Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  There were a few exceptions to our almost total injustice to the Indians. We never did succeed in conquering the Seminoles down in Florida. I saw their chief the last time I was in Florida as president, and he presented me with an Indian-style shirt and reminded me that they had never surrendered to the government of the United States. I told him I couldn’t blame them. And up there in Niagara Falls, when they were trying to get the St. Lawrence Seaway through, they had to make a pretty good settlement with the Iroquois, at least what was left of them, and the Iroquois finally got what was owed to them. And if you go west of the Mississippi, you’ll find a lot of Osage Indians who own big parcels of land and are maintaining their property and doing okay, because, even though they were pushed onto reservations, they eventually got the United States to allow them to own property individually like all other Americans. For this reason, since much of their land turned out to have oil under it, they’re known as “the wealthiest Indian tribe in America.”

  But, even at that, they should have done better, because, in addition to the fact that, as I’ve said, some of them were cheated out of their oil holdings, I gather that others were also talked out of their agricultural land holdings as well. As I understand it, there was a trader out there named Sibley, and he got the Osages to give him, and some other settlers west of the Mississippi, all of the land between the mouth of the Osage River and the head of the Kansas River, in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, in return for the privilege of their trading at Sibley’s Trading Post. Now, I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I think you’ll find that many of the deeds to the land in this part of the country show that Chief White Hair, who was the head man of the Osages, made that deal. And I had an assistant secretary of the air force or the navy, darned if I remember which, whose name was Whitehair, who was a great-great-grandson of old Chief White Hair, and he told me that if old White Hair hadn’t been so easy with Sibley and the rest of those people, he and the rest of his family would be millionaires because they had some of the greatest agricultural land in western Missouri and eastern Kansas.

  It seems as though about the only thing we gave the Indians in return for everything we took from them was what we used to call consumption - TB. They’re very susceptible to that disease, and some Indians have to stay indoors almost all the time. They were the healthiest race that anyone ever met up with when the white people first came over here, and that was the gift we gave them. You know how I’d mark our papers on the Indians? Zero minus.

  Our conscience was finally awakened thirty or forty years ago, and we’ve had two or three Indian agents in this century who are really looking after the welfare of the Indians. Now we have a large number of Eskimos in Alaska who are being properly taken care of, I think, and the Indians in New Mexico and Arizona have the best reservations in the country and are being protected. Nobody’s allowed to go in there and take it away from them. I think they’re being treated justly now. I think it’s as near justice as can be given to them after they’d been exploited to death.

  I tried to look after Indian rights all the time I was president. Whenever any bill came up that looked to me like a new attempt to exploit them, it got vetoed. You’ll find, I think, that at least three such bills were vetoed when I was president, because they were trying to take away the few lands that the Indians had left to them. I think one of them even affected old Chief Joseph’s settlement in Montana, the place where he finally ended up. And I vetoed a bill that would have taken away everything the Indians in Nevada had left if Senator Pat McCarran of that state had gotten his bill through. McCarran was a man I disliked and distrusted when I was in office, both as a human being and as a public official, and this was typical of him, I’m afraid; he was trying to arrange it so that all the Indian lands around Lake Tahoe were turned loose for settlement. It was the old business all over again: just take it away from the Indians. But I vetoed it and saved the Indians from that much, anyway.

  GETTING BACK TO Jackson, his victory over the Creeks brought him back into favor again in Washington, and a couple of months later, he was given the rank of major general in the regular army rather than the volunteers. Then he heard a rumor that Spanish officials were helping out their British friends in areas of Florida still held by Spain, and he sent a scout to Pensacola to see if he could get information about that. The scout reported back that the British were definitely being allowed to use Pensacola as a naval base, and Jackson moved down there immediately and captured the town.

  Then Jackson learned that the British were planning to capture New Orleans and headed over there. In New Orleans, Jackson put through some extremely strict measures to make sure that the city and his men were completely prepared for the British assault if and when it came; he dismissed all local officials, including the state legislature, and placed the city under martial law, and he also ordered the execution of some American soldiers who deserted and were then recaptured, saying, in effect, that he expected the British force to be much larger than his own and had to prevent his army from becoming even smaller through increased desertions. Some people felt he was only doing what he had to do, but others felt his actions were high-handed and excessive, and a federal judge finally served him with a writ of habeas corpus. (For people who don’t know what “habeas corpus” means, which certainly included me during the early part of my life, it’s a Latin phrase that translates as “you have the body,” and it was used at first in situations when some person or some authoritative group might be imprisoning someone unlawfully - holding the prisoner without telling him the charges against him or without a proper trial or something of that sort. The judge issued a writ of habeas corpus to require the person or the people doing the imprisoning to produce “the body of the prisoner” to determine if he was receiving due process. Habeas corpus was then broadened to allow judges to ask questions in any situations where liberties were possibly being violated or reduced beyond the needs of an existing emergency, and that was the situation with the writ in Jackson’s case.) Jackson, however, ignored the writ, and the judge fined him $1,000, which he paid.

