Did Andrew Jackson SAVE the Cherokee?

Great Debates
41

Captain Amazing wrote:

Gonna need a cite for that. What did Georgia do to encourage squatters?

Like I said in the OP, squatters were going to come with or without government approval. They’d been doing so all along, in all Indian lands, not just that of the Cherokee.

This was a real problem even for state governments more conscientious than that of Georgia. In Pennsylvania, for example, the government diligently sought to purchase Indian lands as needed, and diligently sought to discourage squatters. But squatters presented a constant problem for them. The government was continually put in the position of having to purchase from the Indians land already occupied illegally by white settlers.

I think I agree with some of that. I think squatters would have been a problem if it had been 12,000 white US citizens who were trying to hold onto a tract of land that size. The difference is that, as citizens, they would have been paying taxes to support a police or military presence. The Cherokee, paying no taxes on their land, required protection just the same. Who was to pay the bill?

It is a cultural clash to the extent that many settlers, particularly older settlers who had been through the Cherokee wars, viewed the Cherokee as “savages,” the word often used in those days in speaking of Indians no matter how civilized they became. (I don’t mean to imply that this was the fault of the Cherokee. There was simply a lot of prejudice.) Whites were not respectful of the rights of the Cherokee.

There is every reason to believe that if squatting had gone on unchecked, and if the Cherokee had remained where they were, violence would have erupted. And given past history, there is every reason to believe that such violence would have resulted in the destruction of the Cherokee as a distinct culture.

Yes and no. He held a grudge, that’s for sure. Jackson was witness to much violence between the Cherokee and white settlers in his younger days, and he never forgot it. During the uprising of the Chickamauga band of Cherokees in 1793, Jackson submitted a report on a massacre outside Knoxville:

Were the Indians justified in attacking encroaching settlers? Maybe, but the point is, Jackson carried the memory of the violence with him throughout his life, and it’s fair to say he never forgave it. On the other hand, on a one-to-one basis (as with his adopted Cherokee son), he seemed capable of at least some human compassion.

(And Jackson was not Hitler, for crying out loud. He wanted the Cherokee to become citizens, which hardly smacks of a genocidal ideation. And while he coveted their land, he certainly did not want to exterminate them. As I pointed out before, if that had been his aim, he could easily have achieved it.)

japatlgt wrote:

That is very true. Cherokee heritage is written in the features of many north Georgians. (And for that matter, my own Great-great grandfather was Cherokee.) But as you say, except in a little pocket of western North Carolina, the culture is lost, swallowed up into the larger American culture.

And that is part of my point. I think if the Cherokee had not removed, their culture might have been swallowed up entirely, and they themselves might have disappeared (by violence and by genetic dilution), and be remembered today only as we remember the Mohegans.

The other part of my point still has only been addressed by two posters. What should a President in Andrew Jackson’s position have done (given practical and political and financial considerations)? (And I have jokingly couched this as “What would President Jesus have done?”) And what would the long-term result have been if another path had been taken?

42

From 1805-1832, Georgia passed a series of laws taking title to Creek and Cherokee lands, and then using a lottery system to distribute those lands.

Here’s a description of the lotteries:

http://ngeorgia.com/history/lotteries.html

Here’s a further description, this one of the 1832 lottery, including eligibility requirements:

http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/rs/1832.htm

43

spoke your repetition of the practical and financial impossibility of the US govt responding to squatting as it occurred, does not make it so.

Or do you believe the official line that we MUST invade Iraq right this minute, before cooler heads have a chance to prevail.

Curious how the gov’t was unable to keep whites off desireable Indian land, but they had no problem keeping the indians ON worthless land in Indian territory - that is, at least until they decided to move them someplace else.

44

Dinsdale wrote:

And the repetition of the mantra “The US should have evicted squatters” does not magically solve the problem of paying for the soldiers to do it.

Besides which, the sheer geographic scope of the project is daunting. Take a space the size of New Jersey. Make it mountainous, with much of it forested, and with a circumference more than one third the length of the US border with Mexico. Now announce that gold has been found in the middle of it. Good luck keeping folks out.

How many men and women does the US devote to patroling the Mexican border these days? And how successful are they at keeping out illegal immigrants? (And further to the point, who pays for the border patrol?)

