Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (9 page)

This warwoman did not refer to white men as her elder brothers. She was confident enough to position
herself
as a wise parent and the men of both races as her offspring. She was probably Nancy Ward, who reportedly lived to a great age and became a “
beloved woman,” or revered elder, whose advice was greatly influential.

Women did not entirely lose their influence in later years, but the civilization
program altered the status of some women, and certainly the elites. The
customs of inheritance, in particular, seemed problematic to white advisers; the possessions of deceased men and women alike were spread among their respective clans, and so were diffused. It would be so much better if sons inherited from their fathers, so that families could accumulate wealth. In an earlier century, women routinely went as bare-breasted as men. Now long dresses were the custom, reflecting the modesty expected of Christian women. As the economy shifted from hunting to agriculture and home manufacturing, women undertook labor that men would not. John Ridge, the son of Major Ridge, recalled in 1826 that it was women who “were first prevailed to undertake” the work of spinning and weaving. They would make “
white or striped homespun” cloth, woolen blankets, coverlets, and stockings. It was, to be sure, valuable work: “
I can only say that their domestic cloths are preferred by us to those brought from New England.” But it was a
different life than that of a “warwoman.” There is no record showing that women joined the Cherokee Regiment at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The closest thing to women on the force were soldiers who went by a Cherokee name translating as “
The Good Woman,” who according to a modern scholar were men.

John Ross’s wife, Quatie, must have been a formidable figure or at least a durable one. As her husband rose in politics and diplomacy, and came to spend several months a year in Washington, she was at home with an expanding family. She may have had help from the slaves John Ross accumulated, but she did not often have her husband. Though Ross wrote enough letters that his correspondence fills two thick volumes, there is not a single surviving letter that he ever addressed to his wife. Ross’s biographer speculates that Quatie might have been illiterate, which would explain the absence of letters but would also underline the distance between his status and hers. For all the restrictions on women in white society, Andrew Jackson’s wife wrote letters that showed her to be a sharp observer and an influence on her husband. No one knows how Quatie influenced Ross. Hers was an existence hidden from view.

T
he same mass migration that brought John Ross’s Scottish forebears to America also brought the parents of Andrew Jackson.

Jackson’s mother and father were Scots-Irish immigrants. Beginning in the 1600s, the British government encouraged these Protestants to move from Scotland to the north of Ireland, where they helped to control the rebellious Catholic island. Later many made the leap across the ocean, where they helped take control of a continent. Unlike some migrants, drawn to America by religious freedom or dreams of riches, the Scots-Irish, also known as Scotch Irish, made no high pretense.
Many were poor, proud, and seeking to make a slightly better living. They were the “
hoosiers,” or rough backwoodsmen, who settled much of the American interior. Their descendants became so numerous in the southern Appalachians that when one of Jackson’s early biographers traveled the region in the 1850s, he made a discovery.
“The features and shape of [the] head of General Jackson, which ten thousand sign-boards have made familiar to the people of the United States, are common in North Carolina and Tennessee,” he reported. “I saw more than twenty well-marked specimens of the long, slender, Jacksonian head, with the bushy, bristling hair.”

The same biographer described the Scots-Irish as a “
tough, vehement, good-hearted race” who were “formed to grapple with practical affairs” and displayed a “curious” dry sense of humor. They also tended to seek conflict, to “
contend
for what they think is right with peculiar earnestness. . . . Hot water would seem to be the natural element of some of them.” This combative image was plainly a stereotype, but remains useful to us because Jackson’s famous life story probably went far to enshrine the stereotype.
“I was born for a storm,” Jackson once said, “and calm does not suit me.” Scots-Irish culture was adaptable to the violent frontier. If the westward movement brought them in conflict with Indians, so their ancestors had fought Irish Catholics or rival branches of the Protestant church. And if frontier living was harsh and remote, so were their ancestors’ lives near the Irish Sea. Many immigrants hacked out farms in the fertile valleys of the Appalachians, such as the valley where Andrew Jackson’s parents built a home in 1765. Andrew was born in 1767, near enough to the border between North and South Carolina to prompt debate in later years about which state should claim him. Of a more important fact there was no dispute: his father died months before the infant’s birth. His mother moved the remnants of the family into another family’s home, where
she essentially became the housekeeper.

