Turley to White House: Quit whining

AH_C on February 3, 2011 at 8:32 PM

President Jackson came into office with and gave his First Annual Message to Congress (well before the Trail of Tears started) with this as part of it, and it is a long, long Message:

Georgia became a member of the Confederacy which eventuated in our Federal Union as a sovereign State, always asserting her claim to certain limits, which, having been originally defined in her colonial charter and subsequently recognized in the treaty of peace, she has ever since continued to enjoy, except as they have been circumscribed by her own voluntary transfer of a portion of her territory to the United States in the articles of cession of 1802. Alabama was admitted into the Union on the same footing with the original States, with boundaries which were prescribed by Congress.

There is no constitutional, conventional, or legal provision which allows them less power over the Indians within their borders than is possessed by Maine or New York. Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State? And unless they did would it not be the duty of the General Government to support them in resisting such a measure? Would the people of New York permit each remnant of the six Nations within her borders to declare itself an independent people under the protection of the United States? Could the Indians establish a separate republic on each of their reservations in Ohio? And if they were so disposed would it be the duty of this Government to protect them in the attempt? If the principle involved in the obvious answer to these questions be abandoned, it will follow that the objects of this Government are reversed, and that it has become a part of its duty to aid in destroying the States which it was established to protect.

Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.

Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for a while their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast over-taking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity. It is too late to inquire whether it was just in the United States to include them and their territory within the bounds of new States, whose limits they could control. That step can not be retraced. A State can not be dismembered by Congress or restricted in the exercise of her constitutional power. But the people of those States and of every State, actuated by feelings of justice and a regard for our national honor, submit to you the interesting question whether something can not be done, consistently with the rights of the States, to preserve this much- injured race.

When President Jackson got the SCOTUS ruling later in his tenure and asked about how to enforce it, he was not prancing in the face of the SCOTUS but asking a serious question. The Georgia Militia outnumbered (and probably outgunned) the US Army at that point in time, so there was no way that he was going to be able to force Georgia to give up its land so as to establish an Indian State within it.

I find it amusing for Leftists to point at the Trail of Tears and say they know everything they needed to know about Jackson without reading his prior governmental address or addressing the fact he had adopted an Indian child after one of the more horrific raids he conducted. His viewpoint, and that of much of America, was that the Indian tribes needed to settle and declare space for themselves either via treaty arrangement in unclaimed land or via negotiation within the States. The States, singularly, were under no obligation to negotiate, however and the crux of the problem of what to do with people who should be considered citizens who were not acting like citizens, nor respecting the civil laws of their States and wishing to redraw the boundaries long after the States were established is not an easy one for anyone to consider.

He was not being flip about the SCOTUS decision. Not only couldn’t he force Georgia to deal with the tribes, but he couldn’t force the tribes to abide by the laws of the State, save through bloodshed. And attempting anything that Georgia hadn’t signed up to via federal law was inviting a very hostile reception. He could and did face down North Carolina previous to that, and it would have sundered the Union over taxation if NC didn’t back down. For Georgia to give up her sovereign lands, at that point, would have invited a war… so that wasn’t happening. Georgia also wasn’t getting cooperation from the tribes, so a civil understanding wasn’t going on. The tribes weren’t getting their way, either, and if something wasn’t done there would be a horrific end to it. Where was the SCOTUS ruling going? Who could enforce it in that day and age? Thus Congress acted… wrongly, but all the ‘right’ choices were gone by then.

I have yet to hear, from anyone, on what President Jackson ‘should’ have done given his resources, the state of affairs between the various States and the tribes involved, the SCOTUS decision, the state of the US Army vice the Georgia militia, limitations of the federal government with regard to State borders… yes it is later written as a boastful, prideful matter of ‘let the court figure out how to enforce it’s decision’. Matters at the time were not cut and dried then. People can decide if what he was purported to say was defiance, or simply a statement that encapsulated the position he was in. I tend to the latter as I look more into the matter, the worse it looks from every side given the society as it was then. That period is a mark of shame upon the President, Congress, States and Nation as a whole… yet I have trouble seeing what the ‘right’ thing to do was that could have been thought of by those people at that time. Perhaps Crockett should have pushed Jackson more on the initial good will demonstrated in his earlier letters, but the two men did have a dislike for each other. You can judge for yourself reading about the times and what was written by the men involved. Fun it is not.

ajacksonian on February 4, 2011 at 9:33 AM