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Assessments of Andrew Jackson and/or His
Removal Policy
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Theodore Frelinghuysen (1830) |
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“… We must firmly protest against this Executive
disposition of those high interests. No one branch of the
government can rescind, modify, or explain away, our public
treaties. They are the supreme law of the land, so declared
to be by the constitution. They bind the President and all
other departments, rulers and people. … We possess
the constitutional right to inquire wherefore it was that,
when some of these tribes appealed to the Executive for protection,
according to the terms of our treaties with them, they received
the answer that the Government of the United States could
not interpose to arrest or prevent the legislation of the
States over them. Sir, it was a harsh measure, indeed, to
faithful allies that had so long reposed in confidence on
a nation’s faith. They had, in the darkest hour of
trial, turned to the aegis which the most solemn pledges
had provided for them, and were comforted by the conviction
that it would continue to shed upon them a pure and untarnished
beam of light and hope. Deep, indeed, must have been their
despondency, when their political father assured them that
their confidence would be presumptuous, and dissuaded them
from all expectation of relief …” (April
9, 1830 U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 – 1873
Register of Debates, Senate, 21st Congress, 1st Session,
310)
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Alexis de Tocqueville (1832) |
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“ The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which
brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating
the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing
their rights; the United States Americans have attained both
these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and
philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating
a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes
of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect
to the laws of humanity” (Democracy in America,
312).
“Nowadays the dispossession of the Indians is accomplished
in a regular and, so to say, quite legal manner ”.
“When the European population begins to approach the
wilderness occupied by a savage nation, the United States
government usually sends a solemn embassy to them; the white
men assemble the Indians in a great plain, and after they
have eaten and drunk with them, they say: "What have
you to do in the land of your fathers? Soon you will have
to dig up their bones in order to live. In what way is the
country you dwell in better than another? Are there not forests
and marshes and prairies elsewhere than where you live, and
can you live nowhere but under your own sun? Beyond these
mountains that you see on the horizon, and on the other side
of the lake which skirts your land to the west, there are
vast countries where wild beasts are still found in abundance;
sell your lands to us and go and live happily in those lands." That
speech finished, they spread before the Indians firearms,
woolen clothes, kegs of brandy, glass necklaces, pewter bracelets,
earrings, and mirrors. If, after the sight of all these riches,
they still hesitate, it is hinted that they cannot refuse
to consent to what is asked of them and that soon the government
itself will be powerless to guarantee them the enjoyment
of their rights. What can they do? Half convinced, half constrained,
the Indians go off to dwell in new wildernesses, where the
white men will not let them remain in peace for ten years.
In this way the Americans cheaply acquire whole provinces
which the richest sovereigns in Europe could not afford to
buy” (Democracy in America, ed. by J.P. Mayer and
Max Lerner, 1966, 299-300) .
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Francis Trollope (1832) |
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Trollope regarded Jackson’s removal plan as a “treacherous
policy.” She characterized Americans as filled with “contradictions
in their principles and practice.” “You will
see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible
rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the
children of the soul, whom they have bound themselves to
protect by the most solemn treaties” (Domestic
Manners of the Americans, ed. Donald Smalley, reprint 1960,
221-222).
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George Featherstonhaugh (1837) |
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Featherstonhaugh was impressed by Cherokee progress in
the “great principles of civilization” and condemned
those who were driving the Cherokee from “their religious
and social state … not because they cannot be civilized,
but because a pseudo set of civilized beings, who are too
strong for them, want their possessions!” (A Canoe
Voyage Up the Minnay Sotor …, Vol. 2, Reprint 1970,
233-234).
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John G. Burnett (1890) |
“ The removal of the Cherokee Indians from their life
long homes in the year of 1838 found me a young man … and
a Private soldier in the American Army. Being acquainted
with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their
language, I was sent as interpreter … and witnessed
the execution of the most brutal order in the History of
American Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and
dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point
into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain
on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep
into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward
the west. … I have known as many as twenty-two of them
to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold,
and exposure. Among this number was the beautiful Christian
wife of Chief John Ross … giving her only blanket for
the protection of a sick child …. In the year of 1828,
a little Indian boy living on Ward creek had sold a Gold
nugget to a white trader, and that nugget sealed the doom
of the Cherokees. … Men were shot in cold blood, lands
were confiscated. Homes were burned and the inhabitants driven
out by these Gold hungry brigands. … At this time 1890
we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young
people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that
was committed against a helpless race, truth is the facts
are being concealed from the young people of today. School
children of today do not know that we are living on lands
that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point
to satisfy the white man’s greed for gold. … Murder
is murder and somebody must answer, somebody must explain
the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in
the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the four-thousand
silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their
exile. … Let the Historian of a future day tell the
sad story with its sighs, its tears and dying groans. Let
the great Judge of all the earth weigh our actions and reward
us according to our work” (Journal of Cherokee
Studies 3, 3, 1978, 180-183).
