Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (12 page)

His square mile on the south side of the river was eventually expanded to include adjoining property. Jackson also bought land on the north side of the river—land under his own name at a place called Evans Spring, as well as three additional tracts in the name of Andrew Jackson Hutchings, an orphaned relative of Rachel’s who had come to live at the Hermitage alongside the adopted son Andrew Jackson Jr., as well as the adopted Indian Lyncoya. Hutchings was a minor at the time of the land purchases in his name.
At least one of those tracts became Jackson’s third plantation in the valley, while others may have been used for farming or speculation or both.

It is hard to prove what role, if any, Jackson played in the land purchases by another relative. More than
twenty-two hundred acres were purchased under the name of William Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s nephew. William Donelson was also the registered name for the purchaser of thirteen town lots in Coldwater, the former Indian village at the bottom of Muscle Shoals.

Not only were Jackson and his friends and relations buying land near Muscle Shoals, his friends were colonizing it. John Coffee moved
from Nashville to a new plantation just north of the Tennessee River, which he would call Hickory Hill. James Jackson relocated from Nashville to a plantation near Coffee’s, which he called the Forks of Cypress. James Jackson’s property became the apotheosis of southern plantation life, with a grandeur that can still be sensed amid its ruins today. His house stood on high ground, surrounded on all four sides by colonnades some thirty feet high. From the colonnades he could look down on his fields and horse track. The slaves who worked the plantation over the years included an ancestor of Alex Haley, the twentieth-century author of
Roots
, a famous narrative of slavery.

James Jackson and John Coffee also realized the potential for founding a city at Muscle Shoals. Early in 1818 they were among a group of businessmen who formed the Cypress Land Company, which purchased land near their future plantations. John Coffee arranged to lay out a street grid, which quickly became the city of Florence. The key for land speculators was to buy land from the government at an affordable price, often by collaborating with other bidders to reduce competition, and then quickly resell the land at a profit. The Cypress Land Company succeeded:
it paid $85,000 for the land and
quickly resold it (in half-acre town lots) for $229,000. Florence included a ferry across the Tennessee River, and it straddled Andrew Jackson’s military road. In this venture Andrew Jackson was no more than a minor stockholder, but he obtained his share of tribute—buying five town lots in his own name at what appeared to be bargain prices, and gaining shares of quite a few more town lots. He remained involved in Alabama real estate for at least a decade: as late as 1829, when Jackson was about to take office as president, a document showed John Coffee acting as Jackson’s “attorney in fact” in Florence, receiving security on an overdue debt by
taking the title of a Florence man’s home.

Having added to his fortune and his friends’ fortunes while pursuing his national security goals, Jackson then relied on his friends while attending to further matters of national security. In the fall of 1818—the same year he bought Muscle Shoals land—Jackson negotiated a
treaty with the Chickasaws to buy West Tennessee and the western end of Kentucky. He concluded the treaty by promising to pay a massive bribe. The payoff could not be made without proper financing, so the general’s friend James Jackson provided what was necessary:
he advanced $20,000 to buy a strip of land from a Chickasaw leader, hoping to keep the land for himself. A journal written by the federal negotiators described the massive payment as a “doceur,” or sweetener. In the end the federal government took the land and
repaid James Jackson’s $20,000, but the Irish immigrant seemed to take it all in stride. He later bought some of the land yet again from the government. Once established at Florence, James Jackson was elected to the Alabama legislature, and was among the leaders throwing the new state’s early and crucial support to a presidential candidate in the election of 1824: Andrew Jackson.

Jackson and his beneficiaries probably did not imagine they were doing anything more unseemly than using their resources and connections. In fairness it must be said that they paid for their land, and risked their money on the purchases. Their land lost some of its value after cotton prices crashed in 1819. But no one person had done more to create the land bubble than General Jackson, and when the sales began, no one could have had more inside information about the best land to buy than his friend and partner John Coffee, who had it surveyed at federal expense.

 • • • 

A surprising aspect of Jackson’s real estate dealings is that he had time for them at all. His life was accelerating. A biography authored by his former military aides was published in 1817, deepening his fame. He was also continuing to direct military operations in the South, including some that led to land acquisitions even grander than those in Alabama. In 1818—in between Alabama land transactions—Jackson assembled the latest of his improvised armies and sent it southward. Its instructions were to cross outside the legal boundaries of the United States,
and chastise marauding Indians who were based in Spanish Florida—“chastise” in the way that Jackson sometimes used the word, to mean killing. His targets were Seminoles, a mix of Florida natives and refugees from the Red Stick rebellion. Jackson entered West Florida in March. Then he conquered it. Ignoring written orders to concentrate on Indians and stay away from Spanish forts, Jackson captured Pensacola, ran up the American flag, installed a governor, and started collecting taxes.

