John Buchanan’s Jackson’s Way and Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars are detailed narratives describing the destruction of the place and power of Native Americans in the Old Southwest (roughly that region encompassing present-day central and west Tennessee, western Georgia, western Florida and all of Alabama and Mississippi). Chronologically, the story spans the period from the American Revolution to the Trail of Tears in 1838.
Though the books trace a common core story of Indian wars and then Indian removal, and center on the actions of Andrew Jackson, the authors emphasize different eras. Buchanan devotes more detail and discussion to the earlier part of the period, through the end of the War of 1812, while Remini offers a full treatment of the story through Jackson’s presidential years. As the master, the premier biographer of Andrew Jackson, Remini brings greater focus, precision, and authority to his discussion than does Buchanan. Still, Buchanan’s book is a superb work, marked by the author’s formidable descriptive power and painstaking research. And Buchanan’s dozens of vividly drawn vignettes make his work profoundly human in texture. The initiated and uninitiated alike will be impressed with, and instructed by, these books.
Treaty settlements, tribal customs, trailblazing pioneers, battles, wars, land speculation, international intrigue, political parties, Indian agents, duels, runaway slaves: these are among the interwoven elements of the complex history traced by Remini and Buchanan. And all these elements in turn are entangled with the personal, political, sometimes exotic story of Sharp Knife—Old Hickory—Andrew Jackson. But others too play prominent roles in the events described by Remini and Buchanan, some—like the Creek leader, Red Eagle (William Weatherford)—nearly rivaling Jackson in the authors’ eyes as a man of compelling stature and significance.
Largely missing from Remini’s and Buchanan’s accounts are explicit references to things religious. Indeed, there is little in either book to suggest that religious attitudes, assumptions, or aspirations played any substantive part in this epic story. Remini does mention, almost in passing, the role played by missionaries in the legal struggle of the Cherokees to preserve their land in Georgia; and he describes one sympathetic Indian agent as a Christian. But while Remini and Buchanan both indicate that Indian prophets and mystics clearly were influential in shaping the Indian response to white culture and white encroachment, the religious content and context of the messages delivered by these spiritual leaders is scarcely hinted at by the authors. So too, although Remini provides copious quotations by Jackson, many of which are laced with religious language and imagery, he offers no analysis of the religious or cultural context of those biblically limed discourses. Religion is little more than a trace element when compared to the forces, factors, and personalities emphasized by the authors.
The decision of Remini and Buchanan—talented and thorough scholars—to forgo any deeper discussion or analysis of a religious nexus easily leads to the obvious, though highly questionable, conclusion that the people of the frontier, the state and national leaders of the day, the Indian chiefs and their followers, acted apart from any controlling set of religious convictions. Despite the apparent religious ambivalence of the people of the time, as portrayed in these books, the drama itself, so ably described by the authors, inevitably leads to a set of questions—if not conclusions—touching issues religious and moral.
Of course, generations removed from the time, the terror, the emotion, and appetites, it is easy to impose religious and moral sanctions on these long dead actors. It may be far too easy to project a simplistic set of moral tests on these people of the past, to assign them moral roles and responsibilities they hardly understood, embraced, or even imagined. It is an achievement of these authors that they retell their pathos-laden story with a minimal amount of glib moralizing. In letting the people of the time speak and act for themselves, they preserve the essential humanity of all the white, Indian and mixed-blood actors in the events they describe.
Next to slavery, the mistreatment of Native Americans is often identified as the penultimate, emblematic American expression of Eurocentic, capitalistic capacity for the exploitation of vulnerable peoples. Both Remini and Buchanan are clearly aware that the tale they have to tell is tragic, at times perverse. And Remini makes explicit his unwillingness to excuse Jackson and his peers for their attitudes and actions concerning Native Americans. (He clarifies, for instance, that even John Quincy Adams manifested racist inclinations and agreed with Jackson on the necessity of Indian removal). Both Remini and Buchanan concede that in securing the Old Southwest, whites, including Jackson, often acted with moral perfidy. But—and this is crucial—these books are equally eloquent in portraying a past where the lines of moral culpability, moral fallibility, are finally and hopelessly ambiguous.
