Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (22 page)

Catharine Beecher wrote that there were “consequences” for the added “excitement” of her life: “
I suddenly found myself utterly prostrated, and unable to perform any school duty without extreme pain and such confusion of thought as seemed like approaching insanity.” The first American woman to mastermind a significant campaign of political activism was already under great stress, trying to raise an endowment for her school. Now she took a leave of absence, fleeing to the homes of friends to rest. She finally resigned, and the school went into decline.

 • • • 

The women’s campaign had memorable effects on the nation and on Beecher. Her brush with “approaching insanity” apparently left her with a narrower view of women’s roles, and the next time she made a prominent statement about politics, her role was entirely reversed. In the late 1830s, she engaged in a famous debate with a political activist, Angelina Grimké, a Quaker from South Carolina who felt that women should organize against slavery. “
We affirm, that every
slaveholder
is a
man-stealer,
” Grimké declared. Beecher agreed that slavery was an evil, yet she believed that Grimké was overstepping her bounds, and said so in dueling essays with the Quaker activist. Amazingly, given her secret experience, Beecher wrote that “
petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without the sphere of female duty.” Abolitionists were “irritating,” and female abolitionists especially so. Although Grimké wanted northern women to organize local antislavery groups as they once organized against
Indian removal, Beecher saw this as counterproductive meddling in the affairs of the South. She had come to view political activism as a distraction from women’s true calling in education, just as her own past political activism had taken her away from her seminary for girls. And this time Beecher signed her name to the essay. She became known to history not as a pioneering women’s activist, but as the foil of a pioneering women’s activist.

But the Ladies’ Circular of 1829 had gone out into the world. Wilson Lumpkin, a representative from Georgia in the House of Representatives, would remember Congress being flooded with “
thousands of petitions, signed by more than a million of men, women and children.” This was an overstatement—the scores of yellowed petitions that remain today in the National Archives bear
thousands of signatures, not a million—but Lumpkin’s guess does suggest how large the petitions must have loomed in his mind.

Thomas Hart Benton cheerfully spoke about the women’s campaign on the Senate floor. Benton, the former military aide whose 1813 quarrel with Andrew Jackson ended with a bullet in Jackson’s shoulder, had since reconciled with his chief and was a powerful pro-Jackson senator from Missouri. He was amused by the petitions. He meant “
no disrespect” to benevolent women, he said. They were better than “unbenevolent males.” Benton would have been less amused had he looked carefully at the addresses from which the petitions had come. The New England women had appealed to women in “the Northern, Middle and Western states,” but apparently not the South. The petitions that arrived in the capital came from
Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana—but no southern state or slave state. Indian removal was rapidly becoming a template for another, greater conflict between North and South. Its victims would eventually include Senator Benton, a great Unionist who was thrown out of office by his badly divided slave state.

Indian removal was beginning to influence the thinking of people
in “the Northern, Middle and Western states” in ways that neither Benton nor Catharine Beecher could have anticipated. Beecher helped to energize a network of respectable, religious citizens. These new opponents of Indian removal had commonly
supported
what might be termed African removal, the movement to gradually free slaves and send them to a colony overseas. After 1830 some
activists concluded that if Indian removal was wrong, so was African removal. The old antislavery movement had recognized the rights of slave owners, cast them as victims of history, and promised that unfettered black people would not be left in their midst. Now a new movement declared that slaves should be immediately emancipated and allowed to live free in the United States. Activists cast slave owners as evil and challenged white Americans to rethink their views about race.

One of the new activists was William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston writer and fierce critic of slavery. As late as 1829 he favored African colonization, but by 1831 he had completely repudiated the idea. Between those two moments Garrison witnessed the debate over Indians. Imprisoned in April 1830 for libeling a slave trader, he sat in his cell reading accounts of the Indian removal debate in Congress. He emerged from jail declaring that forcing Indians to move would bathe America’s name in “
eternal infamy.” His influential antislavery publications, first
the
Genius of Universal Emancipation
and then
the
Liberator,
reprinted articles from the
Cherokee Phoenix
alongside news about slavery. In Garrison’s mind, the moral issues raised were the same.