The US in 1820-1830 was still a young nation. It had managed (barely) to fend off Great Britain in 1812 by calling up state militias for short periods of service (generally 3 months). It did not maintain a large standing army.

The policing of the Cherokee Nation, including manning its borders, and running patrols in the interior to evict squatters, would require a sizeable force. Soldiers must be housed, clothed, fed and paid. Do you think US voters in 1820-30 would have supported the idea of devoting a large portion of their taxes to protecting the Cherokee from…US voters? Particularly when many of those voters had fresh in their minds various Indian wars of the past half century? (Including war with the Cherokee.)

There would have been no political support for US voters to pay for policing the Cherokee Nation. Any politician who proposed it would have been promptly voted out of office. The Cherokee themselves were not able to pay for it, clearly (unless they had entered into a mineral rights agreement as I suggested a couple of posts ago). So how, as a practical matter, do you propose it should have been accomplished? I’m still waiting for ideas.

Holy non sequitur, Batman! What the hell does Iraq have to do with this thread?

Captain Amazing, good point on the lotteries. Georgia clearly did encourage squatting. It was wrong for Georgia to do so, clearly. And yes, there was definitely a movement to squeeze the Cherokee off the land.

But then, nowhere in this thread have I said that what happened to the Cherokee was morally right. It was not. This thread is for discussion of practical realities.

And it seems to me that the Georgia lotteries would have made it even more difficult for Jackson to do something other than what he did.

Let’s put President Jesus in the White House. The state of Georgia conducts its lotteries. Settlers/squatters stream into Cherokee territory, deeds from the State of Georgia in hand. What would President Jesus do? Make war on the State of Georgia? (Remember, this was prior to the Civil War, back when states had this peculiar notion of their own sovereignty.)

No easy solutions.

45

:smack:

Looking over that lottery info, it looks like the lotteries were not held until after the land being parceled out was ceded by treaty.

So Georgia was not encouraging “squatters.” Or at least the land lotteries are not evidence of that.

(Of course, as previously noted, the treaties themselves were obtained by the Federal government via bribery and coercion.)

46

The (admitted) non sequitur referenced individuals’ gullibility as to government proclamations concerning what the government cannot afford or cannot afford to do without.

Multiply by a factor indicating elected officials’ general willingness to make politically unpopular choices, and you’ll see why the gov’t had no problem eliminating (often peaceful) Indians from their land, but was unable to prevent the Euro-Americans from trespassing upon native soil.

I’m just having a hard time figuring out why you cannot see the Cherokee solution for a naked land grab reflecting ethnic bias.

You ask for a solution. As long as you wish to dwell in the land of supposition and generality, I see no problem with a relatively small band or two of well-armed calvary/bounty hunters roaming freely across the area, forcibly evicting any squatters, and meeting resistance with lethal force. Heck, relatively small forces had tremendous success against the Indians out west! Of course, doing so would require acknowledgment of the Indian’s sovereign right to their territory, and we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?

You want a solution - how about every state, to gain admission to te union, must identify 5% of their territory to remain forevermore Indian territory. (Make it 1%, and the Indians would still be better off than they are now!) The state gets to choose the 5% they deem least desirable, the Indians can lobby but are bound by the state’s decision. And both parties are forever bound by the decision. Relationship can be as a protectorship or territory. A whole bunch of little Guams within our own borders.

Heck, while we’re at it, how about the US government just once decided to actually live up to the terms of a treaty they signed? It wasn’t impossible. Just turned out that future developments made the prior agreements less advantageous than the party with the numbers and the gunpower desired.

The only thing making a reasonable resolution impossible was the capitalist and expansion driven manifest destiny, accompannied by racial prejudice.

47

As other posters have pointed out, the Cherokee were in a different position than the Northeastern tribes involved in the 17th century Indian wars.

By the time of the Trail of Tears, Cherokee culture had been greatly influenced by white culture. Their society was rapidly becoming patrilineal as opposed to matrilineal; men had largely taken over farming, which traditionally had been women’s work; many Cherokee were Baptist or Methodist. The changes are evident as early as the late 18th century–Attakullakulla, an 18th century Cherokee leader, was known among whites as the Little Carpenter because of his propensity for European-style building projects. All of this makes their situation different from the 17th century Pequots or Algonquin, who had a culture vastly alien to the white settlers.

