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Ch. 2 - History, Change, and Tradition
- Michigan State University Press
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2 History, Change, and Tradition “It is our duty to make new efforts for the preservation, improvement, and civilization of the native inhabitants. The hunter state can exist only in the vast uncultivated desert. It yields to the more dense and compact form and greater force of civilized population; and of right it ought to yield, for the earth was given to mankind to support the greatest number of which it is capable, and no tribe of people have a right to withhold from the want of others more than is necessary for their own support and comfort.”1 James Monroe, president of the United States resident Monroe’s first annual message to Congress on 2 December 1817 presaged the complete reorganization of American Indian policy. After extensive review, the new secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, recommended three important changes in American policy. First, he suggested that the United States drop the pretense of treating native tribal groups as sovereign nations. Secondly, he recommended that the United States try to prevent the complete extinction of the native people through education and “civilization,” although he clarified that native people were not ready for instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but should instead be instructed in manual arts— farming and homemaking. Last, and most importantly, he proposed that the United States force native people to adopt the concept of private ownership of land by confiscating their homelands, then giving individual Indians small plots of land west of the Mississippi River. Native compliance with this new policy was to be voluntary, and military force would not P ■ 21 be used to force Indians off their lands. If the Indians refused to move, the states would extend their laws over them and they would be granted only such rights as each state decided to offer, and the native nations would, of course, cease to exist.2 The alternative to this creative form of second-class citizenship was termed “removal,” a euphemism that implies the native people voluntarily elected their own dispossession and permanent exile to the West. Calhoun’s policy was too gradual for American land speculators and others who wanted land. They demanded the immediate dispossession of all native people east of the Mississippi. The price of cotton on the world market had doubled from 1814 to 1816, old cotton lands were exhausted , and plantation owners needed new land on which to deploy their slaves and expand cotton production.3 Recent immigrants and American citizens without land sought farmland to support themselves and their families. Andrew Jackson led the clamor for Indian dispossession, inspired by his personal ambition for wealth, and also with an eye toward the presidency . Jackson had become a national hero due to his fame as a military leader and “Indian fighter” during the War of 1812 and the Creek War. His increasing demands for the dispossession of the native people living east of the Mississippi began early in the second decade of the nineteenth century. His great public support and his experience in dealing with Indians gave him influence far in excess of his political status. The American public trusted his judgment as he called for change in American Indian policies. The fact that he was calling for the dispossession and expulsion of the huge Indian population east of the Mississippi, which would clear title to millions of acres of land uniquely suited to growing cotton, endeared him to the land speculators and others calling for immediate removal. Jackson demanded that the government end its policy of using treaties to negotiate with Indians. Instead, he argued that the United States should unilaterally dictate the course of the future for native peoples. As Jackson saw it, the days were gone when the United States had to consider the native peoples as a military threat, and thus treat with them as though they were sovereign nations. In previous years, when the United States had been weak, the treaty process had been a necessity, but now that the American nation was stronger than any single native nation, Jackson felt that she should use her strength, “to affect any 22 ■ Living in the Land of Death object which its wisdome [sic], humanity, and justice may please to adopt with regard to these unfortunate people.”4 In response to these growing political demands, Secretary of War Calhoun sent American negotiators to meet with the Choctaws in October 1818. Almost as soon as the commissioners made it clear that the Americans wanted more land...