American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

by Jon Meacham

IN THE VAST stretches of Indian land, particularly in the Southwest, Jackson saw a monumental task: the removal of Native Americans to lands west of the Mississippi. It was, said Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts, “the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war.” Jackson believed in removal with all his heart, and by refusing to entertain any other scenario, he was as ferocious in inflicting harm on a people as he often was in defending the rights of those he thought of as the people. To Jackson the interests of whites were paramount in the removal question. To those who argued for Indian rights, he justified his course by arguing that removal would guarantee the survival of the tribes, which would otherwise be wiped out, and by asserting that coexistence was impossible. In an 1833 book entitled Indian Wars of the West, Timothy Flint summed up the arguments of those in favor of removal: “Collisions, murders, escapes of fugitive slaves, and the operations of laws and usages so essentially different, as those of the white and red people, will forever keep alive between the contiguous parties feuds, quarrels, and retaliations, which can never cease until one of the parties becomes extinct.” Flint concluded that advocates of removal “see the race perpetuated in opulence and peace in the fair prairies of the west. Here they are to grow up distinct red nations, with schools and churches, the anvil, the loom, and the plough...