Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (32 page)

None could know what lay ahead, that the summer drought would be followed by a severe winter, that people “in want of shoes Clothing and Blankets” would be held up for weeks in southern Illinois while half a dozen detachments waited for a chance to cross the frozen Mississippi River. (“
The Ice on the Mississippi says to the foremost stand still, and each Detachment to the other hold on.”) Though the journey had been projected to take 80 days, different parties would require 100 or even 150 days. To be sure, the number of deaths on the road was probably less than that in the camps, and also less than would be experienced on arrival in the Arkansas country. Had the deaths on the road been the only deaths, the Trail of Tears would have been a markedly less devastating event. A contemporary federal report put the figure of deaths actually in transit
around 600, while
one Cherokee list recorded 324. But the road was bad enough. Throughout the broader era of removal, a modern study has estimated that the
Cherokee population may have been reduced by as many as eight thousand from what it otherwise would have been.

But at this moment at Blythe’s Ferry in November, Ross could not foresee what lay ahead. He knew only that the parties were on the way. From Blythe’s Ferry he was able to gather news of the detachments spread out ahead on the road. A man who’d been sent to communicate with one of the forward parties had reached it at Reynoldsburg, Tennessee, and then had seen several of the detachments on his way back; all were reported to be moving in good order, “
excepting sickness.” Lewis Ross was astride the road in Nashville, resupplying the parties as they passed. The chief’s brother had assistance there from one Thomas N. Clark, who was regularly writing updates to the principal chief. In mid-November Clark reported that he was headed west out of Nashville, hoping to catch up with some of the detachments and if possible speed them along. Clark was an admirer of John Ross, and knew the
affection with which he was regarded by his people. Just before heading west he sent a letter to the Cherokee chief, saying his job would be easier if John Ross was by his side.

I wish I could have your influence for a few days in order that I might move these people—farewell.

A
lmost two centuries after the events of this book, I took a long drive through the Deep South. In southeastern Alabama I walked the battlefield at Horseshoe Bend. The great bend of the Tallapoosa followed about the same course as it did in 1814. Rain fell in the channel that Cherokee attackers swam and paddled across to strike the Creek defenses from behind. White stakes were lined up across the neck of the peninsula to show the location of the Creek defenders’ fortified wall, and a blue-wheeled cannon rested atop the hill from which Jackson blasted that wall. In the rain I had the battlefield almost to myself, sharing it with two rangers in the office and some deer in a field.

Of the many square miles around the battlefield the most striking thing was the emptiness—little towns half vacant or entirely so, separated by modest homes and churches and great stretches of forest. A large portion of eastern Alabama is woodland now, and some is designated the Talladega National Forest, beyond the reach of real estate development and held by the nation. It is said that nineteenth-century settlers once deforested the region, but some of their descendants moved on, depopulating many rural counties after 1920. Today, in the miles between thriving cities such as Montgomery and Auburn, enough land has returned to nature that should the ghosts of the Creeks return, they might recognize it. There would be room for them now.

By late the next afternoon I was well to the northeast, standing on the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is a pedestrian bridge across the Tennessee River, a blue steel span dating from the late nineteenth century, flying out from the high ground on the south side. A historic marker on the pedestrian walkway said Ross’s Landing once occupied the south bank nearby. Nothing remained of the old ferry, warehouse, and taverns; everything about the scene had changed but a nearby stone bluff, and even the bluff seemed to have grown, topped off by the modernistic gray stone walls of the Hunter Museum of American Art.

Walking off the bridge into central Chattanooga, I found my car and pointed it westward, driving down the Tennessee River valley toward Alabama. The river weaved so much it was impossible for the road to stay on one side of it; Interstate 24 slashed across Nickajack Lake where the channel was dammed by the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression. The names on the road signs were heavy with history—Huntsville, Scottsboro, Lookout Mountain.

On the north side of the river, on Route 72 in Jackson County, Alabama, I saw a billboard lettered in black and white:

FIRST JACKSON BANK

The face of Andrew Jackson glowered out at the cars and the fields.

A few miles later he appeared again on the sign at the First Jackson Bank headquarters, so I pulled over to study his unruly hair and thin face. The picture was based on his image from the twenty-dollar bill, although on the bank sign he seemed a bit tougher, his glare a bit colder. It was hard to say what a man who so distrusted banks would have thought about being the logo for one. The bank was a redbrick building fronted by four white columns, evoking a plantation house. The particular house that came to mind was the home of James Vann, a famously wealthy Cherokee planter from the early years of the nineteenth century.

