I.

When Andrew Jackson arrived in the settlement of Middle Tennessee during 1788, its leaders were in active correspondence with Spanish officials about a possible alliance. In thereby trying to break or avoid the fragile bonds holding them to the new American states, they were hardly alone in the western reaches of the Carolinas and Georgia. Four years earlier, large numbers of settlers, led by the colorful speculator and warlord John Sevier, had declared their independence from North Carolina. They formed a new state, Franklin, because they correctly suspected that North Carolina's elites had already claimed the best western lands. Their hard feelings against the coastal gentry ran deep, and they hoped to become fully independent or to join the Union on their own terms. (The state collapsed by 1789.) In Middle Tennessee, also known as the Cumberland District after the river it bordered, security rather than land titles was the immediate cause of secessionist feelings. Separated by more than one hundred miles from eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, its settlers were uniquely vulnerable to attack from Cherokee war parties. Perhaps half of the original settlers from 1779–80, including Jackson's future father-in-law, had already fled for Kentucky. Cumberland's leader, James Robertson, was sure that the end was near in 1787 and 1788. “The United States afford us no protection,” he reported. The settlement was “daily plundered and its inhabitants murdered by the Creeks, and Cherokees, unprovoked,” and no one was coming to help them.Footnote ⁵

The Spanish official to whom Cumberland's leaders were writing, Esteban Míro, told them that he could not openly encourage them to secede from the United States. The Law of Nations, a general term for the customs and treaties that regulated international relations, proscribed such interference. Instead, he offered free immigration into the lands of His Most Catholic Majesty, thereby reversing long-standing policy regarding Protestant newcomers. This was a practical decision, and perhaps a desperate one. Anglo-American settlers had been pouring into Louisiana since the end of the Revolutionary War—mostly, as one official complained, “without passports, recommendations, or any other document…such as are usually obtained by those journeying to foreign countries.” Unable to keep them out, the Spanish decided to welcome them in, with the condition that they swear an oath to the Bourbon King and promise to raise their children as Catholics. In return, Anglo-American settlers would receive land grants based on occupancy. Spanish policy in this respect mirrored that of the British in Upper Canada, who also tried to lure settlers out of the Republic by giving them what most Americans obviously wanted: freehold land and low taxes. Both the Spanish and British enjoyed modest success. Some 15,000 or more American-born migrants knowingly settled in Spanish lands from 1782 to 1792, although only a fraction of these seem to have signed the oath.Footnote ⁶

That so many people were willing to quit the new United States and become, at least officially, the subjects of a Catholic empire, speaks to how fluid, negotiable, or just plain irrelevant national identities were along the southern borderlands during Andrew Jackson's youth. The Spanish option was an extreme version of the prevailing pattern: people born in the Carolinas and Georgia tried to get away from polities and jurisdictions they knew to be dominated by wealthy planters and speculators. Ignored and exploited by colonial authorities, westerners had gained some representation in the new state constitutions. But they also found that the land offices opened in the wake of the conflict enabled well-connected gentlemen to buy up huge tracts of the best land. Many had been forced to sell their military grants to make ends meet during the early 1780s, and these grants, too, ended up in a few hands. (In Spanish and Canadian territory, by contrast, grants came from the Crown and were nontransferable.) Beyond their attachment to republican ideas or their hatred for Loyalists, they had little sense of belonging to any American state. Indeed, the freedom to quit the country of one's birth was an important part of popular republicanism, even appearing in two of the new state constitutions.Footnote ⁷

Jackson was born in a settlement along the vague border between North and South Carolina, where the benefits of belonging to either province were hard to find. He shared his neighbors' manifest desire to get away from such jurisdictions. This is why he moved several times between 1783 and 1788 before accepting the post of public prosecutor for the remote Cumberland District—whose leaders had just renamed it “the Mero District” in hopes of flattering the Spanish official. But while most settlers sought only the independence that came with good titles to their farms, Jackson wanted to be a public man, a gentleman, an authority figure. This is why he became a lawyer during the mid-1780s, at a time when lawyers were increasingly dominant in politics and hated by most people. Especially in the southern borderlands, the profusion of land claims created a perfect storm of potential litigation. Jackson never doubted that he could and should use his position as the public's lawyer to profit personally. He saw no conflict of public interest because he was not accustomed to any public.Footnote ⁸

