What Hath God Wrought (50 page)

While the Donelsons were out of favor, William Lewis emerged as the president’s most trusted private secretary, and his wife took over as White House hostess. Lewis was John Eaton’s brother-in-law and became a confidante of Martin Van Buren. Knowing how much importance the Old Hero still attached to vindicating his actions in the Florida War, the crafty Lewis obtained from William H. Crawford a letter confirming what had gone on in Monroe’s top-secret cabinet meetings: Calhoun had criticized Jackson’s conduct. Crawford had recuperated from the illness that wrecked his presidential ambitions and seized the chance to play the role of high-level insider once again. The Georgian found it gratifying to frustrate the presidential hopes of his old rival Calhoun while helping those of Martin Van Buren, a longtime ally. Upon receiving Crawford’s message, Jackson declared, “I have this moment” seen that which “proves Calhoun
a villain
.” Jackson never attributed his discovery to the machinations of his secretary of state. “Van Buren glides along as smoothly as oil and as silently as a cat,” observed one insider with a nose for intrigue.
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As vice president, John C. Calhoun served under two different presidents, and he suffered the peculiar fate of falling out with both of them quickly and irrevocably. His good relations with Jackson lasted only a little longer than had those with John Quincy Adams. Eventually he found himself waging a public pamphlet war against the dominant element in the administration, just as he had done under Adams. This time he was defending his role as Monroe’s secretary of war more than a decade earlier. Crawford had been as critical of Jackson as anyone at the time of the Florida invasion, so it was bizarre for the president now to rely on Crawford’s testimony to discredit Calhoun’s role. Even at this late date Calhoun refrained from attacking the president personally; instead he blamed a sinister cabal for turning Jackson against him.
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Calhoun’s accusations were better founded than Jackson’s; it was the vice president, not the president, who was the victim of a conspiracy.

Van Buren’s victory in the competition for Jackson’s favor could not have been more complete. The president laid it out in a letter to an old friend while reorganizing his cabinet. “I
now know
both Van Buren and Calhoun: the first I know to be a pure republican who has laboured with an eye single to promote the best interests of his country, whilst the other, actuated alone by selfish ambition, has secretly employed all his talents in intrigue and deception, to destroy them, and to disgrace my administration. The plot is unmasked.”
⁴¹
As a result of Jackson’s decision that Van Buren should succeed him, the administration cut loose from Duff Green’s
United States Telegraph
, which had sided with Calhoun in the intraparty conflict, and in December 1830 established the
Washington Globe
, edited by Francis Blair, as its official organ. Green took his newspaper into opposition.

Besides its political fallout, the designation of Van Buren as heir apparent to Jackson, the Eaton Affair had other, more subtle resonances. It took place at a time when sexual behavior was undergoing reexamination by standards we now term “Victorian,” which laid increased emphasis on impulse control and strict personal accountability. Jackson did not directly challenge conventional sexual morality; he cast himself as a defender of female purity. Nevertheless, his stand on behalf of Margaret Eaton, coming after his own relationship with Rachel Robards had come under questioning, tended to align the Democratic Party with those (mostly men) who resisted the demands being made in the nineteenth century (mostly by women) for a stricter code of sexual morality. Only occasionally did issues directly involving sex come into the political arena, but even so the associations were not lost on contemporaries. They may help explain why Jackson’s opposition, in the years to come, could count on more support from women’s groups than the Democrats could. Women, although legally disfranchised, were not necessarily politically apathetic or inert.

III

Indian Removal constituted the major substantive issue the Jackson administration addressed in a first year otherwise largely preoccupied with patronage and personalities. Although Jackson had avoided committing himself on the tariff or internal improvements, his strong stand in favor of rapid Removal was well known and accounted for much of his popularity in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The issue involved Indian tribes all over the country, but the ones with the most at stake were the Five Civilized Tribes of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole. These peoples practiced agriculture and animal husbandry much as their white neighbors did and still possessed substantial domains in the Deep South states plus Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida Territory. The eminent geographer Jedidiah Morse had been commissioned by the federal government to prepare a comprehensive report on the nation’s Indian tribes. His report, issued in 1822, waxed eloquent about the economic and educational progress of the five tribes and advised that they be left in peace to continue it. Morse’s advice was not taken. White settlers bitterly resented the Natives’ presence; besides occupying good cotton land, they traded with free blacks and sometimes provided a haven for runaway slaves.
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State and federal governments responded to the wishes of the settlers, not to the advice of experts. Among the numerous racial conflicts that ensued, the one between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation attracted the most national attention and led to a dramatic confrontation with serious constitutional implications.