If the removal had not occured, I think today the Cherokee would have a position similar to that of the Lumbees of eastern North Carolina. The Lumbee have interacted–sometimes amicably. sometimes violently–with the larger society, but retain a unique culture. Their culture has certainly changed since the 18th century, but no culture remains static. Many scholars believe that the Lumbee are actually a tri-racial group, composed of descendents of Indians, white settlers, and escaped slaves. The Cherokee may have experienced a similar blending, but I doubt they would have been entirely assimilated by white culture.

48

Dinsdale wrote:

WTF? Please stop misrepresenting my position. Nowhere have I said that Cherokee sovereignty should not be respected. Just the opposite. I am asking Dopers for realistic alternatives which could have been pursued and which would have preserved that sovereignty. But those alternatives can’t be based in fantasy. There has to be some acknowledgement of the reality on the ground, and of the political winds that were blowing at the time.

Your abrasive tone notwithstanding, I sort of like your proposed solution. Seems like a cost-effective system. However, I’m not sure I follow your “bounty hunter” angle. Do you mean they would be paid on a “per-squatter” basis? By whom? And how do you determine how many squatters they evicted? Take their word for it?

Perhaps just a standing federal cavalry unit would work better, operating from a fort (within the Nation?). I do see a potential for corruption of Cavalymen though, particularly when gold mining comes into the picture. Best to keep troops rotated frequently to avoid development of structured systems of graft.

49

Of course that still leaves open the question of whether the Cherokee should contribute financially to defray the cost of their protection.

50

Except in some cases the land being parceled out wasn’t ceded by treaty, but by legislative fiat. Georgia passed laws at the end of the 1820s, stating that the State of Georgia had authority over Cherokee land, that tribal decisions didn’t have any authority, and that Georgia law applied to Cherokee land. Georgia also sent in its militia to expel Cherokee from gold lands, forbade Cherokee from testifying in court or bringing charges against white Georgians, and required any contract between a Cherokee and a white person to be witnessed by two whites. As Edward Everett described it in a speech before the House of Representatives, the effect of the laws were that whites preying on Cherokees:

51

You are right. I guess I simply do not understand your opinion. You keep suggesting respecting Cherokee territory was impossible. Yet I have seen no reason to accept that supposition. All you have presented are generalities concerning area and expense.

I submit that it was by no means “impossible” to respect the rights of the Cherokee - or any other native Americans. It was just that since they were a conquered, inferior, and militarily weaker people, we had no need to.

Sorry I don’t understand what you are trying to do here, so I’ll bow out.

52

Dinsdale you clearly do not understand (or choose not to understand, I can’t tell which).

Shallow analysis of the problem. Respect by whom? By the federal government? By the State of Georgia? By the squatters?

See, the real trick is getting all three to respect the territory.

I am not suggesting that it was impossible. I am suggesting that it would be an expensive and politically unpopular undertaking. (Not to say an undertaking indicitave of a political death wish.) Bearing those things in mind, how might it nevertheless have been accomplished in the real world?

I intended a thread as a thought experiment. Perhaps I should have chosen a less provocative thread title, since folks can’t seem to get past it.

53

Putting aside the right or wrongs of what happened to the Cherokee (we all know what happened was wrong), I’d like to ask a question related to the responsibility of Jackson. I’m not trying to make excuses for the man, and I don’t really hold any view currently, I’m just curious.

Being a dirty foreigner, I have absolutely no clue as to the political situation at the time. What position did Jackson hold, exactly? Was he voted into office by the common people, or by a privileged few? Did he owe his power to the white settlers who wanted the Cherokee land, and their like?

Basically, was he looking at losing his position if he didn’t find some way to get the whites the land pretty quick? That would surely cloud his judgement, right?

What was the media’s view at the time, if indeed, the media was of sufficient size to rouse people in those days? Even if he did not answer to the would-be settlers, were the people he did answer to solidly bias in the situation or want a quick fix?

Were there more bloodthirsty governors (or whatever he was) waiting in the wings that wanted to exterminate the Cherokees completely? Would this position have made them more popular with the voters?

Why December for the forced removal? Was it an impulse action, or had it been delayed or made urgent by some new event? Was an election coming up in January or something, or had he lost control of the situation by then? It seems a bit sadistic to move them all in winter when there was no good reason not to wait a few months.

