Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (8 page)

Of these, the Creek were known to be the most recalcitrant. Jackson proved his mettle by showing he could mow them down and massacre them into submission, earning his subsequent reputation as an “Indian
killer.” Today we may wince at the title, but it was considered a compliment among Jackson’s Democratic supporters.

Just as much as his exploits with the British, Jackson’s popularity was fired by his actions against the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend. In 1813, a militant band of Creeks called the Red Sticks attacked Fort Mims in the Mississippi Territory and slaughtered several hundred whites. Eyewitnesses who arrived on the scene days later found the victims scalped, including women and children. Today we think of native Indians as disconsolate, victimized people but we should not forget that they could be bloodthirsty warriors, and this is how Jackson and many other frontiersmen experienced them.

Jackson—by this time the general of the Tennessee militia—issued a proclamation calling for retaliation. Among those who responded were the frontiersman Davy Crockett. Jackson also recruited allies from other Indian tribes, notably the Cherokee leader John Ross, who was descended from Indian and Scots-Irish ancestry. Jackson’s militia surprised the Creek attackers and routed them. In Davy Crockett’s account, “We shot them like dogs, and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the warriors in it.”
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Jackson’s troops then went on a rampage, torching Creek villages and slaughtering villagers. At Horseshoe Bend in the Mississippi Territory (now southern Alabama) they settled into a hill overlooking a Creek camp and aimed their cannon at the Creeks gathered there. While Jackson apologists would later speak of a Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in reality the Creeks there were refugees, not warriors; they were seeking shelter from the crossfire.

Jackson’s force wiped them out. As he put it in a letter to his wife Rachel, “It was dark before we finished killing them.” Jackson estimated that beyond the 557 corpses on land, an additional three hundred Indians were “buried in their watry grave.” Jackson’s men cut off the noses of dead Indians as they counted the bodies. Afterward there were few regrets, one of Jackson’s soldiers chuckling that he had killed a boy “five or six years of age” for the reason that “he would have become an Indian someday.”
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Jackson’s Horseshoe Bend massacre could be considered a case of frontiersman “excess” but in this case Jackson
intended
to go too far. He wanted to terrorize the Indian tribes in the region, and he largely succeeded. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson found the other tribes much more pliant.

Remarkably Jackson after his victory demanded land concessions not only from the Creeks but also from the Indian tribes allied with him. They had little choice but to submit. Altogether, his “prize” amounted to twenty-two million acres of saleable real estate in southern Georgia and central Alabama. Those sales, Jackson remarked to one of his cronies, John Coffee, would someday yield him a whole lot of votes.

While Jackson had few qualms about using force, he preferred, like his successor Democrats today, to rely on intimidation and deceit if he could thereby get the results he wanted. One might expect that the Choctaw would receive decent treatment from Jackson, given that they fought alongside him in the War of 1812. The Cherokee, headed by John Ross, felt sure Jackson would be their advocate, since Ross and others were part of Jackson’s expeditionary campaign against the British and the Creek. Soon these tribes realized that Jackson was just as intent on stealing from them as he was from tribes that he fought against.

A PRETENDED FRIEND AND ALLY

Jackson cheated his native Indian allies by pretending to be their friend. He would often write them and refer to himself as their Father or their Great Father. Whenever he proposed a measure that harmed them, he usually insisted, doing his best to imitate Indian language, “Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and advises you to remove to it.” Or, on another occasion: “It is for your nation’s good, and your father requests you to hear his counsel.”
²⁵

Biographer Jon Meacham accepts this at face value; he speculates that Jackson saw himself in this paternal way because he was orphaned
at fifteen and never knew his own father.
²⁶
But if Jackson was acting as a parent to the Indians, he was certainly an abusive parent.

