Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  The argument that Jackson wanted to make resembled Thomas McKenney’s moral case for removal. In a letter to James Gadsden, one of his former army subordinates, Jackson professed to be a friend of Indians. He wanted them to move west to be “free from the mercenary influence of white men, and undisturbed by the local authority of the states.” In the West the federal government could “exercise a parental control over their interests” and save them from extinction. There is no reason to doubt that Jackson believed he was acting in the natives’ best interest. They were not an abstraction to him. He knew many of them intimately from treaty negotiations and war; he had defended the rights of the widows of Cherokee soldiers killed under his command. But he thought about Indian interests in a certain way. Just as General Jackson had analyzed national security in a way that matched his real estate interests, President Jackson defined his “parental” duty to natives in a way that matched his desire to clear land for white settlement.

  His first attempt at selling his preferred solution began with a nod to Indian sympathizers:

  The condition of the Indians within the limits of the U. States is of a character to awaken our Sympathies, & enduce the inquiry if something cannot be done to better their situation.

  Having defined Indian welfare as his purpose, Jackson shifted focus. The real problem was land, the two conflicting maps of the continent. It was true, Jackson admitted, that the Indians could make a case: “These unfortunate people, were once the uncontroled & indisputable owners of this immense region of country,” and they had gradually yielded “to the solicitations of their white brethren” until they were now found only in remote areas. “It is but Justice that a proper degree of sympathy should be awakened in their behalf.” But Georgia and Alabama had a far simpler case: “The states of this Union are Sovereign.” And so, “while a generous feeling is entertained towards this race, it should not be at the sacrafice of principle, and of the interests of others concerned.”

  What then is to be done? Let the plan of removal beyond the Mississippi

  Jackson’s first draft ended in mid-sentence. He never finished. The president may simply have been distracted, but it was a remarkable point at which to stop. He seemed not quite ready to commit to paper an act that would be remembered for ages. Smarter, more strategic, and further-seeing than his opponents understood, Jackson paused. He may have been straining to reconcile his chosen course with his understanding of “Justice,” that word he had characteristically capitalized just a few sentences earlier.

  He left Indian removal for another day and another person. His secretary of war, John Eaton, tried to finish the passage but only came up with bluster. Defending Indians would require the president to call out the army against a state, “a power which should be placed in the hands of no individual.” Jackson discarded Eaton’s draft, no doubt unwilling to limit his own authority to call out troops against a state, which he was soon to do against recalcitrant South Carolina. The president certainly could use his power to enforce federal law. He could have taken a stronger stand against Georgia. He needed reasons why he would not.

  Returning to his first draft, Jackson rewrote and reordered it, making subtle but vital changes. No longer would he confess that the Indians had been the “uncontroled & indisputable owners of this immense region.” Instead he would say that “our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions.” The administration held that Indians had never really “owned” anything, having failed to develop and improve the land, which they merely passed through to hunt.

  The final, polished document led off with Jackson’s best argument for change: the federal policy he had inherited made no sense.

  It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among [the tribes] the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate.

  Even if Jackson’s facts were wrong (Cherokees would not have said they were “in a wandering state”), he was making a frank confession. He said that white men had been too greedy for land. Of course, this confession led to a question: If it was damaging for Indians to be thrust “farther into the wilderness,” why would Jackson advocate thrusting them even farther? Jackson had his reasons.

  A portion … of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection. Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions.

  Here Jackson turned Ross’s great achievement against him. Cherokees had governed themselves for centuries, dating back to a time well before the existence of Georgia. But when Ross and other Cherokee elites reformed and updated that government in accord with American republican principles, Jackson called it a new creation that Cherokees who “mingled much with the whites” had “lately attempted to erect.” This was Jackson’s political jujitsu. The Indians were no longer the inhabitants of the land from time immemorial; they were late-arriving interlopers on the long-standing powers of the states. John Ross was no longer a loyal chief who was insisting on his tribe’s rights within “the great family of the Republic of the U. States,” but instead a man seeking independence. Nevertheless, Jackson was willing to try to save the Cherokees by financing their journey west.

  Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay … [Indians are bound for extinction] if they remain within the limits of the States… . Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity… . This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry.

  Jackson did not mention that Georgia law would not allow Cherokees to vote or even to testify in court.

  There was one more set of opinions to be heard before congressional debate began: the views of Indians. John Ross too wrote an annual message in 1829. Just as the president of the United States reported once a year on the state of the union, so the leader of the tiny republic within a republic reported once a year to Cherokee legislators. It was one more way the Cherokees imitated the United States. Ross’s message in October 1829 insisted that the Cherokees still maintained sovereignty over their land, which could not be changed without their consent. But his tone was grim. “A crisis seems to be fast approaching when the final destiny of our nation must be sealed.”

