An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (16 page)

At the time, many US Americans saw the purchase as a strategic means of averting war with France while securing commerce on the Mississippi. But it was not long before some began eyeing it
for settlement and others proposing an “exchange” of Indigenous lands in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest for lands west of the Mississippi.
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Before turning to conquest and colonization west of the Mississippi, the slavery-based rule of the Southeast would be ethnically cleansed of Indigenous peoples. The man for the job was Andrew Jackson.

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land. This trend of extermination became common in the twentieth century as the United States seized military and economic control of the world, capping five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism.
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The canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor (1871–90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, “The colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the modern world.”
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Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi.

Andrew Jackson was an influential Tennessee land speculator, politician, and wealthy owner of a slave-worked plantation, the Hermitage. He was also a veteran Indian killer. Jackson's family personified the Protestant Scots-Irish migration to the borderlands of empires. Jackson's Scots-Irish parents and two older brothers arrived in Pennsylvania from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in 1765. The Jacksons soon moved to a Scots-Irish community on the North Carolina border with South Carolina. Jackson's father died after a logging accident a few weeks before Andrew's birth in 1767. Life was hard for a single mother and three children on the frontier. At age thirteen, with little education, Jackson became a courier for the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of independence from Britain. Jackson's mother and his brothers died
during the war, leaving him an orphan. He worked at various jobs, then studied law and was admitted to the bar in the Western District of North Carolina, which would later become the state of Tennessee. Through his legal work, most of which related to disputed land claims, he acquired a plantation near Nashville worked by 150 slaves. He helped usher in Tennessee as a state in 1796, then was elected as its US senator, an office he quit after a year to become a judge in the Tennessee Supreme Court for six years.

As the most notorious land speculator in western Tennessee, Jackson enriched himself by acquiring a portion of the Chickasaw Nation's land. It was in 1801 that Jackson first took command of the Tennessee militia as a colonel and began his Indian-killing military career. After his brutal war of annihilation against the Muskogee Nation, Jackson continued building his national military and political career by tackling the resistant Seminoles in what are known as the Seminole Wars. In 1836, during the second of these wars, US Army general Thomas S. Jesup captured the popular Anglo attitude toward the Seminoles: “The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them.” By then Jackson was finishing his second term as the most popular president in US history to that date, and the policy of genocide was embedded in the highest office of the US government.
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In the Southeast, the Choctaws and Chickasaws turned exclusively to US traders once the new US republic effectively cut off access to the Spanish in Florida. Soon they were trapped in the US trading world, in which they would run up debts and then have no way to pay other than by ceding land to creditors who were often acting as agents of the federal government. This was no accidental outcome but was foreseen and encouraged by Jefferson. In 1805, the Choctaws ceded most of their lands to the United States for $50,000, and the Chickasaws relinquished all their lands north of the Tennessee River for $20,000. Many Choctaws and Chickasaws thus became landless participants in the expanding plantation economy, burdened by debts and poverty.
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The division of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation and the rise of Andrew Jackson as a result led to his eventual elevation to the presidency and carrying out of the final solution—elimination of all
the Indigenous communities east of the Mississippi through forced removal. After the Choctaws and Chickasaws lost most of their territories, only the Muskogees continued to resist the United States.

The Muskogee Nation was a federation of autonomous towns located in the valleys of the many rivers that crisscross what are now the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of Georgia and Florida. The Lower Creeks inhabited and farmed in the eastern part of this region watered by the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Rivers, while the Upper Creeks lived west of them, in the valleys of the Coosa, Tallapoosa and Alabama Rivers. Following US independence, the Muskogees were divided by settler colonialism. Lower Creek villages became economically dependent on settlers and emulated settlers' values, including ownership of African slaves. This was largely due to two decades of diligent work on the part of US Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins. He was in charge of the US government's “civilization” project, lending the settler moniker “Five Civilized Tribes” to describe the great agricultural nations of the Southeast. Hawkins's mission was to instill Euro-American values and practices in Indigenous peoples—including the profit motive, privatization of property, debt, accumulation of wealth by a few, and slavery—allowing settlers to gain the land and assimilate the Muskogees. At the time of independence, hundreds of settlers were squatting illegally on lands of Muskogees of the Lower Creek towns, and that is where Hawkins concentrated, leaving the Muskogees up-river alone. However, traditionalists among the Upper Creeks, who had allied with Tecumseh and the Shawnee confederation, understood that they would be next, as they saw the twenty-year Hawkins project transforming some citizens of the Lower Creek towns into wealthy plantation and slave owners, while the majority became landless and poor.

