Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  A description survives of Ross around that time. Forty-seven years old, he was still trim. His once-dark hair was now “streaked with gray,” remembered this observer, and “his complexion was a little florid. He had a dark, brown, brilliant eye.” Something about his charisma succeeded in crossing the language barrier; at assemblies like this he spoke in English and was translated sentence by sentence into Cherokee, his words repeated far out into the crowd. He was addressing the sort of meeting at which Cherokees for centuries had been called forth to hear or to ratify the decisions of their leaders. But it was also a meeting in the emerging democratic tradition, the kind of gathering at which politicians raised their voices to be heard across the crowd, knowing that within that crowd lay the power to decide. This Cherokee meeting was a massive endorsement of Ross. On the last day of the session, Cherokee leaders endorsed a letter declaring that the treaty was “a fraud upon the government of the United States and an act of oppression on the Cherokee people.” Ross was one of thirty-three leaders who signed the letter, a roll call of resistance. Here were men of the elite who had stayed with Ross, like George Lowrey, the assistant principal chief. Here were men who went by their English names like James Spears, and by their Cherokee names like Choo-noo-luh-hno-kee. Here, as on the list of casualties at Horseshoe Bend, were names that fit the attributes or personalities of the bearers: Bean Stick, the Bark, Bushyhead, Money Crier. It was even signed by White Path, the traditionalist who had once led a quiet revolt against Ross and the modernists; now they were on the same side.

  The Cherokees gave their letter to General Wool, with its declaration that they relied on the “good faith” and “magnanimity” of “the President and the Congress.” Wool forwarded the letter to the president in Washington. The president read it and sent it right back to Wool in New Echota. He declared the letter was “disrespectful” to the president and the Senate. A War Department functionary instructed Wool to “immediately return it” to the signers, and tell them the treaty would be enforced “without modification.” Not only that,

  you will deliver a copy of this communication to Mr. Ross, and will thereafter cease to hold any communication with him, either orally or in writing, in regard to the treaty.

  The president also criticized his general for allowing the mass meeting to continue after it became clear it was being used to strengthen opposition to the treaty.

  Wool continued to regard Ross as a dangerous obstructionist, but he was also contemplating the potential horror of prodding an entire nation to move at gunpoint: “The people are opposed to the treaty, and are unwilling to leave this country for the Arkansas. The amount of force [required] in this country will entirely depend on the course which John Ross and his party will pursue.” Wool repeatedly voiced sympathy for ordinary Cherokees, and even protested a plan for some law-abiding Creeks in Cherokee territory to be “dragged like so many beasts to the emigration camp.” The administration began to seem unnerved by the general’s reports; whose side was the army on? Secretary of War Cass wrote the general with a warning about disloyalty. “If any officer of the army should countenance resistance or opposition to the treaty, you will arrest him.” Wool never did “countenance resistance”—he thought Cherokees should move west for their own good—but continued warning of the risk of disaster. He predicted that when the May 1838 deadline arrived, it would be hard to avoid “the shedding of human blood… . It is sufficient to say that the rights of this people have been too often disregarded, too often trampled upon, too often violated without a cause or justification, with impunity, not to have sunk deep into their hearts.”

  It is remarkable, given such statements, that General Wool lasted in his assignment as long as he did. He was an effective organizer, hard to replace when the greater part of the army was bogged down fighting Indians elsewhere. But he increasingly came into conflict with the white men who surrounded the Cherokees. Alabamans were upset when he interfered with white men selling alcohol in Cherokee country; North Carolinians said he insulted their sovereignty. When a white man in Alabama seized a Cherokee’s property “improvement,” meaning cleared fields or buildings, General Wool took it back. State authorities complained to Washington, and General Wool was instructed to relinquish command to a subordinate officer as of July 1, 1837. Supposedly he was recalled from command at his “own request,” although General Wool spoiled this fiction by writing that he was not actually requesting a recall at the time. Returning to the capital, he entered a lengthy defense of his conduct, in which he sounded a bit like John Marshall, insisting that the Cherokee treaties trumped the power of the states. A military court of inquiry, composed of sympathetic officers, cleared Wool of any wrongdoing. He had been ordered to enforce a fictional treaty. It had not been easy to square his orders with reality, but he had followed them.