  Twenty-one

  The Expediency of Setting Fire

  The crisis was dramatized by gold discovered on Cherokee land.

  Interest in Georgia gold predated the existence of Georgia—it was rumors of gold that lured Hernando de Soto to explore the Cherokee country in 1540. It’s hard to prove exactly when white men finally discovered gold in Georgia, although the first public announcement was a news article describing two discoveries in Habersham County in August 1829.

  Habersham County was near the border of the Cherokee Nation, and prospectors soon ranged onto the Indian map. It was an early American gold rush, two decades before the discovery of gol
d in California, featuring “a most motley” group of men, according to one observer—“whites, Indians, halfbreeds and negroes, boys of fourteen and men of seventy … diggers, sawyers, shopkeepers, peddlers, thieves and gamblers.” They came by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, populating a boomtown that would be called Dahlonega. Georgia’s elites didn’t think much of the rabble, described by the governor as “idle, profligate people” who had been “loosed from the restraints of the law.” This seems unfair; at least the Indian prospectors had a right to be there, and none of the prospectors were idle. They were madly digging or sifting the earth, sleeping a few hours under the stars and returning to work again, knowing they could be evicted before they found anything.

  Federal Indian agents understood that they had a duty to evict white intruders, but Georgians took offense, protesting that anything the federal government did interfered with state jurisdiction. In April 1830 the Cherokee Phoenix would report that the federal Indian agent had ordered many prospectors to leave the Cherokee country, and “almost all had departed, until it was ascertained that the agent had procured no warrants in Georgia, as it was supposed he would—they have new returned with redoubled force … encouraged by some of the leading men of the neighboring counties, by the lawyers especially, who will stand ‘between them and all danger.’”

  In later years the impression would arise that the greed for gold drove the Georgians to take Cherokee land. This was not quite accurate. Georgia’s elites wanted the land even before the gold rush, and even afterward they wanted the land mainly because it was land. Over the course of 1830 the throng of miners sent $212,000 worth of gold to the U.S. Mint at Philadelphia. This was a fortune, even when divided among numerous prospectors, yet still a sideline compared with the value of the soil. Two hundred twelve thousand dollars in the gold rush was nothing compared with the millions that were made in the 1818 land rush in northern Alabama. There was an opportunity for a comparable bounty in the Cherokee country of north Georgia. The great prize, the primary prize, in the Cherokee Nation was not gold but real estate.

  • • •

  Land, like gold, caused men to be “loosed from the restraints of the law,” leading to murderous incidents that John Ross struggled to contain. One such incident at the start of 1830 forced Ross to engage in some public relations damage control. On February 13, 1830, he sat down to write a letter while staying at Head of Coosa—the common name for the settlement at the headwaters of that river, where Ross had recently built a new home. Here he was near Major Ridge’s white plantation house with its ferry, farm, and store, and also had a much shorter commute to New Echota. It was to New Echota that he was sending this letter, addressed to Elias Boudinot at the Cherokee Phoenix.

  The previous autumn, the newspaper’s publication had nearly been interrupted when Boudinot came to Ross and announced his resignation. Boudinot’s family was growing, his work in two languages was overwhelming, and he could not go on producing nearly all the editorial material himself. Boudinot was irreplaceable on short notice, and Ross “could not for a moment think of seeing [the paper] stopped.” Ross promised to find money to hire an assistant, even if it had to come from Ross’s own pocket. Boudinot resumed his place in the printshop, buoyed by an extra $100 a year, and Ross quickly found it worth the investment. When he wrote his letter in February, he knew there was at least one sympathetic journalist to whom he could try to explain a tangled mess.

  Sir

  With the view of preventing erroneous impressions from growing out of the various reports which will no doubt be circulated … I deem it my duty to make a true statement of facts.

  It is easy to imagine Ross pausing at this point and rubbing his forehead. Where to begin? The lawbreaking, the fires, the whiskey, the kidnapping, the body dumped by the side of the road … Probably it was best to start at the beginning.

  It is generally known that there are divers intruders on Cherokee land … some of them being men of the most infamous character.

  This was a story of Cherokee efforts to evict white families living on Cherokee land. There was nothing new about the problem or its attempted solution. Burning out intruders was what John Ross had done when commanding the Cherokee Light Horse in 1820. But now the stakes were higher, the problem was worse, and something had gone grievously wrong. That was what John Ross was writing Elias Boudinot to explain. He described a recent effort to remove white settlers.

  The General Council at its last session made it my duty to remove such of them as may be found amidst our citizens in possession of the improvements recently abandoned by the Cherokees, who have emigrated to the Arkansas.