1830–
1832

A
spring day in Washington: the House of Representatives came to order on Monday, May 17, 1830. The lawmakers’ agenda was as diverse as the country that elected them. Records of that day indicate that they began by voting down a proposal to repeal the tax on salt. Next the House resumed debate on a measure that had consumed its time for much of the year.

The chairman recognized Representative Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia—a member of Congress for three years now, a lawyer and a rising political star. He was forty-seven, trim and impressive, with his dark hair piled thick atop his head something like the curving crest on the head of a cassowary bird. But as he stood at his desk in the cavernous chamber, Lumpkin showed no inclination to strut. “
My life has never been free from care and responsibility,” he said, but he had never felt “more deeply impressed with a sense of that responsibility, to God and his country,” than “at the present moment.”

Lumpkin said this burdensome feeling did not arise from his concern for the welfare of the constituents who elected him. No matter what Congress did about the Indians, Georgia and other states could “take care of themselves.” He was motivated by his concern for the Cherokees and other tribes. “To those remnant tribes of Indians whose good we seek, the subject before you is of vital importance. It is a
measure of life and death. Pass the bill on your table, and you save them. Reject it, and you leave them to perish.”

The bill on the table would be known as the Indian Removal Act. The legislation drawn up by Jackson’s allies in Congress provided the president the power to offer land west of the Mississippi to “
such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside.” They would voluntarily trade their lands to the east for lands to the west, and half a million dollars was committed to paying any costs of the transaction. For Representative Lumpkin, the bill was the culmination of his service in Congress;
he had arrived in 1827 with something like this in mind. Nothing had changed his convictions about the wisdom of his course, though he was well aware of the tremendous opposition. Lumpkin was the same lawmaker who later claimed “more than a million” people had signed petitions against removal, whom he dismissed as “Northern fanatics, male and female.” But if he did not accept their arguments, he clearly had taken care to read them, for the speech he delivered on May 17 was tailored to blunt the moral force of the opposition.

Lumpkin’s speech did not deliberately denigrate Indians as a race. He agreed that some could be “brought” to civilization, and “entirely reclaimed from their native savage habits.” But sadly, Cherokees were undermining their own reclamation by remaining in Georgia: “They will every day be brought into closer contact and conflict with the white population,” and this would “diminish the spirit of benevolence” that white men felt toward the Indians, causing white citizens to withhold aid from “these unfortunate people.” Cherokees must surrender their land to avoid irritating “philanthropic” Georgians who merely wanted to help them. Congressman Lumpkin said that he favored Indian interests, and that he assessed those interests more realistically than the Indians’ pious supporters among the missionaries and the women.

 • • • 

Probably not everyone in the House chamber was able to hear Lumpkin’s words, because the acoustics were no better in 1830 than they had
been during the presidential voting in 1825. The reverberations persisted while the country outside the walls perceptibly changed. A nation that had been enthralled in 1825 by the opening of the Erie Canal was turning its attention to railroads. By May 1830 service was opening on the
first dozen miles of the Baltimore and Ohio line. Around the same time the first railroad was chartered west of the Appalachians—a line beginning in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on Tennessee Valley land Andrew Jackson had obtained from Indians during his frantic period of “running the line” a decade and a half before. Within a few years this first western railroad expanded parallel to the Tennessee River, offering a way to bypass the shallows and rapids at Muscle Shoals. Of 12.8 million Americans counted in the 1830 census, several million lived in the Appalachians and westward. Many were shifting farther west than they had been. In 1830 Thomas Lincoln, having once moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana, moved again to Illinois, bringing along twenty-one-year-old Abraham. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had recently graduated from the military academy at West Point and now was posted to a frontier fort guarding against Indians in
what is now Wisconsin.

