Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (11 page)

Knowing that Chickasaws were complaining to the surveyor as he tugged his chains across the landscape, Jackson told him to hire “
25 mounted gunmen as a guard.” Jackson confessed that “I am not Legally authorised, to call for such a force,” but the gunmen would be “punctually paid.” His letter did not specify who would pay them. Jackson had confidence the surveyor would do as he wished, for the surveyor was John Coffee. “Go on my dear Genl,” Jackson told his friend,

compleat the line & show them you are as prompt in the cabinet as in the field.

As for where the line should be drawn, Jackson added, “your own Judgt is your guide,” and then he told Coffee exactly where that judgment should guide him. “Cold Water is in the Creek country,” Jackson wrote. He was telling Coffee that the Creek land cession must include the property around Coldwater Creek, that little stream that flowed into the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals.

There is no proof that General Jackson was thinking of buying land at Coldwater as he gave these instructions. He may have urged Coffee
to obtain the land around Coldwater because he genuinely thought it was Creek territory. But a reading of his correspondence throughout the period makes it clear that he was always mindful of real estate interests. Two years later, when land near Coldwater finally went on the market, Jackson bid on it.

Jackson scrawled a letter to a Chickasaw leader, warning of “
immediate punishment” if anyone blocked or insulted the surveyor. He assured the Chickasaws that if they disagreed with Coffee’s line, they could complain to Washington after it was finished, but Jackson seemed to be altering the facts in a way that would make any protest futile. White settlers from Tennessee were coming southward to take Indian land as quickly as Coffee could run his line, and General Jackson was reluctant to perform his legal duty to evict them.

Coffee shared Jackson’s spirit. The government in Washington had given him no information about where to mark one of the dividing lines. “
I would be glad to be informed,” he wrote, “though I shall not detain for it.” He moved on with his work, but he could not move quickly enough. In the spring of 1816 a thunderbolt arrived from Washington: their superiors informed both Jackson and Coffee that the whole south bank of the Tennessee River was off-limits. It didn’t belong to the Creeks. And because it didn’t, it could not possibly be part of the Creek land cession. Jackson and Coffee had been improperly laying claim to two million acres.

They had been stopped, in large measure, through the efforts of John Ross. It was the only time in Andrew Jackson’s career that he was ever soundly defeated by Indians.

J
ackson, the hero who destroyed the frontal assault of the British at New Orleans, discovered that on this occasion he was the victim of a flank attack. The Cherokees had gone around his defenses, making their case for ownership of the two million acres directly to Jackson’s civilian superiors. On the day Jackson was urging his surveyor to “Go on my dear Genl,” and telling him to hire armed guards, John Ross was in Washington, about to wreck all his plans.

Like any visitor to the capital at the time, Ross was walking among ruins. It was less than two years since the British had torched the Executive Mansion and the Capitol, doing such a thorough job that the fires left behind nothing but the blackened stone walls. These somewhat Romanesque remains, looking like the signs of a lost empire rather than a rising one, attracted gawkers and tourists long after the British were gone; at least one visitor to the capital was so distracted while gaping at “
the Burnt Buildings” that he lost his “red morocko pocket Book” and had to advertise for it in the local newspaper. By 1816 the reconstruction was under way, but Congress was still meeting in a brick house across the street from its ruined chambers, and President Madison was living in a house in town. Vast open spaces yawned to the sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, the grand boulevard designed to be the city’s main street. Congressmen crowded into boardinghouses on Capitol Hill,
taking their meals at communal tables, while the beginnings of the new city’s permanent elite invited diplomats and other distinguished guests into their fashionable homes.

Ross was in town as part of a Cherokee delegation. Although they had come to settle unrelated issues, intelligence of Coffee’s surveying work reached the capital and abruptly shifted the focus of their mission. At age twenty-six Ross was not the most senior member of the group, but was a vital part of it, one of the few Cherokees who had the education and language skills to debate on equal terms with federal officials. The powerful planter Major Ridge had more influence but less English; another leading Cherokee, George Lowrey, was the delegation’s designated speaker when they visited President James Madison, but was apparently not able to write his name. In the coming years Ross would travel with many delegations to Washington, and by necessity wrote many of their letters and formal documents; on joint letters he was sometimes the only one in the group who
signed his name instead of making a mark. With his gracious manners and white men’s clothes, Ross was probably one of the members of the delegation who made a positive impression on local newsmen. “
These Indians are men of cultivated understandings,” the
National Intelligencer
reported. Not only that: their recent past made it difficult to dismiss the Cherokees as hostile savages:

[They] were nearly all officers of the Cherokee forces which served under General Jackson during the late war, and have distinguished themselves as well by their bravery as their attachment to the United States.

