by Rebecca Palmer

Created on: February 07, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

He is seen everywhere: represented by statues, paintings, history books and even in our wallets. He is Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. Although he is gloriously represented in our culture, he has a much darker and shameful history. This history is often omitted from history books, which desire to cast a favorable light on the (often tragic) beginnings of our country. During his administration, he oversaw the removal of 46,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands (PBS). This was the largest systematic removal of Indians in American history. His representation in our culture is unjust to those who were negatively effected by his political agenda.

Borne in Waxhaw, South Carolina in 1767, Jackson was not granted a formal education. Despite his early set backs, he read law books in his late teens in order to become an "outstanding young lawyer" in Tennessee ("Biography of Andrew Jackson"). During the War of 1812, he was a major general, who received his fame after defeating the British at New Orleans in 1815. Armed with only 5000 tired troops, he took the British and the remaining Creeks that fought with them. The newspapers hailed it as an "Almost Incredible Victory!" that "eloquently rounded off the war" (Ward 5). The public loved him. As a handsome young figure, who was fighting to preserve the American republic, this was not his first battle.
Three years earlier, in the Battle at Horseshoe Bend, Jackson took on the renegade Creek Indians. They were apparently harassing the local settlers and being instigated by the British. Armed with his Tennessee troops and other Indian alliances (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee), he invaded Creek territory of Northern Alabama. Although the Creeks anticipated victory, Jackson and his troops crushed them (35). Stannard writes in his book, The American Holocaust, that after the defeat, Andrew Jackson "supervised the mutilation of 800 or so Creek Indian corpses [...] cutting off their noses to count and preserve a record of the dead, slicing long strips of flesh from their bodies to tan and turn into bridle reins" (121). The atrocities did not stop there. They also burned Creek homes with warriors still trapped inside. In his book, Stolen Continents, Wright describes how the troops burned a dwelling down with forty-six people still inside. Once the fire stopped, the troops ate potatoes from a cellar basted in human fat (211). After the Creeks were defeated and mutilated, Jackson took more

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next Page >>