Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  State officials proved active enough on issues better aligned with their interests, such as opening up the countryside for white settlement. On his way to Charleston, Lafayette had spent the night in a new settlement under construction, sleeping in the only house that had a roof, and rising in the morning to see that the surrounding forest had only recently been cleared. Developing new towns and surrounding farms required the continuing removal of the state’s Indians, which in turn required the state to engage in some lobbying. Since only the federal government was allowed to do business with Indians, states pressed for federal help. In 1816, as part of a broader negotiation with the Cherokees, the government proposed to buy their South Carolina land. This was the same negotiation in which Cherokees, including John Ross, focused on preserving two million acres in Alabama threatened by Andrew Jackson. Though they won back the Alabama land, at least temporarily, they had to give up something. They sold their stake in South Carolina for $5,000.

  • • •

  A ship took the national guest and his party from Charleston down the coast to Savannah, Georgia, in March 1825. Waiting for Lafayette amid the crowd at the waterside was His Excellency G. M. Troup, governor and commander in chief of the armed forces of Georgia, and also Lafayette’s host. He had brought along some of Georgia’s troops to fire a salute to the approaching boat in the harbor. The salute was only the start; the legislature had authorized Troup to draw unlimited funds from the treasury to arrange Lafayette’s travel across the state and onward to Alabama.

  Governor Troup is worth dwelling on for a moment, this welcoming politician waiting by the waterside. He was a curly-haired, sideburned, cold-eyed planter’s son. He had strong views about natives; he was the same man who claimed that even Andrew Jackson was laggardly in 1814 because he failed to clear all of the Indians from Georgia. And as Lafayette’s boat neared shore in 1825, Troup was in the midst of an operation designed to push out many natives who remained.

  He was a man accustomed to conflict. He was born in 1780, in the midst of the Revolution, to a wealthy family that apparently stayed loyal to the British crown. The family Bible recorded their flight from one loyalist safe haven to another—Mobile Bay, London, British-controlled Charleston. At the close of the war the Troups returned to Savannah and made their peace with the new order, although Troup spent his youth in a society that was still polarized and suspicious. He became a politician almost as soon as he graduated from Princeton, and developed a withering, apocalyptic, paranoid style. In 1825, thirty-six years before the Civil War, he was already telling constituents that they must prepare “to stand to your arms.” Washington, he declared in a message to the legislature that spring, would “soon, very soon” be aiming for “the destruction of every thing valuable in the Southern country.” Troup was a template for a certain kind of American politician who would persist in later generations. In his world, the people were besieged by radical judges, conspiracies, and imminent plots to overturn their way of life. Washington officials were not at all what they claimed to be. He predicted that Supreme Court justices and Congress would soon collude and, “discarding the mask,” reveal themselves as “fanatics” who would free Georgia’s slaves without even paying for them.

  But there were no such nightmare visions now, for Lafayette’s boat had finally come ashore. The curly-haired governor was greeting the visiting hero, and guiding him through Savannah. Horses pulled them on a kind of parade float as ladies threw flowers on the ground. “La Fayette mania,” scoffed a Savannah woman, Mary Telfair. She claimed the celebrations were overblown, and reported that a friend was referring to the nation’s guest as “the nations jest.” Her nonchalance was an act. Telfair had been just as jaded the previous fall when she was visiting Philadelphia and Lafayette arrived there, but she went to see him anyway. Most likely in Savannah too she joined the crowds that lined the streets.

  Governor Troup brought Lafayette inland, to the state capital at Milledgeville, where the hero of liberty was thronged by admirers in the statehouse. The next morning his carriage was on the road. The party rolled through Macon, Georgia, “a civilized speck lost in the yet immense domain of the original children of the soil,” wrote Levasseur. “Within a league of this place, we are again in the bosom of the virgin forests,” surrounded by trees so enormous they “appear as records of the age of the world.” Not long after that the travelers were in Creek country. Their progress slowed as the road grew worse. The track was often washed away by the spring rains, and Creeks often helped them manhandle a small carriage they’d brought along. Once the party had to cross a stream that was so swollen the water flowed over the bridge. A double line of Indians waded out onto the submerged planking, in racing water breast-high, holding hands in order to guide Lafayette’s party safely across.

