What Hath God Wrought (51 page)

The Indian Removal Bill constituted the highest priority in the new president’s legislative agenda. Both the passage of the law and its subsequent enforcement engaged Jackson’s attention to the fullest. “There was no measure, in the whole course of his administration, of which he was more exclusively the author than this,” commented Martin Van Buren (who would know).
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Indian Removal held the place in Jackson’s vision that internal improvements occupied in that of John Quincy Adams: the key to national development. Jackson’s concerns were geopolitical as well as economic. In his eyes, the tribes not only occupied rich land, they threatened American sovereignty as the British and Spanish had done and, like the free black maroon communities of Florida, challenged white supremacy. Jackson shared the attitude of the Georgians toward the original inhabitants. To him, the practice of dealing with Indian tribes through treaties was “an absurdity”; the government should simply impose its will on them.
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Nevertheless, the administration’s Indian Removal Bill called for another round of treaty-making, intended to secure the complete removal of the Native Americans to west of the Mississippi River.

This grandiose program had been discussed ever since the early days of the Monroe administration. Jackson had commended it; the president had responded with characteristic ambiguity. Monroe seemed to endorse both emigration and assimilation but did not apply pressure on the Native Americans to adopt either. Instead, he allowed Secretary of War Calhoun to continue supporting education and economic progress within existing tribal domains.
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In the succeeding administration, both President Adams and his secretary of war, James Barbour, were convinced that assimilation and U.S. citizenship represented the only just long-term policy toward the Indians. But having tried in vain to defend the legal rights of the Creeks against Georgia, the two left office gloomy about the prospects of the Native Americans. As Barbour put it in 1826, “They see that our professions are insincere, that our promises are broken, that the happiness of the Indian is a cheap sacrifice to the acquisition of new lands.” By the end of his term, Adams had reluctantly concluded that removal probably constituted the only alternative to a lawless destruction of the tribes and the death or subjugation of their members at the hands of the states. He came to view the dispossession of the native inhabitants by the whites as an inevitable tragedy, one that constituted “a perpetual harrow upon my feelings.” But he still wanted the process to respect law and order and federal supremacy.
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Jackson’s State of the Union message claimed that Indian Removal would be “voluntary.” In reality, everyone knew that no stone would be left unturned to extract such “voluntary” migrations. Jackson was personally well experienced in the techniques of bribery, intimidation, and fraud through which treaties were imposed on reluctant peoples, having been active in securing a series of land cessions by the Civilized Tribes since 1816. To make it clear what he really meant, the president stated that the federal government would not protect the Indians in their present locations whenever states extended jurisdiction over them. This announcement was a clear departure from policy under Adams. Jackson told the Native Americans “to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.” Submission to the laws of Georgia for a Creek or Cherokee meant not being able to vote, sue, own property, testify against a white person, or obtain credit. For Sharp Knife (as the Indians called Jackson) to pretend that such submission represented a viable option offering the Natives the chance to “become merged in the mass of our population,” was disingenuous, to say the least. (“I was satisfied that the Indians could not possibly live under the laws of the state,” Jackson admitted privately.) In fact, when an earlier federal treaty (1819) for a Cherokee land cession had guaranteed citizenship and property rights to those Natives who chose to remain, Georgia had refused to accept the stipulations.
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The president’s Indian Removal Bill provoked a fierce debate, producing alignments that proved remarkably durable in defining support and opposition to the Jackson administration. Since the Native Americans themselves were outside the political community, they had to rely on white sympathizers in Congress and society at large. Beyond the doors of Congress, the most conspicuous groups involved in the movement against Removal consisted of Protestant clergy and women. At the head of the movement stood Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an interdenominational organization sponsoring most of the Christian missionaries to the Indians. The attitude of the missionaries must be characterized carefully if we are to understand their role. Passionately devoted to the propagation of Protestant Christianity and Western civilization, they took scarcely any interest in Native culture. Yet at the same time they believed implicitly in the rationality, moral responsibility, and equal human worth of their Indian hosts. Proud of the Cherokee Christian minority and supportive of the tribe’s economic development, the missionaries welcomed Sequoyah’s accomplishments. Dispossession and deportation of the Indians they condemned as a cruel betrayal. Evarts lobbied strenuously, organized protest meetings and petitions, and wrote powerful tracts defending aboriginal rights, using the pseudonym “William Penn.” The Penn essays were reprinted in over a hundred newspapers and read, according to a contemporary estimate, by half a million people.
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Catharine Beecher, the redoubtable daughter of Lyman Beecher and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, led the women’s opposition to Removal. Working anonymously, she organized a drive to deluge Congress with petitions from women opposing Removal. “Women are protected from the blinding influence of party spirit,” argued her circular letter. Not being voters, but defenders of morality, charity, and family values, women were free to “
feel
for the distressed.” A typical petition, the one from Hallowell, Maine, denounced Removal as undercutting efforts to “enlighten and christianize” the Indians. “We are unwilling that the church, the schools, and the domestic altar should be thrown down before the avaricious god of power.”
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Through language such as this, Beecher and her fellow petitioners shrewdly avoided a head-on challenge to male supremacy and sought to wrap their protest in the protective nineteenth-century doctrine of “separate spheres” for women and men. Even so, Democratic politicians like Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri mocked them and their male associates.
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Unprecedented as a mobilization of women’s opinion on a public issue, Catharine Beecher’s petition drive against Removal set a pattern that would be followed by the antislavery movement in years to come.

