Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Read online

  I call this book Jacksonland because Jackson strove to make the map his own. “The object of the Govt,” he wrote once while serving as a major general, “is to bring into markett this land & have it populated.” He did that in more ways than one. This book documents, perhaps more fully than before, Jackson’s personal dealings in real estate that he captured as a general. While still in military service he bought and operated slave plantations on former Indian land that he had opened to white settlement using doubtful means. He worked in concert with friends who bought even more land than he did, and colonized the newly acquired territory. The names of Jackson, his friends, and his relations appeared on the purchase records for at least forty-five thousand acres sold in the Tennessee River valley from 1818 onward. Jackson mixed public and private business in ways that would be considered scandalous today, and were criticized even in the nineteenth century, when notions of ethics were different and not all details of his acts were known.

  Jackson, more than any other single person, was responsible for creating the region we call the Deep South. In a larger sense Jackson was filling out the wider American South, which has persisted ever since as a powerful cultural and political force. Maybe it all would have grown the same way without him—great historical forces were at work—but his contemporaries understood that Jackson did the work, and did it his way. Not for nothing did they bestow his name on Jackson, Mississippi, Jacksonville, Florida, and Jackson County as well as Jacksonville, Alabama. Those were the three states he did the most to establish.

  On the Indian map, of course, the future Deep South was mostly Cherokee land, or Creek land, or Choctaw or Chickasaw or Seminole land. These were the five large tribal groups remaining in the region in Jackson’s day. They would become known as the Five Civilized Tribes because they were adapting their ancient cultures to white society. Despite internal resistance, many Cherokees changed their clothing, their agriculture, their religion, and the relationship between men and women. They embraced literacy and written laws, and even adopted the practice of owning slaves. They acted like immigrants assimilating to a new country, except that the new country was coming to them. Just as John Ross altered the appearance of the people on his boat in 1812, Cherokees were altering their nation in ways they considered necessary for their safety and well-being. It was also to ensure their safety that they turned for leadership to a man with the skills of John Ross. Maybe the Cherokee story would have read the same way without him—here too great forces were in motion—but when the crisis arrived, he chose a different path than other native leaders, and even other Cherokee leaders. Right or wrong, his choices are part of what makes the Cherokee story so meaningful and moving. Ross wanted to stay on the map, and find an enduring place for his people in Jacksonland.

  PART ONE

  Horseshoe

  1814

  One

  Every Thing Is to Be Feared

  On March 14, 1814, General Andrew Jackson began to compose a letter. He did it at his headquarters, an open-sided tent, or marquee, at a camp called Fort Strother in what is now Alabama. The letter was addressed to a man in the same camp. Jackson could have easily summoned the man for a talk, but wanted his message to be written for posterity.

  This letter omitted the flourishes of courtesy that were common in his writing and characteristic of the age. Even when he sent a note filled with vituperation, Jackson might sign off humbly as “Respectfully your Most Obedient Servant.” He began letters to his close friend and military subordinate John Coffee by addressing him as “Sir,” and signed his first and last name when writing home to his wife, Rachel, but his note on March 14 wasted no ink on a show of respect. He did not call the recipient “Private,” which was his rank in the Tennessee militia, nor even check the spelling of his name, which other documents recorded as John Wood.

  John Woods,

  You have been tried by a court martial on the charges of disobedience of orders, disrespect to your commanding officer, & mutiny; & have been found guilty of all of them.

  Andrew Jackson was supreme commander at this camp, and Wood was at that moment the very lowest of his lowly soldiers.

  The court which found you guilty of these charges has sentenced you to death by shooting

  A firing squad from the Thirty-Ninth Regiment was awaiting the order to carry out the sentence.

  Any soldier who glimpsed Jackson working with his aides that morning might have seen the general’s gold epaulettes, with gold fringe, covering the shoulders of his blue shirt. His cold, steady eyes were set beneath bushy eyebrows in a narrow face; his gray hair was so unruly it could have been a fur hat. He was six feet two inches, 145 pounds, so thin that according to an old story his gaunt frame once saved his life in a duel, when his antagonist misjudged the narrow target inside Jackson’s bulky overcoat. A stick man in uniform.

  He surely wasn’t any thicker after the events of the past five months. In the fall he’d ridden with his army from their homes in Tennessee, fording rivers and bypassing mountains to establish Fort Strother in the woods. Jackson made that punishing journey with his left arm in a sling, having been shot in a gunfight in a hotel in the center of Nashville. The lead ball was still in his body. Since the southward march, supplies had arrived so rarely that his army had little food; one soldier recalled later that they “lived on any thing we could get from meat and Bread down to Acorns nutts herbs & some dry cowhide.” Jackson gave his soldiers his own food, which he could hardly eat. His stomach gave him constant trouble. He did contortions to ease the pain, sometimes draping his body over a sapling that had been knocked sideways for the purpose.

