Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Read online

  The freedom to ignore leaders could trigger instability. One Cherokee story, recorded in 1828, describes a chief leading an expedition of thirty men to explore western land. The chief encountered four strange men of an unknown tribe, made friends with them, and exchanged gifts. But when he informed his thirty confederates, they cast aside his diplomacy and chased down the strangers as presumed enemies, killing two. The exploring party itself then came under attack. In other cases, this loose style of governance produced positive results. In the 1760s Lieutenant Timberlake was impressed by the Cherokees’ diplomacy. Though they depended on trade with the British to their east, they maintained ties with the French from New Orleans and Canada. Timberlake realized the Cherokees were playing one colonial power against another, preserving independence from each. “Their alliance with the French seems equal … to our most masterly strokes of policy; and yet we cannot be surprized at it, when we consider that merit alone creates their ministers, and not the prejudices of party, which often create ours.”

  Very soon after Timberlake’s visit it grew harder to play outside powers against one another. The British drove away the French in 1763, and the Americans drove away the British in 1783. The Spanish still controlled Florida to the south, but the Americans were the dynamic power. All the American Indian nations put together might number 600,000 or 700,000 people against the United States’ irrepressible millions. Cherokees needed other ways to guard their sovereignty, and Cherokee leaders embraced the civilization program when it was extended by President Washington in the 1790s.

  Washington had developed respect for natives through personal experience. During the colonial period, when he was a military officer charged with defending the frontier of Virginia, he found Indians to be such formidable opponents that only other Indians could defeat them. He urged Virginia to seek help from natives, including Cherokees. Once he became president, he tried to avoid fighting Indians at all. This required him to protect Indian land from white encroachment. It wasn’t that he opposed western settlement (which he saw as his nation’s future) nor even that he opposed real estate speculation in Indian lands (which he had done on a grand scale himself). He simply opposed white land grabbers’ triggering wars his government could not afford. Washington’s policy explicitly recognized the two dissonant maps of America—the Indian map of nations with great blotches of land, and the U.S. map of straight lines dividing states and territories. He even took the side of the Indian map: the authority of states would only extend to the point where they reached Indian borders.

  It was true that this benevolent approach contained its measure of self-interest. Washington expected that the colors of the Indian map would fade. Natives would need less land for modern agriculture than for hunting, raising the hope that civilizing tribes might sell surplus territory. Indians might even need to sell land to pay their bills at federal trading posts. In an 1803 letter marked “unofficial and private,” President Thomas Jefferson described the policy in terms that make him sound to modern ears like a drug dealer promoting the controlled substance of consumer capitalism. “We shall push our trading houses,” Jefferson wrote, “and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among [the Indians] run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” In a message for public consumption, Jefferson expressed the same idea more elegantly: Indians trading land for goods would discover “the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.” Jefferson did not think he was doing any harm. Though he knew Indians might be compelled to move west, he felt they might someday grasp a better alternative: they could “incorporate with us as citizens of the United States.”

  Whatever its long-term intentions, the civilization program formally recognized Indian rights and offered real opportunities. The program also created certain political strengths for Cherokees. The most striking example of this came with the spread of Christianity. From 1800 onward, Cherokee leaders allowed Moravian and other missionaries to set up schools, spreading literacy and training for skills such as carpentry. When exposed to the new faith, many Cherokees embraced it and blended it with ancient beliefs, as Christians around the world have always done. (Once I sat with a Cherokee man who knew the generations of his family back to the early 1800s; he observed that his lineage included biblical names such as Solomon, David, and Adam—“meaning they were Christianized”—even though some were also “conjure men,” using ancient methods to read minds, give strength to warriors, and influence events.) But if the missionaries did not succeed as purely as they might have liked, the spread of Christianity increased popular sympathy for Cherokees. Many Americans equated the Christian religion with civilization itself. In 1819 a mission in the Cherokee Nation received a visit from President James Monroe. John Ross understood the political value of his nation’s Christianized image, and though never overtly religious, he joined a church in 1829, just as his nation was under severe pressure.

  A significant part of the civilization program was the promotion of Ross himself. By traditional standards he was an unlikely leader, who had fought in the Creek War but came away with no particular exploits to extol. But as an educated English speaker, he had the skills for an age in which sovereignty must be defended by words instead of bullets. He was rewarded with positions of increasing prominence. By the 1820s, the aging leader Charles Hicks was providing Ross with tutorials on tribal history in order to prepare him for a future position of leadership.

  • • •

  One more change in Cherokee culture reflected all the others. It was the change in the role of women. The women affected may have included John Ross’s wife. She was believed to be half Cherokee (though some stories said otherwise), and was known by both a Christian name, Elizabeth, and a Cherokee name, Quatie. She bore six children. But the most important thing to know about her is that almost nothing is known. She is, alongside Ross, nearly invisible.

  Cherokee women were not always so. Because it was a matrilineal society, a husband joined his wife’s family rather than the reverse. When they divorced, the wife kept her property. During his stay among the Cherokees in the 1760s, Lieutenant Timberlake realized that participation in war and governance was not exclusive to men. There were “warwomen” whose exploits made him think of Amazons, and some were “as famous in war, as powerful in the council.” It was more common that women were delegated tasks such as growing food, but at least one “warwoman” did turn up when Cherokees met U.S. negotiators to conclude the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785. According to a contemporary news account, “The WarWoman of Chota” delivered one of the speeches. She said she spoke for herself and all the young men of Chota, her town.

  I am fond of hearing that there is a Peace; and I hope you have now taken us by the hand in real friendship. I have a Pipe and a little Tobacco to give the Commissioners to smoke in friendship. I look on you and the Red People as my CHILDREN.

  This warwoman did not refer to white men as her elder brothers. She was confident enough to position herself as a wise parent and the men of both races as her offspring. She was probably Nancy Ward, who reportedly lived to a great age and became a “beloved woman,” or revered elder, whose advice was greatly influential.

  Women did not entirely lose their influence in later years, but the civilization program altered the status of some women, and certainly the elites. The customs of inheritance, in particular, seemed problematic to white advisers; the possessions of deceased men and women alike were spread among their respective clans, and so were diffused. It would be so much better if sons inherited from their fathers, so that families could accumulate wealth. In an earlier century, women routinely went as bare-breasted as men. Now long dresses were the custom, reflecting the modesty expected of Christian women. As the economy shifted from hunting to agriculture and home manufacturing, women undertook labor that men would not. John Ridge, the son of Major Ridge, rec
alled in 1826 that it was women who “were first prevailed to undertake” the work of spinning and weaving. They would make “white or striped homespun” cloth, woolen blankets, coverlets, and stockings. It was, to be sure, valuable work: “I can only say that their domestic cloths are preferred by us to those brought from New England.” But it was a different life than that of a “warwoman.” There is no record showing that women joined the Cherokee Regiment at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The closest thing to women on the force were soldiers who went by a Cherokee name translating as “The Good Woman,” who according to a modern scholar were men.

  John Ross’s wife, Quatie, must have been a formidable figure or at least a durable one. As her husband rose in politics and diplomacy, and came to spend several months a year in Washington, she was at home with an expanding family. She may have had help from the slaves John Ross accumulated, but she did not often have her husband. Though Ross wrote enough letters that his correspondence fills two thick volumes, there is not a single surviving letter that he ever addressed to his wife. Ross’s biographer speculates that Quatie might have been illiterate, which would explain the absence of letters but would also underline the distance between his status and hers. For all the restrictions on women in white society, Andrew Jackson’s wife wrote letters that showed her to be a sharp observer and an influence on her husband. No one knows how Quatie influenced Ross. Hers was an existence hidden from view.

  Seven

  Every Thing That Was Dear to Me

  The same mass migration that brought John Ross’s Scottish forebears to America also brought the parents of Andrew Jackson.

  Jackson’s mother and father were Scots-Irish immigrants. Beginning in the 1600s, the British government encouraged these Protestants to move from Scotland to the north of Ireland, where they helped to control the rebellious Catholic island. Later many made the leap across the ocean, where they helped take control of a continent. Unlike some migrants, drawn to America by religious freedom or dreams of riches, the Scots-Irish, also known as Scotch Irish, made no high pretense. Many were poor, proud, and seeking to make a slightly better living. They were the “hoosiers,” or rough backwoodsmen, who settled much of the American interior. Their descendants became so numerous in the southern Appalachians that when one of Jackson’s early biographers traveled the region in the 1850s, he made a discovery. “The features and shape of [the] head of General Jackson, which ten thousand sign-boards have made familiar to the people of the United States, are common in North Carolina and Tennessee,” he reported. “I saw more than twenty well-marked specimens of the long, slender, Jacksonian head, with the bushy, bristling hair.”

  The same biographer described the Scots-Irish as a “tough, vehement, good-hearted race” who were “formed to grapple with practical affairs” and displayed a “curious” dry sense of humor. They also tended to seek conflict, to “contend for what they think is right with peculiar earnestness… . Hot water would seem to be the natural element of some of them.” This combative image was plainly a stereotype, but remains useful to us because Jackson’s famous life story probably went far to enshrine the stereotype. “I was born for a storm,” Jackson once said, “and calm does not suit me.” Scots-Irish culture was adaptable to the violent frontier. If the westward movement brought them in conflict with Indians, so their ancestors had fought Irish Catholics or rival branches of the Protestant church. And if frontier living was harsh and remote, so were their ancestors’ lives near the Irish Sea. Many immigrants hacked out farms in the fertile valleys of the Appalachians, such as the valley where Andrew Jackson’s parents built a home in 1765. Andrew was born in 1767, near enough to the border between North and South Carolina to prompt debate in later years about which state should claim him. Of a more important fact there was no dispute: his father died months before the infant’s birth. His mother moved the remnants of the family into another family’s home, where she essentially became the housekeeper.

