Jackson, Andrew
Horace Greeley, The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion, vol. 1, p. 106 ,
noting that I am indebted for this fact to the late Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts,
who was in Washington as a member of Congress when the decision was rendered.
Chief Justice Marshall had read the Supreme Courts opinion in a dispute between the state of Georgia and two missionaries,
who had been convicted of and imprisoned for living among the Cherokee Indians.
The Supreme Courts decision was in favor of the missionaries.
The attorneys for the missionaries sought to have this judgment enforced, but could not.
General Jackson was President, and would do nothing of the sort.
So the missionaries languished years in prison.
Page 104 thru 106.
General Jackson was chosen President in 1898, receiving more than two-thirds of the Electoral votes, including those of all the Slave States but Delaware and a part of Maryland. In Georgia, there were two Jackson Electoral tickets rung but none for Adams. And the first Annual Message of the new President gave the Indians due notice that Georgia had not so voted from blind impulse--that their dearest rights, their most cherished possessions, were among her "spoils of victory." In this Message, the solemn obligations which our Government had volunteered to assume, in treaty after treaty with the Creeks and Cherokees, were utterly ignored, and the rights and possessions of the Indians dealt with precisely as if no such treaties had ever existed! Georgia had herself, through her citizens, participated in negotiating, and, through her Senators, united in raft-flying those treaties; yet not only was she held at liberty to disobey and trample on them, but the United States was regarded as equally absolved, by the convenient fiction of State Sovereignty, from all liability to maintain and enforce them! No one could deny that we had solemnly engaged, by repeated treaties, to protect the Indians in the undisturbed use and enjoyment forever of the lands which we had admitted to be, and marked out as, theirs. No one could deny that we had obtained large cessions of valuable lands by these treaties. No one doubted that Georgia had urged us to make these treaties, and had eagerly appropriated the lands thus obtained by the Union, and passed directly over to her: but then, Georgia was a sovereign State, and entitled to do as she liked with all the lands within her borders, and all the people living thereon, no matter if in flagrant violation of the laws and treaties of the United States! And the new President did not scruple to assert and reiterate the untruth that the Creeks and Cherokees respectively were attempting to "erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama," ringing all possible changes on the falsehood, and gravely quoting from the Constitution that "No new State shall be formed or erected within the limits of any other State," as precluding the maintenance by the Creeks and Cherokees of their governments in territories which they had possessed and governed long before Georgia had been colonized, or the name Alabama invented.
This deliberate and flagrant perversion of the question to be decided was persisted in through several pages of the Message. Says the President:
"Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to ESTABLISH an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi, or submit to the laws of those States."
What the Indians demanded was simply that the portion of their immemorial possessions which they had reserved for their own use and enjoyment in making liberal cessions to our Government, should still be left to them--that they should be protected in such enjoyment, by the United States, as we had solemnly stipulated by treaty that they should be, taking our pay for it in advance. But General Jackson, in urging them to migrate beyond the Mississippi, did not hesitate to speak of their rights and their immunities as follows:
- "This emigration should be voluntary; for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the Aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers, and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that, if they remain within the limits of the States, they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience, as individuals, they will, without a doubt, be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that, in this state of things, claims can be allowed or, tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain, or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population."
