Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  The Supreme Court had moved elegantly but not ruthlessly. It could not operate with the speed of one of Andrew Jackson’s armies; nor could it, like Jackson, disregard the law when convenient, since its sole weapon was the law. Marshall had to follow legal procedure. The Judiciary Act called for the court to send the Georgians notice of their error and give the Georgia courts an opportunity to comply. Only after the Georgia courts failed would Marshall be in a position to push for federal measures against them. It was considered inevitable that the Georgia courts would fail to comply, but the Supreme Court did not stand in readiness for this to happen, adjourning for the year on March 17. The court would not sit again until January 1833, so it would be many months before it could even attempt to add more pressure.

  Henry Clay worried about where the country was heading. He wrote that if Georgia resisted the ruling, “and the President refuses to enforce it, there is a virtual dissolution of the Union.” But President Jackson seemed unconcerned. He took no steps, formal or informal, to encourage Georgia’s compliance. Unlike with neighboring South Carolina—where during the same period he was using appeals, persuasion, threats, and finally legislation that allowed him to raise an army—Georgia’s judicial nullifiers had his support.

  Many years later, a political enemy of Jackson’s claimed the president had said, “Justice Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Historians have questioned this statement, which did not appear in print until decades later, but similar statements were attributed to the president in real time. Two days after the ruling a New York newspaper reported Jackson’s saying that the Supreme Court had no more right to order him around than he had the right to order the Supreme Court. The same day a Philadelphia newspaper said Jackson was telling people in private conversation that he “would not aid in carrying that judgment into effect.” Yet another correspondent reported that Jackson “sportively said in private conversation” that if called upon to enforce the ruling “he will call on those who have brought about the decision to enforce it.” He wrote his friend John Coffee:

  The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.

  The word “it” referred to the court’s decision; “they find that it cannot coerce Georgia …” The ruling, simply a piece of paper, was indeed ineffective if no one acted on it. Some of Jackson’s statements might be dismissed as angry bravado, except that he apparently made a similar statement directly to an influential Cherokee. Shortly after the ruling the president met with Major Ridge’s son John Ridge, and spoke so forcefully that Jackson himself believed he had sent Ridge away in “despair.” Jackson had not misread the young Cherokee diplomat, whose loss of faith in the Cherokee cause would soon have fatal effects.

  Some historians have offered a limited defense of President Jackson: he technically could not be said to have defied the court, since the moment had not yet arrived when it was imperative for him to act. But while awaiting those formalities, Jackson was negligent at best. He could have said, as later generations of political leaders would say of Supreme Court rulings, that he disagreed but would respect the decision. He could have signaled to the Georgians that they must obey federal law, just as South Carolina must. He could have openly recognized the implications of Justice Marshall’s ruling, which spread far beyond the imprisonment of Worcester and Butler. If the law used to imprison the missionaries was unconstitutional, then all Georgia laws relating to the Cherokees were unconstitutional. Jackson should have taken the cue that he must block the Georgians’ survey of Cherokee land, and enforce existing federal law. He did nothing, and a justice close to Jackson informed the Cherokees that the very opposite of Jackson’s duty would be done.

  The significance of Jackson’s course becomes clearer when compared with that of another chief executive in a comparable situation. In 1957, one of Jackson’s successors also faced pressure to enforce a controversial Supreme Court decision that involved the rights of a racial minority in a southern state. In this case the racial minority was African Americans. The court ruling, made three years earlier, was Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in public education. States with segregated schools were instructed to devise ways to comply. School authorities in Little Rock, Arkansas, made plans to allow nine black students into Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957, only to face the defiance of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who ordered the National Guard to block the integration. President Dwight D. Eisenhower viewed it as his duty to enforce the ruling, and he ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to protect the nine black students. To avoid the possibility of combat between state and federal forces, Eisenhower also used his authority to federalize the Arkansas National Guard, taking it out of the governor’s hands. The school was desegregated, the Supreme Court vindicated, and despite intense debate the country at large sustained the president. Had Eisenhower done otherwise, catastrophe would have loomed.

  Jackson did seem to understand, after his reelection was assured in 1832, that he was about to create a monster. The Georgia courts were not acting to free Worcester and Butler. In early 1833 Marshall would rule against Georgia again, and then Federal marshals or federal troops would be called upon to liberate the missionaries. If Jackson refused to enforce the ruling at that desperate moment, he would devastate the authority of the court as well as the authority of federal law. Worse, Jackson himself might look weak—backing down before the Georgians on an Indian question, just as John Quincy Adams had done before him. Yet if Jackson decided after all that he would enforce the law, he risked a crisis with Georgia at the same time as the nullification crisis with South Carolina.