Traditionalist fighters, called Red Sticks due to the color of their wooden spears, began an offensive against collaborating Upper Creeks and settlers that ended in civil war during 1813. The Red Sticks created chaos that affected Hawkins's scheme, as they attacked anyone associated with his program. Their effectiveness, however, provoked a genocidal counteroffensive not officially authorized by the federal government, led by Andrew Jackson who was
then head of the Tennessee militias. Jackson threatened to form his own mercenary army to drive the Muskogees “into the ocean” if the government failed to eradicate the insurgents.
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Although Jackson and his fellow Tennesseans made it clear that their goal was extermination of the Muskogee Nation, their rhetoric claimed self-defense. In a series of search-and-destroy missions over three months prior to the final assault on the Red Sticks, Jackson's mercenaries killed hundreds of Muskogee civilians, pursuing without mercy even homeless and starved refugees seeking shelter and safety. By this point, the Red Sticks had killed most of the Muskogee Nation livestock both to deprive US soldiers of food and to rid Muskogee culture of the colonizers' influence.
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Both Shawnee fighters and Africans who had freed themselves from slavery allied with the Red Sticks. With all their families they set up a fortified encampment at Tohopeka at the Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama. Jackson proceeded to mobilize Lower Creek fighters and some Cherokee allies against the Red Sticks. In March 1814, with seven hundred mounted militiamen and six hundred Cherokee and Lower Creek fighters, Jackson's armies attacked the Red Stick stronghold. The mercenaries captured three hundred Red Stick wives and children and held them as hostages to induce Muskogee surrender. Of a thousand Red Stick and allied insurgents, eight hundred were killed. Jackson lost forty-nine men.

In the aftermath of “the Battle of Horseshoe Bend,” as it is known in US military annals, Jackson's troops fashioned reins for their horses' bridles from skin stripped from the Muskogee bodies, and they saw to it that souvenirs from the corpses were given “to the ladies of Tennessee.”
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Following the slaughter, Jackson justified his troops' actions: “The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the quiet of our borders.… They have disappeared from the face of the Earth.… How lamentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcasses of the slain! But it is in the dispensation of that providence, which inflicts partial evil to produce general good.”
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Horseshoe Bend marked the end of the Muskogees' resistance in their original homeland. As historian Alan Brinkley has observed,
Jackson's political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians—that is, their eradication.
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The surrender document the Muskogee Nation was forced to sign in 1814, the Treaty of Fort Jackson, asserted that they had lost under “principles of national justice and honorable war.” Andrew Jackson, the only US negotiator of the treaty, insisted on nothing less than the total destruction of the Muskogee Nation, which the Muskogees had no power to refuse or negotiate. These terms of total surrender shocked the small group of Muskogee plantation and slave owners, who thought that they had been thoroughly accepted by the US Americans. They had fought alongside the Anglo militias against the majority Red Sticks in the war just concluded, yet all Muskogees were now to be punished equally. To no avail did the “friendlies” prostrate themselves before Jackson at the treaty meeting, begging that they and their holdings be spared. Jackson told them that the extreme punishment exacted upon them should teach all those who would try to oppose US domination. “We bleed our enemies in such cases,” he explained, “to give them their senses.”
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Military historian Grenier observes that “Jackson's ‘bleeding' of the Muskogees marks a culminating point in American military history as the end of the Transappalachian East's Indian wars.… The conquest of the West was not guaranteed by defeating the British Army in battle in 1815, but by defeating and driving the Indians from their homelands.”
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The treaty obliged surviving Muskogees to move onto western remnants of their homelands, and Jackson, far from being reprimanded for his genocidal methods, won a commission from President James Madison as major general in the US Army. The territory that would become Alabama and Mississippi now lay open to Anglo-American settlement, an ominous green light to the expansion of plantation slavery. The Muskogee War thus inscribed a US policy of ethnic cleansing onto an entire Indigenous population. The policy originated by Andrew Jackson in that war would be reconfirmed politically when he became president in 1828.
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The Upper Creek Muskogees who remained in Alabama surrendered to Jackson and ceded twenty-three million acres of their ancestral
lands to the United States in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The Red Sticks, however, joined the resistant Seminole Nation in the Florida Everglades and three more decades of Muskogee resistance ensued. During this period, Anglo-American slave owners, and Andrew Jackson in particular, were determined to destroy the safe havens that Seminole towns offered to Africans who escaped from slavery.
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The Seminole Nation had not existed under that name prior to European colonization. The ancestral towns of the Indigenous people who became known as Seminoles were located along rivers in a large area of what is today Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Florida Panhandle. In the mid-eighteenth century, Wakapuchasee (Cowkeeper) and his people separated from the Coweta Muskogees and moved south into what was then Spanish-occupied Florida. As Spain, Britain, and later the United States decimated Indigenous towns throughout the Southeast, survivors, including self-emancipated Africans, established a refuge in Seminole territory in Spanish Florida in the Everglades. European incursions came in the form of military attacks, disease, and disruption of trade routes, causing collapse and realignments within and between the towns.
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The Seminole Nation was born of resistance and included the vestiges of dozens of Indigenous communities as well as escaped Africans, as the Seminole towns served as refuge. In the Caribbean and Brazil, people in such escapee communities were called Maroons, but in the United States the liberated Africans were absorbed into Seminole Nation culture. Then, as now, Seminoles spoke the Muskogee language, and much later (in 1957) the US government designated them an “Indian tribe.” The Seminoles were one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” ordered from their national homelands in the 1830s to Indian Territory (later made part of the state of Oklahoma).

The United States waged three wars against the Seminole Nation between 1817 and 1858. The prolonged and fierce Second Seminole War (1835–42) was the longest foreign war waged by the United States up to the Vietnam War. The US military further developed its army, naval, and marine capabilities in again adopting a counterinsurgency strategy, in this case against the Seminole towns
in the Everglades. Once again US forces targeted civilians, destroyed food supplies, and sought to destroy every last insurgent. What US military annals call the First Seminole War (1817–19) began when US authorities entered Spanish Florida illegally in an attempt to recover US plantation owners' “property”: former African slaves. The Seminoles repelled the invasion. In 1818, President James Monroe ordered Andrew Jackson, then a major general in the US Army, to lead three thousand soldiers into Florida to crush the Seminoles and retrieve the Africans among them. The expedition destroyed a number of Seminole settlements and then captured the Spanish fort at Pensacola, bringing down the Spanish government, but it failed in destroying Seminole guerrilla resistance and the Seminoles did not agree to hand over any former slaves. “Armed occupation was the true way of settling a conquered country,” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri said at the time, reflecting a popular blend of militarism and white-supremacist Christian identity. “The children of Israel entered the promised land, with implements of husbandry in one hand, and the weapons of war in the other.”
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The United States annexed Florida as a territory in 1819, opening it to Anglo-American settlement. In 1821 Jackson was appointed military commander of Florida Territory. The Seminoles never sued for peace, were never conquered, and never signed a treaty with the United States, and although some were rounded up and sent in 1832 to Oklahoma, where they were given a land base, the Seminole Nation has never ceased to exist in the Everglades.