Fearing that the invasion could cause war with Spain, President James Monroe ordered Jackson to withdraw. Congress investigated the general for usurping the constitutional power of Congress to declare war, but Jackson’s adventure worked out brilliantly. Concerned though they were about trampling the Constitution—“to the support of which,” the Founding Father in the White House gently reminded Jackson, “my public life has been devoted”—Americans really wanted Florida. Jackson’s invasion helpfully demonstrated that Spain could not defend it. Within a year the Spanish government agreed to sell the entire future state. Not wanting Jackson’s adventure to interfere with this purchase, President Monroe doctored the official record. The president wrote Jackson a remarkable letter, warning that the general’s official reports of his invasion could be politically damaging. He instructed Jackson to “
correct” his reports, retroactively changing his reasons for taking Pensacola so that it would seem the Spanish were to blame. “Your letters [to Washington] were written in haste, under the pressure of fatigue & infirmity,” Monroe said, feeding Jackson the necessary excuse for making corrections.

Monroe could not protect Jackson from all criticism. A familiar rumor spread—that Jackson and his friends were profiting from real estate he conquered. Once again, there were facts behind the rumor. A collection of Jackson’s associates—friends, relatives, former soldiers—had banded together to buy Pensacola real estate in the winter of 1818. They managed to buy Florida land just
before
Jackson invaded, which was just in time to see if its value might soar after an American
conquest. Senate investigators heard this story, and
their official report included a veiled reference to it. Andrew Jackson was furious, describing one of his critics in the Senate as a “
hypocritical lying puppy,” and his anger was likely justified. The Senate produced no evidence that Jackson’s motive for taking Florida was real estate speculation. He had seized Pensacola because he wanted it, as many Americans had for years. But if it was unlikely that General Jackson took Pensacola for his friends’ real estate consortium, a subtly different scenario was plausible. It was possible that Jackson’s friends knew in advance of his intention to take Florida, and adroitly positioned themselves to profit. They were certainly close enough to Jackson to learn his plans. A leader of the Pensacola enterprise was
John Donelson, Andrew Jackson’s business partner and brother-in-law. Donelson went to Florida to make his marvelously timed real estate investments while carrying a letter of introduction from Andrew Jackson. Jackson’s friends and relations never denied what they called their “
Pensacola speculation,” nor did they deny that Jackson helped them. They denied only that Jackson had any financial interest in the partnership. They said he helped out of “
friendly motives.”

 • • • 

In his abiding interest in land, Andrew Jackson was a reflection of his country as well as his time. The settlement of land quite literally underlay the entire project of building the United States. But Jackson’s acute sensitivity to rumors about his real estate business revealed another layer of the story. While the speculator was not necessarily immoral or corrupt—the risks he took spurred development, and left behind prosperous and lovely cities like Florence—speculation was a morally fraught enterprise. The speculator obtained land cheaply and sold it more expensively to common people. That was what made rumors about Jackson’s land dealings dangerous: they threatened his developing political persona as the champion of the common man. Had all the facts been known, the public would have seen that Jackson selectively obeyed
orders, pushed laws to the limit, trafficked in inside information, and took advantage of his official position and connections. He shaped his real estate investments to complement his official duties, and performed his official duties in a way that benefited his real estate interests. Jackson, with his naturally suspicious cast of mind, would have had no trouble perceiving something corrupt had he seen any rival conducting business the way he did with his friends.

Once he began running for president, Jackson’s political enemies began questioning his land deals, but they never got the goods.
A pamphlet during the 1828 campaign proposed to investigate the 1818 Chickasaw treaty and the $20,000 bribe, but failed to report damning evidence. Of other transactions there was no longer an original record to investigate. It was inherently hazardous to store paper records in wooden buildings on a frontier lit by fire.
On December 14, 1827, just before the start of the presidential election year, fire consumed the building containing the offices of the Cypress Land Company, which built the city of Florence. Although Jackson’s friends later reconstructed what they believed the accounts to be, all the original records in the office were destroyed.

1820–
1828

S
everal times in his life John Ross had reason to send letters to Andrew Jackson. One occasion came in June 1820, when General Jackson was still based in Nashville, with authority over military affairs in the South. Ross wrote the letter from his home, which stood by a spring in a little settlement known as Rossville. The U.S. map would have shown the house just inside the northern boundary line of Georgia, about 150 miles southeast of Nashville. The Indian map showed that Rossville stood a few miles from the Tennessee River, the current boundary of the Cherokee Nation.