  He was using Fort Strother as his base of operations against a rebellious faction of the Creek Nation, the largest and most important Indian confederation in the region. The Creek rebels had risen up against their own nation’s leaders as well as against the United States, fighting on the same side as the British in the War of 1812. Fort Strother was near the northeast corner of a vast region known as the Mississippi Territory—present-day Mississippi and Alabama lumped together into one—though this territory was mostly a notion. Some of its borders had not even been surveyed. In reality, Fort Strother was on the Indian map, facing tens of thousands of square miles of Creek territory where virgin forest reached toward the sky and wet leaves carpeted the hillsides. The main signs of civilization near Fort Strother were Creek towns and plantations, and many of those were lifeless piles of ashes, since Jackson’s troops had been ranging out to burn them. At the fort most of the men lived in tents, arranged beside parade grounds like the one where General Jackson’s letter would soon be read aloud to John Wood.

  The offenses of which you have been found guilty are such as cannot be permitted to pass unpunished in an army, but at the hazard of its ruin.

  He went on writing for several pages. This was “the second time” that Wood had committed mutiny, Jackson claimed. The private violated “all the principles of honor,” had a mind “totally dead, to every honorable sentiment,” and was “perversely & obstinately bent on spreading discord.” Wood’s actions betrayed

  an incorrigible disposition of heart—a rebellious and obstinate temper of mind, which, as it cannot be rectified, ought not to be permitted to diffuse its influence amongst others—

  An army cannot exist where order & subordination are wholly disregarded.

  Order and subordination were on the general’s mind, for his army was as undisciplined as a bear rug with the bear still in it. Only one portion of his force consisted of regular army troops: the few hundred professional soldiers of the Thirty-Ninth Regiment, established the previous year. They were Jackson’s reliable men—the ones he could count on to form a firing squad, for instance. This regiment included a charismatic and theatrical young officer named Sam Houston. The rest of Jackson’s force of three thousand or so had done nothing in their lives to put them in the habit of following orders. Hundreds were friendly Indians, including the Cherokee Regiment, some of whom cam
e and went as they pleased—one, John Ross, until recently had been away on business in the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokees were prepared to fight for Jackson, but had a tradition that a warrior could refuse to go to war if he did not want to. The white men who formed the remainder of Jackson’s force were also independent thinkers. These were Tennessee volunteers, who neither acted nor looked the part of professional soldiers.

  Jackson, no professional soldier himself, had only begun recruiting his force in late 1812. He had offered to enroll Tennesseans and organize them to fight for the United States, and the War Department in Washington had accepted. The federal government needed states like Tennessee to help generate soldiers, having declared war at a time when the regular army had only a few thousand men. Without the resources to equip his volunteers, Jackson told them to bring their own weapons and even their own uniforms: “dark blue or brown,” his orders said, “homespun or not, at the election of the wearer.” One private was later described, perhaps a bit fancifully, as “a tall delicately framed youth … habited in a hunting shirt of some dark hue, set off with a fringe of yellow, a belt around the waist—in which he carried a dirk knife and tomahawk, and with his hat—these formed his equipment.” That youth, Richard K. Call, had walked out of his studies at a boys’ school called Mount Pleasant Academy to join a company being formed in his neighborhood. The bulk of the volunteers were frontier farmers. For a time the force had included Davy Crockett, a hunter and storyteller with a beloved if neglected wife at home.

  It was a wildly unrealistic way to raise an army. Jackson’s white men had enlisted for specified terms as short as three months, nowhere near the time his campaign required. Proud citizens of a republic, jealous of their rights and with business back home, they agitated to return as soon as their enlistments expired. Back in December Jackson had prevented a mass of troops from marching away only by having artillery aimed in their direction. Later he wrote the Tennesseans a letter saying they were free to go home if they were craven enough to abandon duty and country. Most, including Crockett, shrugged off this effort to shame them and departed, leaving Jackson with a small and motley collection of loyalists, including his friend John Coffee and Richard K. Call, that “delicately framed youth” with the tomahawk. Eventually fresh recruits arrived from Tennessee, Private Wood among them. But Coffee declared that the new men were “very clamorous and I fear will not do much good.” With such a raw force “it was not to be expected,” in the words of another Jackson aide, “that any thing short of the greatest firmness in its officers could restrain that course of conduct and disorder, which had hitherto so unhappily prevailed.”

  Then a man arrived at General Jackson’s tent to inform him of Private Wood’s crime. Wood ignored an officer’s order to pick up some bones that other militiamen had thrown on the ground after breakfast. When the officer shouted at him, the private became enraged, and brandished his rifle before submitting to arrest. No one was hurt. Days later, the swiftly convened court-martial sentenced Private Wood to the maximum penalty allowed under the Articles of War, U.S. military law. As Jackson’s aide later put it, the arrest of John Wood offered “a fit occasion” to set an example and subdue the army’s “mutinous spirit.” It was nevertheless a hard case. It was rare that American soldiers were executed. Wood had been with the army only a few weeks. What made the situation even more extraordinary was that Wood was believed to be underage, a little short of eighteen. In the three days following his conviction his fellow soldiers had asked the general to spare his life. Jackson’s letter provided his answer.

  This is an important crisis; in which if we all act as becomes us, every thing is to be hoped for towards the accomplishment of the objects of our government; if otherwise, every thing is to be feared… . Between [the] law & its offender, the commanding General ought not to be expected to interpose, & will not where there are not circumstances of alleviation. There appear to be none such in your case; & however as a man may deplore your unhappy situation, he cannot as an officer, without infringing his duty, arrest the sentence of the court martial.