  Thirty-two

  Perchance, You May Have Heard That the Cherokees Are in Trouble

  By then Andrew Jackson had left Washington for the final time. He had staggered to the end of his second term in miserable health—correspondence from his final year includes a note from a functionary saying that the president could not even be shown a letter because of his “severe illness.” In his farewell message on March 4, 1837, the president declared that “advanced age and a broken frame warn me to retire from public life.” But he had triumphed over all. The national debt had been retired. The power of the Bank of the United States was broken, and the bank itself would soon be liquidated. Not only that, the Indians were gone, or so Jackson said in his message. Indian removal, his first major legislative proposal, was the first concrete achievement he listed in his farewell letter: “The States which had so long been retarded in their improvement by the Indian tribes residing in the midst of them are at length relieved from the evil.” Now, he told his fellow citizens, “if you are true to yourselves nothing can impede your march to the highest point of national prosperity.”

  The union under Jackson had been preserved, and was on the verge of expanding. For much of his life Jackson had believed the Mexican state of Texas should belong to the United States, and by the time he left office it nearly did. In early 1836 Texas revolutionaries were slaughtered at the Alamo, among them that wayward former member of Jackson’s army, David Crockett, but afterward Jackson’s protégé Sam Houston rescued the cause of Texas independence. Houston, the talented if erratic hero of Horseshoe Bend, had arrived in Texas after a shooting-star political career in Tennessee. He led a small army to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, and his infant Republic of Texas promptly asked to be annexed by the union. Jackson declined. The time was not yet right. But Jackson could confidently leave such matters to his successor, since Jackson had chosen the successor: Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president and the winner of the 1836 election. His victory underlined the strength of the political party Jackson had founded, the first party in American history with sufficient organization and popular identity to last for generations.

  Leaving Van Buren in charge in Washington, Jackson took the roads and rivers homeward, stopping now and then to rest or to greet cheering crowds. The people loved him; even his enemies applauded his service. Jackson was said to be so overcome with sentimental emotions that he expressed regret over his estrangement from Henry Clay. He cried when a crowd greeted his carriage in Tennessee. Reaching Nashville, he once again walked the grounds of the Hermitage, when he was well enough to walk. From a rear porch the old man, now seventy, could oversee enslaved workers tending the fields near the mansion. Guests approaching the Hermitage saw the white-columned front porch between two rows of trees in the yard, and walked into a high foyer wallpapered with an Italianate scene of balconies and trees. Next they would be shown into a sitting room to meet the sticklike, white-haired master of the house, whose mood was returning to normal. His sentimental feelings toward his political enemies soon passed. He read his many regular newspapers and raged at the news, scrawling notes in a shaky hand to politicians, cabinet members, even
Van Buren himself. He remained a political force of nature, a volcano at the Hermitage, occasionally erupting.

  The downsides of Jackson’s brand of presidential leadership would all be left to Van Buren. The new president had been in office just two months when a financial panic struck New York. The causes were complex, but seemed to grow in part out of Jackson’s dislike of banks. Distrusting paper money, which in that era was issued by banks, Jackson in 1836 had declared that buyers of federal land must pay for their real estate only in gold or silver. Instantly he undermined public confidence in paper currency and created a shortage of gold, which contributed to a credit crisis. In responding to the crisis, Van Buren was hamstrung by Jackson’s small-government philosophy: the government had neither the duty nor the authority to help those in need. A catastrophic depression stained Van Buren’s entire presidency. Then there were the Indians. Only in Jackson’s farewell address were they all removed. The truth could be found in another document from that year, the first annual report to Congress by President Van Buren’s secretary of war, who was forced to offer explanations and excuses for the soaring expense and frustration of the Seminole campaign.

