The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815-1848

12. The Trail of Tears

147 12 The Trail of Tears Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself. Andrew Jackson It would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. Andrew Jackson How under these circumstances can you live in the country you now occupy? Your condition must become worse and worse, and you will ultimately disappear, as so many tribes have done before you. Andrew Jackson I concluded it was best to obey our Great Father and say nothing contrary to his wishes. Black Hawk Andrew Jackson’s attitudes toward Indians were a complex mixture of condescension, loathing, admiration, paternalism for them as a people , and greed for their land. Yet hatred rarely animated his racism. He The Trail of Tears 148 bullied recalcitrant Indians like he bullied anyone who opposed him. It was rarely personal. To those who accused Jackson of being a vicious Indian hater who wielded all his powers to destroy the native peoples, he had this reply, “Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself.” He insisted that his policies actually served their best interests. The Indians were savages bound for extinction. By taking their ancestral land and sending them westward, he saved them from being immediately overrun and either wiped out or assimilated by white settlers: “It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the general and state governments on account of the Indians. . . . It will separate the Indians from immediate contract with settlements of whites, free them from the power of the states, enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay.” Yet he also acknowledged that the westward push would only delay the inevitable extinction of the Indian way of life. It will “cause them gradually, under the protection of government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilizing and Christian community.”¹ In justifying his Indian policies, Jackson was being more sincere than cynical. He shared a view held by countless Americans over the centuries. He was an unyielding and decisive perpetrator of the practice of stealing Indian lands and destroying their cultures, which originated with the first settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Thereafter, for nearly three centuries, one tribe after another was driven from their homes because they were decimated by war or disease and the settlers took their land with or without a treaty. However rapacious and violent this process of land theft was, there was never a crown or federal policy of genocide or the mass murder of a defiant tribe, let alone the entire Indian race; King Philip’s War of 1675–76 was the closest a colonial government came to genocide. Ethnic cleansing or the deliberate destruction of a tribe’s culture was not an official policy until the 1887 Dawes Act. Before then ethnic cleansing certainly occurred, but mostly as the sporadic by-product of trade, intermarriage, and Christian proselytizing.² Congressional majorities mirrored Jackson’s views of the Indians. Each house produced a version of what became known as the Indian The Trail of Tears 149 Removal Act. The Senate passed its bill by 28 to 19 on April 26, 1830. The House vote was nearly a dead heat, 102 to 97. A conference committee reconciled the differences between the bills. Both houses voted for the final version, and Jackson signed it into law on May 28, 1830. Jackson now had uncontested power to realize his vision. During his eight years as president, the United States signed more than seventy treaties and acquired more than 100 million acres of land east of the Mississippi River in exchange for $68 million and 32 million acres of land west of the Mississippi. As a result, more than forty-five thousand Indians were removed or resettled; perhaps as many as one in ten died on the way to their “promised land.” It was a stunningly lopsided victory of America’s military, economy, and population over the Indians , but the cost in the violation of America’s constitutional and moral values was incalculable.³ Jackson later admitted that “it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves...