Reply #19: one of America's greatest tragedies, the Trail of Tears [View All]

notice I use the name jacksonian, small "j", for precisely this reason - it's not the man but the movement I refer to. Jackson's Indian policies were dispicable. The only defense is not really a defense - that it wasn't really him acting as leader-pusher, the whole notion of moving Indians west of the Missisippi had extremely large popular support and his was actually a sort of moderate position in it's day. Many just wanted genocide. Any Indian sympathy was an extreme non-factor in political survival.

Jacksonian democracy in its better clothes was also about common people having power and de-centralizing the banking system. Laudible ends, and noteworthy that they came from a charismatic backwoodsman with little education, and involved taking on powerful financial interests like the banking head Nelson Biddle. The Indian question was backdoored to mantain support for this - of course the price paid by the Cherokee and others was monstrous and does indeed compromise any good that came from it, but blaming this on one man is disingenous. Whites were going to move the Indians out of the east one way or another because that's what white men wanted. They desperately wanted to steal Indian land.

Jackson had no power to stop this, not that he made any real effort to. In his personal letters at the time you get the sense he was more tolerant than the average person - he did regard the Indians as human and comes off as a more "separate but equal" type of racist, that is, Indians were worthy as long as they stayed in their place. Today this is rightly known as BS, but at the time it bordered on enlightenment and he was constantly under political attack from the likes of Henry Clay for being "soft on the Indian question".

But for all it's faults, without jacksonian democracy jeffersonian democracy never would have survived.