The American Future (45 page)

Meigs told his Indian friends he thought the move was for the best. If they stayed, they faced eventual “extinction,” while in the west they might still be a nation. This was also the language Jackson used, but “extinction” was not something preordained by history, just because of the numbers of white immigrants. It was an actual policy determined by actual men. What Jackson meant was that they could no longer expect the federal government to protect them in the name of some old treaties signed in a sentimental generation. What was government
supposed to do: establish forts to fire on their own kind? Really, the idea was ridiculous. And the sorriest part of the story is that White Path had begun to talk like this too. The most adventurous of the great Meigs dynasty had become a moral coward, rationalizing that he was doing the right thing by the Cherokee, when a large part of him must have known the opposite was true.

What made it worse was that seeds that he himself had planted among the Cherokee in the Jefferson years were now bearing fruit, belying Jackson's slander that the Indians would never be capable of modernizing themselves. They had a cotton culture (including, lest it be forgotten in the Indian romance, slaves); they spun and wove. Their schools were starting to produce Cherokee children literate in their own language and English, and the influence of fairly benevolent Moravian missionaries had even succeeded in some conversions.

But the success story was exactly what Andrew Jackson neither believed nor wanted to hear. And after the Battle of New Orleans (won after the war with Britain had ended), he was politically untouchable. Jackson was, many people knew, a president-in-waiting, and he made it clear that he was eager to end what he called the “farce” of treaties between the government and jumped-up savages who imagined they were little kings.

It was politics as much as racism (of which there was a deep streak in Jackson, for all his adoption of two Indian children) that moved him. His was the authentic voice of the democratic frontier, both speaking for and expecting the loyalty of all those who could not wait to get their hands on Indian land. The dream of American plenty for the ordinary man was born from Andrew Jackson's determination to evict tens of thousands of Indians—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Creek as well as Cherokee—from the only homelands they had ever known, because they happened to be in the way. It was absurd to the point of offensive, Jackson told himself, to pretend that Indian “nations” could ever be incorporated into the Union on their own terms as Indian states.

Return Jonathan Meigs died in 1823 at the age of eighty-two, and the manner of his going belied his grim conviction in his later years that transplantation—in effect the disentanglement of Indian and white lives that had become so braided together in the up-country—would be for the best. An elderly Cherokee chief had come to see
him at the agency at Hiwassee to debate the wisdom of removal. Meigs saw that the old man was sick and offered him his lodge while he took a tent outside. But it was Meigs whose head cold turned into pneumonia, taking him away. The funeral for White Path was attended by a long file of Cherokee chiefs, braves, and women, all of whom had trusted another Meigs, perhaps too much, with their best interests. A Cherokee death chant went up over the mountains with a wreath of smoke.

Perhaps it was as well that Meigs did not live to see the denouement, which was more tragic than he could possibly have imagined. And it was made so because the Cherokee had listened all too well to their tutor White Path. By the 1820s they had a written language developed by George Gist, known as Sequoyah, based on the eighty-six syllables at the core of their spoken tongue. Once the language was established, a bilingual newspaper followed, the
Cherokee Phoenix.
In place of the old tribal councils meeting in the round houses, John Ross, the charismatic chief of the anti-emigrant majority, an eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scots, produced a written constitution, modeled after that of the United States. Elections were organized; law courts and magistrates, a militia, and a police force put into being. In less than ten years, with the threat of mass deportation always at their back, the Cherokee had become a true microstate comparable to many of those claiming independence in Europe.

It was as though Ross and his allies in Cherokee nationalism, many of whom like Major Ridge had fought in the Creek War and who had been embittered by Jackson's shocking indifference to his own Indian militia, now wanted to demonstrate to the shades of Jefferson and Meigs that they could indeed make a modern political and social culture. It was precisely this
striving
to be like America that had periodically depressed Meigs and made him wish that they return to elk hunts and spirit dances in whatever country they could be left in peace. And it was certainly the fact of their progress in agriculture, the cotton industry, and politics that spurred Andrew Jackson to get rid of the Cherokee sooner rather than later. For who could tell what fancy notions they might get if the experiment in Indian nation building was allowed to mature? They might actually
succeed
in cash crop farming and then be impossible to uproot! They might get dangerous ideas that others might be called on for their protection,
those others usually marching under the Union Jack, the nation that Jackson most detested in the world. As the Cherokee became more organized and aggravatingly articulate, they turned from a nuisance into a menace.

And suddenly fortune played the Cherokee a wild card. Gold ore was discovered in the hills of west Georgia in an area Bartram had traversed, by one Benjamin Parks, setting off the first “rush” in American history. The Cherokee had known about specks of alluvial ore, and the nearest town to the strike was called Dahlonega, Cherokee for “yellow money,” but they had not bothered to do anything systematic about it. Now, the mere thought that, enriched by gold, the Cherokee might be able to hold off their transplantation indefinitely provoked Jackson, elected president in 1828, to introduce the Indian Removal Act in Congress in 1830.