  The intruders were occupying farms left behind by Cherokees who had decided to move west of the Mississippi. It was irresistible for a poor white family to take a chance on farming land already cleared by now-absent hands. Through much of 1829 the Cherokees had waited for the federal government to act against these intruders. The Indian agent did try to warn them off, but the new administration in Washington did not send troops to assist him. Late in 1829 Ross called attention to a decades-old treaty declaring that if any U.S. citizen should settle on Cherokee lands, “such person shall forfeit the protection of the United States, and the Cherokees may punish him or not, as they please.” The Cherokee government decided to enforce this clause, and early in 1830 Ross ordered the deployment of a force of Cherokee horsemen like the one he had led years ago. He assigned the responsibility of command to his burly white-haired neighbor Major Ridge, who was apparently still willing to ride into harm’s way as he approached the age of sixty. Ridge organized what must have been a substantial force, large enough to face down scores of white settlers. He enforced what discipline he could among his troops. “The men were prohibited from using ardent spirits whilst on duty,” Ross stressed in his letter defending the expedition. Along a public road leading toward Alabama, Ridge’s troopers rounded up no fewer than eighteen families, who were told to gather up their effects and leave the Cherokee Nation.

  The company were fully persuaded that if the houses were not destroyed, the intruders would not go away; they therefore determined on the expediency of setting fire to them.

  Possibly the smoke was visible in Carroll County, Georgia, the location of the nearest settlements on the whiteside.

  Their mission seemingly accomplished, Major Ridge disbanded his men and sent them toward home in small groups, and this was when the mission began to go disastrously wrong. Andrew Jackson would never have made such a mistake. When Jackson received an order to disband his force in 1813 at Natchez, Mississippi, he disregarded his instructions and marched them together home to Middle Tennessee, partly to preserve them as a fighting unit under his command, and partly for their own protection. But Major Ridge may never have known this bit of Jackson lore, and in any case did not learn from it. As the small parties of Cherokees departed the field of their success, both security and discipline disappeared. Ross reported in his letter that four of Ridge’s men “became intoxicated and remained” at a friend’s house “where there was whiskey.” They were in no condition to resist or even to flee when a party of twenty Georgians came across the border from the whiteside, seeking vengeance for the eviction of the settlers. The Georgians seized all four Cherokees and dragged them off toward custody in Carroll County. One of the prisoners, Chuwoyee,

  who was unable to walk (being very drunk) was tied and put upon a horse, but not being able to sit on, and falling off once or twice, he was most barbarously beaten with guns &c. in the head, face, breast and arms, and was then thrown across the pummel of a saddle on a horse, and carried by the rider in that situation about one mile and then thrown off.

  Chuwoyee died the next morning, and was dumped on the road. Not until two days afterward was Ross able to send a wagon to pick up the corpse, and “he was decently buried at his own house by the side of the graves of his father and mother. The corpse was shockingly mangled.”

  If it is thus that the laws
of Georgia are to be extended and executed over the Cherokees, it is very obvious that justice and humanity are not to be respected… . The Cherokees … will patiently wait for justice through the proper tribunal. Your ob’t Serv’t

  Jno Ross.

  Ross wrote several letters expressing his view of the tragedy, casting it as a sign of white perfidy, and in the months that followed, Elias Boudinot’s Cherokee Phoenix adopted this view. But as Ross must have known, other people would interpret this as a tale of drunken Indians. And he also suspected that federal authorities would turn it into a story of Cherokees exercising extralegal authority. When news of the confrontation reached Washington, Ross’s view did not prevail. Secretary of War John Eaton blamed the Cherokees for the violence, saying they should not have “arrogated to themselves” the right of “setting in judgment” on American citizens, and “driving them and their families from their houses.” Eaton said he was instructing troops to march from Fort Mitchell, Alabama, to the Cherokee country to restore order, but in the weeks that followed, as federal troops began operating in Georgia, state authorities protested. Fully accommodating Georgia’s insistence on states’ rights, the army withdrew, eventually to be replaced by Georgia troops, who would begin enforcing the law in the Cherokee Nation in ways that served the state’s interest.

  What had really provoked these murderous events along the Alabama road? In the aftermath, the Cherokee Phoenix began to uncover evidence that the wave of intrusion may not have been just what it seemed. In April 1830, the Phoenix printed another exposé: “Some of the officers of the United States have been clandestinely encouraging intruders into the nation.” When asked to explain what had possessed them to settle without authorization on Cherokee land, some of the white settlers explained that they had been acting on the highest authority. “A number of the intruders … have lately certified” that they had come to Cherokee land with the encouragement of a letter from “the President of the United States.” Five white men signed a statement saying that they had heard federal Indian officials in the area read aloud from that letter back on September 29, 1829. As the men remembered the text, President Jackson promised that “any white person or persons was at liberty to settle any where in the Cherokee Nation on any place [from which Cherokees had] emigrated[,] that there was no danger in settling on any such land.” President Jackson’s representative went on to say that if white men would also “go and build at the Springs of Indians that had not emigrated that it would cause them to enrol themselves for the Arkansas.”