FINAL REMOVAL OF THE INDIANS.
At the commencement of the annual session of 1836-'37, President
Jackson had the gratification to make known to Congress the
completion of the long-pursued policy of removing all the Indians
in the States, and within the organized territories of the Union,
to their new homes west of the Mississippi. It was a policy
commencing with Jefferson, pursued by all succeeding Presidents, and
accomplished by Jackson. The Creeks and Cherokees had withdrawn from
Georgia and Alabama; the Chickasaws and Choctaws from Mississippi
and Alabama; the Seminoles had stipulated to remove from Florida;
Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri had all been relieved of their
Indian population; Kentucky and Tennessee, by earlier treaties with
the Chickasaws, had received the same advantage. This freed the
slave States from an obstacle to their growth and prosperity, and
left them free to expand, and to cultivate, to the full measure
of their ample boundaries. All the free Atlantic States had long
been relieved from their Indian populations, and in this respect
the northern and southern States were now upon an equality. The
result has been proved to be, what it was then believed it would
be, beneficial to both parties; and still more so to the Indians
than to the whites. With them it was a question of extinction,
the time only the debatable point. They were daily wasting under
contact with the whites, and had before their eyes the eventual but
certain fate of the hundreds of tribes found by the early colonists
on the Roanoke, the James River, the Potomac, the Susquehannah,
the Delaware, the Connecticut, the Merrimac, the Kennebec and the
Penobscot. The removal saved the southern tribes from that fate;
and in giving them new and unmolested homes beyond the verge of the
white man's settlement, in a country temperate in climate, fertile
in soil, adapted to agriculture and to pasturage, with an outlet for
hunting, abounding with salt water and salt springs--it left them
to work out in peace the problem of Indian civilization. To all the
relieved States the removal of the tribes within their borders was a
great benefit--to the slave States transcendently and inappreciably
great. The largest tribes were within their limits, and the best of
their lands in the hands of the Indians, to the extent, in some of
the States, as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, of a third or a
quarter of their whole area. I have heretofore shown, in the case of
the Creeks and the Cherokees in Georgia, that the ratification of
the treaties for the extinction of Indian claims within her limits,
and which removed the tribes which encumbered her, received the
cordial support of northern senators; and that, in fact, without
that support these great objects could not have been accomplished.
I have now to say the same of all the other slave States. They were
all relieved in like manner. Chickasaws and Choctaws in Mississippi
and Alabama; Chickasaw claims in Tennessee and Kentucky; Seminoles
in Florida; Caddos and Quapaws in Louisiana and in Arkansas;
Kickapoos, Delawares, Shawnees, Osages, Iowas, Pinkeshaws, Weas,
Peorias, in Missouri; all underwent the same process, and with the
same support and result. Northern votes, in the Senate, came to the
ratification of every treaty, and to the passage of every necessary
appropriation act in the House of Representatives. Northern men may
be said to have made the treaties, and passed the acts, as without
their aid it could not have been done, constituting, as they did, a
large majority in the House, and being equal in the Senate, where
a vote of two-thirds was wanting. I do not go over these treaties
and laws one by one, to show their passage, and by what votes. I
did that in the case of the Creek treaty and the Cherokee treaty,
for the removal of these tribes from Georgia; and showed that the
North was unanimous in one case, and nearly so in the other, while
in both treaties there was a southern opposition, and in one of
them (the Cherokee), both Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay in the negative:
and these instances may stand for an illustration of the whole. And
thus the area of slave population has been almost doubled in the
slave States, by sending away the Indians to make room for their
expansion; and it is unjust and cruel--unjust and cruel in itself,
independent of the motive--to charge these Northern States with
a design to abolish slavery in the South. If they had harbored
such design--if they had been merely unfriendly to the growth and
prosperity of these Southern States, there was an easy way to
have gratified their feelings, without committing a breach of the
constitution, or an aggression or encroachment upon these States:
they had only to sit still and vote against the ratification of the
treaties, and the enactment of the laws which effected this great
removal. They did not do so--did not sit still and vote against
their Southern brethren. On the contrary, they stood up and spoke
aloud, and gave to these laws and treaties an effective and zealous
support. And I, who was the Senate's chairman of the committee of
Indian affairs at this time, and know how these things were done,
and who was so thankful for northern help at the time; I, who know
the truth and love justice, and cherish the harmony and union of
the American people, feel it to be my duty and my privilege to note
this great act of justice from the North to the South, to stand
in history as a perpetual contradiction of all imputed design in
the free States to abolish slavery in the slave States. I speak of
States, not of individuals or societies.