Their service at Horseshoe Bend may have been left vague when Jackson’s initial battle report reached the
National Intelligencer
in 1814, but now the delegation managed to work this reality into the capital’s conversation. It gave them credibility to speak boldly to federal officials. Ross did not assume the submissive tone that was expected of Indians, who were encouraged to think of themselves as children and of the
president as their Great Father. When the government was slow to attend to their concerns, Ross wrote directly to William H. Crawford, the secretary of war, whose department oversaw Indian affairs. “
Brother,” he began, “thirty-two days have no[w] elapsed since we arrived at the seat of the American Government . . . we hope you will no longer delay.” Though the secretary was one of the capital’s imposing figures, Ross lectured him. “
During the late war we availed ourselves of an opportunity to prove attachment to the Government of the United States; yet some of our White Brethren on the frontier wish to remain insensible of it.” With multiple statements like this over the next twenty years, Ross laid a moral foundation for his cause. He foreshadowed the later arguments of African Americans, who in generations to come would argue that their own service in war had proven their claim to equal rights. It was during these negotiations that Ross informed an official at the War Department, “We consider ourselves as a part of the great family of the Republic of the U. States,” adding that Cherokees were willing to sacrifice everything in the republic’s defense.

Crawford seemed impressed. The Cherokees insisted the two million acres had long belonged to them, and said that even the Creeks had affirmed Cherokee possession of the land after Horseshoe Bend. The Cherokees knew the Appalachian landscape so intimately that Ross was able to describe their boundary line across war-scarred areas where some of the landmarks existed only in memory: “
Beginning at a point where Vann’s old Store formerly stood . . . and from thence continued to the Coosa River . . . from thence in a straight line, and crossing a fork of the Black Warrior River a little below the old town burnt by General Coffee.”
Crawford and President James Madison approved a treaty affirming the Cherokee claims, and sent the delegation
home with silver-plated rifles, presents for the Cherokee veterans who first swam the Tallapoosa to capture enemy canoes and trigger Andrew Jackson’s great victory.

When news reached Jackson in Nashville, he was outraged. Bypassing Secretary Crawford, he wrote directly to President Madison: “The
late hasty convention with the Cherokees, is much regretted & deprecated in this quarter,” he said. The Cherokees “never had the least semblance of claim” to the territory. Leaving Cherokees in possession of it cut off one part of the union from another, blocked the passage of military supplies, and “wantonly surrendered” territory of “incalculable Value to the U States.” The answer to Jackson came not from the president but from Crawford, who coolly knocked down Jackson’s arguments one by one—military supplies, for example, were still allowed to pass through the Cherokee land, as Jackson must have known, since he was in charge of building the military road through it. Aside from that, Crawford said, the surveyor had blatantly exceeded his power.

Crawford pushed further. He instructed General Jackson to stop Tennessee intruders from grabbing the Cherokee lands: “
The idea of resisting the authority of the government, must not be admitted for a moment.” The truth was that Jackson himself seemed to be resisting the authority of the government. He dragged his feet about evicting intruders, saying they were too poor to relocate, and accused Crawford of insulting them:

Tennesseeans . . . are recorded as the worst sort of robbers, Taking from the poor Indian
.

Supporting fire arrived from Nashville. A group of men from Jackson’s home county sent a “remonstrance” to Congress. Indians must be pushed farther away so that white citizens could travel without “
the risk of being murdered at every wigwam by some drunken savage.” The same document contained a revealing accusation against the Cherokees, calling them “so tenacious” that “they would not surrender one acre without receiving what would be the value of the land.” It was, in other words, unacceptable for white men to contemplate the possibility that they could be forced to pay full price.

The pressure on Washington paid off. Jackson was given a chance to recover the land he had taken once and lost. Although President Madison remained adamant in rejecting Jackson’s illegitimate capture
of the Tennessee Valley, he was willing to see Jackson obtain it through more acceptable means. Jackson was appointed to talk with the Cherokees about selling it. He lost no time, bidding good-bye to Rachel and riding southeastward to Cherokee country. Two horses died on him during the trip, which he called “
extra service of the most unpleasant nature.”

