This month commemorates the 250th birthday of the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson. The 45th president, Donald Trump, fashions himself a modern day Jackson and recently made a visit to Tennessee to celebrate Jackson’s rugged individualism and salute his hero’s status as the first “people’s president.”
Born on March 15, 1767, in North Carolina, Andrew Jackson rose from poverty to become a lawyer, landowner, multi-millionaire, founder of the Democratic Party and major military general. It was his exploits during the War of 1812 against the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, and later the British in New Orleans, that elevated him to national prominence and hero status. Jackson’s life seems torn from the pages of a Horatio Alger story: He went from being an orphan to the Oval Office. That’s the good.
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The bad: Several U.S. Presidents owned slaves, and Jackson is among that number. But he was worse than a slave owner — Jackson was a slave trader. He became wealthy from the interstate slave trade, a practice of exporting slaves from the upper South to the lower South. This is most egregious because it is as close to the breeding of human beings as one can get. Some historians want to gloss over or totally ignore Jackson’s life as a slave trader. But it’s been well documented in the Journal of East Tennessee History, as well as such work as “A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade” by Robert H. Gudmestad. It was the slave trade that allowed Jackson to purchase 420 acres of land that would become the Hermitage in Nashville and where he would amass more than 150 slaves upon his death on June 8, 1845. That number of slaves is enough to place him in the Slave Owner’s Hall of Fame, if there is such a thing.
Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, and by 1830, he had signed the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly removed the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations from the southern homelands to Oklahoma. It was a 1,000 mile trek, mostly by foot, without extra food, clothing or blankets. In total, 46,000 Native Americans were driven from 25 million acres of their native land — and at least 6,000 of them died from small pox, starvation and exposure on what the Cherokee called the “Nunna dual Isunyi” or the Trail of Tears. Naturally, white settlers were given the confiscated Indian lands.
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Jackson had been laying the groundwork for such ethnic cleansing since the War of 1812, when he spear-headed a series of treaties that took over huge tracts of land from Native Americans in the southern states. When escaped slaves found refuge with the Seminole nation in Florida, Jackson used that as a pretext to launch the Seminole War of 1818. The end result was the Florida Purchase a year later from Spain. But it was Jackson’s marauding of Seminole villages and capturing Spanish property that precipitated the transaction.
When gold was discovered in Native American lands, Georgia in 1829, that became the first step of a long winter’s journey. President Jackson summed it up best in his fifth annual address to Congress in 1833: “That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement, which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.”
To his admirers, Andrew Jackson was affectionately known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness. To the Cherokee nation, he was derisively referred to as “Sharp Knife” for the way he destroyed a people and their culture. What you choose to celebrate and who you chose to exalt is your prerogative. However, it should always be comprehensive and never at the expense of the truth.
James E. Cherry is a poet, novelist and social critic from Jackson, Tennessee.
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Source: https://t-tees.com
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