Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab
Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab -Steve Inskeep
Non-Fiction
Pages: 448
When most people think of Native American resistance to 'manifest destiny' and the relentless encroaching creep of white settlers across the spread of the American continent, they tend to think of the Plains Wars, with mounted braves against American troops, and scalping and massacres. The Cherokees took a different approach, fighting with law and order and treaties. But they still lost.
In many ways the Cherokee Nation was an example of the triumph of George Washington's policy towards the Native Americans of 'pacification' and 'civilisation'. They were one of the Five Civilized Tribes, as they were known, adopting a written language, cultivating farms, building schools, establishing a newspaper and adopting a constitution and legislative government much like that of the United States. Whilst maintaining their identity as a separate nation, their leader, the half-Scottish John Ross, affirmed that they were part of the family of the United States. This, arguably, was what many Americans claimed they wanted for the Native tribes, to give up their 'savage' ways and become 'civilized' members of society. Of course, what Americans really wanted was their land, and President Andrew Jackson was prepared to give it to them.
The story ultimately culminates in the infamous 'Trail of Tears' in which the Cherokee Nation and many other tribes were forcibly removed from their lands. Andrew Jackson is very much the villain in this tale, deservedly so, profiting from the sale of Cherokee lands, refusing to abide by signed treaties, refusing to enforce court decisions from the Supreme Court, manipulating federal policy. John Ross' fatal mistake seems to have been in believing in the promise of America, the truths held to be self-evident. He tried to play the white man's game, but Andrew Jackson wouldn't abide by the rules of that game.
Steve Inskeep pulls no punches in the telling, deservedly so. This is a sad, sordid tale of a relatively neglected chapter in American history. The removal of the tribes from an area that stretched across Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama was one of the most bare-faced and brutal acts of aggression in American history, an act that Andrew Jackson set in motion with no legal justification and against a direct judgement by the Supreme Court. As John Ross famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said, "Even when we won, we lost."