0:02 [SPEAKER_01]: The tune was bandolized, and 2018, there was the only time in the 130, some years that had ever happened. 0:09 [SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, there was no structural damage to it, but it was spray paint. 0:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Tennessee, Lomestone. 0:14 [SPEAKER_01]: just drinks up spray paint. 0:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So we had to bring out a laser crew from Sweden. 0:19 [SPEAKER_01]: They had to build like a whole wooden structure covering the tomb so that they could use the lasers because they're the con that will burn your retinas at half a mile. 0:26 [SPEAKER_01]: So that was big. 0:28 [SPEAKER_01]: And they spray painted the words killer killer, killer, all over Rachel Jackson's tomb. 0:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, she's just married to the guy. 0:38 [SPEAKER_01]: She's not the one signing the Indian Removal Act. 0:41 [SPEAKER_00]: If you were with me in the last episode, you'll recognize the voice of Aaron Adams, director of education, at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, the former home of our seventh president. 0:52 [SPEAKER_00]: In current museum dedicated to preserving his life story, Aaron will be with me again on this episode as we consider Jackson's presidential legacy. 1:01 [SPEAKER_00]: What she's describing is an act of vandalism here, at the Hermitage that took place during 1:11 [SPEAKER_00]: protesters to face the tombs of Jackson and his wife, with black and red spray paint, with messages that included anarchist symbols and profanities. 1:20 [SPEAKER_00]: So how does something like this happen to the memory of someone who was once one of the most revered man in American history? 1:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Once he's victorious at the Battle of New Orleans, which would just celebrate it, January 8th, he could have set still for the rest of the 19th century, right, and he's still what had been the most popular man in America. 1:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But for many years, Andrew Jackson was widely considered one of the best presidents this country has ever had, the earliest scholarly ranking of the presidents, compiled in 1948, ranked Jackson as the seventh greatest leader in the history of our highest office. 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Since that time, perceptions have changed. 1:56 [SPEAKER_00]: The most recent poll by the nonprofit network C-Span brings him squarely in the middle, 20 seconds out of 44 total presidencies. 2:05 [SPEAKER_00]: During his lifetime, and especially in his war years, Andrew Jackson was a real-life action hero. 2:12 [SPEAKER_00]: In many ways, he was for the War of 1812, what George Washington had been for the War of Independence, at least as the public feud him. 2:20 [SPEAKER_00]: In pivotal clashes throughout the American South, Jackson led American forces to victory against the British and became the face of a new era in American history as we reasserted our national independence and began our scent as a world power. 2:36 [SPEAKER_00]: But in recent memory, Jackson's shortcomings have largely overtaken him. 2:40 [SPEAKER_00]: His signing of the Indian Removal Act and the contribution of the Act to the notorious genocidal trail of tears have combined with his history of slavery to define his legacy for many contemporary Americans. 2:54 [SPEAKER_00]: While the Indian Removal Act is the biggest headline for Jackson's history with native peoples, his interaction with them long predates his presidency. 3:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson had experience with Native peoples from his earliest years. 3:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson grew up on the Carolina Frontier and a region called the Waxhaws and it's what today sort of forms the border between North and South Carolina. 3:16 [SPEAKER_01]: So he would have been familiar with a frontier wilderness community trying to carve out an identity and a foothold in amongst Native peoples who were trying to defend their own lands. 3:26 [SPEAKER_01]: As Jackson continues to advance westward, he's encountering them as he goes. 3:32 [SPEAKER_01]: the community of Nashville, the Shawnee remained a particular threat of violence against the people here. 3:39 [SPEAKER_01]: And Jackson is the head of the Tennessee militias. 3:41 [SPEAKER_01]: Their major general is going against them at times. 3:44 [SPEAKER_01]: That continues to war of 1812, sort of a aside show of the big show, if you will, is native nations. 3:52 [SPEAKER_01]: And their alliance with Great Britain, right? 3:54 [SPEAKER_01]: So the native peoples of North America had allied with Great Britain as a way of stopping American expansion. 3:59 [SPEAKER_01]: which makes a great deal of sense, right? 4:01 [SPEAKER_01]: They want their homelands, they want to protect them, but they're attempting to cooperate with the British and encircling them. 4:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And this is a threat that James Madison, who's president, is very worried about. 