Beginning in late 1788 and early 1789, Jackson did most of his legal work for private clients, tracking down debtors and repossessing property as needed. He immediately invested his profits in a dry goods store in Nashville, a promising enterprise given the Mero District's population. Its white settlers were wealthier than those in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, with many more slave owners producing goods for market. To get consumer items to those potential customers, however, Jackson and his partners had to buy goods in and pass through Spanish territory leading to the Gulf. Since he could not own property or make contacts there unless he was a Spanish subject, he took his oath to Charles IV in June 1789. As his leading biographer notes, Jackson probably saw this as nothing more than a cost of international business.Footnote ⁹

Besides his legal and mercantile ventures, Jackson invested his money and hopes in land speculation. His mentor in this respect was the territorial governor, William Blount, who claimed vast estates in what became the state of Tennessee. “My Western lands had become so great an object to me,” Blount noted while (privately) explaining his decision to become governor, “that it had become absolutely necessary that I should go to the Western Country to secure them.” Jackson made his name in the early 1790s as a loyal servant to Blount and a reliable prosecutor for the Mero District. With another young lawyer, John Overton, he was soon claiming good plots deep inside lands promised to the Cherokee and other Indian nations. In 1794, for example, Jackson, Overton, and another man purchased title to a 5,000-acre plot in what is now Memphis, more than one hundred miles beyond any white settlement. They also paid surveyors to seek out promising lands as far north as the Illinois country.Footnote ¹⁰

None of this made Jackson, Overton, or Blount hostile to the power of any particular government, including the new federal government of the United States. To the contrary, they were the shock troops of the very state authority that most settlers were trying to get away from: Jackson as prosecutor, Blount as governor, and Overton as collector of federal excise. Blount in particular was a delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787 and an avid voice for national authority, when it suited him. He and other land speculators certainly shared the Federalist fear of squatters' rights and agrarian laws, of debtors escaping creditors physically (by emigration) or politically (through paper money or stay laws). If the settlers of Mississippi ever took control of government, one Federalist noted to another in 1797, “the creditors would certainly be much injured, if not ruined.” In this case, as in so many others, then, “the less the people have to do with the government, the better.” The priority here was to insure the rule of common law and the execution of private contracts, the better to build the Republic's reputation as a nation of laws that obeyed the Law of Nations. The initial point of conflict between national authorities and borderlands elites, including Jackson, came rather over how to balance the terms of Indian treaties with the terms of speculative investments in Indian lands.Footnote ¹¹

Tensions started in 1790 and 1791, when federal authorities signed new treaties with the Creeks and Cherokees, respectively. The boundaries that such treaties created were not in themselves problematic for regional land speculators; it was, after all, the very existence of official boundaries and rules that created the scarcity of access upon which all speculation turned. But these particular treaties cut out regional power holders. The 1790 agreement, for instance, was signed in New York City by Secretary of War Henry Knox, “sole commissioner for treating with the Creek nation of Indians,” and in the presence of a small party of New York and Pennsylvania dignitaries. An “able surveyor” of the United States would join delegates from Georgia and the Creeks in making a “distinct and well known” border, ideally a twenty-foot line of felled trees. The Cherokee treaty of 1791 only provided for federal and Creek surveyors—not for territorial representatives. In addition to these disturbing signs of permanence and good faith, both treaties specified that any U.S. citizen who tried to settle on Indian lands would “forfeit the protection of the United States” and could be punished by the Creeks or Cherokees “or not, as they please.”Footnote ¹²

Federal officials assumed that they had to establish peace within the nation's borders in order to secure their own authority. Such premises authorized the regulation of trade and emigration, primarily through the Indian Intercourse Acts of 1790 and 1794. The United States, Henry Knox and others decided, had a vested interest in encouraging agriculture among Native peoples. That meant discouraging fraudulent land treaties and regulating cross-border commerce. Thus only licensed traders could exchange goods with Natives, and only at one of three federal posts in the region. Moreover, those seeking to enter Indian territory had to carry a passport: an official document granting a conditional, limited right of unmolested movement. Derived from medieval safe-conduits, passports had emerged in the early modern age to represent the power of the European sovereign to keep his subjects at home. They traditionally conveyed the right to leave one's country, not to enter another one. Federalist authorities knew that they could not stem western migration. But they did expect, as Knox wrote in 1789, that encroachment onto Indian lands could be “restrained and regulated.”Footnote ¹³

