrich his relatives and cronies, every one of these deals was structured to provide maximum benefit to Andrew Jackson.

  Inskeep reports in Jacksonland that in order to camouflage the scale of his investments, Jackson put the land that he bought into other people’s names. For instance, he listed three tracts of land on the south side of the river in the name of Andrew Jackson Hutchings, an orphaned relative of his wife Rachel. “More than twenty-two hundred acres were purchased under the name of William Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s nephew. William Donelson was also the registered name for the purchaser of thirteen town lots in Coldwater, the former Indian village at the bottom of Muscle Shoals.”

  At times Jackson acted alone. When a large plot came up for auction at Muscle Shoals, Jackson leaped up and offered the minimum bid. There were many other bidders, but recognizing Jackson among their number, no one else raised his hand. Jackson was elated. “This section I bought at two dollars per acre,” he later wrote, “no person bidding against me, and as soon as I bid, hailed by the unanimous shouts of a numerous & mixed multitude.” Jackson declared that he found this “gratifying, as it was an approval of my official acts.”31 Old Hand Jackson knew the score: he was the one who created the whole racket, so naturally he expected others to let him have a piece of it.

  In 1818, Jackson spied a real estate opportunity in Florida. The opportunity was created by marauding Indians conducting raids from Spanish Florida. The Monroe administration sent Jackson to Florida to stop the raids. Jackson declared his purpose to “chastise” the Indians, which in his parlance meant to kill them. Although he had been specifically instructed to deal with the Indians and not occupy Spanish land, Jackson entered West Florida, captured Pensacola, appointed a governor there, and started collecting taxes.

  Jackson’s illicit action caused a stir in Washington, but many ordinary people cheered Jackson. By now they knew the routine. Jackson takes land, chases off the Indians, and then we get to buy it at fire-sale prices. This was the American Dream, in the version created by the founder of the Democratic Party. The Monroe administration backed down, and once again Jackson found himself in a position to win the allegiance of future voters while amply lining his own pockets.

  As Inskeep reports, Jackson and his associates were planning their Florida investments even before he invaded. Later Jackson’s critics would say that he took Florida solely for the purpose of his personal real estate speculation. Inskeep argues—and I agree—that this is an exaggeration. Jackson wanted Florida for the United States. He wanted settlers to move there, settlers who may at some point in the future be beholden to him. And he wanted to make money out of the whole deal.

  Jackson dispatched his brother-in-law and business partner John Donelson to Florida. Donelson went, carrying a letter of introduction from Jackson. There he found—voila!—that many doors were open for him. Jackson and his friends invested heavily in Florida real estate. Later they sold much of that land at many times the price they paid for it. In other words, they made out like bandits.

  In five separate treaties between 1816 and 1820, Jackson forced the Indians to give up tens of millions of acres in what would eventually become five American states. In this respect, Jackson is the true architect of the map of the Deep South. We can respect the single-minded determination with which he created what Inskeep calls “Jacksonland” while at the same time deploring the self-serving means that were used to bring it about.

  THE EVIDENCE DISAPPEARS

  Jackson’s real estate shenanigans became a hot topic in his 1828 presidential campaign. Even earlier, in 1824, his opponents suspected him of profiting from political office but they were unable to produce convincing evidence. By 1828, however, Jackson’s critics had gotten smarter and more determined. Jackson, however, was ready for them. On December 4, 1827, a fire broke out in the building containing Jackson’s financial papers. Conveniently, all the original records of his earlier land dealings were destroyed.32

  Jackson professed his innocence, and again, no one could prove he was behind the fire. The whole situation, however, bears an uncanny resemblance to Hillary Clinton deleting her emails. Oops! They’re gone! And now we will never have full information about why she set up her private email account and what she wanted to keep out of the official State Department email system. Hillary might have thought she was being original, but Jackson got there first. Just like his twenty-first-century counterpart, Jackson deleted the evidence that his critics might have used to incriminate him.

