Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (29 page)

A large number of the unruly crowd that upset the ice cream in the White House had come to Washington looking for jobs. It was expected that Jackson would sweep out holdovers from the hated Adams administration. They had won the war and were looking for the “spoils” of that war in the form of patronage jobs in the Jackson White House. There was nothing new about this “spoils system”; it had been practiced by every administration from the beginning of the republic. But the widespread and vocal calls for patronage that followed Jackson’s election have linked the spoils system to Jackson. Ironically, only a few new patronage jobs were created during his years in office, with most posts going to previous jobholders, all established Washington insiders—proof once again that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

M
ARGARET
B
AYARD
S
MITH,
witness to the inauguration of Andrew Jackson (March 11, 1829):

But what a scene did we witness! The majesty of the people had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, Negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity! No arrangements had been made, no police officers placed on duty, and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob. We came too late. The president, after having been literally nearly pressed to death and almost suffocated and torn to pieces by the people in their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hickory, had retreated through the back way or south front and had escaped to his lodgings at Gadsby’s.

What was the Trail of Tears?

From the moment Columbus stepped onto the sands of San Salvador, the history of European relations with the natives they encountered could be written in blood. It was a story of endless betrayals, butchery, and broken promises, from Columbus and the conquistadores through John Smith, the Bay Colony, the French and Indian War, right up to the War of 1812. From the outset, superior weapons, force of numbers, and treachery had been the Euro-American strategy for dealing with the Indians in manufacturing a genocidal tragedy that surely ranks as one of the cruelest episodes in man’s history.

Hollywood has left the impression that the great Indian wars came in the Old West during the late 1800s, a period that many think of simplistically as the “cowboy and Indian” days. But in fact that was a mopping-up effort. By that time the Indians were nearly finished, their subjugation complete, their numbers decimated. The killing, enslavement, and land theft had begun with the arrival of the Europeans. But it may have reached its nadir when it became federal policy under President Jackson.

During the Creek War of 1814 that first brought him notice, Jackson earned a reputation as an Indian fighter, and a particularly ruthless one. To the Indians, Jackson became Sharp Knife. Confronted by a tenacious Creek Nation in the South as commander of the Tennessee militia, Jackson had used Cherokee, who had been promised governmental friendship, to attack the Creek from the rear. As treaty commissioner, Jackson managed to take away half the Creek lands, which he and his friends then bought on attractive terms.

In 1819 he embarked on an illegal war against the Seminole of Florida. Claiming that Florida, still in Spanish hands, was a sanctuary for escaped slaves and marauding Indians, Jackson invaded the territory, unleashing a bloody campaign that left Indian villages and Spanish forts smoldering. Jackson’s incursion set off a diplomatic crisis, eventually forcing the Spanish to sell Florida to the United States in 1819 on terms highly favorable to the Americans. Again, Jackson became governor of the newly conquered territory. As a land speculator, Jackson knew that he and his friends would profit handsomely by moving the Indians off the land.

But the harsh treatment of the Indians by Jackson as a general, as well as throughout earlier American history, was later transformed. It went from popular anti-Indian sentiment and sporadic regional battles to official federal policy initiated under Jackson and continued by his successor, Martin Van Buren. The tidy word given this policy was “removal,” suggesting a sanitary resolution of a messy problem, an early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the Third Reich’s “final solution.” The Indians called it the Trail of Tears.

Some historians ascribe humane motives to Jackson’s call for the wholesale forced migration of Indians from the southeastern states to unsettled lands across the Mississippi. Better to move them, argued Jackson, than to slaughter them, which was already happening. In 1831, for instance, Sac tribes under Black Hawk balked at leaving their ancestral lands in Illinois. But when a group of some 1,000 Indians attempted to surrender to the militia and the regular army, they were cut off by the Mississippi River and cut down by bayonets and rifle fire, with about 150 surviving the slaughter.

The removals were concentrated on the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Contrary to popular sentiment of the day and history’s continuing misrepresentation, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes had developed societies that were not only compatible with white culture, but even emulated European styles in some respects. The problem was that their tribal lands happened to be valuable cotton-growing territory. Between 1831 and 1833 the first of the “removals” forced some 4,000 Choctaw from Mississippi into the territory west of Arkansas. During the winter migration, there was scarce food and poor shelter. Pneumonia took its toll, and with the summer came cholera, killing the Choctaw by the hundreds. The Choctaw were followed by the Chickasaw and then the Creek, or Muskogee, who did not go as peacefully. The tribe refused to leave, and the Creek war of 1836–37 followed. Winfield Scott, the American commander of the operation, eventually captured 14,500 Creek—2,500 of them in chains—and marched them to Oklahoma.

The final removal began in 1835, when the Cherokee, centered in Georgia, became the target. Like the other tribes that had been forced out, the Cherokee were among the “civilized” tribes who clearly provided proof that the “savages” could coexist with white, Euro-American culture. The Cherokee, at the time of their removal, were not nomadic savages. In fact, they had assimilated many European-style customs, including the wearing of gowns by Cherokee women. They built roads, schools, and churches, had a system of representational government, and were becoming farmers and cattle ranchers. A written Cherokee language had also been perfected by a warrior named Sequoya. The Cherokee even attempted to fight removal legally by challenging the removal laws in the Supreme Court and by establishing an independent Cherokee Nation.