Jackson’s style of negotiating was frank and coercive. In talk after talk over the years, he told native leaders he was their friend, and that he wanted to pay for their land—but that if they failed to sell, white settlers would take their land for nothing. In that sense, the intruders constantly slipping onto Indian lands were like an army at Jackson’s back. He would later describe his strategy in another negotiation with Indians by saying, “We must address ourselves to their fears and indulge their avarice.” Both approaches were present when he negotiated with the Cherokees in 1816. The element of fear came from John Coffee, who rode ahead of Jackson and brought Cherokee leaders
a warning that their nation might be destroyed if they bargained too hard. Once Jackson arrived, he appealed to avarice, making “
some small presents to the fifteen chiefs that attended here,” as Jackson said. Cherokee negotiators were each paid between $50 and $100.

The Cherokee negotiators did not include increasingly stubborn John Ross. Nor did the group include the influential planter Major Ridge, who backed out after hearing John Coffee’s threats. The Cherokees who remained to face the onslaught included the Horseshoe Bend veteran known as
George Guess or Sequoyah, who would be better known in a few years for developing a Cherokee syllabary, or writing system. Despite Jackson’s pressure, the delegation managed to hold out for a treaty that was not the worst ever signed. Jackson knew what he wanted and was willing to deal for it.
The Cherokees succeeded in retaining about seven hundred thousand acres, including land in northeastern Alabama to which they had the strongest claim. They ceded the remainder of the land for a payment of $65,000. Jackson got the southern bank of the Tennessee in the area of Muscle Shoals.

Now the whole region of the shoals was in the hands of the federal government except for isolated scraps on the north shore, the largest being the late Doublehead’s former land. Doublehead’s reservation became an afterthought, which Jackson was able to obtain for no payment at all when he negotiated a Cherokee treaty on other issues in 1817. Three and a half decades after investors first tried to capture Muscle Shoals, General Jackson finished the job.

Jackson and his friends would move 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. The empire they created included every square foot of real estate in a new city founded along Jackson’s military road at Muscle Shoals.

C
onditions were now set for real estate transactions that so enriched Jackson and some of his friends that the new wealth altered their lives. Jackson’s work had acquired millions of acres for the federal government. Now President James Madison’s administration was expected to subdivide the land and sell thousands of desirable plots to the public. Jackson and his friends made plans to buy some of the land as private citizens. They did this at the same time Jackson continued to influence the situation in his capacity as a public official.

His motives were complex, and Jackson doubtless would have described them as pure. His official goal was the security of the United States, and the evidence shows him constantly working to strengthen the great republic’s hold on the unstable frontier. But the evidence shows something more. Jackson managed national security affairs in a way that matched his interest in land development. They combined in his mind; he spoke of them together.

On November 12, 1816, he urged the secretary of war to build a series of arms depots across the region he was responsible for securing. Jackson suggested the location for a central arsenal: “
I know of no situation combining so many advantages . . . as the lower end of the Muscle shoals.” The same day that he urged the federal government to locate an
arsenal and its employees there, he wrote the president to urge the federal government to begin surveying and selling the area’s real estate. It wasn’t the first time he had written the president on this subject. “In my last to you, I took the liberty of drawing your attention to the benefits that would result . . . by bringing into market those tracts of country lately acquired.” He framed his argument in terms of national defense:

I am so deeply impressed with the importance of this subject that I cannot forego the present opportunity of again bringing it to your view . . . the land can be brought into market, within a very short time, which will immediately give to that section of the country a strong and permanent settlement of American citizens, competent to its defense.

Alabama, Jackson knew, was about to become a separate territory as Mississippi became a state. Did the new president need a surveyor for the new territory? Jackson suggested one. John
Coffee would be an excellent choice for northern Alabama, the area that included Muscle Shoals.

In a letter to Coffee six weeks later, Jackson spoke of the new country not as a bulwark of defense but as a business opportunity:

I wrote to Genl Parker . . . and farther added, that I was determined, to engage in purchasing or entering lands for any Individual or company, on the following terms . . . that I would . . . purchase & enter the amount, at my own expence, having one third of the land so purchased or entered.

It appeared that Jackson was aspiring to help speculators buy land, expecting to receive a share of the real estate in return.

He could not do this right away. It would take time for President Madison’s administration to assume formal possession of the Cherokee land, survey it, and establish the mechanisms to auction it. But Jackson found a way to move more swiftly than the government. Since Indians
remained on the land for the time being, he dealt directly with Cherokees to take temporary ownership of a piece of prime real estate. It was the great plantation once operated by John Melton, the reputed river pirate at Muscle Shoals.