  Thanks to his land-stealing schemes, Jackson went from living in a log cabin to running a huge plantation stretching over a thousand acres. In 1819, he and Rachel moved out of their log house and built a mansion that still stands today, with a spectacular white colonnade front that awed visitors then as it does now. As for the old log cabin, Jackson found another
use for it. What good is a plantation if you don’t have slaves? Jackson converted his former dwelling into slave quarters.

  Jackson had been a slave owner since his early days as a young lawyer in Tennessee. His first slave was a woman named Nancy. The record of the sale notes that “Andrew Jackson Esquire” took ownership of “a Negro Woman about Eighteen or Twenty Years of Age.”33 Later, as Jackson grew rich and his real estate multiplied, he bought slaves to work that land. Altogether, Jackson owned some three hundred slaves over the course of his life. The most he owned at any one time was 150 slaves.

  This made him a large slave owner by American standards. By contrast with the South American plantations, American plantations were typically quite small, employing fewer than twenty slaves. Jackson was also a slave trader, a practice disparaged by most slave owners. In one telling incident, Jackson purchased an ad in a local paper offering a bounty for one of his runaway slaves. Jackson offered a $50 reward for the return of the slave “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him to the amount of three hundred.”34

  Eventually Jackson rode his wealth and popularity all the way to the White House. In 1824, the first time Jackson ran, all the candidates were from a single party, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. There was at the time no system of primaries to determine who should get the nomination. Although Jackson won the most votes, he was outmaneuvered by an adversary, Henry Clay, who steered the presidency to John Quincy Adams.

  An indignant Jackson and his supporters formed the Democratic Party, while his opponents coalesced into a rival Whig Party. These were the two parties that dominated American politics for the next few decades, until the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was founded. The Whigs, led by the stalwart Henry Clay, provided modest though largely ineffective resistance to Jackson. Until the founding of the Republican Party, however, there was no party in America strong enough to stop the thieving Democrats.

  The Jackson Democrats won by an electoral landslide in 1828. A central plank of Jackson’s campaign was Indian removal. In defending this policy, Jackson suggested his actions promoted the welfare of the Indians. He spoke of “preserving this much-injured race” by placing them under government protection “free from the mercenary influence of white men.” To listen to Jackson, one might think he was relocating the Indians for their own good.

  At the same time, speaking to Democratic audiences, Jackson supporters made their case for Indian removal in terms that didn’t shy away from bigotry. Jackson ally Lewis Cass, the governor of Michigan territory, said of the Indians, “To roam the forests at will, to pursue their game, to attack their enemies, to spend the rest of their lives in listless indolence, and to be ready at all times to die—these are the principal occupations of an Indian.”35

  Upon taking office, Jackson instructed his allies in Congress to draw up the Indian Removal Act. The legislation gave Jackson the power to offer land west of the Mississippi to Indian tribes. The Indians were expected to give up their land in the east for new land in the west, and Congress appropriated money to pay for their moving expenses. Theoretically the Indians were being asked to move by choice, but in reality they were being pushed out. Settlers stood ready to occupy Indian lands whether the Indians voluntarily gave them up or not.

  Although there was no Republican Party around at the time to stop Jackson, there were many who opposed Jackson’s Indian policy. One of them was Jackson’s former ally Davy Crockett. “Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining myself,” Crockett confessed. Jackson’s minions threatened that Crockett would suffer politically for his opposition. Even so, Crockett stood firm, condemning Jackson’s Indian policy as “wicked” and “unjust” and “oppression with a vengeance.”36

  While most of the Indians got the message and started packing, the Cherokees refused to go. The Cherokee position was that it didn’t matter what Congress decided. The Cherokee were a separate nation with their own written constitution. They were protected by a slew of treaties with the United States government going back generations. The Cherokees appealed their cause to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the decision was handed down by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

  Marshall conceded that European settlers had gained control of much of the United States and that the right of U.S. citizens to occupy the land of the country was “conceded by the world.” Still, Marshall said, there was no evidence that the Cherokee Nation had relinquished its right to the lands it still possessed. Congress had expressly affirmed those rights through treaties dating back to 1778. Certainly the Indians, lacking power to enforce their rights, were now under the protection of the United States. Even so, Marshall concluded, with seemingly specific reference to Jackson, “Protection does not imply the destruction of the protected.”37

  LET HIM ENFORCE IT

  How did Jackson respond to Marshall’s ruling? He ignored it. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he quipped. “Now let him enforce it.” While historians debate whether Jackson said exactly these words, there is little doubt that these were his sentiments. In any case Jackson took no steps to carry out the Supreme Court’s ruling. He allowed Georgia settlers to force the Cherokee to relocate. This was accomplished by stealing Indian livestock, burning Indian towns, and squatting on Indian land.