But they were fighting an irresistible tide of history. In 1838, after Andrew “Sharp Knife” Jackson left office, the United States government forced out the 15,000 to 17,000 Cherokee of Georgia. About 4,000 of them died along the route, which took them through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the Ohio and Missouri rivers, and into what would later become Oklahoma (the result of another broken treaty). This route and this journey were the Trail of Tears.

The strongest resistance to removal came from the Seminole of Florida, where the Indians were able to carry out another costly war, in which 1,500 U.S. soldiers died and some $20 million was spent. The leader of the Seminoles was a young warrior named Osceola, and he was captured only when lured out of his camp by a flag of truce. He died in a prison camp three months later. With Osceola gone, the Seminole resistance withered and many Seminole were eventually removed to the Indian Territory. But several bands remained in the Everglades, continuing their struggle against the federals.

Who was Tocqueville, and why did he say all those things about America?

One of the most eloquent witnesses to the cruelties against the Indians was a young French magistrate studying America’s penal system. Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, he wrote, “In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.” The Indians, he added, “have no longer a country, and soon will not be a people.”

The author of those words was a young aristocrat named Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville (1805–59), who arrived in America in May 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As young men who had grown up in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, they came to examine American democracy with an eye to understanding how the American experience could help form the developing democratic spirit in France and the rest of Europe. The two spent nine months traveling the nation, gathering facts and opinions, interviewing Americans from President Jackson to frontiersmen and Indians. On their return to France, Tocqueville reported on the U.S. prison system, and Beaumont wrote a novel exploring the race problem in America.

But it is for an inspired work combining reportage, personal observation, and philosophical explorations, and titled
Democracy in America
, that Tocqueville’s name became a permanent part of the American sociopolitical vocabulary. The book appeared in two volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840. More than 150 years after its appearance,
Democracy in America
remains a basic text in American history and political theory. With his keen insight into the American character and his extraordinary prescience, Tocqueville is still regarded as a valuable commentator on American politics and democracy in general.

While he admired the republican system, Tocqueville found what he considered a great many shortcomings. Perhaps his aristocratic background left Tocqueville unprepared for the “general equality of condition among the people” he found. There were clearly class differences in America, but Tocqueville found that the lines were not as sharply or as permanently drawn as they were in Europe, with its centuries of aristocratic tradition. Admittedly, he also spent most of his time with the upper and middle classes, overlooking much of the rank poverty that existed in America among the working poor. Most of the latter were gathered in the sprawling urban centers of New York, Philadelphia, and other northern cities, where waves of poor European immigrants were drawn by the millions and consigned to the spreading inner-city slums and tenements. In this “equality of condition,” Tocqueville saw a social leveling that would result, in his opinion, in a reign of mediocrity, conformity, and what he called the “tyranny of the majority.”

Although many of his commentaries and observations were remarkably astute, and seem to apply as neatly to modern America as they did to the United States he found in 1831, Tocqueville did not always bat a thousand. Perhaps one of his greatest oversights was his assessment of the presidency as a weak office. In fact, he wrote at a time when Andrew Jackson was shaping the office as preeminent among the three branches, establishing the mold of a strong presidency that would be repeated in such chief executives as Lincoln and the Roosevelts. Critical of slavery (as well as the treatment of the Indians), the Frenchman could see civil strife ahead. However, his prediction that the Union would fall in the face of such a regional conflict was wide of the mark.

In many more matters, however, he was right on target and remains eerily correct about the American addiction to practical rather than philosophical matters and the relentless and practically single-minded pursuit of wealth. As he observed, “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.”

Perhaps his most astute forecast was the prediction of the future competition that would arise between the United States and Russia.

What made the South fear a slave named Nat Turner?

Nothing struck deeper fear into the hearts of southerners, whether they held slaves or not, than the idea of a slave revolt. Contrary to the popular image of docile slaves working in peaceful servitude, there had been numerous small rebellions and uprisings of slaves, often in union with Indians or disaffected whites, as far back as slavery in the New World under the Spanish. These were not limited to the South, as murderous uprisings took place in colonial Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. One of the bloodiest of these uprisings occurred in South Carolina in 1739, when slaves killed some twenty-five whites under the leadership of a slave named Jemmy.

But the greatest horror for young America came from the Caribbean, where Toussaint L’Ouverture, a former carriage driver and a natural military genius, led the slaves of St. Domingue (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in a successful rebellion during the 1790s. Inspired by the revolutions in America and France, Toussaint’s rebellion resulted in some 60,000 deaths and a republic of freed slaves on the island. Yet Toussaint was a remarkable administrator as well, and successfully integrated the white minority into the island’s government. In 1800, Napoleon sent troops to retake the island with little success until Toussaint was lured to the French headquarters under a truce flag, arrested, and jailed in the Alps, where he died in a jail cell.

Slaveholders tried for years to keep the news of Toussaint and his rebellion from their slaves. But as Lerone Bennet writes in
Before the Mayflower
, “Wherever slaves chafed under chains, this man’s name was whispered.” In 1831, a new name came to the fore as the most fearful threat to white control, that of Nat Turner (1800–31). Nat Turner’s rebellion followed two earlier unsuccessful rebellions by slaves. The first was of some thousand slaves led by Gabriel Prosser in an aborted assault on Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. The second, in Charleston in 1822, was led by another charismatic slave, Denmark Vesey, and failed because of betrayals.