One of my retirement activities is a project that involves the highways and byways of the Great Cherokee Nation that once occupied this part of the world. We’ve been involved in cataloging the culturally altered "bent trees" that dot our woods, and georeferencing the maps of the early settlers and explorers, hoping to produce accurate maps of the Trails and Roads the Cherokee left behind [see our Mountain Stewards Web Site for the Trail Tree Project and the Indian Trails Project]. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee people in May 1838.
The analogies between that story in the early part of our history and the piece of history we’ve just lived through are eerie. Andrew Jackson came into office with a determination to remove the Native Americans from their ancestral lands to the west. His early order of business was the Indian Removal Act that set the stage for what followed. The Cherokee Nation had shrunk to North Georgia with small pieces in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. The State of Georgia was determined to wrest the land from the Indians. The Cherokee had by this time adopted the ways of the settlers – farming their land, dressing in european clothes, and developing a government modeled on our own. When Georgia began to try to annex the Cherokee Nation, the State of Georgia declared that the land was "Cherokee County Georgia" and demanded all white settlers sign a loyalty oath to the State. A Missionary named Wooster refused and was jailed. His appeal lead to the Supreme Court. The Cherokee won. Justice John Marshall wrote that the Cherokee Nation was soveriegn and in no way bound by the laws of Georgia.
President Andrew Jackson refused to act on that decision and allowed Georgia to press forward with the pressure for removal. The Cherokee stood fast. However a group of the Cherokee leaders representing a small minority signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding the lands to Georgia in return for the Oklahoma Reservation. This dubious treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by only one vote. In May 1838, the sixteen thousand Cherokees on the land were rounded up and marched to Oklahoma, over a fourth of them dying along the way. In Oklahoma, those who signed the treaty were murdered.
Georgians quickly settled the new land [where I now live], and there’s little visible remaining of the Cherokee Nation that flourished here for centuries – the bent trees, the Indian names, and the unseen road system that underlies our modern highways. It was early America at its worst – a racially motivated piece of greed that continued on unabated in the African slave culture that persisted for a few more decades until the Civil War, flowing then into the racial segregation lasting another century.
The President [Andrew Jackson] came into office with an agenda. He pressed that agenda even though the High Court ruled against him, being the only President in our history to ignore the Supreme Court. He got something through Congress based on deceit [the Treaty of New Echota], and he then acted in a way that caused endless suffering and death to complete his plan. His racially driven cause was doomed but he just kept on. It wasn’t long before another kind of President finally took on the racism in the South.
Reading Jon Meacham’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson makes you realize the many faces and hats he wore in our history. He was one of only 2 presidents who was a prisoner of war. He was orphaned after his immediate family died from war related problems. He adopted many children being childless himself. In fact the author writes about Jackson considered Americans his family that needed to be protected from other people(like the Indians) and he wanted the national debt paid to end the debt which he did as the only president to do so. With all Jackson’s terrible faults with the Indians he comes across with a deep love of countrymen and country. I don’t think a future writer of Meacham’s talent could write that of Bush or Cheney, maybe of their love of money or Bush and his base (rich people).