v5n4.book Page 443 Friday, June 28, 2002 9:19 PM Reviews How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees Robert V. Remini Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars Viking 2001 Richard White ecause Americans so often claim to be Indians? American troops are now in the Bal- the democratic conscience of the world, kans to prevent the displacement of entire peo- BAmerican Indian policy has cast a long ples; they once marched into the Southeastern international shadow. One of the darkest parts United States to displace entire peoples. of that shadow has been Indian removal: the Given these claimed parallels between coerced migration in the 1830s and 1840s of tens ethnic cleansing and Indian removal, any of thousands of Indians to open up lands for examination of Indian removal will inevitably American settlers east of the Mississippi River. involve discussions of ethnic cleansing. Indian When criticized by Americans for dispossess- removal is an intellectual mineÕeld, and ing, killing, or exiling a minority population, historians trying to traverse it had better carry modern tyrants and their supporters reÔexively a good map, otherwise they can end up where point to the treatment of Indians by the United they would rather not go. Robert Remini in his States as a precedent and to their critics as discussion of Andrew Jackson’s Indian wars hypocrites. From Adolph Hitler justifying the carries half a map. He probably knows more Nazi campaign for lebensraum to supporters of about Andrew Jackson than any person alive. Slobodan Milosevic’s policy against Bosnians Unfortunately he appears to know as little and Kosovars, proponents of what is now about Indian peoples as most American called ethnic cleansing have cited American historians. His knowledge and ignorance fuse Indian policy to justify their own actions and to to make Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars a stymie their American critics. Why should disturbingly obtuse book about a man who they listen to a people whose own prosperity is probably inÔicted more pain, suÖering, loss, built on land and resources plundered from and death upon Indian peoples than any Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. 443 v5n4.book Page 444 Friday, June 28, 2002 9:19 PM Richard White American of the nineteenth century. Remini’s assertion that removal saved the This obtuseness does not arise from Southeastern Indians is audacious and dis- Remini’s refusal to acknowledge the suÖering turbing, but that is no reason to dismiss it. If Jackson caused. He places Indian removal at Remini is right and removal did secure the the heart of the horrors Indians experienced. survival of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” Remini never diminishes the death and of the Southeast – the Choctaws, Chickasaws, destruction that Jackson brought and never Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles – who denies Jackson’s moral culpability. Remini certainly have survived, then he should say so condemns Jackson and his contemporaries for no matter how oÖensive it may be and no their corruption, their racism, their greed, and matter how many unpalatable historical paral- their refusal to accept responsibility for the lels it reveals. The claim, however, gives him the suÖering they inÔicted. What is obtuse is burden of examining Indian lives closely to Remini’s own conclusion. Out of this circus of demonstrate that the peoples in question owe horrors, Remini contends, there came great their survival to removal. He needs to write good: Andrew Jackson “saved the Five Civilized about Indians as carefully and knowledgeably Nations from probable extinction.” It is not as he does about Jackson. hard to imagine the outcry if a German There are Indians galore in Remini’s book, historian oÖered a similar assessment of the but they are clearly the supporting cast. They results of the German search for lebensraum or are the stock Indians of American history – if the survival of the Kosovars and Bosnians as sometimes noble, sometimes murderous, coherent groups were credited to Slobodan usually tragic, and always simple. They are not Milesovic’s ethnic cleansing. people who will get to evaluate the results of Although proclamations of the beneÕcent their own dispossession and exile. They will results of Indian removal have not been not even get the beneÕt of any detailed evalua- much heard since the nineteenth century, tion of their fate. Jackson’s opinions matter Remini’s point of departure for his surpris- much more than theirs, and Jackson gets the ing destination is quite conventional. Like vast majority of Remini’s attention. many American historians, Remini denies To explain Jackson, Remini needs to explain that American Indian policy was genocidal. Jackson’s initial Indian hating, and so he begins No matter what the results of its actions, the his narrative with what are really a set of United States claimed that it was trying to generic stories in which