Though neither Buchanan nor Remini make attempts at moral-equivalency arguments, the outline of a crude moral symmetry emerges from the honesty and humanity of these two books. For instance, the horrific, frenzied savagery of the Fort Mims massacre serves as a counterweight to the banal, plodding brutality of the Trail of Tears. And just as Red Eagle turned away in shame from the barbarism of his followers at Fort Mims, Jackson expressed revulsion at the cruelty of the Trail of Tears. And while some Native Americans assisted some slaves in escaping bondage, other Native Americans readily embraced the region’s peculiar institution.
So too, while some whites disdained intermarriage with the Indian “race,” other whites intermarried or expressed acceptance of, and respect for, the offspring of the mixed unions. The American government offered bribes to chiefs to sell or exchange the lands of their people, and a great many Native American leaders accepted the bribes. For his part, Jackson disdained the bribery, but also fully, hypocritically employed the technique to great effect. To be sure, there were victims and victimizers in the Old Southwest. Yet, apportioning the guilt exclusively along Indian-white lines is difficult, made more difficult because so many of the influential participants in the story were people of blended ancestry and true cross-cultural heritage. Whites dispossessed Indians—and Indians also dispossessed Indians.
This ragged moral symmetry must also be set over against a landscape of historical anomalies and paradoxes. When taken together, the symmetry and the paradoxes leave little room either for the self-flattering certitudes of fashionable contemporary orthodoxies or for the false pieties of those older orthodoxies currently out of favor. Most interesting among the anomalies is the fact that Jackson, the racist Indian fighter, adopted an Indian boy.
He really did adopt Lyncoya; Remini and Buchanan both provide the pertinent details without lapsing into sentimentality. Remini especially emphasizes that Jackson loved his adopted son and made clear to everyone that Lyncoya was his son, not a servant, ornament, symbol, or any other inferior thing. The racist herrenvolk cultures of the twentieth century have no analogy in this story. The idea of a Himmler or Hitler adopting a Gypsy or a Jew, and celebrating such an adoption, is preposterous. If it allows no new orthodoxy to be born, or an old one to be resurrected, (and it certainly should not do either), then at least the fact of Lyncoya’s adoption must require some modulation, moderation of current received opinions about Jackson and his community. Similarly, the reality that Red Eagle lived out his life in peace and prosperity among the people he tried to destroy must serve to challenge overbroad statements about the character of racism in the Old Southwest.
Insofar as the final disposition of the Indian problem in the Old Southwest is concerned, Remini closes his book with a particularly effective challenge to those who would make the Indian removal policy of the period simply a matter of evil triumphing over good. Drawing upon the earlier analysis of Francis Paul Prucha, Remini argues that four possibilities, “four courses only,” existed when it came to
ending the everlasting white/red crisis [in the Old Southwest] . …First, genocide . …But no one in his right mind seriously proposed such a solution . …Second, integrate the two societies. But Native Americans had no desire to become cultural white men . …Third, protect the natives where they lived . …Jackson knew such a policy was doomed from the start . …Fourth, removal.
Those who would decry the moral failings of the people of the past have an obligation to offer a clear, historically plausible alternative to the admittedly dreary real past.
These were stark, distinct choices freighted with the complex ancillary realities of the time, notably, a generation of violence, suspicion, greed, and deceit demonstrated by whites and Indians alike. Better alternatives than the one taken—than the one pursued by Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, et al.—would have required (still do require) a powerful and idealistic imagination. It might even be necessary to imagine—to wish—that the people of the Old Southwest, God-fearers and godless alike, would have lived out the fullest communal expression of the Sermon on the Mount.
Kenneth Moore Startup is professor of history at Williams Baptist College. He is the author of The Root of All Evil: The Protestant Clergy and the Economic Mind of the Old South (Univ. of Georgia Press).
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