  But he was absolutely right in his information about the impending British assault on New Orleans, and in his prediction that the British force would be much larger than his own. On December 23, 1814, a combined force of British soldiers and soldiers led by General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, an outstanding officer who had served under Wellington and helped him defeat the French in Europe, landed a few miles east of New Orleans and headed toward the city. Ironically, as you’ve probably already realized, this was just one day before the Treaty of Ghent was signed, and the terms of the treaty had already been worked out and agreed upon by both sides; but communications were so slow in those times that neither the British nor the Americans facing each other near New Orleans knew it, and fighting was fierce and continuous.

  Jackson and his men managed to stop the British for a while, but then they retreated to an old, unused canal four miles outside New Orleans and built a defensive wall out of logs and mud alongside the canal. British soldiers and sailors kept arriving until Pakenham had about 10,000 men, as compared to Jackson’s less than 5,000 soldiers, and that including every fighting man Jackson could round up - even the young pirate Jean Lafitte and his followers. The British had approached and offered LaFitte £30,000 and a commission in the British navy if he served with them, but he chose instead to help out the Americans in return for a pardon for himself and his men, and Jackson accepted at once.

  On January 8, 1815, a thick fog developed, and the British decided to take advantage of the fog cover and move on New Orleans. But again, as the British had done in some battles in the Revolutionary War, they marched forward in strict formation and in their bright uniforms, and Jackson and his men were ready for them behind their mud and log wall. In the battle that followed, Pakenham was killed, and 2,600 of his men were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, as compared to eight Americans killed and thirteen wounded.

  Pakenham
’s body was sent back to England for burial, and Franklin Roosevelt told me a story about that in the White House one day, but I think I’d better ask people to skip this paragraph if they’re squeamish. When they went to ship the body back to Britain, according to the story, they pickled Pakenham in alcohol and tied the barrel of alcohol in which he was pickled to the mast. But the sailors down below found out that there was a barrel of alcohol attached to the mast, and they took a gimlet and bored a hole in it and got the alcohol out and drank it, so Pakenham was not in any condition to be buried when he got back to England. That’s the story told to me by Franklin Roosevelt. I don’t know where he got it, or whether it’s true or not, but it’s an interesting story. I think it’s probably true. I don’t think there’s any doubt that if those sailors found out that there was a barrel of alcohol attached to the mast on the main deck, they wouldn’t have hesitated to bore holes in it to get the alcohol regardless of what else was in the barrel.

  Anyway, the Battle of New Orleans was the only real American victory of the War of 1812, and even though it was an unnecessary battle because the war had officially ended two weeks previously, it made Jackson famous and admired throughout the United States. Congress even gave Jackson back that $1,000 fine, though, to tell the truth, he didn’t actually collect it until thirty years later.

  When Monroe became president in 1816, he offered Jackson the job of secretary of war, but Jackson turned it down and said he preferred to stay on in active military service. The Seminoles were attacking American settlements in Florida frequently at this time, coming out of the Spanish parts of Florida and with fugitive slaves fighting along with them, and Jackson was sent to see what he could do about the situation. Monroe instructed Jackson to enter Spanish territory only if it was absolutely necessary to do so because he was “pursuing the enemy,” but Jackson told Monroe that there’d always be trouble in that part of the country if Florida remained under Spanish control to give sanctuary to Seminoles on the warpath there, and he also pointed out that there were British residents in Spanish Florida busily stirring up the Indians against United States citizens. Jackson hinted that it might not be a bad idea to try to take Florida away from the Spanish while he was down there fighting the Seminoles, and the result was that he got permission to do a lot more than the official orders, if things pointed in that direction. So, again, Jackson went a lot further than expected and did what some people thought was only his duty and others thought was excessive: He took over some Spanish forts, threw out the Spanish governor of the territory and put in one of his own officers as governor, and ordered the execution of two British citizens, Robert Ambrister and Alexander Arbuthnot, as ringleaders in plots to get the Seminoles to attack Americans. And, again, he found himself in plenty of trouble.

  The ringleaders in that movement were the two men that Jackson later came to despise more than anyone else in the world, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay. (To get ahead of the story just a little bit, Jackson was asked, after he left the White House, to name two things he had left undone that he thought he ought to have done. He said that he should have hanged John C. Calhoun and shot Henry Clay. If you’re wondering about the distinction between the different ends he yearned to give the two men, the answer is that Jackson thought he should have fought a duel against Clay for insulting Mrs. Jackson and shot him, and he thought he should have hanged Calhoun as a traitor.)

  At this point, Clay was speaker of the House and asked that Congress condemn Jackson’s actions in Florida, and Calhoun was Monroe’s secretary of war, the job Jackson had refused, and went to Monroe and suggested that Jackson should be arrested, though he asked Monroe not to make it public that the suggestion had come from him. Spain also put up a considerable protest, saying it would declare war on the United States if its forts and control of its territory weren’t returned immediately. But Congress refused to censure Jackson and Monroe refused to have him arrested, and Jackson found himself more popular than ever. We straightened things out with Spain by buying their Florida territory for $5 million, and Jackson was appointed governor of the territory in 1821.

