Andrew Jackson (78 page)
This disappointing decision nonetheless guided Wirt and the Cherokees down a more promising path. The next year they brought suit under the 1789 Judiciary Act, which assigned to the Supreme Court jurisdiction over disputes involving treaties and the validity of state laws. The court agreed that the Cherokees had standing, and it listened to Wirt contend that the Georgia laws were invalid because they conflicted with federal treaties governing relations with the Cherokees. The court found for the Cherokees. “The acts of Georgia are repugnant to the constitution, laws and treaties of the United States,” Marshall declared. They were therefore null and void. The Cherokees could stay put, unmolested.
J
ackson yielded nothing to Marshall on the issue of nationalism. But he remained unconvinced—despite Marshall’s three decades of effort to the contrary—that the decisions of the courts bound the executive branch. And he remained convinced that the only long-term answer to the Indian question was for the tribes to move beyond the reach of the whites. In his annual message of December 1830 he had congratulated the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes for accepting a swap of eastern lands for western. “Their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages,” he declared, with perhaps more hope than conviction. He specified the advantages of relocation. “It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the general and state governments on account of the Indians. . . . It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites, free them from the power of the states, enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers; and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.” Jackson avowed benign motives regarding the Indians. “Toward the aborigines of the country, no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people.” Yet one must look facts in the eye.
Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of this race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another. . . . Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?
The policy of the administration was nothing but an extension of the process that had been under way for two centuries. Jackson didn’t deny that relocation would be wrenching. But hadn’t relocation been the story of America from the first settlements? And wasn’t it the story of America even now? “Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions.” The Indians were being asked to do no more.
The Indians must either adopt the ways of the whites, including the laws of the states in which they lived, or move. To stay where they were, under their old customs, was not an option. Jackson knew the Indians’ neighbors, having dwelt among such people most of his life. They wouldn’t leave the Indians alone or let them keep large tracts of land lightly occupied. The status quo was untenable; for the Indians it risked “utter annihilation.”
Jackson’s policy was self-serving but consistent. In matters not touching the integrity of the Union, he generally deferred to the states. Here he refused to stand between the states and the tribes. The Indians must make their peace with the states or relocate.
Moreover, Jackson’s policy reflected a deep understanding of the life on the frontier. Georgia wasn’t as wild as it had been, but wherever whites encountered Indians living apart, in tribes, the old frontier dynamics reemerged. The whites resented the Indians’ immunity from state laws, and they coveted the land the Indians owned. Congress might legislate, and the courts might rule, but the struggle that had begun the moment the first Europeans set foot in North America wouldn’t end until the descendants of those Europeans claimed the whole continent, or as much as they chose to take. Jackson was sincere—paternalistic, but no less sincere for that—in saying he had the best interests of the Indians at heart. His adoption of Lyncoya and the other Indian boys he and Rachel took in attested to his good intentions toward Indians as individuals. Perhaps moving the Indians across the Mississippi would merely buy them time. But the alternative was as grim as the future had always been for losers in the long struggle for North America—“utter annihilation,” as he bluntly put it.
J
ackson hadn’t liked John Marshall before becoming president. The old Federalist bowed to property and stole authority from the states, besides having frustrated Jefferson’s prosecution of Aaron Burr. Jackson’s opinion didn’t change after he became president, despite the fact that Marshall’s long record of nationalism made Jackson’s defense of the Union against the nullifiers easier than it would have been otherwise—easier, for example, than a similar defense by John Adams against the nullifiers of 1798 would have been.
Jackson didn’t like the august airs the chief justice put on, and he didn’t like the undemocratic nature of the court’s decisions—which was why he refused in principle to defer to the court’s decisions. And he didn’t like Marshall’s judgment in the Cherokee case of 1832. “Being more and more convinced that the destiny of the Indians within the settled portion of the United States depends upon their entire and speedy migration to the country west of the Mississippi set apart for their permanent residence,” he wrote to Congress in February 1832, while the case was before the court, “I am anxious that all the arrangements necessary to the complete execution of the plan of removal and to the ultimate security and improvement of the Indians should be made without further delay.” Marshall’s ruling represented one such delay, one that encouraged foolish thinking on the part of reluctant Indians and their self-proclaimed supporters. Jackson reiterated that he simply proposed to treat the Indians as he treated the other inhabitants of Georgia and the several states—in fact, better, in that he was offering to pay their way west. “Should any of them, however, repel the offer of removal, they are free to remain, but they must remain with such privileges and disabilities as the respective states within whose jurisdiction they live may prescribe.”