  Stopping at a cluster of cabins, they encountered two Creek men at a front door, “one young, the other middle aged, both remarkable for their beauty and form. They were dressed in a short frock, of light material, fastened around the body by a wampum belt. Their heads were wrapped with shawls of brilliant colours, their leggings of buckskin reached above the knee.” Lafayette and Levasseur fell into conversation with the younger man, named Hamley, who spoke English.

  Lafayette had heard something about the Creeks on his way here. He’d heard that they were about to be removed from this forest. Some Creeks had agreed to sell their land in Georgia. The sellers were led by a chief known as General William McIntosh, or M’Intosh. “General” was an honorific title, given him because of his service fighting under the command of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. When Lafayette began asking about this sale,

  [Hamley’s] countenance became somber, he stamped on the ground, and, placing his hand upon his knife, murmured the name of M’Intosh in such a manner, as to make us tremble for the safety of that chief; and when we appeared to be astonished, “M’Intosh,” exclaimed he, “has sold the land of his fathers, and sacrificed us all to his avarice. The treaty he has concluded in our name, it is impossible to break, but the wretch!” He stopped on making this violent exclamation, and shortly afterwards quietly entered on some other topic of conversation.

  It is possible that Hamley had personal knowledge of the treaty he despised. The treaty bore the name of a “William Hambly,” an interpreter. But even if this Hamley was not a witness, the story would have been familiar to every Creek family in Georgia. General Lafayette’s host, Governor Troup, had found the way to obtain the Creek land, using McIntosh as his accomplice.

  In January 1825, while Lafayette was in Washington and the capital was consumed with the presidential election, two men appeared at the Creek Indian agency in Georgia. They said they were U.S. commissioners, empowered to negotiate a treaty with the Creeks. This was true, but not the whole truth. They were also Georgians, and federal officials including the president himself later concluded that the men acted as agents for Georgia. Working in collaboration with Governor Troup, the commissioners pressed to buy every square foot of Creek land in Georgia. When many Creeks resisted, the commissioners dealt with William McIntosh, who was not the principal chief, but was well known to white leaders. He had a white father. His cousin was Governor George M. Troup.

  McIntosh also had a certain reputation. In 1821, when the Creeks signed a treaty ceding some of their land, McIntosh arranged to receive 1,640 acres for himself. He used some of the land to build an inn at Indian Springs, where the waters were said to have healing powers. In 1823 he wrote a letter to John Ross of the Cherokees, saying he could pass on a bribe of $2,000 from the white men if Ross would help to sell off Cherokee land. “Nobody shall know it,” McIntosh promised in the letter. Rather than take the money, Ross had the document read aloud at a Cherokee leadership meeting. Cherokees never trusted McIntosh again, but for the federal commissioners in 1825 he was the man to see.

  Allegations of bribery soon swirled around the federal Indian agency. The federal Indian agent was shocked. Even the agent’s brother
said he was offered $10,000 and five square miles of land in exchange for his help. Increasingly suspicious Creek chiefs stripped William McIntosh of his authority to speak for them—but this only drove him into the white negotiators’ arms. His faction of Creeks signed a document on February 12 that gave Georgia everything it wanted. It would be known as the Treaty of Indian Springs, having been signed at William McIntosh’s inn. The commissioners sent an exuberant message to Governor Troup.

  We are happy to inform you that the “long agony is over.”

  Soon after this, William McIntosh sent a letter “To His Excellency George M. Troup,” giving instructions on how to send $2,000 that Troup had promised to lend him.

  William McIntosh needed something besides money. McIntosh’s son and other Creeks traveled to Milledgeville to have dinner with Governor Troup, and made their main concern clear in a follow-up letter, five times using the word “protect” or “protection.”

  If [critics of the treaty] should attempt to breed a disturbance with the friendly Indians we shall inform you for protection, and we hope you will protect us … we look for protection from you… . P.S. We wish to know from you in writing whether you could protect us, should protection be necessary.