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Francis Paul Prucha (1969) |
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“ It was not Jackson’s aim to crush the Indians
because, as an old Indian fighter, he hated Indians. … Rather,
as a military man, his dominant goal … was to preserve
the security and well-being of the United States and its
Indian and white inhabitants” (“Andrew Jackson’s
Indian Policy: a Reassessment,” The Journal of
American History, 56, 3, December 1969, 527).
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Michael Paul Rogin (1975) |
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“ Disguising his motives, Jackson accused the Indians
of designs actually his own … Was the “savage
Tribe that will neither adhere to Treaties, nor the Law of
Nations” the Cherokees or the American Scotch-Irish?
Jackson … ascribed to [the Cherokee] Characteristics
of his own people. He was talking about himself” (Fathers
and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American
Indian , 133).
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More of Rogin’s views: |
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“ Those who see Jackson merely as an acquisitive swindler—a
confidence man—badly miss the point. He needed to ground
acquisitiveness on moral bedrock. The more egregious the
activity, the more he engaged in falsification of memory,
denial, militant self-righteousness, and projection of his
own motivations onto others. Jackson’s relations with
the victimized Cherokees illustrate this proposition.
Secretary of War Crawford signed an agreement with the Cherokees
in March 1816. It recognized their right to the land in question,
and compensated them for damage to livestock and crops inflicted
by Jackson’s troops … [but Jackson would not
admit the legality of the Cherokee claims] … to admit
the Cherokee claims was to admit that the territory marched
through by his troops … actually belonged to the Cherokees. … ‘An
Indian … will claim everything and anything,’ he
wrote in response to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw
claims. Give in to them on this land and they will begin
to claim the neighboring, wrote Jackson, substituting an
imaginary process of Indian expansion for the actual history
of white expansion ” (Fathers and Children, 171-172).
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Ronald T. Takaki (1979) |
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" In the removal and killing of Indians, the expansion
of the market, and the formulation of a metaphysics of Indian-hating,
Jackson was in effect the nation's confidence man. … He
called himself "father" and Indians "children" as
he employed "confidential agents" to deceive and
bribe Indians in order to remove them from their lands; he
insisted that the government be kept pure and separated from
the corruption of land speculators as he permitted the government
to be used in their service. He assured the Indians that
his advice to them was based on "feelings of justice" as
he moved their lands into the "market." Indeed,
through the use of a multitude of disguises, Jackson protected
the moral character of the American people as he served the
class interests of the speculators, farmers, and planters
seeking to appropriate Indian lands. (Iron Cages: Race
and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,1979, 106).
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Robert V. Remini (1977, 2001) |
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“What Jackson did to the Indians as President was
take advantage of [U.S.] strength … by instituting
a policy of removal that included an exchange of land. … As
it turned out, the American people as a whole sided with
the government and approved Jackson’s policy. They
did so because of their racism, their decades-old fear and
mistrust of Native Americans, and their insatiable desire
for the land they occupied. What resulted constitutes one
of the great tragedies in the history of the United States,
a tragedy for which the American people and their President
must be held accountable” (Remini, Indian Wars,
279).
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More of Remini’s views of Jackson |
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“ to understand the meaning and significance of Jackson’s
actions, one must view them in the context of the nineteenth
century … It cannot be ignored or forgotten that a
powerful need existed throughout the country during Jackson’s
lifetime to subdue the Indians and expel them from territory
that was believed to be essential to national expansion and
the defense of the country. … His military skill and
undeviating determination combined to annihilate the Indian
tribes and propel thousands of Americans across the south
and west. His decree, more than any other, forever separated
the white and red races” (Remini, Course of American
Empire, 340).
“The key to understanding Jackson’s attitude
toward the Indian is not hatred but paternalism. He always
treated the Indians as children who did not know what was
good for them. But he knew, and he would tell them, and then
they must obey. If they refused, they could expect a fearful
punishment from a wrathful parent. … If Jackson was
paternalistic did he decide on removal because it was best
for the Indian? Clearly not. He agreed to it because it was
best for the American nation. Most important of all, removal
meant the elimination of tribal government, Tribal organization,
tribal sovereignty from white society. It was never the Indians
per se that bothered Jackson. It was their infernal presence
as a tribe, as a unit separate and distinct from the rest
of the country, as though the Indians as a Nation had a right
to the status of a free, independent and sovereign state.
This Jackson could not abide. So he swept it away—beyond
the Mississippi” (Remini, Course of American Empire,
337).
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