In August 1830, Andrew Jackson traveled from his home in Nashville twenty miles south to Franklin for a meeting with a delegation of Chickasaw chiefs. They gathered at a plain Presbyterian church on the corner of Fourth and North Margin Streets. “Brothers,” Jackson began in a fulsome tone, “Your Great father… can cherish none but the best feelings for his red children,” whom he promised to make “a happy and prosperous people.”
He feared that if they remained in their land, their nation would be swallowed up and obliterated by the swelling numbers of white settlers. His voice dripping with sincerity, he warned them that he could do nothing to stop the states from exercising authority over them. His “earnest desire is, that you may be perpetuated and preserved as a nation.” He would do nothing to force them out of their territory, but he could see no other alternative for their survival than to move west. “Forget the prejudices you feel for the soil of your birth, and go to a land where you can preserve your people as a nation,” the president admonished them.
The Great White Father had noticeably upset the assembled chiefs, but they trusted Jackson enough to agree to consider his words carefully. Four days later they met again with Jackson at the Masonic Hall. Their sad faces made it clear that Jackson had triumphed. Relying on the president’s good faith, the chiefs reluctantly acquiesced in surrendering their nation’s territory in exchange for a strange land promised to them beyond the Mississippi.
Over the course of the next few years, Jackson signed more than seventy treaties with tribal nations ceding around one hundred million acres in exchange for little more than thirty million acres of barren land in what is now Oklahoma. Chiefs were often bribed to betray their people, and if they did not accede, they were warned that the US military was prepared to drive them from their homes.
Jackson asked the secretary of war, Lewis Cass, to oversee the relocation. Cass had a low opinion of the Native American as “reckless of consequences, …Unrestrained by moral considerations, whatever his passions prompt he does.” The tribes were “clinging with a death grasp” to habits of “listless indolence,” in Cass’s view. If Jackson had cared to treat the tribes humanely, as he had promised to do, he chose the wrong man to implement his removal policy.