Of course these regulations were only as effective as the handful of federal Indian agents in the borderlands—including Silas Dinsmoor, who arrived in 1792—could make them. In practice these agents were normally on the move rather than in their agency houses or trading posts, so that both goods and persons moved much more freely than the treaties prescribed. To dwell on the difficulties of frontier law enforcement, though, is to miss the deeper conflict over citizenship and jurisdiction that shaped Jackson's political education. An American was an American, according to the logic of the federal treaties, because they lived within a particular territory and obeyed the laws that were in operation there. In a republican version of the monarchical protection covenant, citizens participated in the making of laws that were then administered by the state to maintain peace and order within its territory. The result was a national social compact or civil society. Especially in their private correspondence, Federalists defined “genuine Americans” as those who were “enthusiastically attached to our national government,” eager to obey a state that protected both the individual citizens and the Union itself.Footnote ¹⁴

These premises were completely foreign to someone like Jackson, who had never known much protection under the colonial regime and thus had no way to transfer that expectation to a republican context. He and other borderlands elites simply saw federal regulations as harmful intrusions—which indeed they were, although much more for speculators than settlers. Tennessee's leaders had anticipated unrestricted trade with the distant Choctaw and Chickasaw. But the Intercourse Acts funneled all Indian trade through a few stations, thus “[e]xcluding from that Trade the Individuals of our State,” Jackson complained in 1797. The various treaty lines made by federal negotiators were in direct conflict with some of the investments that he and his partners had made. Indeed, Jackson may have come to know Dinsmoor through a 1797 incident in which Natives complained to the agent about the lines that Tennessee surveyors—including one of Jackson's friends—were drawing. For its part, the passport rule was easily ignored or circumvented, but Dinsmoor did keep records of those entering Cherokee and then Choctaw land. If enforced to the letter and throughout the borderlands, these rules would have posed a major barrier to business ventures that relied on movement up and down the Mississippi and Cumberland valleys.Footnote ¹⁵

Federal law also threatened the free movement of unfree people. The acts creating the Southwest Territory in 1790 and the Mississippi Territory in 1798 both removed the ban on slavery that Jefferson had written into the Northwest Ordinance. But they also forbade the importation of slaves “from outside the United States,” probably to protect domestic exporters from the Chesapeake and to check the movement of slaves from the revolutionary hotspots of the Caribbean. This restriction never appeared in the huge petitions signed by poorer settlers, who were worried as always about the status of their land titles. By contrast, the leading citizens of the borderlands complained bitterly about the slave importation rule. To be forbidden to bring slaves from outside the United States into Mississippi was a “great and enormous grievance,” noted a grand jury from wealthy Adams County in 1799. Federal law had granted “no term…for removing their negroes out of the spanish Territory into this of the united States—to the great injury and ruin of a number of many of it's Inhabitants.” Of the twenty-six men who signed similar petitions from Mississippi that same year, at least eighteen had owned property or resided in Spanish territory during the previous decade, and apparently held at least some slaves there. Federal law technically separated them from their chattels.Footnote ¹⁶

Beyond the immediate threat to property, such restrictions raised the far more troubling specter of a central authority that was willing and able to tax, regulate, or even decree slavery out of existence. The proximate origins of that fear trace to the Somerset Decision of 1772, in which a British justice reluctantly decided that a Virginia slave who had escaped his master in London could not be held in irons on British soil. Abolitionists quickly turned this into a broad assertion of territorial rights—British ground, in this rendering, imparted certain liberties and protections to everyone who happened to be there. Despite the careful protections for masters in the U.S. Constitution, abolitionist jurisdictions were already part of the American Union when Jackson rose to regional prominence in the early 1790s. Slavery was no longer legal in most of New England, and in Pennsylvania, home of the nation's capital, a gradual emancipation statute had outlawed the sale of any human being within state borders or for transport out of the state.Footnote ¹⁷

Most Federalists were far too concerned with the protection of property, any property, to be consistently antislavery. The threat that Jackson and his peers saw was more latent and indirect, rooted in a larger trend of federal assertion into territories they meant to traverse, define, and sell on their own terms. They mostly seem confused as to what national law meant for slavery. Was it even legal to bring slaves into northern states? Would the authorities in those states track down runaways? (The fugitive slave clause only referred to states, not territories). While traveling to the capital for the first time in 1795, Jackson received a letter from Overton asking him to buy certain goods—and also warning him that “if you purchase Negroes in any of the northern States, be careful in so doing not to subject yourself to the penal Laws of the State.” Still in Philadelphia two years later, as a delegate from the new state of Tennessee, Jackson may well have witnessed a Massachusetts Federalist propose a bill that would ban slavery entirely in Mississippi. Besides being an obvious violation of “the rights of man,” slavery was dangerous, according to the bill's few supporters. And as a threat to “the safety of the people,” slavery should be restrained by the state.Footnote ¹⁸

II.

