Mr. Adams's Last Crusade by Joseph Wheelan

Author:Joseph Wheelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

Before he became president, Adams had subscribed to the predominant belief that America was entitled to the Indians’ lands and could rightfully seize them by force or through faithless treaties. While negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, Adams had asserted the United States’ claims to authority over the western tribes, and as secretary of state, he had supported Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida.

But in the White House, Adams’s thinking underwent a rapid change during the crisis over the Treaty of Indian Springs, in which the Creeks ceded all their lands in Georgia for $400,000 and a commensurate acreage west of the Mississippi River. The treaty was in fact fraudulent, signed by chiefs representing just eight of the Creek Nation’s forty-six towns. When the other Creek leaders complained that they had been cheated, Adams intervened as their protector, opposing Georgia’s determination to enforce the treaty. But the Creeks, followed by the Choctaws, lost their eastern lands.

With public opinion strongly supporting expulsion, Adams chose not to confront the Southern states clamoring for the Indians’ removal, but he stopped believing that removal was a just policy. He reached the new conviction, radically out of step with the spirit of “Manifest Destiny” suffusing America, that the government should protect the Indians—a conviction that now animated his actions in Congress.

In portraying the Indians’ treatment as a stark human rights issue, Adams became recognized as the tribes’ friend, although in actuality he was able to do little for them. He presented a petition by two Seneca chiefs—Dartmouth-educated Chief Pierce, and the elderly Chief Two Guns—asking that Congress not appropriate funds to carry out “the fraudulent treaty by which they are to be driven like a herd of swine from their homes to a wilderness west of the Mississippi.” After Cherokee Chief John Ross met with him, Adams introduced resolutions and petitions protesting the Cherokees’ maltreatment.

Adams rarely retreated on a matter involving human rights, but the futility of his advocacy for the Indians—with the public and Congress overwhelmingly supporting the tribes’ removal to the West—compelled him to do so now. He asked to be excused from serving as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs and “turned my eyes away from this sickening mass of putrefaction.”

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