  Jackson stayed in that job just long enough to make sure that things in Florida were running smoothly, and then, in 1823, he became a senator again. You’ll recall that I mentioned that the first time he was in the Senate, which was back in 1797, he was so bored by what he considered the snail’s pace of that august body that he quit after five months, but this time he lasted two years before quitting again. There were a couple of interruptions or almost-interruptions: in 1824, President Monroe offered him the job of minister to Mexico, and Jackson thought about that for a while before turning it down, and then, later that year, as you’ll also recall, he ran for president against John Quincy Adams and did better in both electoral and popular votes than Adams but lost out when the House of Representatives picked Adams. After that happened, Jackson stayed on in the Senate into 1825, then resigned again to devote himself full-time to building up alliances and increasing his popularity even more so that he’d win for sure over Adams the next time, in 1828.

  When Jackson was in the Senate that second time, incidentally, an interesting bit of irony occurred the first time he showed up to take his seat and his desk. The fellow at the desk right next to his was Thomas Hart Benton, the man who’d pumped him full of lead back in 1813, and now a senator from my home state of Missouri. Jackson knew, of course, that Benton was now in the Senate, but he didn’t expect to find his old enemy sitting inches away from him. For a minute, the two men stared at each other, and then Jackson, who respected strong enemies as much as the Indians he’d fought a while back, reached out and shook Benton’s hand. In time, even though Jackson still had Benton’s bullets in his body, the two men became close friends, and Benton campaigned all over the place for Jackson when Jackson ran again in 1828.

  In those days, it wasn’t considered proper for a presidential candidate to campaign for himself; the candidates were expected to stand on a pedestal, aloof from the hurly-burly of politics, and let other people tell the country how good they were. But Jackson considered that tradition nothing more than a bunch of baloney, and when he was invited to New Orleans in 1828 to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of his victory over Pakenham and his soldiers and sailors, he hurried down there and did a lot of talking, in that city, and on the way down, about his presidential hopes and plans.

  He also took the advice of experienced politicians in his party and accepted John C. Calhoun as his running mate, despite his personal dislike for Calhoun, because his advisors felt that Calhoun was needed to bring in southern votes. The reason was that Jackson and some of his followers had given halfhearted support to a protective tariff bill, a bill that northerners liked because it helped the growing textile industry by reducing foreign competition, which would be reluctant to bring in textiles and pay a tariff on the goods brought in, but that southerners hated because they felt that foreign manufacturers would retaliate by refusing to buy cotton and other raw American goods. The Jackson people really expected the bill to fail, which would give them points with northerners for trying and would not offend southerners too much because the bill hadn’t gotten through anyway. But the bill surprised everybody by passing and reduced Jackson’s popularity in the South even though he was, of course, a southerner himself.

  He didn’t learn until after the election that Calhoun was the man who tried to get him arrested back in 1818, or I doubt that he would have agreed to his party’s choice for the vice-presidential candidate, despite the political value of the man. He also didn’t guess that Calhoun thought the opposite of the way he thought on practically every issue and would oppose him on practically everything. But the Jackson/Calhoun ticket was an extremely strong one, particularly since they were up against the aristocratic John Quincy Adams, running on the National Republican ticket, and the equally aristocratic fellow he picked as his running mate, Richard Rush, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, and a former
attorney general of Pennsylvania, comptroller of the United States Treasury, attorney general in Monroe’s cabinet, and secretary of the treasury in Adams’ cabinet.

  In a sense, the election came down to a contest between the symbol of the privileged upper class of the East, as represented by Adams, and the symbol of the average working man of the North and South and the settlers of the West, as represented by homespun Andy Jackson. And there were a lot more of the latter than the former. Jackson received 647,286 popular votes to Adams’ 507,064 votes, 56 percent to 44 percent, and 178 electoral votes to Adams’ eighty-three. Jackson received the majority of electoral votes in fifteen states - Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia - and Adams received the majority in nine states - Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont. In those days, as you know, the vice president was voted for separately in the Electoral College, and Calhoun did almost as well, receiving 171 electoral votes to Rush’s eighty-three, with another fellow, William Smith of South Carolina, getting the other seven. And the Democrats were now in charge.

  It was a return to real Jeffersonian democracy when Jackson came into power. Jackson was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, and he thought that Jefferson’s idea that the everyday man ought to have a hand in the government was the right thing. And that’s what he tried to do. The people who voted for Jackson were strongly in his corner because they felt he was interested in the welfare of the little man, the small farmer and the small businessman and other people like that, and he did his best to justify that belief in him. People have to have a leader, and when a leader senses what the people want and need and tries to help them in that direction, they’ll always stay with him. Jackson was a man who understood what the people wanted, and he tried to give it to them. The presidents after Jefferson became mixed up with special privilege, and Jackson was trying to break the stranglehold on the ordinary man in the programs he planned, in order to help the average person get along in his or her life. And people always look forward to a man who’ll arrive on the scene and try to do that.