Editor’s note: this article is a selection from Chapter 16 of Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America: “Resurrecting the American System: The Growth of Imperialism.” In this section, author Patrick Newman discusses how Jacksonian Indian policy paved the way for imperial westward expansion in the mid-nineteenth century.
Removing the Indians
The Jacksonians succeeded in eliminating Clay’s American System— save for the imperialist plank that empowered the empire through aggressive acquisition of territory and international commerce. Similar to the Jeffersonian Republicans’ corruption by the Louisiana Purchase, land did the reform coalition in. Although Jackson aggressed on frontier Indians, he and Van Buren pursued a peaceful foreign policy in the 1830s. However, the growing temptation of Texas annexation and the related issue of slavery in the West split the two men apart. Even worse, the lure of California’s coveted western ports pushed Polk to clandestinely maneuver the country into a war of conquest. During the mid-1840s, the party rapidly embraced the debt and land speculators, internationalist merchants, privilege-seeking bankers, and other groups they once criticized. Executive authority primarily facilitated the aggrandizement—a clear sign that power corrupted the Jacksonians into using the presidency to pursue coercive empire building.
Historians increasingly demonize Jackson for enacting “ethnic cleansing,” ranking his Indian removal program as one of the era’s most momentous laws. They ignore the insights of Robert Remini and Sean Wilentz, who emphasize that the truth is far more complicated. First, Jackson genuinely cared about the Indians’ welfare, albeit in a highly flawed manner: condescendingly, impatiently, and coercively. To the president, the savages could either obtain second-class status in civilized society or peacefully maintain their lifestyle by moving to the West. Jackson was actually somewhat unique, since very few Democrats and Whigs cared about the Indians’ plight, and those who did usually hailed from states with no Indian populations. Second, most Americans did not view Indian relations as very significant, weighing banking, tariffs, internal improvements, land prices, foreign policy, and even slavery as far more important. Americans had engaged in heavy-handed Indian relations since the colonial era and saw it as a fact of life.
To Americans in 1829, the basic problem remained: Indian hunters claimed ownership of land beyond those that they farmed, particularly in the Southwest and Florida. This directly conflicted with the heavy influx of westward settlers. As Robert Whaples explains, “Indians’ claims to vast tracts of forested lands made no sense to all [the] European Americans who saw it sitting idle.” Jackson shared these concerns and insisted the Indians either had to assimilate into society—and remain subordinate because they were not white—or relocate to the West, where they could continue their nomad existence.
Consequently, Jackson’s December 1829 message to Congress proposed a new “voluntary” program: Indians could agree to the government’s offers to purchase their land (at a price US officials dictated) and remove to an area west of the Mississippi River (modern-day Oklahoma) or civilize and obey state laws. Jackson knew that settlers would continue to encroach on the lands the Indians claimed, especially given Georgians’ recent discovery of gold. “It seems to me visionary,” Jackson wrote, echoing Adams, “to suppose that . . . claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which [Indians] have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountains or passed them in the chase.”
The Democrats obediently reported on a removal bill in the Senate in February 1830. Whig Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a religious man who genuinely cared about the welfare and rights of the Indians—albeit those in other states, because New Jersey had previously removed its Indians—criticized the bill for imposing removal on a reluctant people and attacked the executive for interfering in the legislative process. Democrats John Forsyth of Georgia and Robert Adams of Mississippi shot back, accusing northerners of hypocrisy for denying to southerners what they had previously carried out in their own region. Whigs tried to make political capital out of the situation: most notably, the anti-Indian Clay opportunistically opposed removal in the 1832 election. After heated partisan debate, the Senate passed the bill by a party vote (28-19) and the House followed by a narrow 102-97, thanks to Jackson’s personal exhortations with congressmen—clear executive influence. In both votes, New England sided against and the South for, while the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest split. Although the bill’s passage was controversial, the removal issue died down over time and “most Americans accepted what had happened.”
The Indian Removal Act provided executive authority to relocate the Indians and transfer their eastern land claims to a western reserve, with $500,000 appropriated for all necessary expenses. This absurdly low number highlights the eternal truth that politicians will always try to conceal the expense of proposed legislation—the taxpayer must never know the full cost! Far more worrisome was that such a massive government undertaking, inherently hobbled by inefficiency and corruption, could lead to only one result—a crony redistribution of resources from Indians to politically connected insiders. As Robert Remini explains,
The President’s noble desire to give the Indians a free choice between staying and removing, one devoid of coercion, was disregarded by land-greedy state and federal officials, who practiced fraud and deception to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of the native tribes.
A blatant example of corrupt profiteering occurred with Mississippi’s Choctaws. Thanks to bribes, corrupt Indians chiefs signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in September 1830, ceding ten million acres their people claimed. Enter the young Robert J. Walker and William Gwin, who organized a land speculation syndicate to corner one million acres up for sale in October 1833. Thanks to the work of the local land office register Samuel Gwin (William’s brother), the group snatched up seven hundred thousand acres and resold most of it. Walker kept fifty thousand acres for himself and others, and the state representatives of the settlers graciously elected the aspiring politician to the US Senate. Fittingly, he became chair of the Senate Committee on Public Lands. To compound the punishment, Gwin, with the help of W. W. Corcoran of Corcoran & Riggs, performed legal services for dispossessed Indians at the hefty fee of $56,000. Walker’s involvement with Indian land speculation sullied his image in the eyes of Jackson, who actually advised Polk not to appoint him as Treasurer after he assumed the presidency.
Other Indian tribes resisted the government’s program, but the end result still occurred. By far, the Cherokee had civilized the most out of the southwestern Indian tribes, farming, wearing Western clothing, adopting a written language and constitution, developing schools, and establishing a newspaper. Significantly, some farmers also used slaves. Cherokees even pursued legal avenues in the courts, but the Supreme Court could not save them from Georgia. More to the point, Jackson and his supporters used the information they had available to demonstrate that the Cherokees still inefficiently used the land and had failed to modernize enough for the president. When a delegation pleaded their case in 1835, the president bluntly told them that “a large portion of your people have acquired little or no property in the soil itself. . . . How, under these circumstances, can you live in the country you now occupy?” The Cherokees finally “agreed” to leave, and the Senate ratified the treaty in 1836. Congress gave the Cherokees two years to vacate. When their leader, John Ross, foolishly instructed his people to stay put and wait for a miracle, the result could only mean trouble: in 1838, the Van Buren administration forcibly drove them out. Bad weather and government inefficiency led to numerous deaths, an unmitigated disaster.
The Florida Seminoles refused to abide by the treaties they signed, and when the US government sent soldiers to evict them, a bitter guerrilla conflict erupted—the Second Seminole War. The Department of War’s budget ballooned 111 percent from 1835 to 1836. By the time Jackson left the presidency, the government had spent $10 million on the conflict and each month after required another $460,000. The war only ended in 1842 under General Zachary Taylor. Whigs proved no more generous to the Indians than the Democrats, and this attitude continued in the decades ahead.
In total, the Jackson administration signed roughly seventy Indian treaties and obtained one hundred million acres in return for $68 million and thirty-two million acres west of the Mississippi River. The one hundred million acres was more than twice what Indians had ceded in the prior eight years. If the public had known of the astronomical $68 million cost instead of the stated $500,000, Congress assuredly would have been unable to pass the original law. Despite Jackson’s intentions, the entire process aggravated relations among Indians and settlers, led to rapacious land speculation, and caused costly wars. What had occurred within the United States did not bode well for adjacent countries the Jacksonians covetously eyed.