  McIntosh knew the penalty for his betrayal of the nation was death. He was unavailable to greet Lafayette as he made his way through Creek country; he may have been lying low. But his son Chilly McIntosh did come out, and welcomed Lafayette to the family’s home village. Chilly offered an explanation for his father’s act as they watched a game of stickball, the local variant of lacrosse: it was time to admit the inevitable. Contact with white men was destroying the Creeks, who might renew themselves farther west. Chilly McIntosh would make that journey west, and would live long enough to fight in the Civil War. His father would not. On April 30, 1825, after the Marquis de Lafayette had safely passed through the Creek Nation, two hundred Creek men surrounded the house of William McIntosh and set it on fire. He might have burned to death had not the attackers dragged him out, stabbed him to death, and shot him dozens of times.

  The Treaty of Indian Springs could not stand. Newly inaugurated President Adams took a personal interest in the case, summoning the federal Indian agent to the Executive Mansion to tell his story. The treaty was so embarrassing that even John Forsyth, a Georgia congressman, sent word that he would “infinitely rather” the United States negotiate a new agreement that gave the Creeks more generous terms. Adams voided the treaty. But there was still that compact of 1802. The president still felt obliged to act as Georgia’s land agent; he lacked Andrew Jackson’s talent for reinterpreting his obligations when he felt them to be wrong. The Adams administration negotiated a new treaty with surviving Creek leaders who came to Washington. Negotiations grew so intense that President Adams’s diary for January 18, 1826, noted that “the first chief of the deputation, Opothle Yoholo, attempted last evening to commit suicide.” Finally, the Creeks consented to sell most of their land in Georgia, but the Georgians under Governor Troup refused to accept this. They wanted it all. Defying federal authority, they began surveying even the Creeks’ remaining land to sell to white buyers.

  U.S. Army forces under General Edmund P. Gaines were ready to move against Georgia to protect the Creeks if ordered. Had Gaines acted, it might have become a farce, or it might have turned into a civil war in 1827. President Adams couldn’t know in advance. In what he called “the most momentous message I have ever sent to Congress,” Adams said he had decided not to risk war with Georgia, and would instead pursue the matter in the courts. The administration was not even effective at that. Finally the federal government went to the Creeks once again, and bought what little Georgia land they had left. Georgia would soon be cleared of all natives except for John Ross’s Cherokees.

  • • •

  When the Marquis de Lafayette departed the western edge of Creek territory, he emerged in the white-occupied lands of Alabama. From there he traveled by water—downriver to Mobile, along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, and then on a zigzag course up the Mississippi Valley, stopping to visit each state he encountered along the way. Other than New Orleans, this whole section of the United States had been established within the span of a single life. At a dinner in Nashville, Lafayette met a man described as the first white settler in Tennessee.

  While staying in Nashville, Lafayette climbed aboard a carriage for a trip out of town. A short distance into the countryside he arrived before the increasingly opulent farm known as the Hermitage, where Andrew Jackson stood to greet him. The failed presidential candidate had arrived home a few weeks earlier, having made his own trip west from Washington. Jackson had followed the customary route westward—up to Pittsburgh, then down the Ohio—and his acts along the way revealed his state of mind, for the defeated man did not act defeated at all. He was reaching out to political supporters. Passing through Pittsburgh, he missed connections with an iron and glass manufacturer who had passionately backed him, but the man sent a letter racing down the Ohio River after Jackson. The manufacturer, Henry Baldwin, pledged to continue his political activity, “having in view the same object—the same purpose—& the same policy which have hitherto guided all my conduct.” The object, purpose, and policy were the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency: his supporters were already thinking of a second run in 1828. Jackson remained the most popular man in America. Though his health was wrecked beyond redemption, his destiny still lay before him. When Lafayette took Jackson’s hand at the Hermitage, he was touching not the nostalgic past but the American future.

