Family  /  Debunk

Andrew Jackson Adopted an Indian Son

Was bringing home an Indian boy-after slaughtering his family-an act of compassion or of political expedience?
Wikimedia Commons

I spoke with historian Dawn Peterson, who gave me a preview of the Lyncoya chapter in her forthcoming book, Indians in the National Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion, which will be published by Harvard University Press in 2017. Peterson’s book looks at different kinds of adoption of Native people during the early years of the republic, between about 1790 and 1830. In bringing Lyncoya into his family, Jackson joined other Southern slaveholders, Indian agents, and Northern Quakers in a short-lived, but politically potent, tradition of assimilative adoption. In the South, Peterson told me, slaveholders adopted Native children while “imagining they were assimilating Native people and their lands into the confines of the United States. They believed that what they were doing was a benevolent act, but also understood it as a form of cultural genocide.” Reading Peterson’s work, it became clear that Jackson might have had many reasons—emotional, political, and ideological—to bring Lyncoya home to the Hermitage.

Lyncoya was a child of the Red Sticks—a faction of traditionalist Creeks, mostly from the northwestern, or “Upper,” towns of the Creek Confederacy, that was determined to resist white encroachment. In 1813, the Upper Creeks went to war with the Lower Creeks, who were attempting to retain their sovereignty by assimilating; allying; and, in some cases, intermarrying with Euro-American settlers. In August 1813, the Red Sticks killed 250 Creek and Euro-American settlers on the plantation of Samuel Mims, in present-day Alabama. Then major general of the Tennessee militia, Jackson saw this intratribal conflict, and the public opprobrium leveled at the Red Sticks in the wake of the Fort Mims killings, as weaknesses he could exploit in his ongoing quest to force Creek lands into Anglo hands. The battle that killed Lyncoya’s village was part of this quest.

The Battle of Tallushatchee was beyond bloody. A thousand American soldiers, led by John Coffee (a Jackson ally who was married to his wife Rachel’s niece), circled Tallushatchee, a Red Stick village, the morning of Nov. 3, 1813, and killed systematically, until all 186 men in the village were dead. Historian Robert Remini flatly calls Tallushatchee “a massacre” and quotes Lt. Richard Keith Call, who described the scene: “We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin. … Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed human bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters.” The soldiers took 84 captives, including Lyncoya.