Continuing my comments about the election, this is the second of four reflections about the history of authoritarianism in America. A theme that I will suggest after the final post is that society, generally, survives authoritarianism, but some particular people or communities do not. This is an example.
Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears
The pressure of European settlement and expansion in the southeastern United States brought suffering and displacement to indigenous Native Americans. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole communities were all eventually subject to removal from their native lands.
For the Cherokee, the government negotiated over a dozen treaties, beginning in 1785, that promised peaceful relationships and territorial integrity. All treaties were violated.
Adding to the attractiveness of Cherokee land, the discovery of gold there in the late 1820s further prompted European encroachment. In 1828, the state of Georgia passed laws that seized Cherokee territory and decreed that settlement policies would be administered by the state.
The growing crisis offered the opportunity for the president to intervene. Andrew Jackson did not, allowing the state action to remain in force.
Hero of the War of 1812, wealthy planter (and owner of hundreds of African American slaves), and legislator in various roles before his presidency, Jackson believed in the cause of European displacement and settlement. In an address to congress in 1829, he called for native people to be removed beyond the areas that white settlers had begun to occupy. Soon thereafter, her signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allowing the president to negotiate for the removal of native people to lands west of the Mississippi.
Seeking legal redress, the Cherokee Nation took to the courts, arguing that the Georgia action was illegal because of the supremacy clause of the United States constitution. The supremacy clause (Article VI, clause 2) stipulates that the national government retains the ultimate authority with respect to laws and treaties, and that this authority supersedes that of states in the event of conflicts.
Two notable decisions by the Supreme Court followed.
In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Cherokee Nation sought an injunction to prevent Georgia from enforcing Georgia laws within Cherokee territory. The court said no, finding in a divided opinion that the Cherokee Nation was not a legal entity that had standing to challenge the Georgia laws. The Cherokee Nation, it declared, was a “domestic dependent nation.”
Worcester v. Georgia (1832) was more sympathetic, in a case that revisited the issue of Cherokee sovereignty. The particulars were that the Georgia laws included a provision that no white settlers could reside within Cherokee lands without a license form the governor and without having sworn allegiance to Georgia’s laws. White missionaries who had been working among the Cherokees, including one Samuel Worcester, were arrested and sentenced to several years of hard labor in prison.
This time, the court found that jurisdiction within Cherokee territory belonged to the federal government. Speaking for the majority in a 5-1 decision, Chief Justice Marshall wrote, “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.” The Georgia laws were therefore found to be unconstitutional, and the Cherokee community was vested with the integrity and authority to govern themselves, with their own laws. (The missionaries were released in 1833.)
Faced with a new barrier in his attempt to orchestrate Cherokee displacement, Jackson ignored the court decision. The oversight by the state of Georgia continued.
Additional depredations followed. Seeking to legitimize the process of removal the Jackson administration negotiated the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The treaty provided that Cherokees would vacate their lands within two years in exchange for 5 million dollars and land in Oklahoma. It was negotiated, however, by a small, selected group of Cherokees who were not elected officials of the tribe and lacked any authority to speak on behalf of the larger community. (Several of the treaty signers were assassinated in Cherokee infighting in 1839.)
The brutal winter of 1838 saw Cherokee Trail of Tears, the forcible removal of 16,000 Cherokees over 1000 miles between eastern Tennessee and Oklahoma. Between 4000 and 8000 perished from disease, malnutrition, and exposure. In his later years, a former Georgia Civil War soldier who had witnessed the march commented, “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
With countless choices available, Donald Trump chose the 1835 Ralph Earl portrait of Andrew Jackson to hang in the oval office in his first term.
Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears
The pressure of European settlement and expansion in the southeastern United States brought suffering and displacement to indigenous Native Americans. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole communities were all eventually subject to removal from their native lands.
For the Cherokee, the government negotiated over a dozen treaties, beginning in 1785, that promised peaceful relationships and territorial integrity. All treaties were violated.
Adding to the attractiveness of Cherokee land, the discovery of gold there in the late 1820s further prompted European encroachment. In 1828, the state of Georgia passed laws that seized Cherokee territory and decreed that settlement policies would be administered by the state.
The growing crisis offered the opportunity for the president to intervene. Andrew Jackson did not, allowing the state action to remain in force.
Hero of the War of 1812, wealthy planter (and owner of hundreds of African American slaves), and legislator in various roles before his presidency, Jackson believed in the cause of European displacement and settlement. In an address to congress in 1829, he called for native people to be removed beyond the areas that white settlers had begun to occupy. Soon thereafter, her signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, allowing the president to negotiate for the removal of native people to lands west of the Mississippi.
Seeking legal redress, the Cherokee Nation took to the courts, arguing that the Georgia action was illegal because of the supremacy clause of the United States constitution. The supremacy clause (Article VI, clause 2) stipulates that the national government retains the ultimate authority with respect to laws and treaties, and that this authority supersedes that of states in the event of conflicts.
Two notable decisions by the Supreme Court followed.
In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Cherokee Nation sought an injunction to prevent Georgia from enforcing Georgia laws within Cherokee territory. The court said no, finding in a divided opinion that the Cherokee Nation was not a legal entity that had standing to challenge the Georgia laws. The Cherokee Nation, it declared, was a “domestic dependent nation.”
Worcester v. Georgia (1832) was more sympathetic, in a case that revisited the issue of Cherokee sovereignty. The particulars were that the Georgia laws included a provision that no white settlers could reside within Cherokee lands without a license form the governor and without having sworn allegiance to Georgia’s laws. White missionaries who had been working among the Cherokees, including one Samuel Worcester, were arrested and sentenced to several years of hard labor in prison.
This time, the court found that jurisdiction within Cherokee territory belonged to the federal government. Speaking for the majority in a 5-1 decision, Chief Justice Marshall wrote, “The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.” The Georgia laws were therefore found to be unconstitutional, and the Cherokee community was vested with the integrity and authority to govern themselves, with their own laws. (The missionaries were released in 1833.)
Faced with a new barrier in his attempt to orchestrate Cherokee displacement, Jackson ignored the court decision. The oversight by the state of Georgia continued.
Additional depredations followed. Seeking to legitimize the process of removal the Jackson administration negotiated the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. The treaty provided that Cherokees would vacate their lands within two years in exchange for 5 million dollars and land in Oklahoma. It was negotiated, however, by a small, selected group of Cherokees who were not elected officials of the tribe and lacked any authority to speak on behalf of the larger community. (Several of the treaty signers were assassinated in Cherokee infighting in 1839.)
The brutal winter of 1838 saw Cherokee Trail of Tears, the forcible removal of 16,000 Cherokees over 1000 miles between eastern Tennessee and Oklahoma. Between 4000 and 8000 perished from disease, malnutrition, and exposure. In his later years, a former Georgia Civil War soldier who had witnessed the march commented, “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
With countless choices available, Donald Trump chose the 1835 Ralph Earl portrait of Andrew Jackson to hang in the oval office in his first term.