Some in the U.S. conservative
faction
are telling us Trump a retread of Jackson,
that murdering, slave-holding esteemed man of action.
On May 28
in “A.D” 1830 in fact,
Congress
passed this disgraceful act*,
one of the nastiest ever enacted.
“Old Hickory” with his “fine people's” approval
set about Southeastern tribes removal:
long-settled peoples pushed off their farms
by this Indian-killer† with force of arms
and forced-marched to southwest infertile soil.
When, later, we found that land had oil,
we
reneged on the deal (business as usual),
took
back Oklahoma and made it a musical.
If you wish, turn your head and look away.
One more thing to forget this Memorial Day.
[Updated 5/28/2018, 10 pm]
______________
*Indian
Removal Act, (May
28, 1830), first major legislative departure from the U.S. policy of
officially respecting the legal and political rights of the American
Indians. The act authorized the president to grant Indian
tribes unsettled western prairie land in exchange for their desirable
territories within state borders (especially in the Southeast), from
which the tribes would be removed. The rapid settlement of land east
of the Mississippi
River made it clear by the mid-1820s that the white man would not
tolerate the presence of even peaceful Indians there. Pres. Andrew
Jackson (1829–37) vigorously promoted this new policy, which
became incorporated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Although
the bill provided only for the negotiation with tribes east of the
Mississippi
on the basis of payment for their lands, trouble arose when the
United
States resorted to force to gain the Indians’ compliance
with its demand that they accept the land exchange and move west.
A number of northern tribes were peacefully resettled in western
lands considered undesirable for the white man. The problem lay in
the Southeast, where members of what were known as the Five
Civilized Tribes (Chickasaw,
Choctaw,
Seminole,
Cherokee,
and Creek)
refused to trade their cultivated
farms for the promise of strange land in the Indian
Territory with a so-called permanent title to that land. Many of
these Indians had homes, representative government, children in
missionary schools, and trades other than farming. Some 100,000
tribesmen were forced to march westward under U.S. military coercion
in the 1830s; up to 25 percent of the Indians, many in manacles,
perished en route. The trek of the Cherokee in 1838–39 became known
as the infamous “Trail
of Tears” (see Cherokee).
Even more reluctant to leave their native lands were the Florida
Indians, who fought resettlement for seven years (1835–42) in the
second of the Seminole
Wars.
The frontier began to be pushed aggressively westward in the years
that followed, upsetting the “guaranteed” titles of the displaced
tribes and further reducing their relocated holdings.
©2018
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
†Andrew Jackson: A man nicknamed “Indian killer” and “Sharp Knife” surely deserves the top spot on a list of worst U.S. Presidents. Andrew Jackson “was a forceful proponent of Indian removal,” according to PBS. Others have a less genteel way of describing the seventh president of the United States.
“Andrew Jackson was a wealthy slave owner and infamous Indian killer, gaining the nickname ‘Sharp Knife’ from the Cherokee,” writes Amargi on the website Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. “He was also the founder of the Democratic Party, demonstrating that genocide against indigenous people is a nonpartisan issue. His first effort at Indian fighting was waging a war against the Creeks. President Jefferson had appointed him to appropriate Creek and Cherokee lands. In his brutal military campaigns against Indians, Andrew Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian women and children after massacres in order to complete the extermination. The Creeks lost 23 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama, paving the way for cotton plantation slavery. His frontier warfare and subsequent ‘negotiations’ opened up much of the southeast U.S. to settler colonialism.”
Andrew Jackson was not only a genocidal maniac against the Indigenous Peoples of the southwest, he was also racist against African peoples and a scofflaw who “violated nearly every standard of justice,” according to historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. As a major general in 1818, Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida chasing fugitive slaves who had escaped with the intent of returning them to their “owners,” and sparked the First Seminole War. During the conflict, Jackson captured two British men, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Ambrister, who were living among the Seminoles. The Seminoles had resisted Jackson’s invasion of their land. One of the men had written about his support for the Seminoles’ land and treaty rights in letters found on a boat. Andrew Jackson used the “evidence” to accuse the men of “inciting” the Seminoles to “savage warfare” against the U.S. He convened a “special court martial” tribunal then had the men executed. “His actions were a study in flagrant disobedience, gross inequality and premeditated ruthlessness… he swept through Florida, crushed the Indians, executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and violated nearly every standard of justice,” Wyatt-Brown wrote.
In 1830, a year after he became president, Jackson signed a law that he had proposed – the Indian Removal Act – which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years 46,000 indigenous people were removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land “to white settlement and to slavery,” according to PBS. The area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.
