American Republics by Alan Taylor

Author:Alan Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

All I want in this creation

Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation

Away up yonder in the Cherokee nation

In a common swindle, a white man forged a promissory note made out to him and allegedly signed by an Indian—who could not deny it in court. Then the forger would get a court order to take livestock, slaves, or land to satisfy the debt. The state had its own swindle: Georgia held a lottery and raffled off lands in the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, the discovery of gold in Cherokee country drew in a horde of intruders who brought slaves to work their mines. When Cherokees got in the way, the invaders beat them, burned their homes, and raped their women.91

Jackson won the presidency with almost unanimous support from the voters of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. They expected him to remove their Indians, and Jackson made that cause the imperative priority of his administration. Publicly, Jackson told Indians to move beyond the Mississippi “or submit to the laws” of the southern states. Privately, he conceded “that the Indians could not possibly live under the laws of the state.” Jackson’s policy spread misery among Indians, but he concluded: “I feel conscious of having done my duty to my red children.” If they stayed and suffered, Jackson declared, “It will be attributable to their want of duty to themselves, not to me.”92

Natives found champions among Protestant clergymen and laity from the Northeast. These friends organized protest meetings and petitions to Congress, and produced newspaper essays and pamphlets to defend aboriginal rights. The friends noted the inconsistency of uprooting people who had followed the government’s advice to embrace civilization. One petition denounced removal as “cruel, unjust, and disgraceful to our Government.” Another warned that forced removal would betray the nation’s founding ideals, and “the only free gov[ernmen]t on earth” would be “converted into a Despotism of the most frightful character.” The petitioners included thousands of pious women. “We are unwilling that the church, the schools, and the domestic altar should be thrown down before the avaricious god of power,” declared women from Maine.93

To counter moral criticism of removal, Jackson claimed that he would save the Indians by removing them to the West, where the federal government could “exercise a parental control over their interests and possibly perpetuate their race.” A few reformers supported his position. They included the superintendent of Indian affairs, Thomas McKenney, and a Baptist preacher, Isaac McCoy, who insisted that Natives faced extermination unless removed far beyond settlers and their alcohol. These reformers claimed that only a few mixed-blood chiefs opposed removal while the silent majority of Indians longed to escape misery by heading west.94

Southerners wanted to oust Indians without dithering about morality. Georgia governor Wilson Lumpkin derided the opponents as “Northern fanatics, male and female . . . protesting against the removal of the poor, dear Indians.” Southerners accused northern opponents of seeking to enhance their region’s relative power by blocking southern development. The removers also charged Yankees with hypocrisy, for their ancestors had driven out or killed most of New England’s Indians.

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