Melton had recently died, leaving his half-Cherokee son holding the plantation, and it was from the son that Jackson and a partner bought the right to use it. Jackson was free to exploit it until federal surveyors got around to subdividing it two years later. Jackson’s overseer moved into Melton’s old house and used about sixty enslaved people to grow crops of cotton and corn. The writer Anne Royall visited the plantation in 1818; she described walking a field “
white with cotton and alive with negroes,” on high ground that seemed “suspended between heaven and earth,” with a view of islands in the river that seemed like “floating meadows.” The writer noticed signs of pain along with the beauty. A white boatman informed her that he had lost his Cherokee wife. When the Cherokee land cession was announced, his wife abruptly joined a group of Cherokees going to live in the west. Although as a mixed couple they probably could have remained together, she no longer wanted to stay, and he was not willing to go. The boatman chased her down the river in a canoe, and gave her a final tearful embrace.

Now and again Andrew Jackson stopped by Melton’s Bluff, and his letters afterward were uncharacteristically happy. “I was at the Bluff Two days & nights, Major Hutchings deserves a Meddle,” he said of his overseer. “He has the finist Prospect of a good crop I ever saw, his cotton far excels any crop I have seen.” The soil and climate of the Tennessee Valley proved ideal for growing cotton, and world demand for cotton was soaring.

A few calculations suggest what this meant for Jackson. To make a profit, after feeding their slaves and shipping their crops to market,
southern planters generally needed to sell cotton for 10–15 cents a pound. During the war cotton dropped below 12 cents, and sometimes could not be sold at all. But when peace returned, prices climbed.
Cotton reached 32 cents by late 1816. The price in some cities hit 35 cents in July 1817, the month that Jackson described his crop worth a medal.

Tennessee Valley soil could produce far more pounds of cotton per acre than land farther east. While it is not known how many acres were under cotton cultivation at Melton’s Bluff that year, the
sixty field hands could probably have picked six hundred acres at an absolute minimum. A conservative estimate gives a sense of the bounty: even if only three hundred of the acres were used for cotton, even if yields per acre were somewhat less than the maximum, and even if Jackson sold for somewhat less than the peak price, the profit for Jackson and his overseer from that single year’s cotton crop, on that single plantation, would have
exceeded $35,000, which in 1817 was an income for a prince. President Monroe’s salary was $25,000. Jackson was wealthy before 1817 in terms of property, but like many westerners he was cash-poor. Commanding troops in 1814, he’d scribbled a letter to his friend James Jackson in Nashville, asking him to send $300 for spending money, though he wasn’t sure he had it on account. “
If I have not that sum in the Bank,” Jackson added, “you . . . must endorse for me.” From 1817 onward, the land and the cotton of the Tennessee Valley promised to transform his financial situation. It was
in 1819 that Andrew and Rachel Jackson gave up living in their two-story log house at the Hermitage. They began building the mansion that, with expansions and renovations over many years, would grow into the magnificent home that still stands today, with a white colonnaded front that awed approaching visitors.
The old log house was cut down to a single floor and converted into slave quarters.

Visiting Melton’s Bluff again in September 1817, Jackson contemplated acquiring more land. He sent a letter to John Coffee, who had been appointed the federal surveyor just as Jackson recommended. “
Let me see you as I pass,” Jackson wrote, “and I would be glad [if] you could bring with you the survey of the 3rd. Township & 8th. range—and that
including cold water or spring creak—I have but little doubt, but something can be done at the sales—on which subject I wish to see you.” Federal land offices divided territory into a grid; the “3rd. Township & 8th. range” would have been near Melton’s Bluff, while “cold water or spring creak” was the area he had urged Coffee to make sure was included when he “ran the line” to define the Creek land cession.

In 1818 he stopped by Melton’s Bluff again to watch the harvest of another crop of cotton; prices late that year climbed a few cents higher than the year before, so the harvest meant another $35,000 if not far more. The slaves had to hurry to gather in the crop, because surveyors were busy
dividing the property into city blocks for a new town. The town never amounted to much, but the land boom was only beginning.

The very best place for a town, Jackson believed, was at the foot of Muscle Shoals: the head of easy navigation, and the place where Jackson’s military road crossed the river,
and
where he had urged the government to locate an arsenal. He had written his friend John Coffee back in 1817 to help spread the word. He urged the federal surveyor to send on advice to the president about possible new town sites. There should be a town at Muscle Shoals; it “
will become one of the largest towns in the western country—here will capital concentrate itself—and it will become the
Nashville
of the Tennessee.”

 • • • 

Up until that time there was only one significant white settlement in northern Alabama: Huntsville, upstream from Muscle Shoals. It was built around the Big Spring, a scenic source of fresh water, but was still a rude frontier town. John Coffee, pausing there during the war, dismissed it with a single sentence to his wife: “
I am yet confined at this loathsome place.”