  Andrew Jackson

  Major Genl.

  Jackson’s secretary wrote out a copy of the text in a letter book before sending the original on its way. The execution was scheduled for noon. Jackson and his aides completed other work that morning, appointing an assistant topographical engineer for the campaign Jackson was planning to launch against the Creeks. He also received news that one of his soldiers had died that morning, as men often did in this place with its temporary shelter, sketchy hygiene, and uncertain supplies. Jackson’s staff gave orders to bury the man “with the honors of war” at two o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe by then the gravediggers would be done with John Wood.

  • • •

  The bushy-haired general may not have known that he was making a signal decision of his life that day, but he knew his act would be scrutinized. The proof lay in his letter to John Wood. It was Jackson’s justification for an exceptional act, including its statement that the militiaman was condemned after committing mutiny for “the second time.” A copy of the letter soon made it to Nashville, where it became, in effect, a press release printed in newspapers.

  After the war General Jackson’s supporters added to this account. Two Jackson aides authored a biography of the general that praised the execution. No doubt reflecting Jackson’s view, his aide John Eaton said the death of John Wood was a “sacrifice, essential to the preservation of good order,” and that it worked as intended. “A strict obedience afterward characterized the army,” producing “the happiest effects.”

  Years later, when Jackson was running for president, the story resurfaced in far less flattering form. His political opponents tracked down former members of Private Wood’s unit. These men did not talk of Andrew Jackson imposing control on his army, but of Jackson losing control of himself. In their version of the story, the general heard that Wood was defying an order and emerged from his tent screaming, “Shoot the damned rascal! Shoot the damned rascal! Shoot the damned rascal!” Although he paused long enough for the formality of a hasty court-martial, Jackson plunged ahead with his brutal impulse, having resolved in advance that “by the Eternal God” he would not pardon the youth. The execution became the subject of political pamphlets and newspaper articles, pursuing Andrew Jackson throughout his career and even staining his legacy beyond the grave.

  So there were two competing interpretations of events. Historians have been left to pick and choose between them ever since, which is unfortunate, because the evidence shows that neither version is true.

  Jackson was wrong to call it Wood’s second mutiny. There had been an earlier altercation involving Wood’s unit, but before he joined it, according to his comrades.

  Jackson’s critics were wrong to suggest that the general lost control of himself. If he had truly screamed to “shoot the damned rascal,” one of his loyalists surely would have done it. A surviving fragment of the court-martial record contains a far more plausible statement. Upon learning that Wood was defying arrest, Jackson gave instructions that would “make it easy” to end the standoff: tell Wood a final time to give up, and “shoot him if he does not.” This threat was justified, since Wood was armed and defiant, and it also worked, since Wood surrendered peacefully. Jackson had a fierce temper, but also the ability to channel it toward his goals.

  More important was the context of the confrontation. Jackson was engaged in a contest of wills over Private Wood, one that apparently involved other members of the young man’s unit. By the admission of one of Wood’s close comrades, General Jackson offered the offender a way to save himself: “He could have the opportunity of enlisting,” joining the regular army, which would bind him to service for some time. His fellow militiamen were outraged, struggling as they were with Jackson over how long they should serve. “Without any apprehension of the sad catastrophe which was to follow,” they urged Wood to call Jackson’s bluff and refuse. They did not believe Jackson w
ould execute a teenage militiaman. When Wood briefly seemed ready to enlist, his friends “opposed it violently.” Once the young man declined the offer of clemency, General Jackson surely understood the seriousness of the threat to his authority. Jackson showed he was not bluffing, but his resolve did not end the conflict, and “a strict obedience” did not afterward characterize the army. On the very day of Wood’s execution, Jackson’s staff ordered a court-martial for another soldier accused of mutiny. Eight days later he ordered yet another court-martial for mutiny. Later in the year, as fresh recruits kept arriving, entire units fell apart: sixty-two of a hundred men from a single company were marked as having deserted, and several men were accused of mutiny and executed.

  Jackson was fighting simultaneously against the Creeks, against his own army, and against his political enemies back home in Tennessee. He was certain that the troops who’d marched home against his wishes were telling nasty stories about him. Having come from all over the state, they were spreading back to their homesteads like an infectious disease. “I have no doubts but you hear a great deal of stuff about Tyranny, etc., etc.,” his friend and subordinate John Coffee wrote home to his wife, urging her to be patient until the public learned the truth. Jackson, whose regular job as major general of militia was an elected one, also served with an elected governor, and he could not ignore the risk of losing public support. He had been documenting his military victories, assuring Coffee that proof of success would “kill dead our enemies,” adding in his uncertain spelling, “The snarling curs may grin—lie—and falsely swear but the[y] will die with their own bit[e]—all we have to do is perform our duty, and they are politically doomd.” That, at least, was his confident prediction in mid-February, although the language and timing of his letter—he scrawled it at “12 oclock at night,” by the light of some flickering flame at Fort Strother—suggested how much the topic gnawed at him.