People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [79]
A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature. . . . We are all striving in the career of life to acquire riches of honor, or power, or some other object, whose possession is to realize the day dreams of our imaginations; and the aggregate of these efforts constitutes the advance of society. But there is little of this in the constitution of our savages.
Cass—pompous, pretentious, honored (Harvard gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1836, at the height of Indian removal)—claimed to be an expert on the Indians. But he demonstrated again and again, in Richard Drinnon’s words (Violence in the American Experience: Winning the West), a “quite marvelous ignorance of Indian life.” As governor of the Michigan Territory, Cass took millions of acres from the Indians by treaty: “We must frequently promote their interest against their inclination.”
His article in the North American Review in 1830 made the case for Indian Removal. We must not regret, he said, “the progress of civilization and improvement, the triumph of industry and art, by which these regions have been reclaimed, and over which freedom, religion, and science are extending their sway.” He wished that all this could have been done with “a smaller sacrifice; that the aboriginal population had accommodated themselves to the inevitable change of their condition. . . . But such a wish is vain. A barbarous people, depending for subsistence upon the scanty and precarious supplies furnished by the chase, cannot live in contact with a civilized community.”
Drinnon comments on this (writing in 1969): “Here were all the necessary grounds for burning villages and uprooting natives, Cherokee and Seminole, and later Cheyenne, Philippine, and Vietnamese.”
If the Indians would only move to new lands across the Mississippi, Cass promised in 1825 at a treaty council with Shawnees and Cherokees, “The United States will never ask for your land there. This I promise you in the name of your great father, the President. That country he assigns to his red people, to be held by them and their children’s children forever.”
The editor of the North American Review, for whom Cass wrote this article, told him that his project “only defers the fate of the Indians. In half a century their condition beyond the Mississippi will be just what it is now on this side. Their extinction is inevitable.” As Drinnon notes, Cass did not dispute this, yet published his article as it was.
Everything in the Indian heritage spoke out against leaving their land. A council of Creeks, offered money for their land, said: “We would not receive money for land in which our fathers and friends are buried.” An old Choctaw chief said, responding, years before, to President Monroe’s talk of removal: “I am sorry I cannot comply with the request of my father. . . . We wish to remain here, where we have grown up as the herbs of the woods; and do not wish to be transplanted into another soil.” A Seminole chief had said to John Quincy Adams: “Here our navel strings were first cut and the blood from them sunk into the earth, and made the country dear to us.”
Not all the Indians responded to the white officials’ common designation of them as “children” and the President as “father.” It was reported that when Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison, Indian fighter and future President, the interpreter said: “Your father requests you to take a chair.” Tecumseh replied: “My father! The sun is my father, and the earth is my mother; I will repose upon her bosom.”
As soon as Jackson was elected President, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi began to pass laws to extend the states’ rule over the Indians in their territory. These laws did away with the tribe as a legal unit, outlawed tribal meetings, took away the chiefs’ powers, made the Indians subject to militia duty and state taxes, but denied them the right to vote, to bring suits, or to testify in court. Indian territory was divided up, to be distributed by state lottery. Whites were encouraged to settle on Indian land.
However,