Andrew Jackson, an Indian war, an adopted war orphan, and how strange the combination of history and political symbolism can be

This is another in my occasional posts about my reservations on what I see as dogmatic and misguided treatments of early American and antebellum history.
(A German version of this post is here.)

This occurs in both popular and academic history. But the bizarrely effective cooptation of the image of Andrew Jackson by Donald Trump and his popular mob of followers has had a grim effect on portraits of the seventh President and his era. Since Jackson's movement and the larger context of what came to be known as Jacksonian democracy involved an expansion of democratic rights and challenged the influence of organized money and the concentration of wealth and power, it really is a sad (and bitter) historical irony that the most crassly oligarchic President in history has successfully identified himself with Jacksonian imagery.

For a recent example among very many illustrations of the current state of oligarchical rule in the US, see: Graham Rapier, Ivanka Trump made nearly $4 million from the President's DC hotel last year Business Insider 06/15/2019. Even if you think of Andrew Jackson as a comic-book villain, Trumpism is about as un-Jacksonian as it gets. (And if you think Jackson is a bigger villain than his arch-enemy John Calhoun, I'm sorry, you're just beyond the pale.)

Washington Post writer Michael Rosenwald discusses Jackson in Andrew Jackson slaughtered Indians. Then he adopted a baby boy he’d orphaned. 06/16/2019.

Not least because the Democratic Party makes no effort to defend its own historical party symbolism - Jackson is one of the founders of the party - centrist and left commentators are quick to condemn him as a perpetrator of genocide against Indians. This is a relatively recent development. "Jefferson-Jackson Dinners" were traditional fundraising events for the Democratic Party. Jarrett Stepman used the occasion of Louisiana Democrats changing the name of those events - in 2017 - to talk about both Jackson and Jefferson as party founders. (Why Are Democrats Purging the Memory of Jefferson and Jackson? Newsweek 07/20/2017)

The point of Rosenwald's article is to debunk the notion that there might be anything constructive or decent or even ambiguous in Jackson adopting an Indian orphan child:

During the War of 1812, roughly two decades before he became president, Gen. Andrew Jackson wrote home to his wife, Rachel, from the battlefield.

Though he was tired and banged up, Jackson was also proud. He had just presided over another successful slaughter of Native Americans.

“I detached Genl John Coffee with part of his Brigade of Cavalry and mounted men to destroy Creek Town,” he wrote, referring to an area in what is now Alabama.

The general, Jackson wrote, had performed this slaughter in “elegant” style. More than 170 Native Americans were killed. Still, there was more killing to do. He was determined to march on, he wrote, to “the heart of the creek nation.” ...

“I send on a little Indian boy,” he wrote.

The baby boy’s family had been wiped out. Jackson arranged for him to be transported to his plantation, the Hermitage, where he would grow up as Rachel and the future president’s adopted child.

I wouldn't necessarily take issue with Rosenwald's criticisms of how the story has been given a sentimental spin. But his historical framing leaves out some important features.

I don't assume the writers at WaPo compose own their headlines. But I doubt most readers would notice any difference between the title and the text. Noting that Jackson is "called genocidal by some critics," he writes, "Now Jackson was taking in this baby whose parents had been killed by his own orders."

Jackson biographer Robert Remini describes this event in Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). It was an episode in the Creek War of 1813-1814. This was one moment in a centuries-long process of European powers and the United States of taking control of the North American continent. But in the moment it occurred, the James Madison Administration was in power, the US had acquired the Louisiana Purchase and so had territory extending to the Mississippi River, and was in the middle of a war against an invading Britain. Florida was still Spanish territory and Britain was operating a naval base in Pensacola. There were various Indian tribes and clans and factions in the southeastern part of the continent. Their alliances and rivalries with each other and with the US government and various American settlements were constantly shifting.

From the American/Madison Administration point of view, the initiating event in the Creek War came in 1812:

... Little Warrior, leading a party of Creeks who were returning from a visit to the Shawnees on the northern lakes, "massacred" several families living near Duck River on May 12, 1812. They took Martha Crawley captive and "murdered" two of her children, who were playing in the yard. Martha's husband was away at the time, and she managed to hide her two youngest children in a potato cellar under the floor of her home. The Indians broke open the door and dragged Martha outside with the intention of killing her but decided instead to hold her captive. They forced her to cook for them as they headed for Tuckabatchee but committed "no other violence" on her.

Remini does not paint a pretty picture of the military encounter in which the baby was orphaned and in which the legendary David Crockett participated:

[Jackson] and his army were now about thirteen miles to the east of the hostile [Creek] village of Tallushatchee. On November 3, 1813, General Coffee's brigade surrounded Tallushatchee and systematically slaughtered most of the warriors. It was a quick and bloody operation. "We shot them like dogs," boasted Davy Crockett. The killing was so gruesome that Lieutenant Richard Keith Call became nauseated. "We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin," he declared. "Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters. Heart sick I turned from the revolting scene." The town was then burned to the ground.