  The war in Florida continued as Jackson left office, though his 8,249-word farewell letter did not mention it. It was as inconclusive as counterinsurgency campaigns usually were. Osceola and other leaders carefully planned their attacks and slipped away. A succession of army commanders tried different ways to trap them.

  Van Buren must have thought that he would begin his administration by putting the sad and brutal conflict to an end. Soon after he took office, several Seminole leaders agreed to negotiations with the army and signed a truce, which included an agreement to give up their land and move west. However, the agreement called for them to go west with the escaped slaves who lived among them and fought on their side. White Floridians were outraged, feeling that if they could not recapture slaves, they would rather continue the war. Osceola did not accept the deal either. Fighters under Osceola and another leader descended on Tampa Bay in mid-1837 and turned out hundreds of Seminoles being held in a detention camp awaiting transportation to the West.

  In October the army commander, General Thomas Jesup, hit upon a way to strike back. The general agreed to send officers to meet Osceola for peace talks. Osceola, with a group of followers, arrived under a white flag—and then, by prearrangement, 250 soldiers surrounded him and took him prisoner. Memorable in his outfit of blue and red, Osceola was paraded through celebrating crowds in St. Augustine, and shipped up the coast to a prison cell in Fort Moultrie, on Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. One of his last sights before being led into the fort may have been a man-made island in the harbor, fifty thousand tons of granite and cut stone, the recently built foundation for Fort Sumter.

  General Jesup went on to use this kind of treachery several more times to capture Seminoles. But his triumph turned to ashes for Van Buren’s administration. Osceola had been captured dishonorably, in what everyone understood to be a violation of the laws of war, and having been captured this way, he died at Fort Moultrie on the last day of January 1838. He had been suffering from malaria. The stories of his exploits, followed by the manner of his capture, turned him from a murderer into a martyr in the eyes of many whites. A popular painter, George Catlin, had visited Osceola in prison to make what became a famous portrait, the classic Indian hero with his feathered headdress and shells around his neck and a soulful look on his youthful face. Osceola was celebrated across the nation as neither a savage nor a terrorist but a defender of his homeland. In the years to follow, a later historian noted, there would be “twenty towns, three counties, two townships, one borough, two lakes, two mountains, a state park, and a national forest bearing his name.” Some of these places were named not in later generations but shortly after the Seminole’s death. Osceola County, Michigan, received its name in 1843. Though the army captured Osceola and disease killed him, democracy kept his name alive.

  This embarrassment for Van Buren and his administration was only beginning to unfold in the fall of 1837 when John Ross arrived in Washington. There was a brief hope that the new president might be more flexible toward the Cherokees than the old one, and might even extend the 1838 deadline for Cherokee removal. This did not happen; Van Buren had been elected by roughly the same political coalition that had elected Jackson, and the southern wing of that coalition had the same interests. But there was a new secretary of war, Joel R. Poinsett, who was nothing if not creative; his previous assignments had included a term as the U.S. envoy to Mexico, where he had attempted audaciously to induce the Mexicans to sell Texas. Now Poinsett, overseeing the blood-soaked catastrophe that was federal Indian policy in 1837, discovered a peaceful if irritating Indian sitting in his office at the War Department. Poinsett proposed to put the Indian to use: Would Ross be willing to appeal to the Seminoles to stop their senseless war?

  Ross pondered this. He had been told that if he aided the government, it would be regarded as a service the government would repay. He also wanted the Seminole war to end; stories of savages fighting in the Florida forests contributed to prejudice against all Indians. He agreed to write a letter, a “talk,” to Seminole leaders. Dipping his pen in ink in Washington, on October 18, 1837, Ross undertook to persuade Seminoles whom he did not know to make peace with a government he did not trust. This called for considerable art in letter-writing. If in 1834 Ross had subtly obscured his Indian roots in an effort to slip past the defenses of Andrew Jackson, in 1837 he put all his weight on those roots.

  I am of the aboriginal race of redman of this great Island—and so are you.