The house said a lot about Ross. While Andrew Jackson the orphan had left his hometown behind to start anew in the West, Ross had grown up surrounded by his relatives, as a kind of frontier prince. At age thirty he was living not many miles from his birthplace, in a settlement named for his family. He was sharing this solid house with his wife, Quatie, and their steadily increasing brood of children. It was a dogtrot house, meaning the first floor consisted of two large rooms separated by a breezeway. The second floor stretched the length of the house, which had the long and comfortable look of a lodge, with a
chimney at either end. The furnishings were solid. Maybe even then Ross was sleeping in a bed like the one he was believed to use in later years, with an elaborately carved headboard as tall as a man. Having arrived at home late one night in June, he’d fallen into bed for a night’s rest before he turned to his correspondence.

Rossville Cherokee Nation

June 19th 1820

Sir

I have the honor of informing you that I arrived here last evening.

Ross used up a line or two before getting around to business. He was wise to write carefully. He was informing General Jackson of his effort to do something that, in the long term, was the opposite of what the general wanted: pushing white settlers off Cherokee soil.

I have been induced to accept of the command of the Cherokee Light horse ordered into service by the Honble. Secry. of War, for the removal of Intruders off Indian lands on the Northern frontier of this nation.

By the “Northern frontier” Ross meant the legal boundary between Cherokee land and what he called the whiteside. Settlers were crossing the Tennessee River into Cherokee territory—asserting the white map and ignoring the Indian map. Cherokees had gained the federal government’s agreement that it would evict these “Intruders,” by force if necessary, but the government did not act. In particular General Jackson did not act. “
I have no troops within three hundred miles of the cherokee nation,” he complained when asked for help in early 1820. The general said his orders from Washington called for him to concentrate his troops elsewhere; the sale of Florida was not yet consummated, and he wanted to be ready for anything.

Having served under the general’s command, Ross probably knew what to think of Jackson’s explanation. Jackson would have
reinterpreted his orders had it suited his strategic purposes. But in this matter of the intruders on Cherokee land, General Jackson declared that he must strictly follow instructions. He could do nothing except “
talk big,” sending a note threatening the intruders with arrest, and hoping that bluster would scare them off. Jackson’s hesitation was even more awkward because the
intruders had ignored a January first deadline to depart or face consequences. Jackson said he would attend to the problem as soon as he could spare troops from work on a military road. There were bridges to be repaired. Shrubbery must be cleared. The “
shrubing” work was “indispensible,” Jackson stressed. In the meantime, Jackson suggested that the Cherokees employ their own force to remove white settlers. This was the Cherokee Light Horse, a company of lightly armed cavalry, for which John Ross was a natural choice as commander, having military experience, a calm temperament, and the ability to speak the white man’s tongue. Cherokees had the law on their side but didn’t know what would happen when they turned their guns on white men.

On the 17th inst. the Detachment was ordered out on duty under my command. The first object presented itself was a place occupied by a man (Atkinson) who had officially threatened opposition.

Atkinson was a man who had moved his family across the river to a spot within a day’s ride of Rossville. There was no doubt he was encroaching. The Tennessee was an unmistakable border. Just as surely, the settler regarded the land as his own, having labored to improve it.

“There has been threats of opposition breathed from almost every quarter,” Ross wrote. With that in mind, his men on horseback carefully approached the Atkinson farm, weapons at the ready. But no shots rang out.

On our arrival to the spot, it was found evacuated. The crop was ordered to be distroyed.

Ross, the short man on horseback, signaled some of his troops to dismount. They began to set Atkinson’s abandoned food stores on fire. Ross kept his eye on the edge of the woods, waiting for any sign of the “threatened opposition.” Atkinson was out of sight but not necessarily gone. Ross studied the abandoned farm—the empty house, the quiet fields. The family seemed to have fled quickly, having left their livestock behind. Sheep bleated and geese honked as the flames began to rise.

 • • • 

Three years of maneuvering had led up to this moment when Cherokees tried to police their land while General Jackson stood back. During those three years Jackson believed he was making arrangements for
Cherokees,
not white intruders, to evacuate the Cherokee Nation. His efforts did not succeed—but they helped to explain both his reluctance to protect the Cherokees and the Cherokees’ increasing determination to defend themselves.

Jackson’s treaty with the Cherokees in 1817—the same one that captured former Cherokee land that became Florence, Alabama, without making any payment for it—contained other provisions, designed to obtain still more land over time. In fact it included a mixture of incentives that “
will give us the whole country in less than two years,” as Jackson predicted in a letter to John Coffee. Individual Cherokees would be invited to relocate voluntarily, moving westward to join the small band of Cherokees who had been living across the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River since 1808. Each Cherokee who agreed to the move would receive transportation, a rifle, a blanket, assorted supplies, and western land. No Cherokees would remain on their ancestral land, Jackson believed, “
except those prepared for agricultural persuits, civil life, & a government of laws.”