The Americans lost five men and forty-one wounded in the attack; some 186 [Creek] Red Sticks were found dead. In this war of unspeakable barbarity only the lives of women and children were spared, but eighty-four women and children were taken as captives in this encounter. "We have retaliated for the destruction of Fort Mims," reported the jubilant General Jackson to Governor Blount.

While inspecting the bloody battleground, soldiers came upon a dead Indian woman still clutching her living ten-month-old male infant. The child was the sole survivor of his family. Some Indian women "wanted to k[ill him] because the whole race & family of his [blood] was destroyed," reported Jackson. But, in an unprecedented act of mercy that not all militiamen approved, one of the interpreters, possibly James Quarles, intervened and lifted the child from the hands of his dead mother. He carried the infant to the commanding general. When Jackson was told that the other Indians wished to kill the infant, he immediately overruled them. Suddenly, he said, he experienced a deep feeling for the boy. "In fact when I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him." [my emphasis]

This account presents a different picture than the WaPo's. Specifically, according to Remini:

• The American soldiers under Jackson's command killed all the adult males in the village.
• The women and children were specifically not targeted for killing.
• There is no indication that both the baby's "parents had been killed by his [Jackson's] own orders", as Rosenwald claims, although the baby's father was presumably among the dead.
• One of the interpreters in Jackson's command rescued the baby from being killed by female Indian survivors of the attack.
• Jackson made a specific decision to spare the baby, who he had good reason to believe would be put to death by the surviving members of the Indian group.

This is why I use the name "Contradicciones" for this blog. History is complicated and the "lessons of history" don't fit very well onto a bumper sticker. And letting historical analysis be driven by momentary and superficial political marketing fads isn't something I can recommend.

What is the difference between these accounts?

One very obvious difference between those two accounts dealing with the same event is that one is a newspaper column, the other an academic history. Different methods, different types of story-telling, different audiences.

The two accounts also focus on different narratives around the same historical event. Rosenwald's column appears to rely on a metanarrative that the displacement of the native population was a horrible, destructive, morally reprehensible process. That's a "fundamental" criticism pointing to a basic societal, even civilizational fault. And there is wide agreement on that metanarrative, although you don't have to push Trumpists very hard to get to an assumption that European expansion in the Americas was a basically benevolent, civilizing historical blessing. But a position of "fundamental" criticism is not a product of recent decades. The Dominican missionary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566) turned against Spanish policy in the Americas and published criticisms of the policy aiming at "the exposure of the 'sin' of domination, oppression, and injustice that the European was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples. It was Las Casas’s intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment..." (Enrique Dussel, Las Casas, Bartolomé de Britannica Online; accessed 06/18/2019)

Remini, on the other hand, is providing an academic, empirical account of a particular moment in a particular place during the centuries-long process of conquest that De Las Casas (sensibly) describes as a "sin" from a Christian religious perspective. And, as is often the case in such empirical accounts, it includes a lot of features that are messy in the sense that they do not fit comfortably into a broader, sweeping, fundamental critical perspective. In other words, "it's sin and I'm agin' it" can be a valid and useful perspective. But the actual situation described by Remini presents more concrete decisions and more specific questions. Were the Americans violating existing law by executing all the adult males in the village? How did that compare to contemporary practices including Indian military practices? Were there practical alternatives to the murder of the Crawley children and taking the mother prisoner? War es akzeptiert under den Creek-Indianern, ganze Familien einschließlich Kinder in dieser Situation zu ermorden?Was it a common and excepted practice among the Creeks to put to death small babies who were orphaned in such circumstances? Were there laws providing guidance on how US soldiers should respond in that situation? Was the interpreter right or wrong to save the baby? Was Jackson acting rightly and legally in adopting the baby by the laws and moral standards of that time and place?

A third way to look at the difference between the two accounts is that Rosenwald is using current political symbolism in which Jackson is (however weirdly!) widely seen as a mascot for Trumpism. And he uses that symbolism to make a symbolic, polemical, contemporary criticism of the racial blind spots of the Trump base. Although Remini presumably was taking account of the context of the historiographic work at the time he was writing, his account is not focused on making an immediate political point. And obviously in a 2001 work, he wasn't addressing the momentary political imagery of 2019. Eighteen years ago, there was no general identification of Andrew Jackson symbolism and Republican racial politics. Although the conservative scholar Walter Russell Mead was already promoting the idea of "Jacksonian" politics as militant militarism. (E.g., The Jacksonian Tradition And American Foreign Policy The National Interest Winter 1999/2000) That was an is still a weird notion. But I assume that was part of whatever mix of propaganda and bad history got us to the point where Jackson has become a symbol for Donald Trump.