Andrew Jackson and the Native Americans
Was he a hero or a villain?

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“It was the Democratic Party under its founder, Andrew Jackson, and then under Jackson’s Democratic successors, that massacred the Indians and drove them west and presided over the ignominious Trail of Tears,” Dinesh D’Souza said in 2017. “This is the actual precedent that Hitler appealed to in formulating his plans of conquest, dispossession and enslavement.” Others, however, believe D’Souza’s likening of Jackson to Hitler was baseless, unjustified, and insulting to a great American.
As president of the United States, Andrew Jackson advocated for the removal of the Indians from the settled areas of the United States, and their relocation in unsettled areas of the West. In May 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act that made this recommendation the law of the land. This is today considered to be one of the black marks on his presidency and a shameful period in the history of the United States. This is a reasonable judgment, as this policy amounted to penalizing all Indians for the misdeeds of Indian warriors, and it led to untold suffering.
It is noteworthy, however, that contrary to D’Souza’s characterization of him as a vicious and inhuman proto-Hitler, Jackson presented his Indian removal plan as beneficial not just for the Americans, but for the Indians as well. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1829, he said:
The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our states have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life.
Jackson pointed out that the endeavor to civilize the Indians was inconsistent with the practice of buying Indian land:
This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits.
All this is jarring to modern ears. We are told today that the idea that the Indians were not civilized and needed to be is a racist assumption. We are told that to charge them with “savage habits” is likewise ethnocentric and provincial. In the 1960s, 1970s, and thereafter, we were inundated with books and films (such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves, and many others) depicting the Indians as innocent victims of American aggression and imperialism; people who were naturally noble, generous, and open-hearted were oppressed and killed wholesale by rapacious, chauvinistic, sexually repressed white Europeans.
It makes for a good story and is a linchpin of the cultural self-hatred that for decades now has been inculcated assiduously in American youth. But reality, as is always the case when compared with propaganda, is more complicated. The claim that Americans stole the land from the Indians is based on the peculiar assumption that the migration of peoples, war, and conquest, all of which are constants of human history, are always illegitimate. If followed through, this principle would roll back a great deal more than the European settlement of North America.
What’s more, the Indians were indeed waging a war. Jackson had ample reason to refer to the Indians’ “savage habits,” and if any of his hearers opposed his policy, it was not because they disputed that characterization. Indian raids aroused horror in American settlers for decades; U.S. Army Captain Robert G. Carter wrote of the victims of one raid years after Jackson’s presidency that “their fingers, toes, and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths, and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines. Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals…One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’” Those who lived on the frontier in Jackson’s day would not have found any of this unfamiliar.
Jackson’s policy was not to respond in kind to the Indians, but to give them a place where they could flourish. “Our conduct toward these people,” he said in his first message to Congress, “is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies.” Noting that some tribes had died out altogether, he asserted that others would disappear also if they continued to live among the Americans. “Humanity and national honor,” he declared, “demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity.” In order to “preserve this much-injured race,” he called for “setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any state or territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use.”
It is ironic that Jackson’s solution is so derided today by the American Left, since it is eminently multicultural: instead of trying to make the Indians into Americans, Jackson proposed that they would have their land and their culture, separate from the land and culture of the Americans. Even the segregationist aspect of Jackson’s plan is modern, for after having been banished from American life, segregation has returned: Wesleyan University, Brown University, MIT, Columbia University, Cornell, Oberlin College, and others, all bastions of multiculturalist orthodoxy, have established segregated dorms in the interest of allowing “marginalized” students to flourish. They could have gotten the idea from a man they hate, Andrew Jackson.
Jackson’s plan was popular but not without opposition. Its character of punishing all for the sins of a few repulsed even some of Jackson’s supporters, including Davy Crockett, later an American hero at the Alamo and at that time a congressman from Tennessee, who wrote that he opposed Jackson’s “famous, or rather I should say his in-famous, Indian bill” from “the purest motives in the world.” He called it “a wicked, unjust measure,” which he was determined to oppose despite the political cost. He told Jackson’s supporters, “I was willing to go with General Jackson in every thing that I believed was honest and right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any other man in the whole creation; that I would sooner be honestly and politically d—nd, than hypocritically immortalized.” Accordingly, “I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.” An indication of the popularity of Jackson’s policy was the fact that Crockett lost his bid for reelection, whereupon he declared to those who had voted him out: “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas.”
Jackson’s Indian policy was understandable under the circumstances, but it was unjust as well. However, that makes his presidency a completely evil one only to insufferable Manichaean moralists. Reality is often more complicated.