Contrary to what he said, Jackson wasn’t offering any counsel to the Indians; he was offering them a
fait accompli
. The Indians could either surrender or be crushed. Inskeep wryly notes that “Jackson defined his parental duty to natives in a way that matched his desire to clear land for white settlement.”
²⁷

John Ross, the Cherokee leader, was a shrewd politician who understood treaties and legal documents. What he could not fathom was the bottomless cunning and trickery of the man he was dealing with. Jackson read the Indian treaties in much the same way that Democrats and progressives today read the U.S. Constitution. They care little about what it says; they interpret it to mean what they want it to mean. Jackson didn’t have any judicial authority but he usually didn’t need it. He had troops to enforce his view of the documents and that was sufficient.

Ross did score one big, though temporary, victory over Jackson. In 1814, in the aftermath of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson imposed a treaty on the Indians—both his Creek enemies and his Chickasaw allies—which effectively turned the south bank of the Tennessee River over to the federal government. In this case Jackson intended the land to benefit someone near and dear to him, namely, himself.

Jackson had a whole system worked out for how to benefit personally from federal land acquisitions from the Indians. First, he appointed surveyors at government expense to mark the boundaries of the property, thus establishing its title and availability for sale. Jackson’s favorite surveyor was his own business associate John Coffee.

Sometimes, though, he used other agents. In a typical correspondence, one agent, in a letter marked “Private,” informed Jackson, “My Dear General, We have succeeded in acquiring an accurate knowledge of all the sections of good lands to be sold.” He drew Jackson’s attention to four sections of land that “would form a most desirable establishment for your old age.”
²⁸

Knowing that the presence of surveyors might upset the Indians who still occupied the land, Jackson warned them that if they harmed the
surveyor, the U.S. government would attack them and seize their lands. In case they didn’t believe him, Jackson recruited mounted gunmen to ensure security from Indians who might attempt to protect their own property.

Then, as soon as the federal government put the land on the market, Jackson bid on it. He did exactly that with the Tennessee River Bank. Unknown to him, however, Ross and his fellow Cherokees were during this time in Washington, D.C., making their own claims before the federal government. This was hardly unusual at the time—Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees often made conflicting and overlapping claims to the same land.

In 1816, Jackson was ready to take profitable possession of the south bank of the Tennessee when he received a stunning notification from Washington. Basically, the U.S. government had decided that it couldn’t, after all, sell that land. It didn’t belong to the Creek or the Chickasaw. Rather, it belonged to the Cherokee—John Ross’s tribe. Jackson had been improperly laying claim to two million acres!

Outraged at President Madison, Jackson wrote him a fiery letter insisting the Cherokees “never had the least semblance of claim” to the land and accusing the president of “wantonly surrendering” land that was of “incalculable value” to the United States.

Remarkably Jackson was accusing Madison of ignoring national security. His argument was that it jeopardized the security interest of the United States to have hostile Indian nations within the geographical land mass of the country where whites lived. I think Jackson was sincere in his patriotism and believed this argument when he made it. Still, it is hard to escape notice that this land was also of immense financial and political value to him personally.

Jackson used his political connections to try to reverse the Madison administration’s ruling. He stirred up land-seeking whites from his home county to deluge the government with protest letters. This correspondence urged the Madison administration to drive the Indians farther west so that white citizens could travel without “the risk of being murdered at every wigwam by some drunken savage.”
²⁹

BUY LOW, SELL HIGH

Jackson was smarting from his defeat—not merely a humiliation, but a blow to his pocketbook—but the Cherokee maneuver would prove the first, and last, time he was beaten by the Indians. Soon Jackson convinced the Madison administration to give him the right to negotiate with the Cherokees to buy some of the land in question. Jackson implemented a new, and this time successful, rip-off scheme.

Jackson’s first step was to bribe the Cherokee chiefs. Each of them received “presents” from Jackson that ranged from $50 to $100. Jackson also used threats and intimidation against Cherokee holdouts. He and his associate John Coffee warned Cherokee leaders that if they failed to sell their land, then white settlers would take it for nothing.

Jackson obviously had no intention of offering military protection to the Cherokee against these white intruders. Jackson’s offer to the Cherokee was: take my money and leave, and then your safety will be guaranteed. Many Cherokee dejectedly agreed to depart from the lands on which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds if not thousands of years.

As soon as this happened, Inskeep reports, “Jackson and his friends moved to take advantage. The scale of their gain has rarely, if ever, been calculated. Many real estate records from the era have been lost. But records that survive show that after 1816, the names of Andrew Jackson, his relatives, and his two closest business associates appeared on the titles to more than forty-five thousand acres of newly opened Alabama land. Most was in the Tennessee Valley.”
³⁰

The U.S. government opened a land office in Huntsville, Alabama, to sell the newly acquired land. Jackson was ready, along with his associate John Coffee. While both were already quite wealthy, they needed more money to make the large purchases they coveted. So they went to a wealthy investor named James Jackson, a longtime friend of Coffee and Andrew Jackson, and together the three of them formed a business partnership “to purchase or enter lands in the Alabama Territory.”

Jackson also teamed up separately with his brother-in-law, John Donelson, who brought a group of Philadelphia investors. While Jackson
certainly intended to enrich his relatives and cronies, every one of these deals was structured to provide maximum benefit to Andrew Jackson.

Inskeep reports in
Jacksonland
that in order to camouflage the scale of his investments, Jackson put the land that he bought into other people’s names. For instance, he listed three tracts of land on the south side of the river in the name of Andrew Jackson Hutchings, an orphaned relative of his wife Rachel. “More than twenty-two hundred acres were purchased under the name of William Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s nephew. William Donelson was also the registered name for the purchaser of thirteen town lots in Coldwater, the former Indian village at the bottom of Muscle Shoals.”

At times Jackson acted alone. When a large plot came up for auction at Muscle Shoals, Jackson leaped up and offered the minimum bid. There were many other bidders, but recognizing Jackson among their number, no one else raised his hand. Jackson was elated. “This section I bought at two dollars per acre,” he later wrote, “no person bidding against me, and as soon as I bid, hailed by the unanimous shouts of a numerous & mixed multitude.” Jackson declared that he found this “gratifying, as it was an approval of my official acts.”
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Old Hand Jackson knew the score: he was the one who created the whole racket, so naturally he expected others to let him have a piece of it.

In 1818, Jackson spied a real estate opportunity in Florida. The opportunity was created by marauding Indians conducting raids from Spanish Florida. The Monroe administration sent Jackson to Florida to stop the raids. Jackson declared his purpose to “chastise” the Indians, which in his parlance meant to kill them. Although he had been specifically instructed to deal with the Indians and not occupy Spanish land, Jackson entered West Florida, captured Pensacola, appointed a governor there, and started collecting taxes.

Jackson’s illicit action caused a stir in Washington, but many ordinary people cheered Jackson. By now they knew the routine. Jackson takes land, chases off the Indians, and then we get to buy it at fire-sale prices. This was the American Dream, in the version created by the founder of the Democratic Party. The Monroe administration backed
down, and once again Jackson found himself in a position to win the allegiance of future voters while amply lining his own pockets.

As Inskeep reports, Jackson and his associates were planning their Florida investments even
before
he invaded. Later Jackson’s critics would say that he took Florida solely for the purpose of his personal real estate speculation. Inskeep argues—and I agree—that this is an exaggeration. Jackson wanted Florida for the United States. He wanted settlers to move there, settlers who may at some point in the future be beholden to him. And he wanted to make money out of the whole deal.

Jackson dispatched his brother-in-law and business partner John Donelson to Florida. Donelson went, carrying a letter of introduction from Jackson. There he found—voila!—that many doors were open for him. Jackson and his friends invested heavily in Florida real estate. Later they sold much of that land at many times the price they paid for it. In other words, they made out like bandits.

In five separate treaties between 1816 and 1820, Jackson forced the Indians to give up tens of millions of acres in what would eventually become five American states. In this respect, Jackson is the true architect of the map of the Deep South. We can respect the single-minded determination with which he created what Inskeep calls “Jacksonland” while at the same time deploring the self-serving means that were used to bring it about.