Andrew Jackson and Native Americans

As anyone who studies history knows, Indian Removal with the resultant mass migrations that became known as the Trail of Tears were largely the brainchild of one man, Andrew Jackson.  Although other Administrations prior had enacted treaties with Natives restricting them to reservations or pressuring them to "voluntarily" give up eastern ranges for other lands out west, his Administration was elected partly on his campaign promise to remove all tribes east of the Mississippi.  This begs the question, what was this man's problem with Natives?  To dismiss Jackson as a bigot with a screw loose, living in a prejudiced age is to over-simplify the problem.  There was more.

Andrew Jackson grew up in a single-parent family around violence, much as many kids do today in urban inner cities.  His parents were from County Antrim in Northern Ireland, where seeds of hatred and animosity were sow long before his birth.  The Borders region, three counties in Scotland facing the three counties in England, was the home of the blood feud, where families had ravaged each other across a lawless, poorly defended border with little control from Edinburgh or London.  When these people were offered a chance to immigrate to Ireland under James 1 (1603-1624) and Oliver Cromwell (1649-1659), they jumped at the chance to farm new land.  But they had to fight for it, against the original inhabitants who were Gaelic-speaking and Catholic. 

By the late eighteenth century, these immigrants, called Ulster Irish in Great Britain and Scotch-Irish in America, were ready to move on again.  They poured into the American colonies.  Disliked by their more settled neighbors along the seaboard, they populated the Appalachian foothills, then ventured "over-mountain" or into the "backcountry", taking their feuds and their dislike of foreigners with them.  Only this time, the foreigners were the Native inhabitants.  Natives raided settlements and farms, trying to drive the intruders back East.  The frontiersmen, used to dealing with adversaries took their revenge, replacing one enemy with another.  Enter British Indian Agents and military commanders, who were trying to preserve the hunting ranges that they had promised the Natives and curb settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains.  If there were people whom the Scotch-Irish disliked more than Natives, it was Redcoats. 

Andrew and Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson immigrated from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in 1765.  Like many immigrants, they landed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, quickly got the hint that their kind wasn't welcome and drifted onward.  They found a home in the Scotch-Irish community of the Waxhaws, along the North/South Carolina border.  There, they planned to raise their two older sons, Robert and Hugh, whom they had brought with them from Ireland.  Jackson's father Andrew died of an accident a few weeks before his son was born, somewhere in the Waxhaws area though the site was disputed.  Elizabeth Jackson never remarried, which was unusual for that time-period, and raised her three boys on her own.  Andrew, Jr., received little schooling and grew up in what was still, given the area, the frontier. 

Andrew's experiences during the Revolution didn't help sweeten his temper.  His elder brother Hugh died of heat exhaustion at the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779, when his little brother Andrew was 12 years old.  By that time, Andrew was already serving informally as a courier for local militia units.  The Revolutionary War came to his family's front door on May 29, 1780, with the Battle of the Waxhaws between North Carolina militia under Col. Abraham Buford and the British Legion under their infamous leader, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton.  This controversial battle, during which Tarleton let his undisciplined men get out of hand and continue the battle after the militia had throw up a flag of truce, was viewed by Jackson's neighbors as a massacre.  Andrew, his mother and older brother helped carry the wounded from the battle into a church and nearby homes, their hatred of the British deepening.  Later, in 1781, Andrew and his brother Robert were interned in a British POW camp.  Andrew was ordered to clean an officer's boots but refused, earning a swipe from a sword across his face for his impudence.  He carried the scar and his animosity toward the British for life.  Robert caught smallpox in the camp and his mother came to nurse him and other soldiers, who were also ill of diptheria.  Both she and her eldest son died, leaving Andrew an orphan at the age of 14. 

As a teenager, Andrew was already a hardened, bitter man who had yet to see his first Native.  He moved to Tennessee, where he was appointed a Colonel in the state militia.  He had no military experience, but had studied classical warfare and the campaigns of Frederick the Great from books, part of the reason he got the job.  His first service was during the War of 1812, particularly the Creek War of 1813-14.  The short synopsis of that war in an earlier post does not do justice to how violent it was in reality, including the killings by Natives of White and mixed-race Settlers at Fort Mims and the retaliation by Americans of burning Creek towns and villages.  Davy Crockett, another Tennessee militiamen, cited his experiences in the Creek War as giving him an empathy for Natives and a permanent distaste for Jackson.  Jackson, though, was in his glory, having defeated the Creeks and later his old enemies the British at the Battle of New Orleans. 

Jackson saw service against both the British and Natives during the First Seminole War, 1816-1818.  There, his behavior against both Natives and British nationals caused international controversy.  He would hang both Milly Francis' father and another Creek-Seminole leader, as well as two British traders whom he suspected of supplying whiskey and guns to the Natives, along with information on American troop movements to the British.  Jackson dealt with Seminole resistance the same way he dealt with the Creeks, burning villages and destroying crops.  The Natives had their own name for him, "Sharp Knife", because of his ruthlessness.  Britain ceded Florida to the United States in 1819 and Spain gave up its claim to Florida in 1820, removing those two enemies off the continent and out of his sight.  Jackson returned to his plantation in Tennessee a hero.  He also returned a foster father.  Andrew and Rachel Jackson had no children of their own, but over the years took in eleven foster children.  Mostly, these were relatives or the orphaned children of family friends, but he also adopted two Native children.  One was a Creek boy whom Jackson raised as his own child. 

But he'd also found a new enemy to fight, the Natives.   After his bitter loss to John Quincy Adams in the election of 1824, Jackson needed something big to bolster his campaign in 1828 and he decided that one of the planks of his platform would be the removal of all Native people east of the Mississippi.  This was a case of the man and the hour having met.  Many Natives still remaining in the east had determined to peacefully co-exist with White settlers and had turned to farming.  This was particularly true of the Southeastern tribes, where many families had risen in the ranks of plantation society, owning slaves and large, prosperous properties.  White neighbors turned covetous eyes on tribal land.  In the North, which remembered the effects of so many wars on the frontier, old scores remained to be settled.  Jackson could promise Indian Removal and get people to buy into his campaign not just because he himself harbored animosity against the Natives, but because anger and animosity toward Natives was deeply ingrained in America. 

Jackson won the Presidency and Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.  Despite the success of Native tribes, particularly the Cherokee, in arguing their case to the United States Supreme Court, Jackson was adamant.  He had found a new enemy, besides Natives.  This was Chief Justice John Marshall, who came from a prominent slave-holding Virginia family.  Jackson's enemies ranged from groups of people in general, to certain people in particular.  As prosperous as he'd become in Tennessee, he harbored jealousy of planters who were wealthier and of older lineage than he.  Marshall, with his ties to the Randolph, Madison and Jefferson families, was in his sights for that reason alone.  It didn't help that the Chief Justice consistently used the power of the Court to strike down laws that the Administration sponsored and favored.  When told of the Court's decision in favor of the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson responded, "John Marshall has made his decision, let him enforce it.  Burn them out and they'll go!" 

Jackson's Administration ended in 1837 with the election of Martin Van Buren and a nationwide financial panic.  It was too late to save thousands of Natives who had died, and who would yet die along the Trail of Tears as the Second Seminole War wound on and the Cherokee began their trek to Oklahoma.  Jackson died in 1848.  Lyncoya, the Creek orphan whom he had taken in and apprenticed to a saddle maker, died of tuberculosis in 1828.