4:09 [SPEAKER_01]: He's particularly worried about the strength of the Shawnee people and the Muscogee or the Creek as the British referred to them, but native mostly to Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, was a very powerful confederacy of smaller tribes. 4:22 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson is sent to defeat the Musco Uniction, as a way of preventing them from allowing with the British, allowing with the Shawnee and others. 4:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson is sent against them. 4:31 [SPEAKER_01]: The Tennessee militia is called up. 4:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson is commissioned as an officer in the U.S. 7th inventory, so in the professional army, Jackson puts out a call for about 4:40 [SPEAKER_01]: 1,500 volunteers to swell the ranks of the militia and increase his overall force, he ends up with over 5,200. 4:47 [SPEAKER_01]: So the beginning of Tennessee getting its nickname the volunteer state. 4:51 [SPEAKER_01]: So Jackson marches against the Muscogee or the Creek. 4:54 [SPEAKER_01]: It was called the Creek War. 4:56 [SPEAKER_01]: It was about a 16-month period of incredibly brutal warfare across Alabama. 5:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Mostly down the eastern half. 5:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson and his army finally defeat the Creek. 5:06 [SPEAKER_01]: at a place called Horshubend at the Battle of Horshubend, which today is a park, it's part of the National Park Service today, the creek called it Tohopaka. 5:13 [SPEAKER_01]: And as a result of the battle, not only has Jackson defeated the creek as a military force, he's attempting to break them. 5:21 [SPEAKER_01]: as a nation. 5:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The punishments that he inflicts on them is intended to scatter the musco-unation. 5:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The perfect example of this is that as part of the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which is the name of the Treaty that governs the end of the Creek War, part of that session that the Creek make is to see 23 million acres of land to the United States. 5:41 [SPEAKER_01]: That's better than half of the size of the state of Alabama, little pockets of western Georgia, pockets of what today's Florida. 5:48 [SPEAKER_01]: This is a huge punishment. 5:50 [SPEAKER_01]: He's not just trying to stop them as a military force. 5:53 [SPEAKER_01]: He's trying to take their land from them too. 5:55 [SPEAKER_01]: It goes hand in hand for Jackson. 5:57 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson is nothing if not objective driven, and the objective is the security of the United States. 6:03 [SPEAKER_01]: Defeating their militaries one step in that process in Jackson's mind, taking their land as another one. 6:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Right, because it decentralizes the nation. 6:10 [SPEAKER_01]: So Jackson is going to be involved in many treaties over the next decade. 6:15 [SPEAKER_01]: with the seminal, the creek, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the entire southern United States is open to white settlers as a result of Jackson's dealings with Native Americans. 6:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson creates what is today to southern United States. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: In some ways, the Indian Removal Act is a political continuation of these earlier military campaigns. 6:38 [SPEAKER_01]: When he's president, of course, the issue of the relationship between indigenous nations, settlers of the different states, its relationship with the federal government, is this big bermuda triangle of confusion and violence and frustration. 6:56 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson steps into office in March of 1829. 6:58 [SPEAKER_01]: That's about the same time that gold has just been discovered in the United States and North Georgia on Cherokee land. 7:03 [SPEAKER_01]: The people of Georgia and from outside are flooding into Cherokee territory in order to access that gold with a complete disregard for the rights of the Cherokee nation. 7:14 [SPEAKER_01]: And they're creating not only illegal disaster, they're creating an environmental catastrophe. 7:19 [SPEAKER_01]: They're driving off wildlife. 7:20 [SPEAKER_01]: They're choking out rivers 7:22 [SPEAKER_01]: mud that comes out through the mining process. 7:25 [SPEAKER_01]: It is a true emergency for the Cherokee nation. 7:28 [SPEAKER_01]: So Cherokee nation goes to the state of Georgia. 7:31 [SPEAKER_01]: First, Georgia refuses to get their people in line, one that'll want to get their people in line. 7:36 [SPEAKER_01]: They have no interest in doing it. 7:38 [SPEAKER_01]: But there was a very confusing scenario in which the federal government had given Georgia access to Cherokee territory in exchange for its western lands, western lands that today form Mississippi and Alabama. 7:50 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that the federal government could begin to make states out of them. 7:53 [SPEAKER_01]: So Georgia has been given some permission by the federal government to access Cherokee territory, and yet the Supreme Court, 8:01 [SPEAKER_01]: And the previous president, St. Jackson, had all demonstrated a path that native nations were still sovereign, within the United States. 8:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The Supreme Court had backed that up. 8:11 [SPEAKER_01]: All dealings with Indigenous nations were to be held at the highest levels of government nation donation, and for Georgia to just stand in such defiance of the federal government in this way, and not give over to the federal government to manage its affairs with the Cherokee, 8:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Here's Jackson. 8:32 [SPEAKER_01]: Jackson is not going to not solve the issue. 8:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Much of Jackson's value, as a military leader, was in his ability to bring decisive resolution to tensions and disputes that have lingered and fastered for years, sometimes decades before his arrival. 8:49 [SPEAKER_00]: He was an impatient person, by nature, it was not going to walk away from the so-called 8:58 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think this is a perfect analogy, but when you look at the civil war and the billet to the civil war, you see slavery is an issue that everybody's just trying to kick a little further down the road. 9:08 [SPEAKER_01]: It ends up with Lincoln and it can't be kicked any further. 9:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Right? 9:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Something is going to have to be done. 9:14 [SPEAKER_01]: I think there's a comparison there between what Jackson is trying to do with Native peoples. 9:20 [SPEAKER_01]: They've long had this struggle about the relationship right between Native peoples in the United States and the different states and of course Great Britain before that and the can just he's not going to let it get kicked in a further so Jackson steps into the freight and after watching what's unfolding in Georgia Jackson goes to Congress and his second annual message to Congress in January of 1830 it's probably in my mind it's the most powerful document that comes out of Jackson's presidency because he enumerates he literally says number one 9:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Number two, number three, I was given Congress a to-do list. 9:53 [SPEAKER_01]: I need you to enact policy and create it that is forever going to set the standard for how the United States deals with native peoples. 10:01 [SPEAKER_01]: And so that becomes the Indian Removal Act. 10:04 [SPEAKER_00]: So how bad was the Indian Removal Act? 10:07 [SPEAKER_00]: Adolf Hitler loved it, that's how bad. 10:10 [SPEAKER_00]: A few minutes ago, I referred to the quote, Indian Problem. 10:14 [SPEAKER_00]: If you know your second world or history, that phrase probably sounded familiar, the Nazi spoke frequently of the quote, Jewish Problem. 10:23 [SPEAKER_00]: As Hitler and his staff plan to remove the Jewish people from German lands, they look to the Indian Removal Act for inspiration. 10:29 [SPEAKER_00]: The Führer was impressed by our abuse and genocide of Indigenous Americans, that he once proclaimed, the Volga must be our Mississippi. 10:38 [SPEAKER_00]: As far away as the Indian Removal Act may seem, this law still surfaces and legal proceedings, most recently in Oklahoma. 10:47 [SPEAKER_01]: law in the United States today continues to get invoked in federal courts in state courts. 10:52 [SPEAKER_01]: It was most recently dealt with that I'm aware of in May of 2020 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case called McWart versus Oklahoma. 11:03 [SPEAKER_01]: and it had to do with tribal jurisdiction over law enforcement within Muscogee Nation, which, of course, now is in Oklahoma. 11:10 [SPEAKER_01]: So there had been a long history of Oklahoma state law enforcement, just running roughshod over those boundaries, over that tribal jurisdiction. 11:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And Neil Gorsuch, the justice who wrote the majority opinion, went back and said, the treaty with the creeks goes back to 1832, 11:29 [SPEAKER_01]: Congress hasn't renegotiated this treaty. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: We are bound by its terms. 11:33 [SPEAKER_01]: And really, which surprised everybody, the spring court has a history of siding with the United States in this case. 11:40 [SPEAKER_01]: And for Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, not just Neil Gorsuch, but for the Supreme Court to say, nope, United States, you are bound by your treaties, right? 11:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Just... 11:50 [SPEAKER_01]: It's been really interesting to watch that. 11:52 [SPEAKER_01]: The issue has come up with standing rock, the pipeline, and South Dakota. 11:56 [SPEAKER_01]: It's come up with water rights and the core of engineers and the Pacific Northwest and the damning of rivers for hydroelectric power. 