  Jackson’s administration began working to make the problem go away. He had a new secretary of war by late 1832—Lewis Cass, the former Michigan governor who had so publicly made the case for Indian removal—and Cass appealed to Georgia to simply free the missionaries. “Other important considerations,” meaning the confrontation with South Carolina, made this necessary, Cass said. His letters were addressed to Georgia’s new governor, Wilson Lumpkin, the same politician who as a member of Congress had led the fight for the Indian Removal Act. Lumpkin agreed with Cass’s appeal. In fact, he had already cleared the ground to resolve the issue. That fall in Milledgeville the governor had dined with the wives of Worcester and Butler, assuring them he held no ill will toward their husbands. More dramatically, on December 22, he had signed a repeal of the law under which Worcester and Butler had been convicted. This would allow the missionaries to accept a pardon without, as the law had required, swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia. The missionaries themselves had come to believe that “considerations of a public nature” made it necessary that they stop pursuing their Supreme Court case. Governor Lumpkin freed the missionaries on January 14, 1833, avoiding a final ruling by the Supreme Court.

  The powerful dynamic of sectional politics was now beginning to work against the Indian cause. Previously, sectional politics had worked in their favor, drawing New England missionaries, northern women, congressmen, and others more easily to their side. Now the northerners were staring into the abyss. They began to see Indian removal as a conflict that could wreck national institutions, even leading to civil war. Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who had spoken eloquently against the Indian Removal Act, advised the Cherokees that it was time to negotiate a generous treaty with the United States and move west. One of the Cherokees’ own lawyers, Elisha Chester, appeared in the Cherokee Nation and infuriated John Ross by revealing that he had switched sides, becoming a government agent seeking a treaty of removal. The worst defection was that of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This group, more than any other, had helped the Cherokees make their case to the nation—sending them Samuel Worcester, obtaining a printing press, and of course providing the passionate support of Jeremiah Evarts. Evarts was dead now; his fragile constitution had finally failed him
in 1831, at the age of fifty. Late in 1832 the board’s governing committee sadly sent advice to John Ross that it was in the “best good” of the Cherokees to sign a removal treaty.

  Americans were passing through a series of crises in these decades before the Civil War, and though none could foresee when the calamity would come, many saw the risk of it. (“While the Union lasts,” Daniel Webster declared while debating a South Carolinian in the Senate in 1830, “we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind.”) The fear of disunion was driving several decades’ worth of sectional compromises. In 1820, a dispute over slavery in western territories had been resolved with the Missouri Compromise. Later the Compromise of 1850 would put off the crisis again. In 1833 the sectional crisis focused not directly on slavery but on economic power, as the slave states of South Carolina and Georgia resisted anything they regarded as interference with their interests. It was widely understood what was at stake if Jackson failed to find a resolution, and even his opponents fell behind his leadership as the elements of his policy fell together. South Carolina was to be isolated and stared down—and also offered a compromise, in the form of revised tariffs crafted by none other than Henry Clay, now back in the Senate. Georgia must give in on the matter of the missionaries, but would suffer no harm to its long-term goal of removing the Indians. The Cherokees would be sacrificed for the larger interest of the nation. “We consider ourselves as a part of the great family of the Republic of the U. States,” Ross had written back in 1816, “and we are ready at any time to sacrifice our lives, our property & every thing sacred to us, in its cause.” Ross probably had not anticipated the manner in which the great republic would take his offer.

  PART EIGHT

  Democracy in America

  1833–1835

  Twenty-six

  The Purest Love of Formalities

  A sign of the dawning age came on June 6, 1833, when Andrew Jackson became the first president to board a train. Beginning a triumphal tour of eastern cities, he rode between Ellicott City, Maryland, and Baltimore. It was the initial stretch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which was projected to run westward across Maryland to the Potomac, and then over the Appalachians.

  Beyond those mountains the westering nation was taking shape. Chicago was founded in 1833. That same year Stephen A. Douglas of Vermont, age twenty, moved to Illinois and found temporary work as a schoolteacher, while Abraham Lincoln was appointed the postmaster of tiny New Salem, Illinois. Lincoln’s politics should have disqualified him. He was trying to win a seat in the state legislature as a member of Henry Clay’s opposition party, who were soon to become known as the Whigs. Years later Lincoln explained that his posting in such a tiny town was “too insignificant, to make [my] politics an objection,” though it seems just as likely that he gained the appointment thanks to the support of his personal friends and admirers, who included politically active Jackson Democrats.

  Jackson was beginning his second term, which he may have won despite his Indian policy rather than because of it. The policy had certainly been criticized during the campaign, as Jackson’s adviser Martin Van Buren knew personally. Nominated in 1832 to serve as Jackson’s vice president, Van Buren was traveling through upstate New York when he stopped for a night at the home of a female relative, who apparently was part of the women’s movement against Indian removal. “After I had retired to my room,” Van Buren recalled,

  she entered it, and after a kind introduction and welcome soon proceeded to a spirited denunciation of our proceedings (for she associated me with the President) towards the Cherokees in general and the Missionaries in particular, with the utmost severity… . Well aware of the tenacious grasp with which her opinions, in matters of conscience, were held … I made but little answer to her charges, and, on leaving the room, she said, yet holding the door in her hand, “Uncle! I must say to you that it is my earnest wish that you may lose the election, as I believe that such a result ought to follow such acts!”

