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By Root 285 0

independence, the southeastern tribes, especially the Cherokees and Creeks, adopted many of the elements of the white world. This meant abandoning the old ways—the traditions and customs that the whites frowned on and considered pagan and offensive. Many of the prosperous mixed-bloods accepted the whites’ religion and lifestyle. They dressed like whites, ate the same type of food, started a plantation culture that included the keeping of black slaves to work the fields. Part of the rationale was tribal survival, with the hope that the whites would leave them alone if they became more like them. In the long run none of it mattered. Jackson and his troops eventually moved the tribes westward, sometimes at the point of bayonets down several “Trails of Tears” to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, where they were referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes,” a pejorative term still used by many.7

“Andrew Jackson has been saddled with a considerable portion of the blame for this monstrous deed,” Robert V. Remini, one of Jackson’s biographers, wrote of the Removal Act.

He makes an easy mark. But the criticism is unfair if it distorts the role he actually played. His objective was not the destruction of Indian life and culture. Quite the contrary. He believed the removal was the Indian’s only salvation against certain extinction…. Yet he practiced a subtle kind of coercion. He told the tribes he would abandon them to the mercy of the states if they did not agree to migrate west.8

Jackson’s own words serve as the best evidence of how he felt about Indian people and their tribal lands. In a message delivered to Congress in late 1830, several months after the Removal Act became the law of the land, Jackson spoke of his hope that relocation to a distant land would help the tribes “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized and Christian community.”9 He went on to say:

Toward the aborigines of the country no one can indulge a more friendly feeling than myself, or would go further in attempting to reclaim them from their wandering habits and make them a happy, prosperous people…. To save him from this alternative, or perhaps utter annihilation, the General Government kindly offers him a new home, and proposes to pay the whole expense of his removal and settlement…. May we not hope, therefore, that all good citizens, and none more zealously than those who think the Indians oppressed by subjection to the laws of the States, will unite in attempting to open the eyes of those children of the forest to their true condition, and by a speedy removal to relieve them from all the evils, real or imaginary, present or prospective, with which they may be supposed to be threatened.10

Although some historians tried to present a balanced picture of Jackson’s role in Indian Removal, it is clear that Jackson had no real concern whatsoever for the Indians—“the children of the forest”—whose lives he disrupted. To this day there remain traditional Cherokee and Creek people in Oklahoma who refuse to handle or even touch twenty-dollar bills, which since 1929 have been imprinted with the image of Andrew Jackson. These Indian people find commemorating Jackson’s presidency on legal tender an insult to the memory of ancestors who died along “the trail where they cried.” Some equate having Jackson’s picture on the money to printing Adolf Hitler’s face on the bills. Through the years, there have been petitions calling for the U.S. Treasury Department to remove Jackson from the twenty-dollar bill. One of the candidates suggested as a suitable replacement is John Ross, the much-revered chief who led the Cherokee Nation during the horrors of Indian removal.11

David Crockett, however, is still remembered by many Indian people in Oklahoma as one of the few white men in government who had the courage to stand up to Jackson and vote against his Indian Removal Act.12 Crockett may not have been the most vociferous opponent of Jackson’s removal legislation, but he was the lone member of the entire Tennessee congressional delegation