Under its terms not just the Cherokee but all the “Five Civilized Tribes”—Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were to be removed from their lands east of the Mississippi and taken to an alternative settlement somewhere to the west of the river, plumb in the region straddling the 100th meridian, called by Stephen Long, and with good reason, “the Great American Desert” (now Oklahoma). What little was known of the area made it clear that it was, especially west of the 100th, arid and unsuitable for precisely the kind of settled agriculture the Indians had been told they were supposed to master. The Removal Act attempted to mask its mass deportations as a voluntary invitation to emigrate, and to make that act seem akin to the westward movement of white pioneers on the Oregon Trail. But Cherokee chiefs like Ross noticed that the Oregon emigrants traveled straight past the region to which they were being removed. Had it had any serious potential, it would already have surely attracted settlers. But the president made it clear that should any decide to remain, they would henceforth be subject to the laws of the states in which they resided. It was, in effect, a threat. Jackson would eliminate all federal protection for the Indians (in violation of guarantees made by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams) and would unleash the governments of Georgia and Tennessee on them, which would undoubtedly ride roughshod over any notion that the tribes owned much land at all, and certainly not any that white settlers and gold prospectors had their eyes on.

It was one of the most morally repugnant moments in American history, one that ought by rights to take its prime mover, the seventh president, off the currency of any self-respecting nation. But there he is with his imperious forelock on the face of the twenty-dollar bill, the ethnic cleanser of the first democratic age. Jackson made several speeches on the subject, in which he cast himself and his policy as the Savior of Indians who otherwise would be doomed to disappear, surrounded as they were by the arts and industries of a “superior race.” They had neither the intelligence nor the inclination, he said, to transform themselves into a viable modern society, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary.

It is not as if the ferocious immorality of the Removal Act were not noticed at the time. It squeaked through with bare pluralities, in the House of Representatives by just five votes, and many of the most eloquent voices of the day spoke bitterly and lengthily against it; Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey took three days to go through all the solemn undertakings given by past governments to the Indians on the implicit understanding that they had title to the land from “immemorial possession.” “If we abandon these aboriginal proprietors of our soil, these early allies and adopted children of our forefathers, how shall we justify this trespass to ourselves…Let us beware how, by oppressive encroachments on the sacred privileges of our Indian neighbors, we minister to the agonies of future remorse.” The most unlikely opposition came from a legendary figure who embodied the frontier even more emblematically than Jackson: David Crockett, like the president, from Tennessee. Crockett had fought alongside Cherokee like John Ross at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and had come to admire their tenacity and courage. He would pay at the polls for the temerity of his opposition, losing a bid for reelection to the House, though winning on a second try. Many of the greatest figures in Congress like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster spoke in indignation at the iniquity of the bill, but the orator who most grasped the enormity of what was being proposed, a people's destruction engineered from greed and covetousness, and who attempted to summon American moral tradition against it, was Edward Everett, Massachusetts congressman, later governor of that commonwealth and president of Harvard. “The evil,” said Everett, “was enormous, the inevitable suffering incalculable. Do not stain the fair fame of the
country…Nations of dependent Indians, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it; you cannot reason it away…Our friends will view this measure with sorrow and our enemies alone with joy. And we ourselves Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach and a regret as bitter as it is unavailing.”

None of this had the slightest effect on Jackson's implacable determination to purge the Southeast of Indians. The more civilized they were, the more reason to uproot them. Nor could the Supreme Court make much of an impression. When Ross and the anti-removal party sued the state of Georgia for illegal trespass and having no standing in altering binding treaties concluded between the federal government and the Cherokee Nation, the court initially dismissed the argument. But the greatest advocate of the day, William Wirt, pleading for the Indians, had no trouble showing from the letter of past treaties that the Cherokee had indeed been treated as a nation and Chief Justice John Marshall's court upheld their case, disallowing Georgia from, among other presumptions, holding a lottery to sell off Indian land. The newspaper editor Horace Greeley reported Jackson as saying, contemptuously, “John Marshall has made his opinion. Now let him enforce it.” Apocryphal or not, the contempt for the Constitution certainly sounds like authentic Jackson.

Jackson advertised the measure as the purest benevolence and its realization as “a happy consummation.” In his second address to Congress, Jackson finally obliterated Jefferson's dream of being “all Americans” by boasting that removal would “separate the Indians from immediate contact with the whites” and “enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions…and perhaps cause them gradually to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilised and Christian community…Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country…To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflection…[but] what good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms…and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilisation and religion?…Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they [do] more than our ancestors did or than our
children are now doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects…How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions!” All the Indians had to do to become truly American was to hitch their wagons to the religion of Moving Right On.

Everything about this was specious: the caricature of the Cherokee as still “savage,” unable to maintain themselves against the white hordes, needing separation in their own best interests, and the same kind of arguments would be heard again in the future history of ethnic cleansing in and out of Europe. America's honor lies in the fierceness of those who opposed Jackson. They continued to do so, but were up against the most authoritarian president the United States had seen, dressed withal as a new kind of Democrat; someone who had no compunction about violating the Constitution, ignoring the Supreme Court, unilaterally rescinding treaties. When a “Treaty” was signed with a small but influential faction of the Cherokees moved to despair by Jackson's bullying, and passed through Congress by a single vote, Everett demanded that the president go to the Capitol steps and burn the actual treaties with Washington's, Adams's, and Jefferson's signatures written on them.

And for what was this monstrous crime committed? So that the myths of the homestead movement, of America's millions moving into empty space, the “garden” that a generous Providence had bestowed on them, could be sustained. But what the white settlers of west Georgia and east Tennessee were actually doing was taking someone else's plenty.