I have shown that this policy of the universal removal of the
Indians from the East to the West of the Mississippi originated
with Mr. Jefferson, and from the most humane motives, and after
having seen the extinction of more than forty tribes in his own
State of Virginia; and had been followed up under all subsequent
administrations. With General Jackson it was nothing but the
continuation of an established policy, but one in which he heartily
concurred, and of which his local position and his experience made
him one of the safest of judges; but, like every other act of his
administration, it was destined to obloquy and opposition, and
to misrepresentations, which have survived the object of their
creation, and gone into history. He was charged with injustice
to the Indians, in not protecting them against the laws and
jurisdiction of the States; with cruelty, in driving them away from
the bones of their fathers; with robbery, in taking their lands for
paltry considerations. Parts of the tribes were excited to resist
the execution of the treaties, and it even became necessary to send
troops and distinguished generals--Scott to the Cherokees, Jesup
to the Creeks--to effect their removal; which, by the mildness and
steadiness of these generals, and according to the humane spirit of
their orders, was eventually accomplished without the aid of force.
The outcry raised against General Jackson, on account of these
measures, reached the ears of the French traveller and writer on
American democracy (De Tocqueville), then sojourning among us and
collecting materials for his work, and induced him to write thus in
his chapter 18:
"The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place, at the
present day, in a regular, and, as it were, legal manner. When
the white population begins to approach the limit of a desert
inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the United States
usually dispatches envoys to them, who assemble the Indians
in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with them,
accost them in the following manner: 'What have you to do in
the land of your fathers? Before long you must dig up their
bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you
inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes or
prairies, except where you dwell? and can you live nowhere but
under your own sun? Beyond those mountains, which you see at
the horizon--beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the
west--there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found
in great abundance. Sell your lands to us, and go and live
happily in those solitudes.'
"After holding this language, they spread before the eyes of
the Indians fire-arms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy, glass
necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and looking-glasses.
If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still hesitate,
it is insinuated that they have not the means of refusing their
required consent, and that the government itself will not long
have the power of protecting them in their rights. What are
they to do? Half convinced, half compelled, they go to inhabit
new deserts, where the importunate whites will not permit them
to remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the
Americans obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which
the richest sovereigns in Europe could not purchase."
The Grecian Plutarch deemed it necessary to reside forty years in
Rome, to qualify himself to write the lives of some Roman citizens;
and then made mistakes. European writers do not deem it necessary
to reside in our country at all in order to write our history. A
sojourn of some months in the principal towns--a rapid flight along
some great roads--the gossip of the steamboat, the steam-car, the
stage-coach, and the hotel--the whispers of some earwigs--with the
reading of the daily papers and the periodicals, all more or less
engaged in partisan warfare--and the view of some debates, or scene,
in Congress, which may be an exception to its ordinary decorum
and intelligence: these constitute a modern European traveller's
qualifications to write American history. No wonder that they commit
mistakes, even where the intent is honest. And no wonder that Mons.