The road led back across to the south side of the river on the long
bridge and causeway at Decatur, which was home to plants operated by GM and 3M. The route was crossing into country claimed by Cherokees until Jackson obtained it for white settlement through his treaty of 1816. Sometimes rails ran alongside the highway, the route of the first railroad chartered west of the Appalachians, whose early passengers included Cherokee emigrants being shipped west. High cornfields stretched as far as I could see in the last of the sun. Somewhere out of sight to my right was Muscle Shoals, its waters deep and placid now ever since the river was dammed to turn the shoals into a lake. Beyond the shoals I crossed the river yet again to the north bank, on a bridge that flew between the river bluffs. It was dark by the time I parked and walked up the main street of Florence, which was guarded by the statue of a Confederate soldier on the plaza in front of the courthouse. I had dinner at the bar of an upscale restaurant, fell into conversation with the young man and woman at the next two stools, and in the morning heard the blare of brass instruments in town. The University of North Alabama marching band was practicing for the upcoming football season. So many small American cities have hollowed out over time, their reason for existence long gone; Florence lived.

Five town lots that Andrew Jackson once owned were now the location of a parking lot and a public housing complex. Outside town the ruins of his friend James Jackson’s mansion were still visible on a farm. The house burned down in the twentieth century, leaving only the brick columns that surrounded all four sides. When I first saw the columns at the top of a slope, they took my breath away. They seemed like some remnant of ancient Rome. On the day I visited, a white horse was grazing beside them. A member of the owner’s family happened by and allowed me to wade through the high grass and stand amid the ruins.

While in Florence I encountered one of the joys of writing about the South: even when researching centuries-old events you find people to interview. Milly Wright, a local historian, had spent much time gathering historic Florence real estate records and maps and generously made copies available. We met at her home, which dated from the 1820s
and was the house of another friend of Andrew Jackson. Occasionally, she said, African Americans from Chicago or elsewhere arrived at her door, wanting to see where their white ancestor had lived. It was also from Ms. Wright that I learned of a stone wall in Florence, built by a local man in honor of his Indian ancestor who was removed in the 1830s and apparently made her way back.

Signs of Indians were everywhere in this land that had been cleared of them. Back in Georgia I’d stopped at New Echota, now a historic site with buildings that are reconstructed or moved from elsewhere. Many residents of the region believe old cabins on their property date from Cherokee times, and at least some of the homes are authentic. In Rossville, Georgia, I’d found the two-story log house where John Ross was living in 1820. The house is in excellent shape, though the caretaker said it was a short distance from its original location, having been moved up the street in recent decades to make room for a store and a coin laundry. One last, little Indian removal.

 • • • 

The place for which Jackson opened the way was a world of its own. There was no denying his achievement. It was Jacksonland, the Deep South, vital then and now to American life and the American identity. It was opened for development by his armies, acts, treaties, or laws. Jacksonland is not only Florence and Jackson County, Alabama; it is the famous Muscle Shoals recording studio and the manufacturing centers of the Tennessee Valley, as well as the steel mills of Birmingham and the Sun studio in Memphis. It is the Civil War battlefields of Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. It is Jackson and Oxford, Mississippi, as well as the elegant and prosperous city of Rome, Georgia, where Major Ridge’s old home is now preserved as a museum, and where a downtown cigar bar is presided over by a wooden Indian. The South of William Faulkner, George Wallace, Robert Johnson, and Rosa Parks could not exist until Andrew Jackson cleared the way for it. Orlando, Florida, and Walt Disney World: that too is Jacksonland.

An 1861 map showed the Black Belt, the name that was given to a great crescent of settlement where slaves and the plantations they worked were heavily concentrated. A substantial part of the Black Belt was Jacksonland. That map had a powerful influence when completed at the start of the Civil War. It illustrated what opponents of slavery wanted to destroy. A famous painting of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation showed him in a crowded office that was cluttered with documents, among them the map of the Black Belt. Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation did not apply to loyal slave states or to Union-controlled areas, only to rebel-held zones, which in large measure meant Jacksonland. In the generations after the final emancipation in 1865, millions of former slaves and their descendants migrated to the North, yet twenty-first-century maps still show an identifiable Black Belt—the descendants of enslaved farm workers, of freedmen and freedwomen, of soldiers, sharecroppers, steelworkers, railroad workers, writers, pastors, washerwomen. Other twenty-first-century maps, showing migration and settlement patterns, make it just as easy to spot signs of the great migration from northern Britain that, sweeping through the Appalachians and beyond, also populated Jacksonland—the descendants of slave owners, soldiers, sharecroppers, steelworkers, railroad workers, writers, pastors, and washerwomen.