How "voluntary" their emigration was to be, and what sort of "protection in their persons and property" they were likely to receive in case they refused to "abandon the graves of their fathers, and seek a home in a distant land," let the laws which Georgia proceeded to enact bear witness. Grown weary of awaiting the operation of the methods whereby she had already secured, at no cost to herself, the gradual acquisition of the greater part of the Indian lands within her borders when she acceded to the Union, that State passed acts abolishing the government of the Cherokees, and reducing them at a word to the condition of unprotected vassals. Their lands were thereupon divided into counties, surveyed, and ordered to be distributed by lottery among the white citizens of the State, of whom each was to have a ticket. A reservation of one hundred and sixty acres to each head of a Cherokee family was made; but this reservation conferred or recognized only a right of possession during the good pleasure of the State Legislature. The Indians, whose government was thus abolished, were allowed no voice in that to which they were arbitrarily subjected; they could not even give testimony in a Georgia court, though denied a resort to any other. The fortunate drawer of Cherokee lands in the Georgia State lottery was entitled to call upon the Governor to put him in summary possession, expelling any adverse [Indian] claimant. If there were two or more antagonist white claimants, their respective claims were to be deliberately adjudicated by the courts, according to the dictates of ordinary jurisprudence. If any one sought to legally hold or recover lands against a claimant under this rule, he must make express affidavit that he
- "was not liable to be dispossessed of said land by or under any one of the provisions of the said act of the General Assembly of Georgia, passed December 20, 1833: * * * in which issue the person to whom possession of said land was delivered shall join: and which issue shall constitute the entire pleadings between the parties; nor shall the court allow any matter other than is contained in said issue to be placed upon the regular files of said court; * * * nor shall said court, at the instance of either party, pass any order, or grant any injunction, to stay said cause, nor permit to be ingrafted on said cause any other proceedings whatever."
It can hardly be necessary to say that the sole, unconcealed object of this legislation was to deprive the Cherokees of the protection of the courts of the United States, or any adjudication therein touching their rights, by precluding any appeal to said courts for the sake of testing the validity of these acts of the Legislature of Georgia.
That State had already decisively indicated that, if unable to make or control such adjudication, she was abundantly ready to defy it.
A Cherokee named Tassells was arrested on a Georgia warrant for killing another Indian within the Cherokee territory. His counsel obtained a writ of error from a United States court, requiring Georgia to show cause why he should not be discharged and his case remitted to the Cherokee authorities, according to existing treaties. Georgia defied the writ and hung the Indian. And this finished the case.
Some time thereafter, two missionaries of the American Board among the Cherokees were arrested on a Georgia process, tried for, and convicted of, inciting the Indians to resist the policy of the State of Georgia designed to effect the expulsion of the Indians from her soil. They were of course sentenced to the State Prison. They appealed by writ of error to the courts of the United States, and the final adjudication thereon was had before the Supreme Court at Washington, the decision being pronounced by Chief Justice Marshall. It was entirely in favor of the missionaries and against the pretensions of Georgia, holding that the treaties between the United States and the Cherokees were valid and binding on all the States, and paramount to all State laws, according to that provision of the Federal Constitution which prescribes:
"Article VI., p2. This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the copstitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
The attorneys for the missionaries sought to have this judgment enforced, but could not. General Jackson was President, and would do nothing of the sort.
- "Well: John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!" (27)
____________________
27 I am indebted for tins fact to the late Governor George N. Briggs, of Massachusetts, who was in Washington as a member of Congress when the decision was rendered.
28 President Jackson, in his first Annual Message, already referred to, had said:
"A portion of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites, and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of the States of Georgia and Alabama."
And Colonel Benton, in his "Thirty Years' View," says (vol. i., p. 164), General Jackson "refused to sustain those Southern tribes in their attempt to set up an independent government within the States of Alabama and Georgia."
Both these gentlemen well knew--Colonel Benton could not but know--that the Cherokees only claimed or sought the rights which they had possessed and enjoyed from time immemorial, which were solemnly guaranteed to them by treaty after treaty, whereof the subsisting validity and pertinence were clearly affirmed by the tribunal of ultimate resort.
29 The late Jeremiah Evarts, long the efficient and honored Secretary of the American Board
A HISTORY OF THE GREAT REBELLION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 1860-'65:
ITS CAUSES, INCIDENTS, AND RESULTS:
INTENDED TO EXHIBIT ESPECIALLY ITS MORAL AND POLITICAL PHASES, WITH THE DRIFT AND PROGRESS OF AMERICAN OPINION RESPECTING HUMAN SLAVERY
From 1776 to the Close of the War for the Union.
By HORACE GREELEY was published in 1866 by
- O. D. CASE & COMPANY.
CHICAGO: GEO. & C. W. SHERWOOD.
It's good to read history that was written before the communists started re-writing it.