Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (10 page)

1815–
1818

A
lmost the whole nation celebrated Andrew Jackson after Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans. His defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans, especially, was the perfect American story. Throwing together regular army soldiers, Tennessee militiamen, Choctaw Indians, New Orleans militia forces including free black men, and gunners commanded by the local pirate Jean Laffite, Jackson placed his main force behind a canal and a barricade. On January 8, 1815, the British invaders ran straight at Jackson’s guns. The British frontal assault was the same tactic that Jackson employed against the Creek wall at the Horseshoe, but Jackson had chosen far more defensible ground. Trapped in the open, facing the murderous fire of the Americans behind their barricade, the British assault force lost
291 redcoats killed, and more than 1,300 others wounded or captured. The Americans suffered 13 dead and a few dozen wounded or captured. The surviving British boarded ships and sailed away.

It was true that the battle took place after the War of 1812 was over—news had yet to arrive of a peace treaty signed two weeks earlier—but only the sourest critic could dismiss New Orleans as a needless fight. The triumph of New Orleans was not its strategic importance
but its style. It embodied an enduring American ideal: that free citizens would come together in defense of liberty. Generations later, many American war movies would contain the same basic plot as the Battle of New Orleans: a diverse band of citizen soldiers, thrown together by their commander, overcame their differences and improvised their way to victory. Of course, the black men in Jackson’s army could not vote, while his Choctaw allies were under pressure to give up their land, but few people were thinking about such things in 1815. Public adulation fell on the mélange of hardy frontiersmen and the wild-haired Tennessean who led them. Jackson would spend the remainder of his life in the brilliant light of fame.

Before 1815 ended, however, the hero was hearing a rumble of discontent. It involved his other, considerably more substantive victory. Nobody would ever debate whether Horseshoe Bend was a meaningless battle, since the general had exploited it to claim a land area larger than Scotland. Everyone knew the federal government would begin putting the land up for sale, and this knowledge lay behind a rumor that circulated around Nashville. In December 1815, Jackson’s friend John Coffee heard the rumor. He wrote Jackson to warn that two men were telling stories about “
some pretext or color of fraud about you and myself with some others concerning the purchase of lands in the new country.”

Andrew Jackson, the longtime land speculator, was being accused of planning with his friends to speculate in the real estate he had just conquered.

Jackson seized his pen, telling Coffee of his “astonishment and surprise” at this attempt to “injure” him. “Such base ingratitude will meet its reward,” he wrote.

It is evidence of such wanton wickedness & depravity of heart that I can scarcely believe it myself, that I have huged such monsters to my boosom, called them friend, and risqued my life for the preservation of the charector & feelings of such a man.

Coffee went to confront the men on Jackson’s behalf. He brought along another of General Jackson’s close friends—James Jackson, unrelated to the general by blood but close to him in outlook, an Irish immigrant who had become a wealthy merchant and avid horse racer in Nashville. Coffee and James Jackson stared down one suspected storyteller and then the other.
Each professed his innocence and blamed the other.

What must have made the rumor especially galling was that it was true. General Andrew Jackson really was going to buy former Indian land in “the new country.” So was John Coffee. So was James Jackson. Coffee was going to play a special role, which General Jackson alluded to in the same letter in which he complained about the outrageous suggestion of a “color of fraud” in his conduct. At the end, Jackson dropped his tone of outrage and gave Coffee good news.

P.S. I have the express promise that you will be appointed
receiver of Publick money—A.J.

Jackson was campaigning to have Coffee hired to run the federal land office for northern Alabama. The “receiver of Publick money” would be in charge of conducting all the sales of former Creek land that were about to take place, putting him in an ideal position to pass on inside information.

Coffee didn’t get the job, but Jackson engaged another agent to nose around a federal land office. “My Dear General. . . .
We have succeeded in acquiring an accurate Knowledge of all the sections of good Lands to be sold,” reported the agent in a letter marked “Private.” He called Jackson’s attention to four sections of land that “would form a most desirable establishment for your old age.”