de Tocqueville, with admitted good intentions, but with no "forty
years" residence among us, should be no exception to the rule
which condemns the travelling European writer of American history
to the compilation of facts manufactured for partisan effect, and
to the invention of reasons supplied from his own fancy. I have
already had occasion, several times, to correct the errors of
Mons. de Tocqueville. It is a compliment to him, implicative of
respect, and by no means extended to others, who err more largely,
and of purpose, but less harmfully. His error in all that he has
here written is profound! and is injurious, not merely to General
Jackson, to whom his mistakes apply, but to the national character,
made up as it is of the acts of individuals; and which character it
is the duty of every American to cherish and exalt in all that is
worthy, and to protect and defend from all unjust imputation. It
was in this sense that I marked this passage in De Tocqueville for
refutation as soon as his book appeared, and took steps to make the
contradiction (so far as the alleged robbery and cheating of the
Indians was concerned) authentic and complete and as public and
durable as the archives of the government itself. In this sense I
had a call made for a full, numerical, chronological and official
statement of all our Indian purchases, from the beginning of the
federal government in 1789 to that day, 1840--tribe by tribe,
cession by cession, year by year--for the fifty years which the
government had existed; with the number of acres acquired at each
cession, and the amount paid for each.
The call was made in the Senate of the United States, and answered
by document No. 616, 1st session, 26th Congress, in a document of
thirteen printed tabular pages, and authenticated by the signatures
of Mr. Van Buren, President; Mr. Poinsett, Secretary at War; and
Mr. Hartley Crawford, Commissioner of Indian Affairs. From this
document it appeared, that the United States had paid to the Indians
eighty-five millions of dollars for land purchases up to the year
1840! to which five or six millions may be added for purchases
since--say ninety millions. This is near six times as much as the
United States gave the great Napoleon for Louisiana, the whole
of it, soil and jurisdiction; and nearly three times as much as
all three of the great foreign purchases--Louisiana, Florida and
California--cost us! and that for soil alone, and for so much as
would only be a fragment of Louisiana or California. Impressive as
this statement is in the gross, it becomes more so in the detail,
and when applied to the particular tribes whose imputed sufferings
have drawn so mournful a picture from Mons. de Tocqueville. These
are the four great southern tribes--Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws
and Choctaws. Applied to them, and the table of purchases and
payments stands thus: To the Creek Indians twenty-two millions of
dollars for twenty-five millions of acres; which is seven millions
more than was paid France for Louisiana, and seventeen millions
more than was paid Spain for Florida. To the Choctaws, twenty-three
millions of dollars (besides reserved tracts), for twenty millions
of acres, being three millions more than was paid for Louisiana and
Florida. To the Cherokees, for eleven millions of acres, was paid
about fifteen millions of dollars, the exact price of Louisiana or
California. To the Chickasaws, the whole net amount for which this
country sold under the land system of the United States, and by the
United States land officers, three millions of dollars for six and
three-quarter millions of acres, being the way the nation chose to
dispose of it. Here are fifty-six millions to four tribes, leaving
thirty millions to go to the small tribes whose names are unknown to
history, and which it is probable the writer on American democracy
had never heard of when sketching the picture of their fancied
oppressions.
I will attend to the case of these small remote tribes, and
say that, besides their proportion of the remaining thirty-six
millions of dollars, they received a kind of compensation suited
to their condition, and intended to induct them into the comforts
of civilized life. Of these I will give one example, drawn from a
treaty with the Osages, in 1839; and which was only in addition to
similar benefits to the same tribe, in previous treaties, and which
were extended to all the tribes which were in the hunting state.