  Voters interested in Indian removal certainly had a choice. Jackson’s strongest opponent was his old enemy Senator Henry Clay, whose gradually coalescing opposition party would eventually include many of the same politicians who had worked against Indian removal—Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, Theodore Frelinghuysen. A strong third party emerged, nominating none other than the Cherokees’ lawyer William Wirt. But Indian removal was not the predominant issue. Henry Clay made sure of that when he brought a different issue forward, committing yet another of his too-clever political acts that led to unexpected consequences.

  Clay sensed a political advantage when the president, always suspicious of banks, objected to the very existence of the Bank of the United States. It was the era’s nearest equivalent of a central bank, and a vital part of Clay’s American System. Like the modern-day Federal Reserve, the bank influenced interest rates and the availability of credit, and was considered essential to the growing economy. In 1832 Clay pushed through legislation giving an early renewal to the bank charter. So overwhelming was the bank’s support that even many of Jackson’s allies voted in favor of it, and Clay was certain that Jackson would be forced to sign the bill in an election year. Jackson vetoed it. It was the beginning of Jackson’s fight to destroy the bank, which put the entire economy at risk but was far less damaging to Jackson’s reelection than expected. Because the bank served wealthy and well-connected businessmen (and even politicians such as Clay who received bank loans), attacking the bank fit Jackson’s ideology. Democrats said they were fighting big-government elites, and campaigned with organization and enthusiasm never seen before. Men raised giant hickory poles for Old Hickory. One observer said a pro-Jackson parade in New York was “nearly a mile long.” The president himself sidestepped the traditional ban on campaigning, taking an unprecedented fall tour from the Hermitage to Washington, which, of course, was not campaigning, merely a president attending barbecues and parades as he traveled through a series of contested states just before an election. When the ballots were counted, Jackson easily won.

  The ideology of Jackson’s party seeped into business as well as politics. By the early 1830s even millionaires stood up for the rights of the common man. In New York, Cornelius Vanderbilt—the ferry and stagecoach operator who had once driven the Marquis de Lafayette in a carriage across New Jersey—opened a “People’s Line” with steamboat service northward from New York City, running up the broad Hudson River between the mountains to Albany for the incredibly low rate of one dollar. It was service within the means of ordinary citizens, and upscale passengers were dismayed to see the enthusiastic rabble with whom they never before had been forced to share a steamer deck. Vanderbilt advertised in a pro-Jackson newspaper using Jacksonian rhetoric, saying the Albany service was battling the “aristocratic monopoly” that ran a competing line. Left unmentioned was Vanderbilt’s own record as an aristocratic monopolist, who did everything possible to destroy his competitors on other ferry and stage routes. He was driving down prices on the Albany route to punish the rival company for competing with him elsewhere. When his rival surrendered, offering an extortion payment of $100,000, Vanderbilt shut down the People’s Line to Albany, allowing the “aristocratic monopoly” to restore high prices and leaving the common man to shift for himself.

  Possibly at some point one of Vanderbilt’s many steamers carried the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who was traveling around the United States in the early 1830s, making observations he would later publish as Democracy in America. Tocqueville marveled at a country that seemed to be founded on the principle of social equality. “Birth, condition, or profession” no longer raised one man above another; “hardly anything but money remains to create strongly marked differences between them.” So powerful was the ethos of equality that a man falling behind in the race would scramb
le to catch up with his neighbors, while a man edging ahead of his neighbors might be tripped up by them. “They call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism; but they will not endure aristocracy.” Tocqueville was not entirely complimentary about this trait. Universal education was equal in its mediocrity: “I do not think that there is any other country in the world where, as a proportion of the population, the ignorant are so few and the learned still fewer.” He also took notice of black people and Indians, to whom equality did not apply.

  The Frenchman said that Americans—by which he meant white Americans—were notable for their “singular mildness,” yet inflicted “cruel punishments” on enslaved people, who were not perceived as equals. It was precisely because black people were not seen as equals that citizens could tolerate slavery as “an evil which does not affect them.” While Tocqueville was in the United States in 1831, authorities in Virginia suppressed a slave uprising and executed more than fifty alleged perpetrators, including the leader, Nat Turner. Afterward Virginia legislators debated a proposal to gradually abolish slavery, but decided instead to entrench it.

  And then there was the United States’ Indian policy, which Tocqueville compared with that of the Spanish who began the conquest of the New World. The ruthless Spaniards “loosed their dogs on the Indians as though the natives were ferocious beasts,” yet Indians eventually intermarried with the colonizers and became a large portion of Hispanic society. “By contrast,” Tocqueville wrote,