As far as I can see, the answers to these questions can help determine if he had no real alternatives, or if he just didn’t care about the Cherokee’s rights.

Based on what I’ve heard here so far, it sounds like he just didn’t care about the Cherokee enough to consider these things, but I would be interested in the above questions just to clear things up a little as history is rarely as clear cut as it seems.

54

Racer1 wrote:

The common people. In fact, his election was hailed as the triumph of the common man, and gave rise to the term “Jacksonian Democracy,” meaning a democracy in which the common people were full participants. In celebration of this spirit, Jackson held an “open house” in the White House during his inauguration. All citizens were invited to come to the celebration. (This actually backfired, as the resulting mob wrecked the place.) Nevertheless, his election was regarded as the end of what had been, in effect, an oligarchy in the US. He was the first non-Easterner elected to the White House, and the first who rose to power from humble beginnings. His reputation (except for his mistreatment of the Indians, which is a black mark indeed) is as a fighter for the common man and against the citadels of power and privilege.

(From earlier posts in this thread, you’d never guess how he managed to make it onto the $20 bill.)

Yes.

Probably. The alternative would have been to spend tax dollars protecting the Cherokee. While that was the right thing to do morally, it would have killed him politically. (The Cherokee had no vote, of course.)

Newspapers of the day were certainly capable of rousing the public. While there were editors and prominent people opposed to the mistreatment of the Cherokee, the majority still regarded them as “savages.” Most importantly, the frontiersmen who were Jackson’s power base wanted the Indians (without regard to tribal affiliation) gone. In addition to the hunger for Indian land, the settlers regarded Indians along the frontier as a security threat. (As mentioned in the OP.) The Creek War in general, and the Fort Mims massacre in particular, colored their thinking. While the Cherokee were not the Creek, all Indian tribes suffered from the loss of trust the war engendered.

(And incidentally, though the historical foocus in on the removal of the Cherokee, the Seminoles, Creek, Choctaw and Chickasaw were also removed to the Oklahoma Territory (west of the Mississippi).

Southern politicians, in particular, wanted the Indians removed. (We’re talking about Southeastern tribes here. Northeastern tribes had already been wiped out.) many Northern politicians opposed the removal, some on religious grounds. (In fact, this issue was one of several which divided North and South in the decades leading to the Civil War, slavery of course being the main point of division.)

I don’t know of any single politician who was ready to step into Jackson’s shoes if he faltered on this issue, but doubtless one would have stepped forward. John C. Calhoun, perhaps.

Actually, they weren’t moved in winter. The removal began in the summer. Unfortunately, many Cherokee didn’t arrive in Oklahoma until winter had set in.

The Treaty of New Echota, which provided for removal, went into effect May 23, 1836. The treaty provided a two-year grace period for the Cherokee to leave. (Bear in mind, though, that the treaty was obtained by bribery and threats, and was not supported by the majority of Cherokee.)

At the end of May, 1838, most of the Cherokee still had not left. By this time, Jackson was no longer in office. His hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren, ordered the removal to begin. The Cherokee were rounded up, and by the middle of June, the general in charge reported that not a single Cherokee remained in Georgia except as prisoners in the stockade.

The first contingent of westward-bound Cherokee actually sailed down the Tennessee River on the first leg of their journey in June. Deaths among this first group of removees were high, and Chief John Ross prevailed upon General Winfield Scott (the man in charge) to let him (Ross) organize the trip west. Ross broke the remaining Cherokee into smaller groups, so they could better forage along the way. Ross was able to significantly reduce the casualty rate. However, because Ross’s group started late (early fall) they arrived at the end of the trail in the middle of the brutal winter of 1838-39.

Was the suffering on the Trail of Tears inflicted intentionally? For the most part, no. It was more the result of poor planning and inefficiency. As I said earlier, criminal negligence.

55

I went back and reviewed Rimini on the subject of squatters in the Cherokee territory.

Andrew Jackson had made an earnest effort to evict squatters. In 1820, he posted a notice along the frontier which read:

Jackson follow up by actually undertaking eviction of squatters. According to Remini

Jackson expressed his frustration at the difficulty of the task in correspondence with Secretary of War John Calhoun (as reported by Remini):

–Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars, pp. 187-88

56

The Only Answer

57

OK, Libertarian, you win.

Jackson was a Nazi.