Both female and male opponents of Removal made use of the network of evangelical colleges and organizations as well as the communications system to mobilize their followers. This time the moral reformers mounted a much bigger campaign than they had for sabbatarianism. Their activities and support were not confined to New England neo-Puritan strongholds; the largest of the women’s petitions, bearing 670 signatures, came from Pittsburgh. Martin Van Buren felt startled when his own niece denounced Indian Removal to his face and told him she hoped he and Jackson would lose the election of 1832.
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A popular play called
Metamora
, based on King Philip’s War of 1675–76, opened in New York City to foster and exploit white sympathy for the Indians. America’s leading actor, Edwin Forrest, played the title role of the Wampanoag sachem who fought courageously against encroaching settlers. When the play went on tour to Augusta, Georgia, a boycott forced its closure.
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But even within the South courageous opponents of Removal spoke up, like the lawyer Robert Campbell of Savannah, who warned his fellow Georgians that they would bring “enduring shame” on their state. “In modern times in civilized countries there is no instance of expelling the members of a whole nation from their homes or driving an entire population from its native country,” he declared.
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Within Congress, the most eloquent critic of Jackson’s Removal Bill was Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a prominent supporter of the ABCFM and other benevolent associations like the American Temperance Union and the American Bible Society. Frelinghuysen proposed an amendment to the bill that would have reaffirmed the government’s obligation to protect the tribes in their existing locations unless and until they signed new treaties; this would have continued the policy of Monroe and Adams. On behalf of this amendment he spoke for six hours over a period of three days. One after another, the senator demolished the arguments offered to justify unilateral expropriation, beginning with the claim that the needs of white society justified taking the Natives’ lands. He condemned the “high-handed” conduct of Georgia in defying the Treaty of Hopewell. Frelinghuysen did not shrink from using the U.S. Army to protect the Cherokees against Georgia’s intrusion if necessary. “Let such decided policy go forth in the majesty of our laws now, and sir, Georgia will yield. She will never encounter the responsibilities or the horrors of civil war. But if she should, no stains of blood will be on our skirts; on herself the guilt will abide forever.” This unflinching high principle won Frelinghuysen the nickname he bore ever after: “the Christian statesman.”
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The grassroots protest movement organized by Evarts and Beecher succeeded in defining Removal as a moral issue. It served to awaken anti-Jackson politicians less morally committed than Frelinghuysen to their opportunity to resist the president. Henry Clay, who had expressed precious little sympathy for the Indians earlier in his career, now decided to rally to their side.
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With the opposition invoking moral principle, the administration felt impelled to find philanthropic arguments of its own. The Indians might be better off in the West, farther away from the alcohol and contagious diseases of the whites. There, the administration claimed, the Indians could become “civilized” in peace. One of the administration spokesmen espousing this argument was Isaac McCoy, a former Baptist missionary who was now a government surveyor of Indian lands. The Baptist missionary board and denominational organ repudiated McCoy’s statements.
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Many advocates of Removal, particularly southerners, scorned to employ the philanthropic argument. “I do not believe that this removal will accelerate the civilization of the tribes,” Georgia’s John Forsyth, now a senator, told his colleagues. “You might as reasonably expect that wild animals, incapable of being tamed in a park, would be domesticated by turning them loose in the forest.” The administration’s effort to arouse popular support for Removal on a philanthropic basis quickly fizzled.
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To mobilize support in Congress, the administration relied less on persuasive argument than on party loyalty, though this was still a novel concept in a country not long removed from the Era of Good Feelings. While complaining that their opponents were motivated primarily by partisanship, administration leaders made no secret of their own determination to make support for Removal a test of fealty to the president. Despite Frelinghuysen’s oratory, the Jacksonian majority in the Senate passed the Removal Bill by a party-line vote, 28 to 19. In the House it proved a different story. Representatives elected as Jackson supporters from districts with many Quaker, Congregationalist, or New School Presbyterian voters found themselves in an awkward crossfire. The difficulty northern congressmen had in swallowing the betrayal of treaty obligations was compounded by their fear for the future of internal improvements. Indian Removal would be expensive, and Jackson said he wanted to retire the national debt. Even if the government avoided frontier wars, the money spent to buy out the tribes, round up their members, and transport them hundreds of miles would not be available for internal improvements. Beset by these concerns, northern Jacksonian congressmen defected in large numbers. The Indian Removal Bill only barely passed the House, 102 to 97, with 24 Jacksonians voting no and 12 others not voting. On some of the preliminary tests of strength the votes had been even closer, Speaker Andrew Stevenson having to break ties three times. At the last minute the administration managed to press three wavering Pennsylvania Democrats back into the party line, saving the bill. The vote had a pronounced sectional aspect: the slave states voted 61 to 15 for Removal; the free states opposed it, 41 to 82. Without the three-fifths clause jacking up the power of the slaveholding interest, Indian Removal would not have passed. Yet sectionalism did not determine positions so much as political loyalties and moral values. The trans-Appalachian West did not by any means display solid support for the bill; its congressmen voted 23 in favor, 17 opposed. Those opposed included a West Tennessee frontiersman named Davy Crockett, who characterized the bill as “oppression with a vengeance.” Like most critics of Indian Removal, Crockett went on to become a permanent opponent of Jackson. The president signed Indian Removal into law on May 28, 1830.
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Jackson wasted no time implementing his favorite measure. While the nation’s attention was focused on Georgia and Cherokees, he sent his trusted friend John Coffee and Secretary of War Eaton to Mississippi to obtain the removal of the Choctaws. The efforts they commenced secured the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, against the wishes of the majority of the tribe, by excluding the Indians’ white counselors from the negotiations and then bribing selected tribal leaders. While some Choctaws in the forests of eastern Mississippi contrived to elude the government’s attention until 1918 (!), the majority were compelled to move to Oklahoma. The first large party of Choctaws crossed the Mississippi River during the severe winter of 1831–32, the French observer Tocqueville noting the hardships of their passage.
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