These benefits were, to these Osages, two blacksmith's shops, with
four blacksmiths, with five hundred pounds of iron and sixty pounds
of steel annually; a grist and a saw mill, with millers for the
same; 1,000 cows and calves; two thousand breeding swine; 1,000
ploughs; 1,000 sets of horse-gear; 1,000 axes; 1,000 hoes; a house
each for ten chiefs, costing two hundred dollars apiece; to furnish
these chiefs with six good wagons, sixteen carts, twenty-eight yokes
of oxen, with yokes and log-chain; to pay all claims for injuries
committed by the tribe on the white people, or on other Indians, to
the amount of thirty thousand dollars; to purchase their reserved
lands at two dollars per acre; three thousand dollars to reimburse
that sum for so much deducted from their annuity, in 1825, for
property taken from the whites, and since returned; and, finally,
three thousand dollars more for an imputed wrongful withholding of
that amount, for the same reason, in the annuity payment of the
year 1829. In previous treaties, had been given seed grains, and
seed vegetables, with fruit seeds and fruit trees; domestic fowls;
laborers to plough up their ground and to make their fences, to
raise crops and to save them, and teach the Indians how to farm;
with spinning, weaving, and sewing implements, and persons to
show their use. Now, all this was in one single treaty, with an
inconsiderable tribe, which had been largely provided for in the
same way in six different previous treaties! And all the rude
tribes--those in the hunting state, or just emerging from it--were
provided for in the same manner, the object of the United States
being to train them to agriculture and pasturage--to conduct them
from the hunting to the pastoral and agricultural state; and for
that purpose, and in addition to all other benefits, are to be added
the support of schools, the encouragement of missionaries, and a
small annual contribution to religious societies who take charge of
their civilization.
Besides all this, the government keeps up a large establishment
for the special care of the Indians, and the management of their
affairs; a special bureau, presided over by a commissioner at
Washington City; superintendents in different districts; agents,
sub-agents, and interpreters, resident with the tribe; and all
charged with seeing to their rights and interests--seeing that the
laws are observed towards them; that no injuries are done them by
the whites; that none but licensed traders go among them; that
nothing shall be bought from them which is necessary for their
comfort, nor any thing sold to them which may be to their detriment.
Among the prohibited articles are spirits of all kinds; and so
severe are the penalties on this head, that forfeiture of the
license, forfeiture of the whole cargo of goods, forfeiture of the
penalty of the bond, and immediate suit in the nearest federal court
for its recovery, expulsion from the Indian country, and disability
for ever to acquire another license, immediately follow every
breach of the laws for the introduction of the smallest quantity of
any kind of spirits. How unfortunate, then, in M. de Tocqueville
to write, that kegs of brandy are spread before the Indians to
induce them to sell their lands! How unfortunate in representing
these purchases to be made in exchange for woollen garments, glass
necklaces, tinsel bracelets, ear-rings, and looking-glasses! What a
picture this assertion of his makes by the side of the eighty-five
millions of dollars at that time actually paid to those Indians
for their lands, and the long and large list of agricultural
articles and implements--long and large list of domestic animals
and fowls--the ample supply of mills and shops, with mechanics
to work them and teach their use--the provisions for schools and
missionaries, for building fences and houses--which are found in
the Osage treaty quoted, and which are to be found, more or less,
in every treaty with every tribe emerging from the hunter state.
The fact is, that the government of the United States has made it a
fixed policy to cherish and protect the Indians, to improve their
condition, and turn them to the habits of civilized life; and great
is the wrong and injury which the mistake of this writer has done to
our national character abroad, in representing the United States as
cheating and robbing these children of the forest.
But Mons. de Tocqueville has quoted names and documents, and
particular instances of imposition upon Indians, to justify his
picture; and in doing so has committed the mistakes into which
a stranger and sojourner may easily fall. He cites the report
of Messrs. Clark and Cass, and makes a wrong application--an
inverted application--of what they reported. They were speaking of
the practices of disorderly persons in trading with the Indians
for their skins and furs. They were reporting to the government
an abuse, for correction and punishment. They were not speaking
of United States commissioners, treating for the purchase of
lands, but of individual traders, violating the laws. They were
themselves those commissioners and superintendents of Indian
affairs, and governors of Territories, one for the northwest, in
Michigan, the other for the far west, in Missouri; and both noted
for their justice and humanity to the Indians, and for their
long and careful administration of their affairs within their
respective superintendencies. Mons. de Tocqueville has quoted their
words correctly, but with the comical blunder of reversing their
application, and applying to the commissioners themselves, in their
land negotiations for the government, the cheateries which they were
denouncing to the government, in the illicit traffic of lawless
traders. This was the comic blunder of a stranger: yet this is to
appear as American history in Europe, and to be translated into our
own language at home, and commended in a preface and notes.