A People's History of the United States: Teaching Edition. Howard Boone's Zinn
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American lives. Finally, in the 1840s, the Seminoles began to get tired. They were a tiny group against a huge nation with great resources. They asked for truces. But when they went forward under truce flags, they were arrested, again and again. In 1837, their leader Osceola, under a flag of truce, had been seized and put in irons, then died of illness in prison. The war petered out.
Meanwhile the Cherokees had not fought back with arms, but had resisted in their own way. And so the government began to play Cherokee against Cherokee, the old game. The pressures built up on the Cherokee community—their newspaper suppressed, their government dissolved, the missionaries in jail, their land parceled among whites by the land lottery. In 1834, seven hundred Cherokees, weary of the struggle, agreed to go west; eighty-one died en route, including forty-five children—mostly from measles and cholera. Those who lived arrived at their destination across the Mississippi in the midst of a cholera epidemic and half of them died within a year. Now the Georgia whites stepped up their attacks to speed the removal.
In April 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed an open letter to President Van Buren, referring with indignation to the removal treaty with the Cherokees (signed behind the backs of an overwhelming majority of them) and asked what had happened to the sense of justice in America: “You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”
Thirteen days before Emerson sent this letter, Martin Van Buren had ordered Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott into Cherokee territory to use whatever military force was required to move the Cherokees west. Five regiments of regulars and four thousand militia and volunteers began pouring into Cherokee country.
Some Cherokees had apparently given up on nonviolence: three chiefs who signed the Removal Treaty were found dead. But the seventeen thousand Cherokees were soon rounded up and crowded into stockades. On October 1, 1838, the first detachment set out in what was to be known as the Trail of Tears. As they moved westward, they began to die—of sickness, of drought, of the heat, of exposure. There were 645 wagons, and people marching alongside. Survivors, years later, told of halting at the edge of the Mississippi in the middle of winter, the river running full of ice, “hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground.” During confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokees died.
In December 1838, President Van Buren spoke to Congress:
It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.
Exercises
1. Why did almost every important Indian nation fight on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War?
2. What was Jefferson’s policy toward the Indians?
3. What prompted Tecumseh’s rebellion?
4. How was the Battle of Horseshoe Bend won?
5. Why would demanding that Indians own private property make them more vulnerable to losing their land than if they continued to use the land in common?
6. What reasons did Jackson give to explain his invasion of Spanish-owned Florida? What resulted from the Seminole War of 1818?
7. How did President Jackson’s Indian policy compare (in practice, rationale, and effect) to his predecessors’?
8. How did Jackson act unconstitutionally?
9. What caused the outbreak of the Second Creek War?
10. How did Speckled Snake describe the history of European-Indian relations? Do you agree with his synopsis? If not, how would you alter it?
11. If you went up to a Creek or Cherokee in the 1830s and asked if you could buy some of his or her land, what would he or she say to you?
12. Is there any parallel between Bacon’s Rebellion and the Indian Wars preceeding the War of 1812 with respect to the dynamics among Indians, poor whites, and rich whites? If so, explain how the situations are parallel. If not, what factors are different enough so that there is no structural parallel?
13. What strategy(ies) did the Cherokees adopt to fight removal?
14. What position did Senator Frelinghuysen take regarding Indian removal? What action did Ralph Waldo Emerson take to oppose the removal of the Cherokees? Does Frelinghuysen remind you of Bartolomé de las Casas (chapter 1)? Why or why not? Does the existence of ineffective white opposition to Indian removal indicate that white Americans were swept away by historical forces? Why or why not?
15. What happened to the Choctaws after they signed their treaty of removal? Were the terms of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek observed by both sides?
16. Why did the Georgia militia arrest Sam Worcester and Elizar Butler? Were the actions of the militia consistent with the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? Why did it not matter whether the Supreme Court ruled in favor of or against the Cherokees?
17. By 1832, how long had the Creeks been defending their lands against the Europeans?
18. Place the following events in the order in which they usually happened:
a. Indians appeal to federal government to enforce treaty that protected the integrity of Indian land.
b. White settlers encroach on/invade Indian land.
c. Federal government does nothing.
d. On Indian land (by federal treaty) whites and Indians attack each other.
e. Federal government orders Indians to move farther west.
f. [Are any steps missing?]
Why did this process repeat itself over and over again?
19. What were the conditions under which the Creeks moved west?
20. How did the Seminoles resist removal? How effective was the Seminole form of resistance?
21. If the Cherokee removal was so dreadful that it was to be known as the Trail of Tears, why did Van Buren feel that it had the “happiest effects?”
22. Draw a map that includes the following: Appalachians, Mississippi River, Rocky Mountains, Florida Territory, Tallapoosa River in Alabama, the state borders of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, the location of the Battle of Horshoe Bend, the Trail of Tears.
23. Debate Resolution: Andrew Jackson’s Indian policy represented a fundamental change from the Indian policies of previous U.S. presidents.
We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a professional soldier, graduate of the Military Academy, commander of the Third Infantry Regiment, a reader of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Hegel, Spinoza, wrote in his diary:
Fort Jesup, La., June 30, 1845. Orders came last evening by express from Washington City directing General Taylor to move without any delay to…take up a position on the banks of or near the Rio Grande, and he is to expel any armed force of Mexicans who may cross that river. Bliss read the orders to me last evening hastily at tattoo. I have scarcely slept a wink, thinking of the needful preparations.… Violence leads to violence, and if this movement of ours does not lead to others and to bloodshed, I am much mistaken.
Hitchcock was not mistaken. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase had doubled the territory of the United States, extending it to the Rocky Mountains. To the southwest was Mexico, which had won its independence in a revolutionary war against Spain in 1821. Mexico was then an even larger country than it is now, since it included what are now Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado. After agitation, and aid from the United States,