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 Jacksonâs 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)">https://www.powells.com/book/-978...
âAs of 1815, more people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had come from Europe.â
The United States was the âfirst outside power to recognize the independence of the former Spanish coloniesââbut 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 Adamsâ decision to annul the treaty with the Creeks for Georgian landâon account of briberyââwould remain unique in the history of the governmentâs Indian relations.â
(âAndrew Jackson, however, egged on the Georgians.â)
(âAndrew Jackson, however, egged on the Georgians.â)
"In the South, [Andrew] Jackson& #39;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.â
Ethnically cleansing the southeast U.S. of Native Americans âengaged [Andrew] Jacksonâs attention to the fullest. âThere was no measure, in the whole course of his administration, of which he was more exclusively author than this,â commented Martin Van Buren (who would know).â
Mapping out land cessions of the âcivilized tribes,â culminating in the Jackson/Van Buren Trail of Tears:
TIL Andrew Jackson was the only president censured by the Senate in U.S. historyâand that he promptly wanted to challenge Henry Clay to a duel as a result:
âThe 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.â
More on Andrew Jacksonâs 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:
âBefore the end of [Andrew Jacksonâs] two terms, about 46,000 Native Americans had been dispossessed and a like number slated for dispossession under [Van Buren].â
TIL one of the reasons Britain extended so little financial support to the Confederacy stemmed directly from the Panic of 1837:
Martin Van Buren âsealed his white supremacist policy by carrying out [Andrew] Jacksonâs 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.] armyâs Indian Wars.â
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.