Mary Stockwell - The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians

MANY TRAILS OF TEARS

Any professor of the history of the United States in the early nineteenth-century has to say only two words to get a reaction from students. Those two words are Andrew Jackson. The response is usually swift and visceral, running something along the lines of: We hate him! No amount of defending our seventh president as the hero of New Orleans, the champion of the Common Man, or the guardian of the people against the Hydra of the Second Bank of the United States can silence his many critics in and out of the classroom. When asked to explain this all-pervasive dislike of President Jackson, the answer is always the sameThe Trail of Tears!

The story of the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes as they were designated by historians in the late nineteenth-century, most especially the Cherokee, who had a government based on a constitution, a written language with their own alphabet, and cotton plantations in northern Georgiahas seared itself into our collective imagination. So much was lost on the trail where tears were shed, along which the Cherokee and four other tribes were driven from their homes in the southeastern United States to the Indian Territory across the Mississippi River. Thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw died on the long trek to the present-day state of Oklahoma. Hundreds of American soldiers perished fighting the Creeks and Seminoles who refused to leave Alabama and Florida.

But perhaps the greatest loss came to Jacksons own reputation. Even his best contemporary biographers have not been able to repair it completely. Robert Remini, Jacksons greatest defender in the late twentieth-century, concluded that the president had decided long before the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 that the good of the nation and the tribes required their removal.

More recently Jon Meacham, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008), explains that Jackson was neither a humanitarian nor a blind bigot when it came to Indian removal. Instead he was practical. He knew the Indians were increasingly being crowded out by white settlers who demanded their land. Georgia, in fact, was on the brink of taking the Cherokees land by force. Jackson weighed the situation and sided with the average American, who wanted property of his own. After stating that there was nothing heroic, right, or brave about this decision, Meacham added, Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

Yet there is something tragic in believing that if we explain why Andrew Jackson drove the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole west to Oklahoma in the early nineteenth century, we have explained Indian removal. The tragedy lies in the fact that the struggle between Jackson and the southern tribes was only one part of a wider story that reaches back across time to the closing months of the War of 1812, back through many statesmost notably Ohioand back into the lives of so many other tribes, including the Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, Ottawa, and Wyandot. They, too, departed down many trails of tearssent west in aprocess that leaves a great deal of responsibility and blame to pass around among citizens of the United States and Indian nations alikenot just to Andrew Jackson.

A closer look at what the major Ohio tribes passed through in the period leading up to their official removal sheds light into how complex that process truly was. While the conflict between Jackson and the Cherokee, as well as with the other southern tribes, reads like a mythic battle between good and evil, the struggle of Ohios historic Indians to find a place for themselves in a rapidly changing world comes closer to the tragedies of Shakespeare. There is no black-and-white scenario of perfect characters on one side to root for, nor wholly evil characters on the other side to condemn. Instead, there is only the tale of the many individuals who tried to come to terms with the fast pace of change on Americas western frontier. While they often disagreed with one another on how to proceed, they all attempted to move toward the best possible future. In the end, Ohio became a microcosm of how people with conflicting views and competing interests strove to find the surest way forward, even in the face of the relentless press of time.