12:02 [SPEAKER_01]: It came up again in 1917, after these people had already been removed. 12:07 [SPEAKER_01]: When oil and natural gas were first discovered in Oklahoma, 12:11 [SPEAKER_00]: So guess what happened next? 12:13 [SPEAKER_00]: White settlers attempted to take it back. 12:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Fortunately, the government did not engineer another trail of tears. 12:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, indivigible white Americans infiltrated those native communities, enriched by the discovery of oil on their land, even to the point of marrying internet of families before killing them off one by one in order to claim their wealth. 12:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Look up the name, Molly Bracart, sometime, as well as the Aussage Indian murders. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: We'll cover this story in a future episode, but it provides a glimpse at the cruelty and exploitation that hounded native communities well into the 20th century. 12:49 [SPEAKER_01]: the Indian Removal Act intended to move people to Indian Territory as they called it at the time because it was basically worthless land. 12:57 [SPEAKER_01]: In their opinion, right? 12:59 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't this. 13:00 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't this prime agricultural cotton producing territory. 13:04 [SPEAKER_01]: It was fairly useless. 13:06 [SPEAKER_01]: And then all of a sudden, we have oil and natural gas reserves under this property. 13:10 [SPEAKER_01]: And so there are headlines in the New York 13:13 [SPEAKER_01]: that say seek the riches of Indians that puts out another call for people to start pushing in, let's just move them again. 13:20 [SPEAKER_01]: And finally enough reason prevails that is not enacted, but people find other ways to make that hardship for native peoples. 13:29 [SPEAKER_01]: So all of that to say, what Jackson and Acts with the passing of the Indian Removal Act is not just meant to solve 13:40 [SPEAKER_01]: to permanently establish the policy of the United States related to native nations. 13:46 [SPEAKER_01]: It empowers the president to treat directly with native nations, so then everything that falls after that federal Indian policy, bureau of Indian affairs, the entire sort of governmental bureaucracy that deals with the affairs of native peoples in the U.S. today is all a result of this. 14:02 [SPEAKER_01]: People talk about the trail of tears, which is a specific historic event. 14:07 [SPEAKER_01]: We largely think of it in relation to the Cherokee, but it is happening to native people's all over the nation, the Shawnee, the Potawatomi, which is from Indiana, from your territory. 14:16 [SPEAKER_01]: They called their removal the trail of death. 14:18 [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a common name that's in use in some form. 14:21 [SPEAKER_01]: So the trail of tears is a historic event that is profoundly disturbing and profoundly disruptive and still continues to disrupt lives. 14:31 [SPEAKER_01]: What Jackson is responsible for is not only the trail of tears, it would be one thing to say, 14:36 [SPEAKER_01]: We removed the Cherokee one time, and it was done, and we never did it again. 14:40 [SPEAKER_01]: What Jackson is able to have Congress enact makes it possible for that to happen at any point to any native population within the boundaries of the United States. 14:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. 14:51 [SPEAKER_01]: He will cry, I think. 14:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I do this program a lot with fourth grade. 14:56 [SPEAKER_01]: That's where it first comes into school curriculum. 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's also where slavery usually first enters history curriculum. 15:02 [SPEAKER_01]: Fourth grade is the most depressing year in the entire school calendar. 15:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Because all of a sudden, you're like, wait! 15:08 [SPEAKER_01]: I thought the president's supposed to help people, right? 15:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I thought the U.S. Army is supposed to protect people, and it's tough. 15:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, this is a lesson most of us are still learning well into adulthood. 15:19 [SPEAKER_00]: The tragedies that have haunted our native peoples have been so far reaching and so continual that they are frankly difficult to wrap your head around. 15:27 [SPEAKER_00]: But we can at least sit down and learn more of these stories and share them with others. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Because of Andrew Jackson's relationship to Native Peoples, the legacy of this once enormously popular war hero is complicated, and in the view of some, a redeemably tarnished. 15:43 [SPEAKER_00]: But whatever your view of Jackson may be, spray painting tombstones, is never okay. 15:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Damaging personal property is never a compelling way to make your case.
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