As Congress prepares to impeach President Clinton for lying about an extramarital affair, it might serve us well to look back on another president whom we have honored by placing his name on cities, counties and schools. To this day many Americans continue to think of Andrew Jackson as a great hero. And when it came to high crimes and misdemeanors, Jackson was truly the champion.
After defeating the Creek Indians in 1814, General Andrew Jackson confiscated 23 million acres of the Creek nation, without approval of the U.S. government, and proceeded to sell it off cheaply to his fellow slave owners, saving a sizable portion for himself. Then he set his greedy eyes on the Spanish territory of Florida, home of the Seminole Indians.
Over several years many slaves had escaped bondage in Georgia and Alabama and ran off to live with the Seminoles in Florida. Descendants of those original runaways established a peaceful farming community around an abandoned Spanish fort deep inside the territory. Jackson took an army of Southern whites illegally into the territory, attacked the free black community, murdered 270 men, women and children and then took the rest back to Georgia and Alabama and gave them to any whites claiming to be descendants of the "owners" of the original runaways!
Jackson, a fanatical authoritarian who executed enemies without due process and regularly settled his personal disputes with deadly duels, was rewarded by the American people for his atrocities by being twice elected president. In this exalted position he set out to eliminate the Indians once and for all.
The great Cherokee nation of the Southeast had heeded the advice of the U.S. government to accept the ways of the whites if they wanted to retain sovereignty over their lands. They wrote a constitution, published newspapers, started schools and churches, and grew cotton. An irritated Jackson decided that Indians had no right to change their customs and ordered the eviction of the Cherokees. Rich white Southerners wanted to expand their profitable slave-based plantations and needed the Cherokee territory to do it.
The Cherokee nation appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and in 1832 the Court ruled in favor of the Indians. But Jackson would not tolerate any challenge to his authority, even from the Supreme Court. He went ahead and ordered the eviction of all Indians from the Southeast. They were forcibly marched off to the Oklahoma territory in what became the infamous "Trail of Tears".
The march took place during a terrible winter. Cherokees were forced to leave all of their possessions behind. Hundreds drowned as they were sent across the Mississippi River in rotting boats. Thousands more died of starvation, disease and exposure. Aside from slavery, the Trail of Tears was the worst crime in American history and President Andrew Jackson deserves all the credit.
It can be argued that other presidents committed crimes against humanity, but Andrew Jackson holds a special place in our hall of shame. Ironically, it was Andrew Johnson not Andrew Jackson who faced impeachment. Johnson, our 17th president, had reservations about Reconstruction policies following the Civil War and the pro-Reconstruction Congress tried to oust him from office. They failed by one vote. Jackson, the 7th president, who did commit high crimes, was never in danger of impeachment.
How many members of the current Congress, so anxious to impeach Clinton, consider Andrew Jackson to be a great American patriot? I think it would be safe to say that most of them do. Today Congress is controlled by Reagan Republicans who are not unlike the Jacksonian Democrats of the 1830's. They seem to possess a self-righteous sense of moral superiority that threatens to send our nation tumbling backwards.
This pompous charade in Washington D.C. should be an embarrassment to all of us. Like most Americans I wish our elected officials would get back to work. If they have so much free time I suggest they study the history of the country they pretend to represent. Then they might discover how criminal some of our most famous presidents really were; and how relatively harmless Clinton actually is.
Joe Fulton of Kings Valley, Oregon is the author of From Beardstown to Andersonville: the Civil War Letters of Asa and Samuel Paschal. He is currently working on 366 Tales of Triumph and Tragedy from American History.