Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep (review)

Jacksonland is an American story that reads like a Greek tragedy. The expulsion of the Native American tribes living within the southern states was an inevitable fate replayed across the globe in collisions between white settlers and aboriginal peoples. What made that outcome different in the United States was that one of the doomed tribes—the Cherokee Nation—sought to persuade public opinion and the courts that they were entitled to their lands in Georgia. Jacksonland captures this failure in vivid detail, though at times Inskeep strains to fashion heroes and villains from ambiguous people.

In a nod toward Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” Jacksonland examines this slice of history through a profile of two charismatic leaders. Andrew Jackson was the driving force behind the acquisition and conquest of tribal lands in the South, first as a general and then as president. John Ross was the head of the Cherokees who realized that the tribe’s only hope for survival in its ancestral homeland rested with adopting the manners and political tactics of its white antagonists. Ironically, Ross served in General Jackson’s militia during the War of 1812, when the Cherokees helped the United States to make war on the tribes that allied with the British. Ross attempted to invoke this relationship to obtain a compromise with President Jackson but failed. After his retirement, Jackson referred to Ross as a “scamp” who should be “banished from the notice of the Administration” (332). In describing the struggle between these two men, the book renders a complicated debate with many moving parts into what is probably the best account of the events that led to the Trail of Tears.

To the extent that Jacksonland goes astray, its sin is in overstating the moral distinctions between Jackson and Ross. For example, Inskeep takes pains to describe Jackson’s pre-presidential efforts to line his pockets by using his official authority to buy Native American lands for pennies on the dollar, whereas he mentions Ross’s ownership of slaves as briefly as possible. Likewise, at the beginning of the book, Inskeep dwells on Jackson’s decision to execute John Woods, an alleged mutineer in his War of 1812 militia, to set a brutal example of discipline, but he glosses over the murder of Ross’s opponents within the Cherokee Nation in a single sentence: “It is reasonable to suppose that some part of the Cherokee leadership endorsed the coordinated assassination” (343).

The good guys (in American stories, anyway) do not own slaves or slay their associates. Inskeep’s desire to report what happened to the tribe, as represented by Ross, as a matter of clear-cut right and wrong, is understandable. But life, especially political life, often does not lend itself to such straightforward characterizations—a truth that Jacksonland resists but must recognize nonetheless.