Jackson is, like the save the lives of Indian peoples and Indians he hates, less an historical Õgure than a eventually to assimilate them, one by one, type. Herman Melville captured and dissected into the American population. But having the Indian hater in The ConÕdence Man. Indian dismissed genocide, Remini never explicitly haters thirsted for revenge for Indian atrocities; confronts the tougher question of whether they existed only to kill Indians; they became Indian removal constituted a form of what white Indians more skilled in woodlore and we now call ethnic cleansing. Although geno- violence than their adversaries. They were cide accomplishes ethnic cleansing – the relentless and merciless. forced removal of a population from its Remini makes Jackson’s hatred of Indians native land – not all ethnic cleansing is seem nearly inevitable, the shared mark of all genocidal. Ethnic cleansers want to get rid of backcountry settlers. There was, however, minority populations, and are hardly nothing inevitable about Indian hating in the solicitous of their welfare, but they do not South Carolina backcountry of Jackson’s necessarily want to kill them. youth. James Merrell’s The Indians’ New World 444 5 G r e e n B a g 2 d 4 4 3 v5n4.book Page 445 Friday, June 28, 2002 9:19 PM How Andrew Jackson Saved the Cherokees gives a far more nuanced account of the world world in which Indian hating was the sole in which Jackson came of age. The Catawbas possible outcome of contact between the races. were an Indian people who lived near the In Remini’s narrative the early mythic Jacksons. They were allies of whites, Õrst the Jackson gradually yields to the historic Jackson, British and then Americans, against other a young man on the make in Tennessee who Indians. There was plenty of violence, conÔict, did hate and distrust Indians. In a 1792 letter to and hatred between Indians and whites in the John McKee, a commissioner sent to make South Carolina backcountry but also enough peace with the Chickamauga branch of the cooperation to indicate possibilities of a Cherokees, Jackson condemned peace talks as grudging accommodation. This was not a “Delusions.” Experience “teaches us that Trea- ties answer No other Purpose than opening an Easy door for the Indian to pass through to Butcher our Citizens.” Citi- zens were innocent victims of barbarous murderers, and the Creeks and Cherokees had failed to abide by existing trea- ties and surrender the “butch- ers who kill our people.” “If they [the murderers] are not given up it is an infringement of the Treaty and a cause of war and the whole Nation ought to be Scurged for the infringe- ment of the Treaty for as the Nation will not give murderers up when demanded it is a[n] acknowledgement of their Consent to the Commission of the Crime therefore all are Equally guilty.” Jackson was not blind. He recognized that invasion of Indian lands and the murder of Indians by whites precipitated the chronic violence along the borders, but this would over time become yet another argument to dis- possess Indians. Since whites Osceola was the most effective opponent of Jackson’s Indian removal program, desired their land – and it leading the Seminoles during the first years of the Second Seminole War until, never occurred to that they as Remini reports, he was “tricked into attending a meeting under a flag of didn’t deserve it – then the only truce to negotiate the release of three captured chiefs. The great chief was seized and interned at Fort Marion in St. Augustine. After a few months he lasting solution was the died on January 31, 1838.” removal of Indians. Green Bag • Summer 2002 445 v5n4.book Page 446 Friday, June 28, 2002 9:19 PM Richard White What Jackson believed as a young man did United States feared both the Spanish, who not always accurately reÔect or have much retained Florida, and the British, who while no inÔuence on actual American Indian policy, longer perched on the American border but as he rose in the world, what he believed maintained ties with various Indian peoples became more important. It still might not that persisted from the days when West always conform to oÓcial policy, but, as Rem- Florida was a British colony. The threat of a ini notes: “On more than one occasion … he European-Indian alliance against the southern would simply ignore government orders United States was both real and potent. It was regarding the Indians and act according to his the national security argument that made own perception of what was the proper course Jackson an early convert to JeÖerson’s idea of of action.” removing the Indians west of the Mississippi. To act on his own authority, however, Remini’s emphasis on national security as Jackson had to be in a position of authority, the heart of Jackson’s conviction that removal and he quickly discovered that by tempera- was necessary is both convincing and original, ment he was happier as a soldier than as a and it strengthens the parallels between Indian politician.