Indian Time - A Voice from the Eastern Door

By Bruce Johansen

One of President Donald J. Trump’s first interior decorating decisions in the Oval Office was installation of a large portrait of Andrew Jackson, who served between 1829 and 1837 as the United States’ seventh president. The portrait became a familiar fixture as President Trump showed off his executive orders for the cameras. A no-nonsense former Army general, Jackson led an insurgency by frontier farmers, miners, and traders (the “forgotten men” of the 1820s) against the East Coast elite, led by former President John Quincy Adams.

Jackson was a self-made millionaire (worth billions in today’s money), gained by trading in the two most valuable commodities of his pre-industrial time, real estate and human beings. Jackson had a temper, and was generally intolerant of contrary opinion. He was accustomed to issuing orders, not seeking consensus. He provided the Democratic Party with its iconic donkey, co-opting it after an opponent called him a “jackass.”

Jackson’s main campaign pledge involved his own deportation policy, called “Removal,” which required forced marches of southeastern Native American peoples (and others) westward to “Indian Territory,” now Oklahoma. The best-known of many forced marches involved the Cherokees, about 16,000 of them, of whom a quarter died on the trail, and an equal number died of starvation and disease within two years of arrival in what was, to them, a foreign land. Men, women and children, deprived of sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, died by the thousands.

Jackson had an inflated self-image, imagining himself as a friend of the Native peoples he was forcing into exile. Removal was an act of paternal kindness, and certainly preferable to extermination, Jackson argued. In today’s language, Jackson employed “alternative facts,” and his “base,” whose members stood to receive the lands that had belonged to the Native peoples, supported him fervently. “The Indians’ relocation relieved ‘the evil’ of their presence….The safety and comfort of our citizens have been greatly promoted by their removal,” he said. “The paternal care of the Government will thereafter watch over them and protect them.”

Jackson’s racism is raw to our ears — no “political correctness” here. He proclaimed that Native peoples were incapable of civilization, as he proclaimed: “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms...filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion? The policy [of Removal] is not only liberal, but generous.”

The Cherokees did not leave their homeland without opposition. They sued the state of Georgia, and the U.S. Supreme Court under its founding Chief Justice John Marshall, largely upheld their position. President Jackson then ignored Marshall’s majority opinion. A constitutional scholar might argue that Jackson had engaged in contempt of the Supreme Court, an impeachable high crime or misdemeanor. There is no contemporary evidence that Jackson said, “The chief justice has rendered his decision, now let him enforce it.” The outcome was the same, however. Jackson was no stickler for constitutional fine points.

Despite considerable opposition to his stiffing of the Supreme Court, Jackson was not impeached by the House of Representatives. As today, the United States was deeply divided during the 1830s. One of the most divisive issues, especially among Jackson’s southern base, was states’ rights. When Jackson ignored the U.S. Supreme Court in the Cherokee case, he was taking the side of the state of Georgia, which sought to seize their land and give it away to non-Indians in a lottery. Had Jackson sided with the Court (and Marshall’s ruling in favor of the Cherokees), the Civil War might have started in the 1830s, rather than the early 1860s.

This is the face into which President Trump has chosen to look when he walks into the Oval Office.

Bruce E. Johansen is the Frederick W. Kayser University Research Professor in the Communication and Native American Studies Department at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Email him at bjohansen@unomaha.edu.