  “We are strangers,” Ross went on, “yet, the time was, when our ancestors once smoked the pipe of peace together—therefore, I ask you to listen to my talk.” Ross did not go along with a War Department suggestion that he tell the Seminoles they must agree to removal as a condition of peace. He would not be used to that extent. Instead he tried to use the letter for his own purposes, suggesting that the Seminoles should try to negotiate a new and better treaty as the Cherokees wanted to do.

  Perchance, you may have heard that the Cherokees are also in trouble about their own lands—this is true—but I have spoken to my people, and they have listened… . That, the laws & treaties for the security and protection of our rights were the only weapons with which we must defend [our lands]. That, if it has been our misfortune to suffer wrongs from the hands of our white brethren we should not despair of having justice still extended to us by the U. States.

  Ross had been writing letters seeking justice for more than twenty years now, at least since his 1816 letter declaring Cherokees part of the “great family of the Republic of the U. States.” He may have believed in the ideals and the justice of the great republic even more than some of the men who governed it. His letter was sent onward in the hands of four Cherokees, who carried the paper to an army fort in Florida. This letter was used to lure within the fort’s walls a delegation of Seminoles, including their leader Micanopy, who came under a white flag to hear it read, after which the army’s General Jesup had the visiting Seminoles arrested. They were sent off to prison at St. Augustine.

  Distraught, the four Cherokees followed the prisoners until they found an opportunity to express their regret and to insist that they had nothing to do with the white man’s treachery. The Seminoles believed them.

  Thirty-three

  The Thunder Often Sounding in the Distance

  Some Cherokees did not wait until the May 1838 deadline to take their leave of their homeland. Major Ridge joined a party that departed more than a year early. Four hundred sixty-six people, half of them children, converged on Ross’s Landing for their departure. A few inevitably got drunk among the liquor shops of the riverside settlement, but finally tumbled with the rest of the party into a dozen flatboats that had been gathered for them on the Tennessee River. They cast off from the Cherokee Nation on March 3, 1837.

  The water was low, and they made slow
progress, sometimes only a few miles a day. At Decatur, Alabama, they could travel no farther; Muscle Shoals loomed ahead, its water too low for navigation. The emigrants hoisted their belongings through the town of Decatur and were taken to a set of iron rails. They heard a clattering in the dark. A steam locomotive arrived, pulling a string of open freight cars: the first railroad to be chartered west of the Appalachians had now completed a set of tracks that ran parallel to Muscle Shoals, and the Cherokees now climbed into the freight cars to continue their migration. Hands on the sides of the freight cars, watching the countryside blurring past in the dark, they rode across the landscape south of the river. The rocking cars bypassed Jackson’s former plantation at Melton’s Bluff before creaking to a halt at the bottom of Muscle Shoals, at Tuscumbia, near the square mile of land Jackson had bought at auction in 1818 and across the river from Florence, where his onetime real estate partners James Jackson and John Coffee still lived. Here the emigrants descended the bluffs to the Tennessee, its waters smoother now. They transferred back to boats, for their route was the same one taken back in 1812 by young John Ross in his keelboat—down the Tennessee to the Ohio, then southward down the Mississippi, then westward up the Arkansas. Major Ridge’s party reached its destination by the end of March. It had taken less than a month and resulted in no reported deaths.

  There were also parties traveling by land to the Arkansas country, and their experience was a better indication of what future emigrants would face. On October 13, 1837, 365 emigrants loaded their wagons to begin the land route, which like the water route led well to the northwest before angling back southwestward. Slowed by terrible roads, over which the elderly and children had to walk—for even those who had seats in wagons climbed down to lighten the load on steep slopes—it took them two weeks to travel the first two hundred miles or so to Nashville, where they stopped to wash clothes, repair wagons, and shoe horses. Some took advantage of this pause to visit the Hermitage. They stood before the house, with its two-story white columns, and paid a call on white-haired General Jackson. No doubt Jackson treated his guests with courtesy and respect now that they were doing what he expected of them.