Though Jackson died in 1845, his political influence persisted for another generation. His Democratic Party, that coalition of “plain republicans” of the North and planters of the South, won four of the six presidential elections after he left office. After the annexation of Texas in 1845 a protégé of Jackson’s, President James Polk, went to war with Mexico over the international boundary, confirming a greater Texas and also conquering California. Another protégé of Jackson’s, James Gadsden, completed the continental United States with the Gadsden Purchase. Jackson appointed yet another of his protégés, Roger Taney, to be chief justice of the Supreme Court when John Marshall died in 1835. Taney served for decades, and issued the Dred Scott decision of 1857, declaring that black people had no rights that white people must respect. Only in 1860 did Jackson’s direct influence begin to ebb. His party
fractured on sectional lines—the “planters of the South” breaking ranks with the “plain republicans of the North”—and opened the way for the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. Yet there was something striking about Lincoln, which was visible in that famous painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The artist faithfully reproduced the portrait that Lincoln had chosen to hang over his office fireplace. It was a portrait of Andrew Jackson. The great unionist of the 1830s was shown watching over the most momentous act of his successor.

Jackson persists, as Jacksonland persists. And within Jacksonland, something else persists: Indians.

It is true that most natives headed west of the Mississippi during the era of the Trail of Tears—most of them.
A glance at a modern census map makes it clear that Native Americans and their descendants have also remained in some of their ancestral homes throughout the Deep South. Though the Creeks were removed, small numbers remained or returned, and eventually gained federal recognition and small reservations. Some of the
reservations are in southeastern Alabama, by the Florida border, land that Andrew Jackson insisted the Creeks must cede in 1814. Tiny Chickasaw and Choctaw populations remain in Mississippi. In Florida, the Second Seminole War ended with most natives killed or removed—yet federal authorities, tiring of the conflict, declared an end to the fighting in 1842 while some Seminoles were still at large. They withdrew into South Florida and the Everglades. Though they later clashed with landowners in yet another war, and
their numbers dwindled to as little as a hundred, the Seminole population later increased. They now possess several federally recognized zones around Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades. They have granted permission for Osceola to serve as the mascot of Florida State University.

 • • • 

Nor did all the Cherokees end up in the West.

John Ross moved to the West, of course. He departed with the final group of Cherokees in December 1838. They took the water route, and
it was apparently on a riverboat that Ross’s wife, Quatie, died in early 1839.
She was buried after the boat tied up at Little Rock, Arkansas. Ross continued on to the Cherokees’ western territory, where he was confirmed in his continued leadership of the Cherokee Nation.

Soon afterward the Treaty Party was decapitated: Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were all murdered in their homes.

The killers were never identified. No evidence linked John Ross to the crime, though it is reasonable to suppose that some part of the Cherokee leadership endorsed the coordinated assassination, just as Cherokee leaders endorsed killing Doublehead for selling land many years before. Ross, not yet fifty at the time of the killings, remained the leader of his nation through another generation—all the way until the Civil War, when many Cherokees fought for the Confederacy, though Ross tried to remain on the side of the Union, and many Cherokees also fought and died on the Union side. Ross lived long enough to see the Union prevail. In 1865, Ross was in Washington for the second inauguration of President Lincoln, which he described in an exultant letter home to Mary Ross, his second wife: “
The clouds vanished and the rain ceased to fall—behold, the effulgent rays of the noonday sun shown out upon the great multitude that assembled, around the magnificent Capitol of the Nation.” Ross died in 1866, just as his nation was completing a peace treaty with the United States. The treaty, in the customary manner, required Cherokees to
cede some of the land that had previously been granted to them forever.

Land assigned to Cherokees and many other nations was known as the Indian Territory. In the early twentieth century a movement arose for Indian Territory to seek the status of a state—the future that Ross seemed to have envisioned for his nation as early as 1825. Residents, both Indian and white, participated in drawing up a proposed constitution for the state of Sequoyah. President Theodore Roosevelt’s administration rejected the idea, instead incorporating Indian Territory with non-Indian areas to form the state of Oklahoma.

That was the story of the Cherokee Nation in the West, but there
was also a continuing story of Cherokees in the East. Some simply would not be removed from their ancient homeland. During the early phases of the removal in 1838 it had been clear that a few Cherokees would stay; a number of Cherokees in North Carolina had embraced provisions in old treaties that allowed them to claim U.S. citizenship. To these few in 1838 were added fugitives from the forces of Winfield Scott. The Smoky Mountains and the surrounding terrain in far western North Carolina were the least accessible areas of all the Cherokee country, and there some Cherokees hid after eluding the soldiers.