In early 1818 Coffee rode again to that loathsome place. He found conditions even less appealing. Hundreds of men were converging on the town, overloading the local taverns—log cabins that were part bar,
part restaurant, and part hotel.
Food was so scarce that prices soared, and some could not find it at any price. Yet the threat of starvation could not keep men away, for Huntsville was to be the location of a federal land sale. The register of deeds noted that “
many gentlemen from the Eastern States (very considerable capitalists too) have arrivd. in this Country,” some accompanied by slaves.

The land office for northern Alabama occupied
a log cabin in Huntsville. Until this year only a little Tennessee Valley land had gone on the market, commanding ordinary frontier prices of about $2 an acre on average. February 1818 promised to be different. The auctioneer was about to begin selling
close to a million acres. Witnesses recorded signs of excitement they had never experienced before.
Buyers formed coalitions to avoid bidding against each other, but when the auctions began, their efforts collapsed. Prices for some tracts soared from the minimum $2 an acre up to $50. And then $70 an acre.
And then $78.

Returning from a land sale, Coffee wrote Jackson: “
The prices have surpassed any ever known in the U.S. heretofore.” He believed the prices also surpassed reason, and Coffee bought no property at first. In later rounds of auctions, prices subsided. The quality of land varied, the cartels regrouped to limit competition, and each new round of land sales increased the supply of available property. Yet prime land continued to sell for many times its price before the bubble, spurred by easy terms of payment and the incredible price of cotton. Millions of dollars poured into the land office. The madness for real estate even infected the receiver of public money. He was supposed to be forwarding the land payments to Washington, but fell months behind, until his superiors slowly realized
he had failed to forward some $80,000. He had been making bogus sales to himself, recording phantom down payments for land in his own name.

John Coffee waited patiently through the frenzy, and settled in to steady buying when he judged the price was right. In the years that followed, the federal surveyor’s name appeared on
federal patents for more
than fifteen thousand acres. Sometimes his name appeared alone, and sometimes with those of other men who appeared to be joint investors. Sometimes in the crowds at the auction, or in the taverns and houses around town, he did business with a familiar face from Nashville—James Jackson, long-standing associate of both Coffee and Andrew Jackson and apparently richer than either.
James Jackson’s name would eventually appear, singly or with others, on federal patents for twenty-two thousand acres. These were the two men who in 1816 had moved to quash rumors that they, along with Andrew Jackson, were planning to speculate in the newly won Indian lands.

Andrew Jackson’s friends purchased some of their acreage with Andrew Jackson. Often one man would be recorded as the “assignee” of others, typically meaning that he was designated to purchase the land on behalf of a partner or partners. Presumably when Jackson was “assignee,” he was taking a portion of land for himself as he had said back in 1816 that he would. From early 1818 onward, Coffee, James Jackson, and Andrew Jackson were all members of a business partnership “
to purchase or enter lands in the Alabama Territory.” Other partners included
John Donelson, Andrew Jackson’s brother-in-law, and a group of Philadelphia investors. It is difficult to determine exactly how much land the men bought or sold together, but an analysis of federal records suggests that an absolute minimum of
6,700 acres was bought for the partnership, and possibly much more.

Sometimes too Jackson acted on his own. When another round of sales began in November, cheers echoed through Huntsville: Jackson himself was standing in the crowd, his unmistakable figure the shape of his cane, with his mass of hair making him loom even higher over his fellow men. He was planning to bid on property around Coldwater Creek at Muscle Shoals: “Section 33, Township 3 south, Range 11 west.” It was, as Andrew Jackson noted in a letter, “on the military road” that General Jackson had built. When the plot came up for sale, Jackson entered the minimum bid, and out of respect for the national hero, no one else raised his hand.

This section I bought at two dollars per acre, no person bidding against me and as soon as I bid off, hailed by the unanimous shouts of a numerous & mixed multitude—This on the eve of my retireing from all Public appointment, I am compelled to say was gratifying as it was an approval of my official acts.

Given the range of land values at the time, the square mile was instantly worth thousands of dollars more than Jackson paid for it—probably tens of thousands. He used it for some years as a farm, known as the Big Spring plantation, and
sometimes lived there for a month at a time. “
I am determined to push that farm for a livelihood,” he wrote in 1822, while giving instructions to install a cotton gin. That same year
he advertised a $50 reward for a slave who escaped from there.
In 1823 he personally led the effort to capture three more escaped slaves, and had to put two of the men in irons, a step he said he regretted.