Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  Maybe, also, the dissenters realized the central benefit of the constitution. Under this law there would be no repeat of 1775, when white speculators bought most of modern-day Kentucky for a houseful of trade goods; or of 1805 and 1806, when Doublehead sold much of Tennessee; or, for that matter, 1821, when some local chiefs allegedly conspired to sell Cherokee land in Alabama after corresponding with a friend of theirs, General Andrew Jackson. In each of these cases one or more Cherokee leaders freelanced agreements with outsiders. Now only one man would be in charge of Cherokee business with the United States: the principal chief, or chief executive, who had traditionally served for life but would now be elected to four-year terms by the legislature.

  Whatever business the chief might conduct with the United States, it was not going to be a real estate transaction.

  Article I, Sec. 1.

  The boundaries of this nation, embracing the lands solemnly guaranteed and reserved forever to the Cherokee Nation by the Treaties concluded with the United States, are as follows; and shall forever hereafter remain unalterably the same—to wit—Beginning on the North Bank of the Tennessee River at the upper part of the Chickasaw old fields… .

  Surely as the delegates proofread this document, and read it aloud for the delegates who were not literate, they must have noticed that the passage used the word “forever” twice. They must have liked the sound of it. They left it that way.

  • • •

  The constitution had hardly been approved when the Cherokees had an opportunity to test it. The men in New Echota that summer included a representative of the federal government—General John Cocke, a Tennessee military officer and a veteran of Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks. Cocke was one of three commissioners who were bringing a proposal from Washington. The federal government was offering to buy half a million acres of Cherokee land in North Carolina, as well as land for the digging of a canal. The commissioners invited Cherokee leaders to the federal Indian agency at Rattlesnake Springs, Tennessee, to discuss the government’s proposal, and promised to pay “every expense” of Indians who attended.

  Ross and Ridge declined. Ross, as he had once told President Monroe, despised the federal practice of calling special meetings with little notice. It allowed the government too much power to set the agenda. He told the commissioners to wait until the next legislative session in October 1827 in New Echota.

  General Cocke and his fellow commissioners lost their cool.

  We are correctly informed that Mr. John Ross has used all of his influence with the Nation to thwart the views of the United States.

  Or so they complained in a letter that was addressed to John Ross, the very man they needed to win over. “You remark,” they went on, that

  you have invited our attendance on the day appointed for the meeting of the approaching session of the General Council. Can you expect this subterfuge will avail, when you know you have predetermined to reject every proposition that we are authorized to make to the Cherokee Nation?

  Ross barely paused to deny the accusation, simply noting that Cocke had failed to name his source of information. “We are sorry to discover that you are ready to believe every unfavorable report respecting us.” He went on to answer another of the commissioners’ arguments for a meeting at the Indian agency. The commissioners had said that Rattlesnake Springs was perfectly capable of accommodating the Cherokees:

  It is true there is no palace for the reception of a King or Emperor; but there are four taverns in the vicinity of the Agency, and one at it, where all the Committee and Council can be well accommodated, and their expenses paid by us.

  One could imagine Ross struggling to suppress a smile as he penned his reply, professing to be mystified by the commissioners’ sarcasm.

  We do not understand the idea you intend to convey, in reference to a palace for the reception of a King or Emperor, as the Cherokee Nation are governed by neither, and we were not informed that you had anticipated the arrival of any of the Crowned Heads from abroad.

  Then came the final thrust.

  As to the four taverns spoken of we assure you that they were unknown to us.

  Perhaps you are familiar with every shabby inn selling whiskey, Ross was saying. We are not.

  The commissioners had no choice but to meet the Cherokees in New Echota at the time John Ross had suggested, at which time their proposal to buy land was politely rejected.

  In giving you this definitive reply, we do it with consideration and respect, uninfluenced by any Individual, but solely with the view of maintaining the interest of our nation.

  With great respect, we are politically your friends and brethren.

  Ross saved copies of all the correspondence. It would prove useful later.

  Interlude: Hero’s Progress

  1824–1825

  Fourteen

  Liberty, Equality, and True Social Order

  The U.S. Capitol, seat of the government Cherokees sought both to emulate and to outwit, was a different building in the 1820s than it is today. So white and perfect is the modern facade that a visitor might see no sign that the Capitol has been added to in the manner of an expanding family’s rambling house. In the 1820s the white cast-iron dome was not even imagined. The architect of the Capitol had recently completed a smaller, simpler dome of copper that turned green when exposed to the weather.

  The chamber of the House of Representatives was a gorgeous disaster, breathtaking to visit and terribly suited for its purpose. Redesigned after the British burned it in 1814, the room was roughly a half circle, with a high, arched roof—beautiful curvatures that complemented the semicircles of legislators’ desks, and also caused the human voice to reverberate in maddening ways. A lawmaker might perfectly hear a whisper a hundred feet away, while understanding not a word of the speaker at the rostrum. An account of one speech in 1819 described a lawmaker drowned out by “walking and talking and coughing” as he “begged” in vain to be heard.

  But certain events compelled people to fill the House and strain their ears. Such an event came on December 10, 1824. “At an early hour the galleries began to fill with spectators,” a newspaperman reported,

  and soon after 11 o’clock, many ladies entered into the Hall, and took possession of the sofas and seats, which were appropriated for their reception.

  So momentous was the occasion that women had been granted a rare dispensation, allowed not merely in the elevated gallery at the back of the hall, but on the House floor.

  A great number of additional seats soon became necessary; and, long before the hour appointed for the reception of the General, the House presented an exhibition of beauty and fassion which, we presume, has scarcely ever been equaled.

  The “General” was the Marquis de Lafayette. During the American Revolution the French general had fought alongside General Washington. Wounded in battle, Lafayette fought on, and played a role at the Battle of Yorktown. Now, at age sixty-seven, he had returned to behold the country whose freedom he had helped to secure.

  The House chamber was likely dim that day, as it was when Samuel F. B. Morse painted a picture of it. The future inventor of the telegraph began his career as an artist, and in 1822 rendered the House preparing for business. Lawmakers clustered near their seats, every man in a black coat and white shirt. A great brass chandelier was lowered from the ceiling so a man could set its lamps aflame. Beneath that chandelier on the day of Lafayette’s 1824 visit, the House began its work by voting to invite the Senate to attend the event, though oddly it was a contested vote, 90–69. Representatives made room for senators at the desks, and then

  General La Fayette entered the House, supported on his right by Mr. Mitchell, the chairman of the select committee, and on his left by Mr. Livingston… . The General was then conducted to the sofa placed for his reception, when the Speaker addressed him.

  Lafayette was in good health; he did not need to be “supported” on either side by a member of the House. But no politician would hav
e missed the opportunity to be seen beside him. Cabinet secretaries and diplomats leaned forward from their seats in the gallery, and all fell silent to hear the welcoming remarks of the Speaker of the House, who now stood behind the rostrum.

  The Speaker was Henry Clay of Kentucky, one of the most remarkable men of the early American republic, who had been a dominant force in Washington for more than a decade and was still well short of fifty. Clay was born in 1777, the same year Lafayette arrived to fight the British, and his remarks reflected Clay’s place in a younger generation. “Few of the members who compose this body shared with you in the War of our Revolution,” Clay said, but everyone knew “the perils, the sufferings, and the sacrifices which you voluntarily encountered.” This reference to generational differences fit into a generational drama in which Clay was involved. James Monroe, the last of five Founding Fathers to serve as president, was retiring. It was time for new leadership. Clay was a candidate in the presidential election of 1824. Since none of the four candidates had won a majority of the electoral votes that determined the winner, the Constitution said that the deadlock must soon be broken, and the next president chosen, by the House—this House, whose members sat in their semicircles facing Henry Clay.

  Clay was a leader from the growing West, and author of economic policies that came to be called the American System. He won so many admirers during his long life that more than a dozen states across the country would name a Clay County or Clay Township after him. But in 1824 he was not the only westerner on the ballot. Andrew Jackson was a candidate, and though the counting was incomplete in early December, it was clear that the hero of New Orleans had amassed more electoral votes than anyone. He was poised to elbow Clay off the pinnacle of generational and sectional leadership.

  Jackson was in Washington that December as a senator from Tennessee, and was almost certainly in the House chamber as Clay spoke. Of course, the two would show no sign of their confrontation. A presidential candidate was not supposed to campaign in public—but each man privately believed the other to be a menace. Their battles over many years would transfix the nation and influence its future, including its future treatment of Indians. Though the candidates did not debate Indian policy or anything else in 1824, it mattered who won. Clay had an ugly prejudice against Indians, but said they had rights and should not be removed without their consent. Jackson thought differently. He considered it a “farce” to make treaties with natives. They were subjects of the United States, who could be told what to do.

  • • •

  Clay missed none of the dramatic opportunities of introducing Lafayette. The French general, he said, had a chance to see what Americans had built upon his Revolutionary labor: “the forests felled, the cities built, the mountains leveled, the canals cut, the highways constructed, the progress of the arts, the advancement of learning, the increase in population—General … You are in the midst of posterity. Every where, you must have been struck with the great changes, physical and moral, which have occurred since you left us.”

  Lafayette had last seen a confederation of thirteen states along the Atlantic coast. Now the states numbered twenty-four, the United States controlled both banks of the Mississippi, and the newest state, Missouri, lay entirely west of it. Lafayette was on his way to see every one of those states, traveling by carriage and steamboat. Huge crowds met the old soldier, starting when his ship arrived in New York in August 1824. The New York crowd, estimated at fifty thousand people, was more than the entire population of the city in Revolutionary times. Now it was a metropolis swiftly approaching two hundred thousand. News of Lafayette’s arrival spread to every part of the country, even frontier zones; an article on Lafayette appeared in the Tuscumbian, in the newly settled Tennessee Valley near Florence, Alabama.

  Lafayette wanted to see everything. After arriving in New York, he dashed up to New England for a commencement at Harvard, where the library had twenty thousand books, an incredible collection for its time. Lafayette’s secretary said Harvard’s curriculum ranged from divinity and anatomy to “the Oriental languages”—not a surprise, since American seafarers were trading with China. Recently endowed chairs at the university focused on “Rhetoric and Eloquence,” important as democratic politics developed, and the application of physical and mathematical sciences to “the useful arts,” meaning business and industry. The profits generated by the useful arts were evident when Lafayette returned to New York, the commercial capital. He attended a celebration at Castle Garden, a fortress recently transformed into a place of entertainment, where hundreds danced cotillions beneath an “immense and splendid cut-glass chandelier.” He moved about the eastern waterways on steamboats run by Cornelius Vanderbilt, a self-educated sailor turned ferryboat entrepreneur who was making himself the richest man in America. Vanderbilt boats and stagecoaches combined to hurry the elites between New York and Philadelphia on an early version of the route that would become the modern-day Northeast Corridor railroad line, and when Lafayette made the trip, he rode in a carriage with Vanderbilt at the reins. At Philadelphia, workers and artisans marched in parade: “three hundred weavers—one hundred and fifty rope-makers—one hundred shipbuilders—seven hundred mechanics,” accompanied by “one hundred and fifty butchers” riding horses.

  On a side trip up the Hudson River, Lafayette heard “the thunder of a cannon a thousand times repeated by the echoes” off the surrounding cliffs—the signal that they had arrived at West Point. The U.S. Military Academy was thriving under the leadership of superintendent Sylvanus Thayer. Dedicated to creating a professional officer corps, the academy offered opportunity to youths like Robert E. Lee, whose prominent Virginia family was down on its luck. Farther up the Hudson, Lafayette glimpsed a portal to the expanding West: the Erie Canal, the almost-completed new route to the Great Lakes. He’d already seen a three-dimensional relief map of the canal on display in Manhattan, laid out on a table sixty feet long with water in the channel, lined by models of “houses, trees and animals.”

  The interior needed every connection it could get. Western life was harsh: typical was the story of Thomas Lincoln, one of many Kentuckians who lost their farmland to disputes over the title. Lincoln moved in 1816 to the brand-new state of Indiana, where establishing a farm required clearing the woods tree by tree on land that had only recently been cleared of Indians. By 1824, Lincoln’s first wife was dead of an incurable disease, he was straining to support his family, and he began renting out his teenage son Abraham as a laborer. Western life was so difficult partly because of transportation: farmers struggled to ship crops to market, paid high prices for supplies, and found that any journey back East was an endurance contest. When Senator Andrew Jackson traveled to attend Congress in the fall of 1824, his route from Nashville to Washington took twenty-eight days. Traveling with Rachel, he missed the start of the session on December 6. On December 8, as the Senate conducted business, an exhausted Jackson slouched at his desk in the Senate chamber, scrawling a note to a friend. He said the journey had taken so long even though he had gone “without resting one day.” He also said he was “in good health,” which was untrue. Rachel wrote a friend to say, “My dear husband was unwell nearly the whole of our journey.” Even after two weeks of recovery in Washington, the best Rachel could say was that her husband “is in better health than when we came.”

  Lafayette was planning to see the interior, accepting invitations from cities and states. As letters arrived from places with names like Cahaba, Alabama, the general may have noticed something curious. White settlers were forming new states by displacing Indians, yet they preserved Indian names. The Alabamas were a branch of the Creeks. If the British in colonial days had bestowed many names that referred to people or places in the old country—New Jersey, Georgia, Pennsylvania—the founders of newer states preferred Tennessee, Mississippi, and Illinois. Americans even applied Indian names to social organizations. New York’s Tammany Society, or Tammany Hall, had been named in the 1780s in honor of a Delawa
re chief. As Tammany evolved into a political organization that dominated New York for generations, its members were called braves. The leaders were sachems, or chiefs, who met in a building known as the Wigwam. If the use of native names, or the occasional donning of war paint, was not a deep or respectful reflection of native culture, it was still meaningful. European immigrants and their descendants sensed that the tribes made the United States distinct. To have a connection to Native Americans was to be American.

  Indians slipped into literature and art. James Fenimore Cooper was at work on his Leatherstocking Tales, soon to include The Last of the Mohicans. When Samuel F. B. Morse painted his panorama of the House chamber in 1822, he put an Indian in it: a Pawnee chief, in full headdress, observing the proceedings from the gallery. The detail was drawn from life. The chief had been invited to the chamber to impress him with the power of the United States. There is no record of what he thought about the acoustics.

  This was the America that Lafayette surveyed when he returned to be in “the midst of posterity,” as Speaker Henry Clay put it. In only “one respect” could Lafayette “find us unaltered, and that is in the sentiment of continued devotion to liberty.” Clay praised Lafayette for “your consistency of character, your uniform devotion to regulated liberty, in all the vicissitudes of a long and arduous life.” When Clay finished his talk before the crowded House, Lafayette was “very evidently affected,” according to a newspaper account. The hero remained seated for several seconds, apparently composing himself. At length he rose to reply: “Well may I stand firm and erect, when … I am declared to have … been faithful to those American principles of liberty, equality, and true social order, the devotion to which, as it has been from my earliest youth, so it shall continue to be to my latest breath.”

  • • •

  When newspapers printed accounts of Lafayette’s emotional exchange with Clay, an irony became apparent. The praise of liberty and progress looked odd when printed alongside certain other items that made the papers. One account could be seen on Henry Clay’s personal copy of the Argus of Western America, a Kentucky newspaper whose editor was among his political allies. The Argus included advertisements on its front page, which was the reason that Lafayette’s description of the “American principles of liberty, equality, and true social order” appeared inches from an ad placed by one Edward O. Chambers.