Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars

Robert V. Remini. Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Remini, a preeminent Jackson scholar, chose to devote his final book on Andrew Jackson to the most contentious aspect of his entire public career--his important role in the removal of Indian nations from the United States east of the Mississippi River.

Remini recounted the story with narrative flair and an impressive command of the facts, but what is most striking about this book is the rather startling argument at its core--as summarized in the closing sentence, Remini claims that for all his racism, and for all his responsibility for the great suffering and mortality inflicting on Indians in the process of removal, the end result was that "[h]e saved the Five Civilized Nations from probable extinction."

Remini wass neither ignorant nor dismissive of contemporary attitudes towards Jackson and his role in the dispossession of the southern and (old) western Indian nations. Nor does he deny that Jackson held values and viewpoints which are heinous by contemporary standards, However, he argues that Jackson's racism was hardly unique to him (an inarguable claim, really) and that his oft-stated concern for his "red children", while condescending, was genuine. He really believed--with good reason--that white incursions into Indian land would doom the nations of the old Southwest, and that their removal to "vacant" (of whites) land further west as their only chance of survival.

Remini also established that while land hunger drove white settlement, it was not Jackson's primary concern. Rather, he was obsessed with national security. His original interest in removal stemmed from a belief that Indian occupation of the American frontier was a fatal weakness in American defense and sovereignty. Given the role that British and Spanish authorities played in encouraging and supplying Indian military ventures and raids against American settlers, this was hardly an unrealistic viewpoint.

Remini did not flinch from illustrating the horrors of Jackson's policies as they were carried out (he had a blind spot as to the consequences of policies he sincerely believed in), nor did he try and absolve either Jackson or the American people of their guilt. But he does ask the reader to set aside contemporary mores and retrospective judgment. Look at the situation as it was at the time. Jackson was not a monster. He was merely a human being, and like all of us he was a prisoner of the circumstances and mentalities of his age. In the end, this book demands a little humility from the reader.