Andrew Jackson was about to participate in the biggest real estate bubble in the history of the nation up to that time. His multiple plantations in the new country would considerably exceed the acreage of the
Hermitage. Some of his closest friends and allies would colonize the new country and be installed among its leading citizens. He was nation-building. On its face there was nothing wrong with this. But to make it happen, Andrew Jackson the real estate magnate first needed help from General Jackson the federal official. He had to get the former Creek land on the market. This proved to be complicated, because some of the most valuable land was found not to be Creek territory at all. He hadn’t really conquered it at Horseshoe Bend. He hadn’t even taken it at the Treaty of Fort Jackson.

Andrew Jackson had a problem. General Jackson solved it. What follows is an account of what he did and how he did it.

 • • • 

The prize was the Tennessee Valley. Through it ran one of the great highways of the region, the river that John Ross traveled in December 1812 during his journey to trade with the Cherokees in the West. The Tennessee cut its way out of the Appalachians and spilled into the plains, flowing east to west in the shape of a jagged smile. White settlers had long ago taken control of its upper reaches and tributaries. But farther downriver, the Indian map showed that much of the valley was still the domain of Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws. This was especially true at the Big Bend of the Tennessee, where the channel dipped into present-day Alabama. It was here that the currents roared through the
shallows known as Muscle Shoals, forty miles that were perilous to travel downstream and often impossible to travel up.

Andrew Jackson would have known about the shoals almost as long as he was a westerner. He likely heard about them soon after his arrival in Nashville in 1788. The Donelson family, with whom he boarded, had made it to Nashville on a route that included a terrifying descent through those rapids. The Donelsons’ story surely interested Jackson, because it involved the woman who became his wife.

Rachel was twelve years old in December 1779, when her father organized a convoy of settlers who started down the Tennessee. The
current flowed westward, the direction they wanted to go, but everything else was against them. Boats ran aground on sandbars. Cherokees opened fire from the banks. The journal kept by Rachel’s father recorded a boat shot full of holes, an enslaved man drowned while fleeing an attack, and an infant dashed on the rocks. When the survivors reached Muscle Shoals, they intended to travel overland to the planned settlement on the Cumberland River, but failed to find a message from a guide who was to give them directions. They decided to continue by water, shooting the rapids directly ahead. “
The water being high made a terrible roaring,” wrote Rachel’s father, John Donelson, “which could be heard at some distance among the drift-wood heaped frightfully upon the points of the islands, the current running in every possible direction. . . . Our boats frequently dragged on the bottom, and appeared constantly in danger of striking.” Emerging safely on the far side, the party drifted downriver to the Ohio—and then, half-starved, improvised sails to travel upriver on the Cumberland to what became Nashville.

Muscle Shoals gained a sinister reputation, as Jackson knew. He’d heard stories of a village near the bottom of the shoals, which Creeks had once used as a base for raids on white settlements, committing “
ever kind of rapine & murder on our women & children.” The attacks ended in 1787, when
Tennessee militiamen moved south and burned the village called Coldwater. A little upriver was an elegant plantation where a white man, John Melton, lived with his Cherokee wife. Atop the riverside cliff known as Melton’s Bluff, he built a sprawling farm worked by slaves and featuring a two-story house and a tavern.
Local lore held that Melton was a river pirate, a legend that may have been overblown. Whatever Melton did to make his fortune, he was discreet enough that the Tennessee militia never came to burn his plantation. But he had hacked out a lucrative life in remote and beautiful country.