Jackson was an evildoer.

Jackson woke up each morning wondering what he could do to inflict suffering on the Cherokee.

The Cherokee of the time were (to a man) peaceful, angelic farmers.

On his best day, Gandhi couldn’t match the saintliness of the Cherokee.

The Cherokee conducted themselves honorably at all times. (They even scalped honorably.)

The white squatters were “barbarians.” Their own poverty was no excuse for their actions.

Black is black. White is white. There is no gray.

The orthodoxy must be preserved!

58

Very minor correction: Jackson’s adopted Indian son actually wasn’t Cherokee, but Creek. His name was Lincoyer and AJ seems to have truly cared for him, making no distinction between him and his white adopted son AJ, Jr. (who was, as you probably know, a source of major aggravation to the General). Lincoyer was found when he was about 3 years old wandering among the bodies at Horseshoe Bend, and Jackson became enraged when none of the Creek women captives would care for him due to some superstition or other. Jackson fed him himself (brown sugar water) and cared for him the rest of his life. He died of tuberculosis sometime around 1827 when he was in his late teens and it was remarked by friends that it was one of the few times Jackson cried in public.

Speaking of Creek Indians, I grew up in very rural Alabama, one of many many descendants of William Weatherford, the Creek Indian chief better known as Red Eagle. (He was more white than Indian but he culturally identified as a Creek, loathing his maternal uncle Alexander McGillivray who he felt was far too white). Red Eagle, while a valorous warrior and general who won the respect of Jackson, is in and of himself proof that the Indians as natural born peacelovers is a myth. A few hundred yards from where I grew up are the remains of Fort Mims, where hundreds of innocent whites, blacks, Indians, and mixtures thereof were slaughtered and scalped by Creeks on Weatherford’s orders, and the Creek Cherokee wars have been mentioned already. One of the major reasons that the Indians were vanquished in spite of their numeric advantages was that they loved fighting each other more than they liked fighting whites. (Daniel Boone’s son was tortured to death by Cherokee, incidentally.)

To answer the OP, in my opinion (YMMV) Jackson’s removal, bloody and merciless as it has been repeatedly established it was, changed Cherokee culture more than it preserved it. The more “pure” Cherokee cultures are those descended from the ones who hid in the Carolinas during removal, just as the closest thing to a real Creek culture left is courtesy of the swamp dwelling Seminoles who resisted.
The only real option to have protected the rights of the Cherokee that I can think of in a young country with limited money and only a tiny standing army would have been to have allowed them to have formed a militia and their own Federal law courts. I can’t imagine even the SCOTUS or what passed for liberals in the day having been much relieved by this decision as it would have given thousands of Indian men the weapons and the military training that could and probably would have been turned against the eastern seaboard of the Carolinas. While even at the time Jackson was reviled by many for the act, it is absolutely impossible and unfair to judge him with 21st century eyes since peaceful co-existence, to paraphrase Spoke, couldn’t have been achieved by Jesus himself. Plus, let’s face it, had they not been removed we’d be living on a very very very very overcrowded eastern seaboard.

Another of my ancestors (I’m about 1/4 assorted Native American) was one of many white or mixed men who married his wife for her quarter-section (160 acre) apportionment. He was a penniless immigrant to whom that was an almost inconceivable amount of land. The land happened to be nowhere near anyplace she’d ever set foot; she was from west Georgia and the land was in what’s now West Alabama, but they settled the place and mercenary as the beginnings of the relationship were they must have found some common ground not given in the lottery as they had 16 children.
It is a horrible but true fact that throughout history many civilizations have been forced to assimilate or cease existence. (Where are the Hittites today, or the Mercians, or the Carthaginians?) The mass media of the 20th century so changed human perceptions that it is almost impossible to truly empathize with ancestors so recent that we have photographs of them yet who are so distant from us that they owned slaves and stole half of Mexico. A question that I have wondered, though if I posed it it would instantly degenerate into a “you insensitive bastard” bashing, is “are we better off today BECAUSE of the removal of the Indians?” and how can people who favor the establishment of the Jewish state in Israel condemn Jackson for throwing natives off their land. And of course above all, what do women want?

59

So, it was necessary to destroy the village to save it.

60

Holy crap, you nailed me!

-prav, Scotch-Irish Cherokee Texan :slight_smile: