A Nation Rising (16 page)

One of the secrets making up America's hidden history is that many of these “aborigines” had accepted Jefferson's call to “husbandry.” In the southeastern United States, in particular, several Native nations had adapted to Anglo ways. Clearly that was not enough for successive administrations, including Andrew Jackson's.

Some historians have attempted to ascribe humane motives to Jackson's call for the wholesale forced migration of Indians from the southeastern states to unsettled lands across the Mississippi. Far better to move them, argued Jackson, than to slaughter them; and slaughter was indeed already happening. In 1831, for instance, Sac tribes under Black Hawk balked at leaving their ancestral lands in Illinois. When a group of some 1,000 Indians actually attempted to surrender to the militia and the regular army, they were cut off by the Mississippi River and then cut down by bayonets and rifle fire. Only about 150 survived.
*

In his speech of surrender, recorded on August 27, 1832, at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Black Hawk might have been speaking for millions of Native Americans:

 

B
UT JUST AS
9/11 and the “war on terror,” dominated the American political landscape and decision making in the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, the national security aspect of the “native problem” dictated policy in Jackson's day. Jon Meacham writes in
American Lion
, “To him, the tribes represented the threat of violence, either by their own hands or in alliance with America's foes. When Indians killed white settlers, Jackson tended to see England (or Spain) as the guiding force, believing Indian skirmishes and clashes meant the Indians had been ‘excited to war by the secret agents of Great Britain.'”
⁸

Jackson wrote to James Monroe, who was then secretary of state, as early as 1817, “The sooner these lands are brought to market, [the sooner] a permanent security will be given to what I deem the most important, as well as the most valuable, part of the nation. This country once settled, our fortification of defense in the lower country, all Europe will cease to look at it with an eye to conquest.”
⁹

The fact that the territory in question included some of the richest cotton-growing soil in the Southeast added to Jackson's desire to see that “these lands are brought to market.”

Passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 ensured it. During the Jackson administration, the removals were concentrated on the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Contrary to popular sentiment of the day and to continuing misrepresentation by historians, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes had by then developed societies that were not only compatible with white culture, but even emulated European styles in some respects. The
problem was, to repeat, that their tribal lands happened to be valuable cotton-growing areas. Between 1831 and 1833 the first of the “removals” forced some 4,000 Choctaw from Mississippi into the territory west of Arkansas. During the winter migration, food was scarce and shelter poor. Pneumonia took its toll, and with the summer came cholera, killing the Choctaw by the hundreds.

One of the most eloquent witnesses to the cruelties against the Indians was a young French magistrate studying America's penal system. Observing a Choctaw tribe—which included the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns—forced to cross the ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in
Democracy in America
, “In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung.” The Indians, Tocqueville added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

The Choctaw were followed by the Chickasaw and then the Creeks, or Muskogee, who did not go as peacefully. The Creek tribe refused to leave, and another Creek War was fought in 1836–1837. Winfield Scott, the American commander of the operation, eventually captured 14,500 Creeks—putting 2,500 of them in chains and marching them all to Oklahoma.

The final series of removals began in 1835, when the Cherokee, who lived in Georgia, became the target. The Cherokee had been among the most “successful” in assimilating European customs. They built roads, schools, and churches; had adopted a system of representational government; and were becoming farmers and cattle ranchers. A warrior named Sequoya had also developed a written
Cherokee language. Establishing a legal, independent Cherokee nation, the Cherokee attempted to resist removal by challenging the policy in the Supreme Court. In one of his final decisions as chief justice, John Marshall ruled in 1831 (
Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia
) that the Cherokee technically could not bring suit as a “foreign nation” because they were a “Domestic dependent nation”: “Their relationship to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”

The Indians had, in other words, tried to fight and switch. But neither strategy worked. They were confronting an irresistible tide of history and an irresistible force in Andrew Jackson. They would disappear, in the Shawnee leader Tecumseh's memorable phrase a generation earlier, as “snow before a summer.” In 1838, after Andrew “Sharp Knife” Jackson left office, the United States government finally forced out the 15,000 to 17,000 Cherokees who were still in Georgia. About 4,000 of them died along the Trail of Tears, which took them through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the Ohio and Missouri rivers, and into what would later become (after more broken treaties) the state of Oklahoma.

The strongest resistance to removal came in Florida, where Jackson had already battled the Seminoles. Here, the Indians would carry on a long and costly war, in which thousands of U.S. soldiers and Indians died and millions of dollars were spent, out of a scanty U.S. Treasury. The war began during Jackson's administration but continued well past it. Still, in many ways the Second Seminole War was always Andrew Jackson's war.

An offshoot of the Creek nation, the Muskogee-speaking Seminoles had begun to emigrate into northern Florida in the early
1700s, from the neighboring colonial American territories in Georgia, South Carolina, and other future southern states. Pressed by the expansion of white settlers into their lands, they were also welcomed by the Spanish, who hoped the Natives would act as a buffer against the English (and later American) expansion. The Spanish were also actively encouraging runaway American slaves to escape into Florida.

Settling in Florida, which had been largely emptied of its original Native inhabitants, these transplanted Seminoles established towns like those of the Creeks and maintained Creek societal practices and organization. At first they relied on farming, deer hunting, fishing, and foraging; but they eventually raised livestock and traded with Europeans. Like the Creeks, the Seminoles had essentially done everything that the American administrations from the time of Washington and Jefferson had asked of them.

But during the war of 1812, they aided the British. And after the war, they continued to battle against white settlements until Andrew Jackson used these hostilities as the pretext to invade Florida. When he became president, “Sharp Knife” would be uncompromising in the campaign to rid the Southeast of Indians.

On February 16, 1835, President Andrew Jackson wrote a letter to be read to an assembly of 150 Seminole headsmen and warriors:

Aside from the benefits for national defense that Jackson believed removal of the Seminoles would bring to America, and the rich land that would be opened for settlement and for growing cotton, there was another deeply pervasive worry about security, which Jackson did not specifically outline. This was the desperate fear of slave insurrection, especially if runaway slaves and free blacks continued to form alliances with the Indians.

Nothing troubled the sleep of southerners, whether they held slaves or not, more than the idea of a slave revolt. The history of uprisings throughout the colonies and in the early republic was well recorded. The example of Haiti hung over the American South like a storm cloud. “Southern whites were plagued with anxieties,” writes the historian Stephen B. Oates. “Can it happen here? What if it happens here?”
¹¹

In August 1831, three decades after the rebellion in Haiti, it nearly did happen, when Nat Turner led the bloodiest of America's slave insurrections. Nat Turner's rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia, about seventy miles south of Richmond, near the North Carolina border. It ultimately failed, as every other major insurrection had, but this uprising transformed the country.

Born on a Virginia plantation in 1800, Nat Turner seemed to
be marked, almost from birth, for an unusual life. Having received a rudimentary education—virtually unheard of for a slave in his day—he had become intensely religious. According to accounts of Turner that later emerged, he had developed what the historian David S. Reynolds describes as a “messianic image of himself as a liberator of his race.” Reynolds adds: “He had visions of black and white angels fighting in the heavens, and saw blood on corn—portents, he believed, of his forthcoming victory over his white oppressors.”
¹²

As a mystic and preacher, Turner used his visions and biblical authority to attract a devoted following among slaves who were permitted to gather for their own worship services on Sunday afternoons after they had been allowed to attend a service at a “white” church. Slaves soon flocked to hear Turner's sermons, dazzled by his visions and his electrifying words.

In his account of Turner's rebellion, Oates describes the centrality of these services for the slave community: “There can be no doubt that the slave church (now a forest clearing, now a tumbledown shack) nourished young Nat's self-esteem and longing for independence. For the slave church was not only a center for underground slave plottings against the master class, but the focal point for an entire subterranean culture the blacks sought to construct beyond the white man's control. The church was both opiate and inspiration, a place where the slaves, through their ring-shout responses and their powerful and unique spirituals, could both escape their lot and protest against it. Here they could find comfort and courage in a black man's God.”
¹³

Late in August 1831, Turner and about seventy followers started
their rampage. Turner believed that a solar eclipse at the time was the portent he had been awaiting—a heavenly sign that the hour of rebellion had come. After killing his own master and the master's family with axes, Turner and his followers set off on a deadly march that spared no one. The killing spree ultimately left fifty-five white men, women, and children dead. And the white folks around Southampton, Virginia, were thrown into utter panic, many of them even fleeing the state.

When Turner's small army was met by a large contingent of white militiamen, Turner attempted a counterattack. But his undisciplined band of freed slaves was vastly outnumbered and out-gunned. Following the rout of his forces, Turner escaped and went into hiding. Troops and vigilantes flowed into Virginia, and thousands of soldiers searched the countryside for this lone man who had thrown the region into hysterical terror. Bent on avenging the deaths of the whites, some of the vigilantes simply murdered any blacks they came across; hundreds were cut down in the aftermath of the uprising.

Turner eluded capture for nearly two months, during which he became a frightening bogeyman to the people of the South. On September 17, a reward of $500 was offered for his capture. To whites and blacks alike, Nat Turner had become larger than life, taking on an even greater mystique during his brief disappearance.

In the end, two black men out hunting spotted him and alerted their masters that they had seen the man known as “the Prophet.” Following his capture on October 30, 1831, Turner sat in his jail cell for a series of interviews with a sixty-year-old white attorney named Thomas Gray who had ostensibly been assigned to defend the black
rebels. Gray asked him, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?'

Turner replied, “Was not Christ crucified?”
*
¹⁴

Even after Turner's execution by hanging, slave owners feared the charismatic Prophet's influence. As the historian Kenneth M. Stampp once wrote, the Turner uprising was an “event which produced mass hysteria from which the whites had not recovered three decades later. The danger that other Nat Turners might emerge, that an even more serious insurrection might some day occur, became an enduring concern as long as the peculiar institution survived.”
¹⁵

Stringent new slave laws were passed, and strict censorship laws aimed against abolitionist material were enacted with Andrew Jackson's blessing. Jackson once referred to the antislavery materials mailed by a pioneering abolitionist group, the Anti-Slavery Society, as “a wicked plan of exciting the Negroes to insurrection and massacre.” At the other end of the spectrum from Jackson, the abolitionist John Brown—who would later mount his own violent insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859—found inspiration in Nat Turner's plan. “If Nat Turner with fifty men could hold a section of Virginia for several weeks,” Brown declared, “an ever-growing band of armed blacks and whites could topple slavery in the state and eventually throughout the South.”
¹⁶