Andrew Jackson & his Indian wars

Library Journal

Many Americans today tend to lay the sole blame for the Indian removals of the 1830s on the shoulders of Andrew Jackson. Award-winning historian and Jackson biographer Remini argues that this is a very simplistic view that betrays a lack of understanding of the circumstances surrounding removal. In this book he explains what happened and why, showing that national security interests protecting the southern border from English and Spanish machinations dominated Jackson's thinking throughout his life and that he firmly believed that separating Native Americans and whites was the only way to ensure the survival of tribal cultures. It is a story of negotiations, bribery, tribal politics, and war told in all its complexity and based on a lifetime of research and study. This well-written volume is accessible to students and general readers as well as scholars and specialists, and it belongs in most libraries. Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A reasoned consideration Old Hickory's Native American policy, from the man who probably knows more about Andrew Jackson than anyone alive today. Although Jackson is well known for his war against the Five Civilized Tribes ("which did not end for some twenty-five years, until he had removed them from the ancestral homeland and sent them into a wilderness across the Mississippi River"), Remini (The Battle of New Orleans, 1999, etc.) points out that his reputation as an Indian fighter began decades earlier when he was growing up in South Carolina. He charts that course with a linear precision that would make any surveyor proud, from those first Natchez attacks until the Trail of Tears, all the while keeping Native American and settler perspectives at play. The author eloquently distills Jackson's life and times while stirring in Native American political and military history—but he makes it painfully clear that "to Jackson, killing Indians and driving them further south and west was a necessary function of life in the wilderness." His was a scourge-and-banish approach ("as early as 1809, if not earlier, he began discussing the possibility of Indian removal"), and he pursued it with messianic zeal, for "vengeance and atonement." And though Jackson could be accommodating to tractable natives, to most of them he was a bully and a briber—a violent opportunist who dismissed native customs and fully shared the settlers' "racism, their decades-old fear and mistrust of Native Americans, and their insatiable desire for the land they occupied." All the native tribes, from Apalachicola to Wyandot, felt Jackson's sting: "Only about 9,000 Native Americans were without treaty stipulationsrequiring their removal when Jackson departed Washington." A sharp and haunting portrait of a brilliant statesman's darker side.