Bit on how Andrew Jackson, years before his presidency or the Trail of Tears, forcibly seized massive swaths of Creek/Cherokee land for the U.S.:

Turns out Andrew Jackson’s undeclared 1818 invasion of Spanish Florida helped the U.S. effectively become a two-ocean power, forcing Spain to relinquish claims to Oregon Country:

(These passages are from: https://www.powells.com/book/-9780195392432)

“As of 1815, more people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had come from Europe.”

The United States was the “first outside power to recognize the independence of the former Spanish colonies”—but waited until 1862 to recognize independent Haiti:

Amazing prescience from John Quincy Adams about the American Civil War, 40 years before it actually took place:

John Quincy Adams’ decision to annul the treaty with the Creeks for Georgian land—on account of bribery—“would remain unique in the history of the government’s Indian relations.”

(“Andrew Jackson, however, egged on the Georgians.”)

"In the South, [Andrew] Jackson's popularity was enhanced by the feeling that only he could be relied upon to maintain white supremacy and expand the white empire, to evict the Indian tribes, to support and extend slavery.”

Ethnically cleansing the southeast U.S. of Native Americans “engaged [Andrew] Jackson’s attention to the fullest. ‘There was no measure, in the whole course of his administration, of which he was more exclusively author than this,’ commented Martin Van Buren (who would know).”

Mapping out land cessions of the “civilized tribes,” culminating in the Jackson/Van Buren Trail of Tears:

TIL Andrew Jackson was the only president censured by the Senate in U.S. history—and that he promptly wanted to challenge Henry Clay to a duel as a result:

“The Creeks, once the most powerful of the southern tribes, suffered perhaps the worst of all during [the Trail of Tears]... Mortality due to Creek deportation may have run as high as 50 percent.”

More on Andrew Jackson’s responsibility for the US troop/militia massacre of Sac and Fox nationals in what is now Wisconsin, with a cameo from Abraham Lincoln:

Striking map of ethnic cleansing in the U.S. under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations:

“Before the end of [Andrew Jackson’s] two terms, about 46,000 Native Americans had been dispossessed and a like number slated for dispossession under [Van Buren].”

TIL one of the reasons Britain extended so little financial support to the Confederacy stemmed directly from the Panic of 1837:

Martin Van Buren “sealed his white supremacist policy by carrying out [Andrew] Jackson’s Indian Removal... In trying to implement Removal, Van Buren... wound up fighting the Second Seminole War, the longest and most costly of all the [U.S.] army’s Indian Wars.”

Still ridiculous that the collective memory of Martin Van Buren is limited to his height/sideburns, not his role in overseeing the Cherokee Trail of Tears.