It must have been frustrating for Jackson to realize as time passed that the vast majority of Cherokees weren’t taking the deal. They hated
his treaty. It was not “Just,” a concept that meant as much to Cherokees as it did to Jackson. The deal had been negotiated with a small group of Cherokee leaders, using Jackson’s customary pressure tactics, and
imposed over the protest of dozens of other leading figures. In 1819, finding Cherokees still in place, the government negotiated yet another treaty, purchasing still more land, and including provisions designed to peel away individual Cherokees. Some would receive individual plots of land. Some accepted; yet both treaties intensified Cherokee debate about how they could improve their governance and avoid being sucked into such land cessions. A resolution grew among tribal leaders that the territorial concessions in the 1819 treaty should be the last they ever made.

It was also in 1819 that John Ross boldly wrote a letter to President James Monroe. Amid a few flourishes of deference toward the president (Ross appealed for “
the interposition of your Fatherly hand”) the rising Cherokee diplomat complained of the government’s “evil” tendency to call assemblies of Indian leaders and demand territory with no notice. Ross said he hoped “the Government will now strictly protect us from the intrusions of her bad citizens and not solicit us for more land—as we positively believe the comfort and convenience of our nation requires us to retain our present limits.”

This “positive belief” lay behind Ross’s order in 1820 that the Cherokee Light Horse should begin its mission by torching the Atkinson farm. But another aspect of Ross’s thinking shaped what happened next. He was capable of understanding his antagonist’s point of view, and this empathy made him reluctant to go to extremes.

As his men set aflame the food stores at the farm, Ross had been waiting for the response—the sound of hooves, the gunshot from the woods. But when at length he saw figures approaching, it was not a party of white gunmen. It was one man, one woman, and some children.

Atkinson came across the river with his wife & family to defend it, not by the force of powder & lead, but by the shedding of tears, this
unexpected weapon of defence had more effect on the minds of the men, than if he had resorted to the measures threatened. . . .

His conviction of error & pitiful acknowledgements &c &c induced me to permit him to recross the river to the whiteside unmolested with a few sheep & geese—his crop was all distroyed.

Ross watched Atkinson go away, driving his livestock before him. It was probably all he owned. Though the strategy of gaining great strips of land for white settlement was a central project of the frontier elite, illegally occupying Indian land was a job for the poor. Not just any farmer would risk his life, labor, and possessions to improve land that might be snatched back. This white farmer had probably taken Cherokee property because he couldn’t afford the abundant real estate on sale nearby in Alabama. Atkinson did not even have the support of relatives or other white Tennesseans. Nobody had rallied to help defend his farm. Surely his poverty was evident to Ross as soon as his weeping family appeared.

A few years earlier, Ross had denounced “
the conduct of the malitious and lawless class of our white Brethren on our frontier our property frequently stolen our lands forcibly occupied & the blood of Country people spilt all in cold blood & unprovoked.” But now, finding himself with power over one such land grabber, he could summon no wrath. He showed as much mercy as circumstances allowed, and went home. Delegating a lieutenant to oversee his men’s next moves, he rode away from the Light Horse for a few days, returning to Rossville, where he could write his report to General Jackson in his two-story cabin of his ancestors.

Atkinson’s sorrow and submission left Ross feeling optimistic about other white intruders. “I am induced to believe they will mostly cooperate like Mr. Atkinson,” he wrote, but here he was wrong. Later that summer, other settlers would resist the Cherokee Light Horse, assembling
a little army of about seventy. Their force was strong enough that the Cherokee horsemen decided to hold off their assault until federal
troops at last arrived. But for now Ross was able to report his mission successfully begun.

I have the honor to be Sir, yr. vry. obt. Hble. Servt.

Jno Ross.

While Jackson’s reply to this note, if any, has not survived, it is easy to calculate from other letters what Jackson thought of it. He almost certainly disapproved. He would never have let Atkinson walk away.
Jackson believed it was a mistake to allow white squatters to depart with their livestock. The squatters would simply wait until the troops had moved on, and then return. While Jackson showed little enthusiasm for removing white settlers, he had none at all for doing a job badly, or for giving anyone a chance to flout his will. If white settlers were to be removed at all, the job should be thoroughly and irresistibly done. Once
his
troops finally arrived, he would order them to hold white settlers and deliver them to the nearest civilian lawman for prosecution.

Here was a subtle but significant difference between the two men who would contend over the years that followed. Andrew Jackson could show mercy and respect. He could have empathy for others; he could never have succeeded as a politician otherwise. But these qualities were governed by his ruthlessness. He must never lose a fight. He must always uphold his authority. Ross, too, proved to be fiercely and stubbornly competitive. But there were moments when Ross let his stubbornness give way to generosity and, Ross hoped, to justice.