The United States was obligated to extinguish Indian claims in Georgia. It was a condition of Georgia’s 1802 agreement to cede to the federal government the land that became Alabama and Mississippi.
Jackson was carrying out a policy that was in place long before he took office.
You can see the original Articles of Cession here. The requirement to extinguish Indian claims in Georgia is set forth in the fourth article.
Actually, he only had to measure one angle. He measured the angle of the Sun at zenith in Alexandria on a solstice. Among his assumptions were that Alexandria is directly north of Syene, so that the distance between them would be a simple arc length along a great circle, and that the sun was directly overhead in Syene at the solstice (ie, that it was exactly on the Tropic of Cancer). Both assumptions are off by a few degrees. But mainly, I just have more doubts about how accurate the distance estimates he obtained from camel drovers could be than you do. Also, he was trying to measure a fairly small angle of about 7 degrees - even a quarter degree error would throw his calculation off by about 4%.
wiki “In 1838, the Cherokee people were forcibly removed from their lands in the Southeastern United States to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the Western United States, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 4,000 Cherokees.[25] In the Cherokee language, the event is called Nu na da ul tsun yi—“the Place Where They Cried”. The Cherokee Trail of Tears resulted from the enforcement of the Treaty of New Echota, an agreement signed under the provisions of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which exchanged Native American land in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River, but which was never accepted by the elected tribal leadership or a majority of the Cherokee people…Nevertheless, the treaty, passed by Congress by a single vote, and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, was imposed by his successor President Martin Van Buren who allowed Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama an armed force of 7,000 made up of militia, regular army, and volunteers under General Winfield Scott to round up about 13,000 Cherokees into concentration camps at the U.S. Indian Agency near Cleveland, Tennessee before being sent to the West. Most of the deaths occurred from disease, starvation and cold in these camps. …In the winter of 1838 the Cherokee began the thousand-mile march with scant clothing and most on foot without shoes or moccasins”
“…* Van Buren … Also, he oversaw the “Trail of Tears”, which involved the expulsion of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole from Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina to the Oklahoma territory.”*
"Ross’s petition was ignored by President Martin Van Buren, who soon directed General Winfield Scott to forcibly move all those Cherokee who had not yet complied with the treaty and moved west. The Cherokee people were almost entirely removed west of the Mississippi (except for the Oconaluftee Cherokee in North Carolina, the Nantahala Cherokee who joined them, and two or three hundred married to whites)."
1838. Van Buren, not Jackson.
And as Spoke pointed out Jackson was just carrying on a policy started long before he took office.
IMHO, Jackson would not have been anywhere near as brutal as the racist Van Buren. Mind you, Jackson was hardly a nice guy.
I’ve only one biography of Jackson but according to John Buchanan Old Hickory was sparsely educated. His mother hoped he would become a minister and sent him to school but the Revolutionary War intervened and he only returned to his studies briefly afterwards. However frontier standards are flexible and he was able to secure work teaching school. His training in the law was the traditional and practical learning by working for lawyers. The book does not discuss the idea of a Flat Earth but Jackson’s support for the Exploring Expedition indicates that he wasn’t a believer (an unlikely possibility in any case). The book I have on the expedition likewise is silent on the matter.
Further note - thinking about what I said regarding the assumptions - Syene is actually about a third of a degree north of what was then the Tropic of Cancer, and the difference in longitude is about 3 degrees. The first is actually pretty significant - had he been able to measure the sun in Syene at solstice, he would have found it was not directly overhead, but at an angle of about 1/3 degree (not enough to be noticed in casual observations that you could see the bottom of wells and so on). Since he was measuring an angle of 7 degrees and a fraction in Alexandria, this is a significant difference - apparently, he concluded the distance between Syene and Alexandria represented 1/50 of the Earth’s circumference - 7 degrees 12 minutes. 1/48 would have been more accurate. People reproducing his measuring techniques, and doing so from more northern latitudes can get better results because they are measuring a larger angle, and an absolute error of a fraction of a degree isn’t as significant.