  Jackson was a genial host for the national guest. The two men looked around the prosperous and orderly farm, with black servants always close at hand—Lafayette portly and nearing exhaustion from his monumental tour; Jackson sticklike and white-haired but feeding on the energy of the moment. Inside the house, Jackson produced a brace of pistols and asked: Do you recognize these? Lafayette did. Many years earlier, the pistols had belonged to Lafayette. He’d made a gift of them to George Washington. Now Jackson had obtained them. “I believe myself worthy of them,” he said, “if not from what I have done, at least for what I wished to do for my country.”

  PART FIVE

  Inaugurations

  1828–1829

  Seventeen

  We Are Politically Your Friends and Brethren

  Long afterward, it became clear that the year 1828 was a watershed. It was the year of a momentous presidential election. It was a hinge point for American culture, which previously had leaned heavily on its European forebears, and increasingly afterward became its own self-confident creation. And it was the year that a Native American culture took a step toward self-empowerment and self-preservation. In a wooden house in New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, a printer rolled ink across a page of metal type. Some of the type on the page was in English. The remainder was in Cherokee, using symbols for Cherokee syllables in the system developed by Sequoyah. It was the first written language for any Native American nation. And it was the first time a native nation ran a newspaper. The printer laid a sheet across the inked type, pulled a lever to press it between two metal plates, and afterward probably hung the sheet over the rafters to dry. The inaugural issue of the Cherokee Phoenix was dated February 21, 1828.

  Until that day natives relied on oral history, passed from one generation to another, while the wider American public mostly read accounts filtered through white observers. The speeches of famous chiefs passed through multiple hands and were likely romanticized on their way to publication. Even the Harvard library with its twenty thousand volumes would have contained few words of Indians recorded by Indians. Now some natives would add their perspectives in two languages.

  No evidence shows that John Ross conceived of the newspaper, but he understood its potential. The Phoenix came into existence after the Cherokee legislature, where Ross was a leader, committed $1,500 toward establishing the newspaper and a National Academy. Though the academy
never amounted to much, Ross valued the newspaper so highly that when its subsidy seemed insufficient in later years, he paid bills from his own pocket. Having grown up in a home stocked with the latest newspaper editions, and having spent time in Washington, he intuitively grasped the link between the media and power in a democracy.

  Cherokees needed the newspaper in order to play their emerging role as part of the American body politic. Since their agreements with the federal government could no longer be backed by force, they must rely on the law, which was made, interpreted, and applied by the people’s representatives. Cherokees depended on the democratic system. They worked that system even though they had no right to vote for federal officials, only for Cherokee leaders. Ross put it perfectly in the closing line of his 1827 letter telling federal commissioners that Cherokees would not sell land: “With great respect, we are politically your friends and brethren.”

  Ross still had a copy of that letter, along with the whole correspondence in which the frustrated federal commissioners demanded an advantageous place and time for negotiations, and accused Ross of “subterfuge,” only to have Ross subtly mock them. Somehow in the spring of 1828 these letters made their way from the council house in New Echota to the printshop of the Cherokee Phoenix, which was only a short walk away. The editor took an interest in the letters, which the printer began to set in type.

  • • •

  The birth of the Phoenix reflected the era. The number of newspapers was growing. In 1775, by one count, the thirteen colonies supported 37 newspapers. This number increased until, by 1823, the nationwide total reached 598. By the presidential election year of 1828 there were 802. Some were daily papers; many more came out weekly. Within a few more years, cheap “penny papers” in major cities would vastly expand newspaper circulation. Newspapers were multiplying far more rapidly than the population, growth that coincided with expanding commerce, speedier communications, rapid urbanization, and intensifying democratic politics. The National Intelligencer in Washington had been the semiofficial voice of the ruling Democratic-Republican Party since the start of the century, but a more diverse political scene demanded additional voices. Politicians subsidized those voices: officeholders steered government printing contracts to friendly newsmen, and Henry Clay once loaned an editor $1,500. Andrew Jackson had supportive papers in key states, like the Philadelphia sheet that first printed claims that Clay and Adams were about to consummate a corrupt bargain for the presidency. As the 1828 election approached, Jackson’s men added to their network of news outlets. Many editors saw where the future lay and shifted toward the general.