In his 1832 annual message, several months after the Supreme Court’s decision, Jackson didn’t deign to acknowledge the decision or even notice that the issue had come before the court. “I am happy to inform you,” he told Congress, “that the wise and humane policy of transferring from the eastern to the western side of the Mississippi the remnants of our aboriginal tribes, with their own consent and upon just terms, has been steadily pursued, and is approaching, I trust, its consummation.” Jackson’s single reference to the recent court case was oblique to the point of being willfully obscure. “With one exception every subject involving any question of conflicting jurisdiction or of peculiar difficulty has been happily disposed of. . . . With that portion of the Cherokees, however, living within the State of Georgia it has been found impracticable as yet to make a satisfactory adjustment.” Defending as generous his offers to the Georgia Cherokees, Jackson went so far as to say, “Whatever difference of opinion may have prevailed respecting the just claims of these people, there will probably be none respecting the liberality of the propositions, and very little respecting the expediency of their immediate acceptance.”
In fact there was considerable difference of opinion regarding the liberality of the president’s propositions. Indian advocates decried Jackson’s defiance of the Supreme Court and his insistence on Indian removal, claiming he was playing agent for grasping Georgia speculators and rewarding his party allies in that state. Politicians and editors who opposed him for other reasons became sudden allies of the Cherokees.
Jackson might claim his policy was liberal, but the claim didn’t make it so. He held out the alternative that the Cherokees might remain in Georgia by submitting to the authority of the state and living like whites. But considering how far the Cherokees had adopted white ways and how little their efforts had won them of respect from their neighbors, such a response would have required a daunting leap of faith. The harsh fact of the matter was that Georgia was determined to expel the Cherokees and take their land. Jackson knew this, and he refused to prevent it.
He was on firmer ground in declaring his policy inescapable. The defenders of the Cherokees were few and mostly far away from Georgia; their persecutors were many and near at hand. Given the racist realities of the time, Jackson was almost certainly correct in contending that for the Cherokees to remain in Georgia risked their extinction. To preserve the Cherokees as a tribe—to enforce Marshall’s decision—would have required raising and sending federal troops to Georgia, stationing them there indefinitely, and ordering them to shoot white Georgians who threatened the Indians. Jackson realized that American democracy simply wouldn’t sustain such a policy. It was one thing to threaten to use force to preserve the Union; in such an endeavor he could expect broad support from the people who would actually do the fighting. It was another thing to ask white citizens to risk death protecting Indians. They wouldn’t do it. Horace Greeley put words in Jackson’s mouth when the New York editor quoted the president as saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Yet the words captured Jackson’s attitude. The chief justice would have to enforce the decision, because nobody else would.
N
icholas Biddle was a more resourceful foe than John Marshall, in a very literal sense. The resources at the command of the Bank of the United States included a large portion of the country’s money supply. If Biddle employed those resources against the administration, he could bring the American economy to its knees.
He hoped this wouldn’t be necessary. Even after Jackson’s veto of the bank renewal bill, and after Jackson’s reelection, Biddle believed the bank’s position was impregnable. The critical issue for the bank—and for Jackson—was control of the deposits of the federal government. They constituted the bank’s primary source of financial strength, providing the assets against which the bank made loans. They were under the control of the Treasury, which was to say, under the control of Jackson, and if the president were to remove the deposits, the bank would be crippled. But to do so would disrupt financial channels developed over the sixteen years of the bank’s existence, would seriously inconvenience the government and the public, and would destabilize the economy.
Biddle felt secure, even smug. “They will not
dare
to remove them,” he told Daniel Webster. “If the deposits are withdrawn, it will be a declaration of war which cannot be recalled.”
W
ar was precisely what Jackson intended, although he would have said that Biddle brought the conflict on himself. In February 1833 the president received an alarming report of what he considered the bank’s continuing designs against democracy. “I am informed by a gentleman whose knowledge of the U.S. Bank is second only to that of its president . . . that the Bank counts upon being rechartered,” James Hamilton wrote.
Its purpose is for the next two years to fortify itself beyond all hazard by calling in its responsibilities gradually. . . . This operation will be performed under the avowed idea that it is necessary and preliminary to winding up its concerns. . . . At a proper time, about the expiration of the period referred to, it will by withholding bills and by other means within its power cause exchange to advance so as to cause the exportation of specie and thus occasion a run upon all the monied institutions. This
it
will be prepared for. And the affairs of the state banks will consequently be so deranged as to compel them to stop specie payments. The immense injury to the whole nation resulting from that event, it is believed, and not without foundation, will induce a strong public feeling in favor of recharter of the Bank as the only means of restoring a sound currency.