The earliest cohorts of western leadership had by necessity consisted mainly of men transplanted from the East—William Blount, William Henry Harrison, Henry Clay, Lewis Cass, and Andrew Jackson. Now the region was producing homegrown leaders; as Wilson Lumpkin delivered his speech on May 17, the man in the chair overseeing the debate was Representative Charles Wickliffe, born in Kentucky. Lands once seen as empty, save for Indians, were becoming solidly settled. Their growing populations attracted the interest of additional newcomers.
In 1830 Lyman Beecher’s Boston church burned, prompting jokes that the fire-and-brimstone preacher had experienced a touch of hell, but also causing him to think of casting off from New England. By 1832 he would be running a seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. He wanted to win the West for Protestants over Catholicism. He brought along Catharine Beecher, who started another girls’ school.

The South, too, was growing, and growing restive.
Second
Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, who like Jefferson Davis had recently graduated from West Point, was posted to Georgia. Lee was an engineer, instructed to help build a coastal fort at Savannah—just the sort of visible expenditure of federal tax revenue that President Jackson’s allies hoped would cement the southern states’ allegiance to the union. It wasn’t enough. South Carolina politicians went on promoting their doctrine of nullification, and it gradually became known that their supporters included South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, President Jackson’s own vice president. Facing a challenge both to the federal government and to his personal authority, Jackson avoided a direct confrontation until April 1830. At a dinner in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, the president was called upon to give a toast. He declared, “Our Federal union—it must be preserved.” Calhoun was forced to reply with a toast of his own: “The Union—next to our liberty, most dear.”

Americans continued to identify in complicated ways with Indians. No one personified this impulse more spectacularly than Edwin Forrest, one of the greatest actors of his generation, who resolved that he would like to play an Indian. Twenty-four years old, acclaimed for his role as Shakespeare’s Othello, Forrest had ambitions to promote the growth of American literature, and offered a prize for an original play on the aboriginal Americans. The result was
Metamora
, whose title character was loosely based on an actual seventeenth-century chief defeated in war and killed by white men. In December 1829, at New York City’s Park Theater, Forrest appeared onstage as Metamora. “
White men, beware!” he howled at the audience as he died. “The wrath of the wronged Indian shall fall upon you like a cataract that dashes the uprooted oak down the mighty chasms.” The standing-room-only crowd swooned.
Metamora
was a monumental hit. Traveling repertory companies were soon making plans to perform it on stages across the nation, even in Congressman Wilson Lumpkin’s home state of Georgia.

Five southern Indian nations still possessed significant lands east of the Mississippi: the Choctaws and Chickasaws near the great river, the Creeks and Cherokees farther east, and the Seminoles in Florida. All
were formally at peace with their white neighbors, though newspapers reported ominous events. One such event began
on February 1, 1830, when a man in the Creek Nation attempted to flag down a passing stagecoach. The stage was carrying passengers and mail through Creek country,
roughly the same route General Lafayette had taken years before.
Believing the Creek man was drunk, the driver maneuvered past while a passenger leaned out to insult the Indian.

The Creek man, named Tuskina, wanted to complain that the U.S. mail contractor was failing to pay tolls to the Creek Nation as promised. When the stage did not stop, Tuskina took a shortcut across a curve and emerged in front of the stage a second time, now clutching his only weapon, a common folding pocketknife. The alarmed driver and passengers stopped the stage for an hour and a half until the man calmed down. That should have been the end of the incident, except that when the stage finally passed out of the Creek Nation into white Alabama, the passengers spread exaggerated stories of an Indian attack. The community flew to arms.
Two troops of cavalry, along with a troop of volunteers, were sent into Creek territory in search of Tuskina. Authorities also made an effort to isolate the Creek Nation, ordering every white man not married to an Indian to depart Creek areas within fifteen days.

Even some white Alabamans were startled by the overreaction, which “
has thrown the whole country into commotion,” wrote the editor of the
Mobile Register
, “drawn out the troops of the government, and occasioned a parade and show of authority that, as the times are, would hardly be exceeded were the dissolution of the union to be attempted.” The editor was “mortified” that “a single Indian, in a whiskey frolic, should be able to stir up the government to such an exhibition of its power.” A British traveler visiting the Creek Nation was equally dismayed to see “severe measures” against the entire nation “
on account of the delinquency of one individual.” The anxiety of Alabama authorities was revealing. It was as if white settlers
expected
an Indian assault, for they knew they had been courting trouble for years. Men and women who were building the American interior, who were proud of that work
and believed it to be their national destiny, still understood there was another side of the story. When a Georgia legislative committee reported in 1827 on the state’s right to take possession of Indian land, the lawmakers openly acknowledged the ambiguity of their argument. “
It may be contended, with much plausibility, that there is, in these claims, more of
force,
than of
justice,”
said the Georgians, but the claims “have been recognized and admitted by the whole civilized world,” and “under such circumstances,
force
becomes
right.
”

The Alabama soldiers never caught up with Tuskina, but troops riding through Creek villages created the danger of far more tragic confrontations. Concerned Creek leaders held a solemn conference (they were “
handsomely dressed,” the British traveler observed; their “scarlet turbans, their blue dress covered with beads, and their long spurs, gave them an imposing appearance, when their accoutrements were not too nearly inspected”) but the Creeks did not respond with force. Tuskina turned himself in, and when he was put on trial May 7, 1830, the evidence began to show his crime was considerably less dramatic than first described. The judge fined Tuskina for obstructing the mail and set him free. Postal service continued as before. The newspapers did not report if the Creek Nation ever received its unpaid tolls.

 • • • 

Throughout the passionate debate in Washington in the spring of 1830, members of a divided House surprisingly agreed on one thing: it was detrimental to Indians to live in the South. Not only did Lumpkin of Georgia say it, so did Henry R. Storrs of New York, though perhaps not for reasons that Lumpkin would have approved. The northern lawmaker said he could “
cheerfully” support a bill to move the Indians, if the “real object” was to offer refuge to those who wanted to leave “of their own free choice.” Indeed, approval of such a bill would be automatic: “No philanthropic man can look at the condition to which these unfortunate people have become reduced . . . without fervently wishing
that they were already removed far beyond the reach of the oppression—and, I was about to say, the example of the white man.”
But Storrs said that helping Indians was never the purpose of the Indian bill. It was “chiefly intended” to clear Indians from southern real estate. Most northern lawmakers opposed the bill, representing as they did states that had produced the missionaries to the Indians, the women’s petitions, and the public meetings in support of the tribes. Storrs also represented a state where white settlement, warfare, and migration to Canada had already devastated the Indian populace, meaning lawmakers could oppose Indian removal without threatening their constituents’ interests. But there was something heartfelt about Storrs: “I am sick—heart-sick of seeing them at our door as I enter this hall, where they have been standing during the whole of this session, supplicating us to stay our hand. There is one plain path of honor. . . . Retrace your steps. Acknowledge your treaties. Confess your obligations. Redeem your faith. Execute your laws. Let the President revise his opinions. It is never too late to be just.”

Could Jackson have pursued a different course? Jackson was right that something must be done. The clash between the white map and the Indian map was eating away at the old Indian policy. Washington’s policy had been a wise and careful stalling tactic, putting off bloodshed until the day when a basic problem of the nation’s founding might resolve itself. It was one of several compromises that the Founders had used to manage the contradictions attending the nation’s birth. Now a new generation was testing the compromises.

From a distance of centuries, it is possible to imagine several alternatives to Indian removal. The simplest was the only one seriously discussed at the time: uphold the old policies a little longer. (“Retrace your steps. Acknowledge your treaties. Confess your obligations. Redeem your faith. Execute your laws. Let the President revise his opinions.”) This could not have been a policy of inaction or of moderation. Sustaining the Cherokees against the ceaseless pressure of Georgia would have
required Jackson to use persuasion, threats, and federal troops. He would have had to run the risk of civil conflict with Georgia, much as he was soon to do with the nullifiers of South Carolina. Even supporters of the Indians had to acknowledge the possibility of war. If properly protected, the Cherokees might have prospered. Or they might have become isolated and mired in poverty, as later generations of Indians did on western reservations.