The earliest European intruders into what later became the southeastern United States had encountered a thriving people called the Cherokees living in a large area of the southern Appalachians. Like many other Native Americans, the Cherokees sided with the British at the time of the Revolutionary War, recognizing that while the imperial authorities wanted to trade, the white settlers wanted their land. Four years after their British allies surrendered at Yorktown, the Cherokees too conceded defeat in the Treaty of Hopewell, South Carolina (1785). By its terms, the Cherokees yielded the larger part of their accustomed territory. What remained acquired for the first time clear boundaries, which were further restricted by treaties after Tennessee became a state. For a decade there continued to be sporadic unauthorized raids and reprisals by both sides, but the Cherokee Nation never again made war against the United States. Indeed, the tribe allied with Andrew Jackson against their old enemies the Creeks and played a major part in his victory at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Celebrated as a triumph at the time, in the long run this campaign against the Creeks may have been a mistake, since it foreclosed any possibility of intertribal collective resistance. Jackson’s goodwill, which the Cherokees imagined they had earned, proved short-lived; at the Treaty of Fort Jackson, he extracted land cessions not only from the Creeks but also from his Cherokee allies. (The willingness of Crawford, then Madison’s secretary of war, to compensate the Cherokees for these lands initially provoked the long-standing bitterness between him and Jackson.)
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The half century following 1785 might be called the golden age of the Cherokee Nation. As defined by 1819, the nation occupied the northwest corner of Georgia and adjacent portions of what are now Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The people had always practiced agriculture (as their Green Corn Dance testifies), and within their restricted boundaries they increasingly turned to farming as a substitute for hunting and gathering. Trade with the whites flourished, and permanent towns grew up. Decades of evolution in the direction of more centralized and formalized political institutions reached their climax with the adoption of a written constitution for the nation in 1827.
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In these and other ways, the Cherokees showed an ability to synthesize elements borrowed from Western civilization with their Native culture. A prosperous elite emerged, among whom some had received a Western education at mission schools and converted to Christianity. There were Cherokees who intermarried with whites, took up cotton cultivation, and bought slaves. By 1835, about 8 percent of Cherokee families owned slaves. Most of the slaveowners were “mixed bloods,” as those with some white ancestry were called.
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A census taken in 1825 counted 13,563 Cherokees, plus 147 white men and 73 white women who had married into the nation, and 1,277 black slaves. While surely an undercount, the census indicated a growing and cohesive population.
⁴⁶

As remarkable as the economic and political history of the Cherokee golden age was its intellectual history. Far away from the mission schools, a disabled Cherokee veteran of the Creek War went off to live in Arkansas. Sequoyah knew no English, but he pondered deeply over bits of paper with little marks on them, called the white people’s “talking leaves.” How could one make leaves that spoke in the Cherokee language? The solution Sequoyah found workable came to him in a flash of insight in 1821. Within six weeks he devised a system of eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable in the Cherokee language. He rushed back to Georgia with the news. Sequoyah’s syllabary could be mastered by an adult Cherokee-speaker within a week and caught on quickly. By 1828 special type had been cast so that a newspaper, the
Cherokee Phoenix
, could be published in the nation, with parallel columns in English and Cherokee using the new system. Sequoyah turned his attention to applying his system to the Choctaw language, but he never learned English. Sequoyah remains the only identifiable person in human history to have invented a system for writing his own language without first being literate in another.
⁴⁷