  Accounts of Andrew’s childhood portray a tempestuous boy. If he was not challenged to a fight, he would start one, and if knocked down, he would never give up. These accounts, while plausible, are not entirely reliable. They were written down long after Jackson became the most famous man in America, when people would naturally recall stories about Jackson the child that confirmed the established image of the adult. It is more certain that the boy grew up as the society around him came apart. He was nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, and sixteen when the Treaty of Paris secured that independence in 1783. Jackson lived those years in a landscape scarred by guerrilla warfare and murder as rebels contended against loyalists. By his teenage years he was a messenger and eventually a fighter for the rebels. Captured by British soldiers along with his brother Robert, Andrew refused a demand to clean an officer’s boots. The boy is reported to have declared that he was a prisoner of war, meaning that he was entitled to more dignified treatment, a remark that prompted the officer to strike him with a sword. “The sword point reached my head,” Jackson recalled years later, “and has left a mark there as durable as the scull.” The Jackson boys’ mother successfully negotiated for their release, but afterward she contracted cholera and died while serving as a nurse for American prisoners in British hands. Andrew Jackson would refer in later years to “the struggle for our liberties, in which I lost every thing that was dear to me.”

  Nothing assured that this orphan of the Revolution would rise to a position of leadership. Before he could command his army at Horseshoe Bend, he had to survive years of his own high-risk behavior. As a teenager, Jackson followed friends to Charleston, South Carolina, and did little besides drink and gamble. Later he traveled back inland to Salisbury, North Carolina, and studied to become a lawyer when not occupied with entertainment. Long afterward, people in Salisbury recalled the night that the future president and three friends ended a night of drinking by smashing their glasses and the furniture of the tavern where they were staying, and throwing the remnants on the fire.

  Then the young lawyer—still just twenty-one, for it was 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified by enough states to take effect—received an offer to move west. He accepted a job as a prosecutor in the most remote part of North Carolina, the western zone that would eventually emerge as a separate state called Tennessee. He took on the trappings of a gentleman as he traveled toward his new home. Reaching the Appalachian town of Jonesborough, he purchased his first slave. The record of the sale noted that “Andrew Jackson Esquire” took possession of “a Negro Woman named Nancy about Eighteen or Twenty Years of Age.” He also fought his first duel. Gentlemen were accustomed to demand “satisfaction” when their honor was impugned, and Jackson believed another attorney insulted him in court. “When a man’s feelings and charector are injured he ought to seek a speedy redress,” he wrote his antagonist. Many men in Jackson’s time spoke freely of their “feelings” and confessed to the reality that they were governed by emotions. Jackson was especially emotional, and wrote of his “feelings” throughout his life, though he also learned to control those emotions when necessary. On the day appointed for the duelists to meet with pistols drawn, they acted out a lifesaving compromise, with both men firing in the air, leaving dignity and honor preserved.

  It also preserved their lives, of course. Jackson was able to continue westward to his permanent posting, a rude frontier town called Nashville. It was not even ten years old, and breathtakingly remote from the East. Not only were mountains in the way; the rivers, which were the best highways, led in the opposite direction. Nashville was on the banks of the Cumberland, which flowed northwestward to the Ohio and then down the Mississippi, where Indians and European powers had more influence than the United States. But this remoteness meant a man of energy and talent faced less competition for leadership. The vigorous young prosecutor quickly made connections with the local elite, boarding at the home of the Donelson family, whose late patriarch John Donelson was among the founders of Nashvill
e. Before long Jackson married Rachel, one of Donelson’s daughters. He became a delegate to his state’s constitutional convention in his twenties, and Tennessee’s first representative in Congress at age thirty. Before the age of forty he was a prominent trader and planter. His farm, the Hermitage, had the style of a rough frontier settlement, where he lived with Rachel in a two-story log house, but he steadily added to his property until he had dozens of enslaved men, women, and children tending more than a thousand acres. He ran a dry goods store and riverside boatyard that he developed into a kind of playground for men, including a tavern and a racetrack.

  Controversy followed the whip-thin politician with the wiry hair. Although his ownership of slaves was unremarkable in Tennessee, he sometimes engaged in slave dealing, a business that even slave owners considered disreputable. He also endured criticism for his continuing tendency to challenge other men to duels, a practice that remained common but illegal. In 1806 Jackson let an exchange of insults with a Nashville man escalate into a duel, and resolved to kill his opponent. Jackson let the other man shoot first, took a lead ball near his heart that would remain in his body the rest of his life, yet remained standing. He took time to be sure of his aim before firing a fatal shot in return. Unfortunately for Jackson, his antagonist was a popular young man whose death stained Jackson’s reputation; and that reputation was already colored by scandal. It was widely known that he had been together with Rachel for years before she completed her divorce from an abusive husband. Rachel and Andrew lived as husband and wife from 1790 or 1791 onward even though the formal decree ending her previous marriage did not arrive until 1793. They had to be remarried in 1794 to clear up doubts about their status. But having married, they cultivated a conventional family life. With no children of their own, they adopted their son Andrew Jr. from Rachel’s relatives. When Jackson traveled, his miserable wife wrote him letters urging him to hurry home. He wrote back tenderly to express regret that he could not.