Historians and biographers have written more than 200 books about the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson. Most have painted him as a steadfast national hero, a victorious general and an administrator of the expansion and enrichment of the nation. Bettina Drew, assistant English professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is writing a biography of Jackson arguing that he is responsible for the largest ethnic cleansing in U.S. history.
"Jackson forcibly and permanently removed tens of thousands of Native Americans from the populated eastern part of the country to the 'Indian Territory' that later became Okalahoma," Drew said.
Drew details how Jackson accomplished this feat by exacting land cessions in military victory, threatening war, and later, passing legislation. Drew said Jackson never wavered--he first wrote of it when he was 26--from his conviction that treaties with the Indians were absurd and that their nations had to go. He saw the Indians in broadly racial terms, not as degraded as blacks but essentially inferior to white Europeans, and he saw no role for their race in the hierarchical social world of the slave-holding South.
As president, Jackson made Indian removal national policy, refusing to enforce a Supreme Court decision ruling that allowed the Cherokees to remain under their own jurisdiction on their own lands in Georgia. The state of Georgia had attempted to annex those lands and impose both its laws and Indian codes based on slave codes; when Jackson failed to act, Georgia sold the Cherokee lands to whites in a lottery.
"By the time President Jackson presented his Indian Removal Bill of 1830, the nation was wading even deeper into the rising waters of sectional conflict, and indeed the vote was split along North-South lines," Drew said. "This removal policy changed the color of the face of the nation. More than any one other individual, Jackson banished Native Americans from our visual realm, our culture and our gene pool, and this should be recognized as his legacy."
Yale University Press will publish Drew's biography next year.
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