And it
was
beautiful, that land south of the Tennessee River. Above the bluffs stretched tableland—high ground sometimes many miles wide, in places framed by mountains and exceedingly rich in soil. The
land was covered in timber, and said to carry veins of iron ore. The river made it all accessible. Crops could be shipped downstream to the Ohio River, then the Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans. True, the Muscle Shoals were an obstacle to travel farther upriver—but for a land speculator, this obstacle created an opportunity. Muscle Shoals was the head of navigation for cargo boats traveling to or from New Orleans. Journeys must start or end there. Should the valley be opened to settlement, the lower end of the shoals would require riverside towns. Street grids. Civilization. The Donelsons had hardly completed their nightmare voyage when men of means began to see that the region had great potential.
In 1783 a North Carolina land company began a long-running but ultimately fruitless effort to take control of hundreds of square miles in the region that later became northern Alabama. The Muscle Shoals Company, as it was called, included the exuberant speculator William Blount, who went on to become Tennessee’s territorial governor and Andrew Jackson’s early political mentor.

A second effort to capture land around Muscle Shoals, by an organization called the Tennessee Company, began shortly after Jackson’s arrival in Nashville in 1788. This too came to nothing, but the shoals were part of the frontier land conversation, and Jackson passed near them many times. The Natchez Trace crossed the Tennessee a few miles below the rapids.
From 1789 onward Jackson traveled this road to and from Natchez frequently—herding slaves, leading troops, conducting his first marriage ceremony with Rachel in Natchez, and also famously quarreling with a federal Indian agent on the road. In 1816, General Jackson was assigned to build a new military road through the region, which would speed the journey to New Orleans. Though built for national security purposes, it would also open up previously inaccessible real estate. Jackson’s engineers laid out a route that would cross the Tennessee at the lower end of Muscle Shoals.

The prize was in view, but could not be claimed unless someone gained access to Indian land.

 • • • 

The north side of the river was largely Cherokee until treaties in 1805 and 1806, under which the nation sold a swath of modern-day northern Alabama and much of Middle Tennessee. These treaties, negotiated by President Thomas Jefferson’s administration, perfectly reflected his goal that Indians should trade land for American goods, exchanging “what they can spare and we want for what we can spare and they want.” Under one treaty the government paid for land with “
three thousand dollars in valuable merchandise” plus another $11,000 in either cash or merchandise, followed by an annual subsidy of $3,000. The second treaty gave up at least five thousand square miles for even less compensation—$10,000 plus a gristmill and a cotton gin. That treaty was a curious document entirely aside from the nominal payment. While it sold Cherokee territory for less than half a cent per acre, it exempted certain parcels from the sale, including a strip of rich land along the north shore of Muscle Shoals. This was land controlled by
Doublehead, the Cherokee leader who negotiated the treaty. He was renting that land to farmers and wanted to continue profiting from it. Doublehead did not have long to enjoy this income. Other Cherokees judged his treaty so terrible that it amounted to treason, and
murdered him in 1807.

The Cherokee land ceded in these treaties had drawn interest on the real estate market for years. (Speculators bought and sold the rights before the land was even available;
Jackson was involved in a deal for eighty-five thousand acres that fell apart when his purchase was ruled invalid.) But because of the land reserved for Doublehead, the treaties did not yet open up the north bank of the river at Muscle Shoals.

The south bank was also closed to white settlement. Several native nations made conflicting and overlapping claims—Chickasaws and Cherokees as well as Creeks. It would take a forceful and visionary personality to alter these facts on the ground. Such a personality was
available. In 1814, as we have seen, General Jackson imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson upon his Creek allies.
“We will run the line,”
he had vowed, underlining his words. In the years that followed, Jackson set about consolidating this conquest—and expanding it. The Treaty of Fort Jackson was worded in such a way that it never explicitly declared that the south bank of the Tennessee River should become the property of the federal government. The boundary of the Creek cession in that area was simply not defined. Jackson nevertheless began to operate as if it
was
defined, and moved to “run the line” as he wanted. A surveyor had been appointed to mark the boundaries of the Creek cession, and in early 1816 Jackson repeatedly urged him to complete his work, even though it appeared the surveyor was exceeding his authority. “
Do you progress with the line,” Jackson instructed, as the surveyor captured real estate that was claimed by both Cherokees and Chickasaws.