The national development of the Cherokees, undertaken at their own initiative, occurred along lines the federal government had approved and professed to encourage. In the Treaty of Holston (1791), the United States had undertaken to assist the Cherokee Nation to “be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of hunters.” In 1806, President Jefferson had urged the Cherokees “to go on learning to cultivate the earth.” Jefferson had welcomed intermarriage, hoping it would lead to the assimilation of the Natives into the dominant culture. (“In time you will be as we are,” the third president had told a delegation of chiefs in 1809; “your blood will mix with ours: and will spread with ours over this great land.”)
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Others, seeing the havoc wrought in the New World by European diseases, predicted that the Indians would simply die out. Significantly, Jefferson’s vision of absorption and the less benign expectation of extinction shared a common consequence: The lands of the Natives would become available for white settlement.
⁴⁹
The government had promoted commerce to encourage the tribes to adopt a white way of life, operating its own Indian trading posts, called “factories,” between 1796 and 1822. Beginning in 1815, it subsidized Christian missionaries to set up schools (with no one voicing a concern about church-state relations). The emergence of a commercially and politically viable Cherokee Nation with a growing Christian minority, borrowing Western technology as needed, forced the white majority to decide what they really wanted for and from the Native Americans. In the past, whites had justified taking aboriginal lands on the grounds that the Indians were not fully utilizing them. Now, Cherokee economic development was rapidly eliminating that excuse.

The problem—from a white point of view—was that the success of efforts to “civilize the Indians” had not yielded the expected dividend in land sales. On the contrary, the more literate, prosperous, and politically organized the Cherokees made themselves, the more resolved they became to keep what remained of their land and improve it for their own benefit. The council of chiefs, urged by federal commissioners in 1823 to sell out and migrate beyond the Mississippi, replied, “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this nation never to cede
one foot
more of our land.”
⁵⁰
Where whites had contemplated such possibilities for them as assimilation, eviction, or extinction, the Cherokees envisioned a different future, built in what remained of their ancestral homeland. A delegation to Washington in 1824 presented the tribe’s case with straightforward dignity. “The Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory; and the limits of their territory are defined by the treaties which they have made with the Government of the United States.”
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The Monroe administration accorded the delegation diplomatic courtesy, provoking protest from racists.
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There was a third party to the debate over the Cherokee lands: the state of Georgia, which had both Creek and Cherokee territory within her boundaries. Georgia’s political leaders had concentrated first on pushing out the Creeks; now, they turned against the Cherokees. Governor George Troup, who had been a Crawfordite in 1824, supported state internal improvements and public education. He could logically have rallied to support John Quincy Adams had that upright New Englander winked at defrauding the Creeks. But when President Adams resisted Georgia’s high-handed methods of dispossession, Troup decided to capitalize on the Indian Removal issue, issuing inflammatory denunciations of Adams. Troup’s demagogic tactics worked: He not only occupied all the Creek lands but also gained reelection as governor in 1825. In 1827, John Forsyth, equally committed to Indian Removal, succeeded Troup as governor and delivered a unanimous Georgia popular vote to Jackson for president in 1828.
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In December 1828, with Jackson safely elected, the Georgia state legislature proceeded against the Cherokees, confident that the incoming administration would not interfere. The legislature unilaterally declared that starting in June 1830, state laws would extend over the Cherokee Nation, notwithstanding the federal treaties of 1785 and subsequent years. To justify its presumptuous action, the legislature asserted that the United States could never have meant to accord autonomy to “barbarous and savage tribes,” and that the Indians were only Georgia’s “tenants at will.”
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When the Cherokees discovered gold on their lands in the spring of 1829 and outsiders found out about it, a horde of impatient whites, unwilling to wait even until June 1, 1830, rushed in and began prospecting. What should have been an economic advantage to the Cherokee Nation turned into a political liability, as violent clashes between Cherokees and intruders ensued. At the request of Governor Forsyth, Secretary of War Eaton withdrew federal troops from the area and after June 1829 allowed the Georgia Guard to assume responsibility for law and order. The aggressiveness of the Georgia political establishment, compounded by outside pressure on the Cherokee gold fields, lent urgency to the issue of Indian Removal when Jackson’s first Congress assembled in December 1829.
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