ANDREW JACKSON AND HIS INDIAN WARS
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BOOK REVIEWS:
ANDREW JACKSON AND HIS INDIAN WARS |
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/books/review/15CAYTONT.html?searchpv=nytToday
By Andrew R. L. Cayton
ANDREW JACKSON AND HIS INDIAN WARS
By Robert V. Remini.
Illustrated. 317 pp. New York: Viking. $26.95.
First Chapter: "Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars" (July 15, 2001)
Andrew Jackson polarizes historians almost as much as he polarized
Americans when he served as president of the United States from 1829 to
1837. Because Jackson so often defied his critics, we half expect him to
rise from the grave to defend his reputation with the same ferocity he
demonstrated in his lifetime. But there is no need for a miracle. ''Andrew
Jackson and His Indian Wars'' is ample proof that Robert V. Remini, a professor
emeritus of history and the humanities at the University of Illinois, Chicago,
remains as tenacious a champion as any president could ever hope to have.
More than a biography, ''Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars'' is
a spirited response to scholars who deplore Jackson's treatment of Indians,
in no small part because they view it as emblematic of a larger national
failure to deal with racial diversity. Remini sees Jackson as ''a patriot''
who did good as well as ''supposed 'evil.' '' Recalling discrimination
against Japanese-Americans during World War II, Remini argues that profound
''fear and mistrust'' have frequently led ''normally decent and upright
Americans'' to support ''despicable crimes'' against perceived enemies.
How easy it is, in retrospect, for us to think that we would have behaved
better.
Historians agree that Jackson played a critical role in the expansion
of the United States. But they disagree about what his behavior signifies.
The general's victory over the British outside New Orleans in January 1815
made him a national hero. Fighting European intruders was an understandable
defense of American freedom. However, less than a year earlier, at Horseshoe
Bend, Ala., American militia, Cherokees and Creeks under Jackson's command
surrounded a community of Creeks and slaughtered an estimated 850 of them.
The action produced, in Remini's words, ''a killing field.'' If we celebrate
the battle of New Orleans as a triumph of American democracy, Horseshoe
Bend suggests the racial boundaries of that democracy.
As president, Jackson advocated the removal of all Indians living
east of the Mississippi River. Despite opposition in and out of Congress,
he signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the president
to give Indians federal land in the West in exchange for the land they
occupied. The federal government would also compensate them for improvements
they had made, and pay the costs of removal. Enormously successful from
the perspective of white Southerners, the policy led to the relocation
of 45,690 Indians during the two Jackson administrations.
The Cherokees became the last great tribe to suffer forced relocation.
In 1838, American soldiers placed approximately 17,000 Cherokees in a ''concentration
camp'' and transported them in railroad cars and by foot over the 800 miles
that became known as the Trail of Tears. By the time Jackson left office,
the United States had acquired roughly 100 million acres from Indians --
at a cost of $68 million, 32 million acres west of the Mississippi and
the lives of the several thousand human beings who did not survive the
journey to their new homes.
Denying that he wants ''to excuse or exonerate'' Jackson, Remini
tries to place the president in a larger cultural context. Most whites
in the 1830's were racists, Remini points out. Moreover, American leaders,
including Thomas Jefferson, had been moving toward a policy of Indian removal
for decades.
Remini faults Jackson for his impatience and his intolerance. Yet
he wants us to understand that Jackson acted to protect the security of
white settlers and their young nation. Indians and whites ''despised and
feared each other, and this prejudice and mistrust saturated both their
cultures.'' No wonder Jackson learned that ''killing Indians and driving
them farther south and west was the only way to safeguard the Tennessee
frontier. It was a necessary function of life in the wilderness.''
With the South secure, an older Jackson became more benevolent,
seeing removal as the only viable alternative to genocide. Without relocation,
Remini argues, white Americans would have annihilated or assimilated the
dwindling number of Indians east of the Mississippi. By encouraging the
Creeks, Cherokees and others to migrate west, Jackson gave them an opportunity
to preserve their cultures in relative isolation from white Americans.
Cherokee leaders who fought removal, like John Ross, only made things worse
by delaying the inevitable. If they had not migrated, the Cherokees would
have suffered extinction, like the Yamasees and the Pequots before them.
''Removal,'' Remini concludes, ''was meant to prevent annihilation, not
cause it.''
The idea of Andrew Jackson as the savior of the American Indians
is more likely to inflame than mollify the president's critics. Remini's
greatest asset has always been his ability to empathize with Jackson. Seeing
the world through Old Hickory's eyes, we appreciate him as a complex human
being. The problem with ''Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars'' is that
we see the world only through Jackson's eyes; biographer and subject almost
completely converge. Indeed, Remini is so obsessed with explicating Jackson's
perspective that he neglects the more complicated story in which Indians
-- as well as presidents -- were significant actors.
An account with a larger context would include multiple perspectives
on removal, as well as an appreciation of the diversity that existed in
frontier societies. Even if whites, Indians and the many people who were
descended from both did not always understand one another, they regularly
exchanged goods, ideas and customs. The Cherokees adapted European constitutional
ideas and mastered the federal legal system in a futile effort to avoid
removal. In short, while fear spawned hatred and violence, it did not stop
human beings from pursuing more constructive forms of contact. Remini's
case would have been stronger, both intellectually and morally, if he had
balanced Jackson's words with those of the Indians who honorably resisted
his efforts to transform them into people they did not wish to become and
to transport them to places they did not wish to go. Jackson's wars, after
all, were their wars too.
Andrew R. L. Cayton teaches history at Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio. He
is the co-editor, with Fredrika J. Teute, of ''Contact Points: American
Frontiers From the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi.''
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