Accounts of Andrew’s childhood portray a tempestuous boy. If he was not challenged to a fight, he would start one, and if knocked down, he would never give up. These accounts, while plausible, are not entirely reliable. They were written down long after Jackson became the most famous man in America, when people would naturally recall stories about Jackson the child that confirmed the established image of the adult. It is more certain that the boy grew up as the society around him came apart. He was nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, and sixteen when the Treaty of Paris secured that independence in 1783. Jackson lived those years in a landscape scarred by guerrilla warfare and murder as rebels contended against loyalists. By his teenage years he was a messenger and eventually a fighter for the rebels. Captured by British soldiers along with his
brother Robert, Andrew refused a demand to clean an officer’s boots. The boy is reported to have
declared that he was a prisoner of war, meaning that he was entitled to more dignified treatment, a remark that prompted the officer to strike him with a sword. “
The sword point reached my head,” Jackson recalled years later, “and has left a mark there as durable as the scull.” The Jackson boys’ mother successfully negotiated for their release, but afterward she contracted cholera and died while serving as a nurse for American prisoners in British hands. Andrew Jackson would refer in later years to “
the struggle for our liberties, in which I lost every thing that was dear to me.”

Nothing assured that this orphan of the Revolution would rise to a position of leadership. Before he could command his army at Horseshoe Bend, he had to survive years of his own high-risk behavior. As a teenager, Jackson followed friends to Charleston, South Carolina, and did little besides drink and gamble. Later he traveled back inland to Salisbury, North Carolina, and studied to become a lawyer when not occupied with entertainment. Long afterward, people in Salisbury recalled the night that the future president and three friends ended a night of drinking by
smashing their glasses and the furniture of the tavern where they were staying, and throwing the remnants on the fire.

Then the young lawyer—still just twenty-one, for it was 1788, the year the Constitution was ratified by enough states to take effect—received an offer to move west. He accepted a job as a prosecutor in the most remote part of North Carolina, the western zone that would eventually emerge as a separate state called Tennessee. He took on the trappings of a gentleman as he traveled toward his new home. Reaching the Appalachian town of Jonesborough, he purchased his first slave. The record of the sale noted that “
Andrew Jackson Esquire” took possession of “a Negro Woman named Nancy about Eighteen or Twenty Years of Age.” He also fought his first duel. Gentlemen were accustomed to demand “satisfaction” when their honor was impugned, and Jackson believed another attorney insulted him in court. “
When a man’s feelings and charector are injured he ought to seek a speedy redress,” he
wrote his antagonist. Many men in Jackson’s time spoke freely of their “feelings” and confessed to the reality that they were governed by emotions. Jackson was especially emotional, and wrote of his “feelings” throughout his life, though he also learned to control those emotions when necessary. On the day appointed for the duelists to meet with pistols drawn, they acted out a lifesaving compromise, with
both men firing in the air, leaving dignity and honor preserved.

It also preserved their lives, of course. Jackson was able to continue westward to his permanent posting, a rude frontier town called Nashville. It was not even ten years old, and breathtakingly remote from the East. Not only were mountains in the way; the rivers, which were the best highways, led in the opposite direction. Nashville was on the banks of the Cumberland, which flowed northwestward to the Ohio and then down the Mississippi, where Indians and European powers had more influence than the United States. But this remoteness meant a man of energy and talent faced less competition for leadership. The vigorous young prosecutor quickly made connections with the local elite, boarding at the home of the Donelson family, whose late patriarch John Donelson was among the founders of Nashville. Before long Jackson married Rachel, one of Donelson’s daughters. He became a delegate to his state’s constitutional convention in his twenties, and Tennessee’s first representative in Congress at age thirty. Before the age of forty he was a prominent trader and planter. His farm, the Hermitage, had the style of a rough frontier settlement, where
he lived with Rachel in a two-story log house, but he steadily added to his property until he had dozens of enslaved men, women, and children tending more than a thousand acres. He ran a
dry goods store and riverside boatyard that he developed into a kind of playground for men, including a tavern and a racetrack.

Controversy followed the whip-thin politician with the wiry hair. Although his ownership of slaves was unremarkable in Tennessee, he sometimes engaged in slave dealing, a business that even slave owners considered disreputable. He also endured criticism for his continuing
tendency to challenge other men to duels, a practice that remained common but illegal. In 1806 Jackson let an exchange of insults with a Nashville man escalate into a duel, and resolved to kill his opponent.
Jackson let the other man shoot first, took a lead ball near his heart that would remain in his body the rest of his life, yet remained standing. He took time to be sure of his aim before firing a fatal shot in return. Unfortunately for Jackson, his antagonist was a popular young man whose death stained Jackson’s reputation; and that reputation was already colored by scandal. It was widely known that he had been
together with Rachel for years before she completed her divorce from an abusive husband. Rachel and Andrew lived as
husband and wife from 1790 or 1791 onward even though the formal decree ending her previous marriage did not arrive until 1793.
They had to be remarried in 1794 to clear up doubts about their status. But having married, they cultivated a conventional family life. With no children of their own, they adopted their son Andrew Jr. from Rachel’s relatives. When Jackson traveled, his miserable wife wrote him letters urging him to hurry home. He wrote back tenderly to express regret that he could not.

The muddled circumstances of his marriage proved to be characteristic of Jackson. He took counsel of what he wanted, what his friends desired, and what he felt to be right. He was guided less by the norms of society than by what he considered “Just,” as he wrote in his letters, often capitalizing the word. For his marriage to Rachel, the most romantic act of his life, he was willing to endure decades of whispers and insults. A darker manifestation of this characteristic came out in
Jackson’s slave trading. The social convention that it was acceptable to own human beings as property, but that only low-down characters would engage in the slave trade, would have been just the sort of elaborate hypocrisy by which Jackson refused to be governed. Modern readers can wish that he resolved this hypocrisy by rejecting both practices. Instead he embraced them both when it suited his interests. His approach to slavery foreshadowed his approach to federal Indian policy:
he would reject what he saw as its false piety, and rewrite the policy in the way that suited people like himself.

He was one of many frontier leaders who made their own rules. One of the region’s leading men, the Revolutionary War hero John Sevier, briefly established his own state, called Franklin. Jackson’s first political mentor, William Blount, admitted that he became territorial governor of the future state of Tennessee
to support his personal land speculation. Jackson, the orphan finding his way in the world, absorbed the ethos of such older men. When Aaron Burr passed through Nashville in 1805—Burr, who as vice president of the United States had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel—he was just the sort of colorful rogue who was welcome for an extended stay at the Hermitage. Burr was on a mysterious western journey that eventually led to his arrest for some vague treasonous plot, possibly a plan to found his own independent nation. The exposure of Burr forced Jackson to denounce him and to insist that he had not known anything about Burr’s plans, even after
the two men talked for days and Jackson sold boats to Burr for his expedition.

Until the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, the record of Jackson’s career suggests a talented man thrashing about in the dark, trying to locate a ladder that no man of his background had ever climbed. His speeches made an impression in the House of Representatives, but he left his seat. He served briefly in the Senate but resigned and went home, becoming a justice on the Tennessee supreme court. He won election in 1802 as major general in command of the Tennessee militia, but for years he found no wars to fight. Like many a westerner, he speculated in land. He bought and sold the rights to tens of thousands of acres, including land alongside the Mississippi River that eventually became Memphis. It was common for speculators to buy the rights to Indian land and then press their politicians to clear it of Indians—pressure that Jackson, as a politician himself, was well connected to apply. But he made the mistake of dealing with men more dreamy-eyed
than he was, and when one of his land sales unraveled, Jackson struggled to avoid bankruptcy and the risk of debtors’ prison.

That was long before the War of 1812, when his military and diplomatic triumphs opened new horizons for a man with a real estate background and business connections. During that war he was a general in command of an army. When it was over, he applied his relentless energy to the conquest of acreage.