  Jackson’s conduct in this respect echoes the Obama administration’s refusal to comply with laws and court rulings that Obama finds uncongenial. From the Defense of Marriage Act to welfare reform to Obamacare to immigration, today’s progressives seem willing to bend the law to their own purposes. This tradition of Democratic lawlessness has its true forefather in Andrew Jackson.

  The Cherokee continued to protest. The tribe owned a printing press which put out a newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. Acting on the advice of Jackson’s former attorney general, John Berrien, Jackson’s people raided the printing house and destroyed the press, shattering it to pieces and silencing the voice of the Cherokee people.

  Jackson also had Cherokee leader John Ross arrested. The Jackson administration then opened up an investigation into whether Ross was a genuine Native American. Actually there was little doubt he was. While Ross had Scottish and Irish blood through his father and grandfather’s line, Cherokee society was matrilineal, and Ross had Cherokee blood directly through his mother and grandmother. Ross’s great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee. The Cherokee recognized him not merely as one of their own but as their elected leader.

  Jackson, however, considered Ross to be a fake Indian. In 1834, Jackson’s men organized a plebiscite of the Cherokee and put before them the question of whether Ross was a legitimate Native American and whether he actually represented their interests. To Jackson’s chagrin, Ross won 95 percent of the vote. Jackson tried again the next year, and once again the Cherokee overwhelmingly sided with Ross.38

  By itself the Jackson ploy was transparent and got nowhere. But it’s worth noting, because successive generations of Democrats have continued Jackson’s practice of trying to discredit nonwhite opponents by portraying them as inauthentic. Today when Republicans who are black, Hispanic, or Native American expose Democratic chicanery, they are routinely denounced—not just by Democrats but also by their allies in the press—as sellouts and, in the case of African Americans, “Uncle Toms.”

  For example, political scientist Manning Marable said of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Ethnically, Thomas has ceased to be an African American.” Columnist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post wrote of black economist Thomas Sowell, “Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage as Sowell is doing.” And Spike Lee said that Michael Williams, a black appointee in the Bush administration, was such a traitor to his race that he deserved to be “dragged into an alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”39

  Back to our story. Eventually the Jackson Democrats found a small faction of Cherokee wh
o were willing, in exchange for bribes, to sign a removal agreement. This was called the Treaty of New Echota. The leaders of this group were the true Uncle Toms. They were not the recognized leaders of the Cherokee, and more than fifteen thousand Cherokee—led by Ross—signed a petition of protest. Ignoring their pleas, the U.S. government gave the Cherokee two years to migrate voluntarily.

  The deadline of 1838 came and went, and most Cherokee had not moved. The Democrats at this point did not hesitate to use force. Those who refused to move were compelled. “The soldiers cleared out one farm at a time, one valley at a time,” Inskeep writes. “Approaching a house, the troops would surround it so that no one would escape, then order out the occupants with no more than they could carry.”40

  Native Indians unable to travel were rounded up in internment camps, a policy reminiscent of the Japanese internments that a later Democratic administration would enforce during World War II. Reports differ about how bad conditions in the camps were; what no one disputes is that around four thousand Indians died from malnourishment and disease. The Trail of Tears has gone down in American history as cruel and infamous. It certainly was, although its actual perpetrator was not “America” but rather the Jackson Democrats.

  The Trail of Tears occurred after Jackson had left the presidency. He was by this time back at his plantation, the Hermitage. His handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, was president. Yet Van Buren was only continuing the policies of his mentor. From a safe distance, Jackson approvingly watched his Democratic Party carry out his handiwork.