Jackson and his peers were deeply invested in bringing commercial and legal order to the borderlands. They very much wanted to install a state powerful enough to enforce contracts across western territories. In this sense they were the lone Federalists of the southern borderlands—and might have remained so, had federal officials not threatened many of their cross-border investments and cut them out of essential decisions regarding trade and treaties. The great majority of southern settlers had nothing Federalist about them. They wanted ready access to workable land and good titles, along with some flexibility in the enforcement of debts and contracts. Social divisions between poor settlers and landed gentry might have led to prolonged and even violent conflict, as happened in frontier regions of post-Revolution Maine and Pennsylvania. In the Southwest, though, an especially traumatizing kind of racial warfare during the early 1790s not only gave poor settlers and ambitious gentry a common foe, but also fostered new understandings of mutual protection and nationhood.Footnote ¹⁹

Jackson had arrived in the Cumberland or Mero District toward the end of a renewed wave of violence. Devastated by scorched-earth expeditions during the Revolutionary War, the Cherokees were in the midst of a major reorganization during the 1780s, with some clans settling in five new towns on the Tennessee-Georgia border and others taking shelter near Chota, just south of the eastern Tennessee settlements. Both poor settlers who farmed land near Chota and surveying teams who staked out claims for speculators provoked many braves to attack—against the wishes of Old Tassel, the relatively accommodationist leader in Chota. Violence became its own justification: in retaliation for the murder of a family in eastern Tennessee, for example, white militiamen lured Old Tassel to a truce and then killed him in early 1788, inducing still more vengeance raids. This was the immediate context in which many Tennessee leaders had sought aid from the Spanish.Footnote ²⁰

After Franklin's first and only governor, John Sevier, led a devastating invasion of Cherokee towns in late 1788, a low-grade war spread over the borderlands. The fragmentary evidence suggests that most Cherokee warriors left the actual settlements alone, instead harassing or ambushing whites they encountered on roads or deep inside Native grounds—hunters and surveyors, in particular. They also stole horses. Feeding a continental equine market whose center reached west to the Comanche, small bands of warriors rode off with thousands of horses from Kentucky to northern Georgia. White posses gave chase, often venting their fury on the first Indians they came across. (Whites also stole horses on a large scale.) Realizing that the boundaries of the 1791 treaty were fictions, the people of the five Cherokee towns, now known as Chickamaugans, thus declared war on Tennessee in the fall of 1792. White leaders were stunned. “I do not find that any thing of the kind has ever before been done by Indians in so formal a manner,” Blount reported.Footnote ²¹

For the next two years, Native parties of anywhere from a dozen to several hundred struck both the Cumberland District and eastern Tennessee with impunity. Now they came not to steal horses or harass invaders but to wipe out the settlers. They set fire to stables, barns, and homes and attacked entire households. In the Cumberland District, women and children made up about 35 percent of those killed during 1792–94, a dramatic change from the previous five years and a devastating blow to the traditional male obligation of family protection. War parties targeted particular households, including that of Cumberland's military leader, James Robertson. Because the Cumberland settlements were thinly dispersed along the meandering banks of the river, though, no spot was much more secure than any others. Homes within a few miles of Jackson's residence went up in flames, and in May 1793 one of the boats he used to import goods vanished, presumably ambushed.Footnote ²²

One Cumberland settler recalled these miserable months as “the time of the forts.” Whenever any Indians were reported in the general area, most settlers took to these crude and crowded shelters. There they remained for days or even weeks. Those who left too early took an awful risk. One seventeen-year-old Betsey Steele, for example, set out at the behest of her father, who wanted to get back to farming. A young man found her in a nearby field: “she was lying on the ground, terribly, mortally wounded, scalped and bleeding…she died in a few moments.” Because the war parties rarely numbered more than twenty and because they could easily hide in the thick cane that grew along the Cumberland, attacks came with terrifying speed and spontaneity. In a steady stream of letters to Knox, Governor Blount relayed news of this or that family killed and scalped, this or that homestead burned to ashes. “[A]t one [station] which I lately visited,” he saw fit to mention, “there are 280 people, men women and children, living in a miserable manner in small huts.”Footnote ²³

The Washington administration had no philosophical objection to total war on Native peoples. It had simply selected the Northwest as the theater of such warfare. That region's security seemed more important than that of the Southwest, mostly because of the proximity of the powerful British rather than the feeble Spanish. Besides, the destruction of Arthur St. Clair's army in 1791 demanded national retaliation. At the height of the violence in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia during the next three years, the federal army was occupied in the Ohio Valley. As a result, Knox and Washington repeatedly told Blount, there were no troops available to help the southern borderlands. They therefore recommended that frontier leaders seek a negotiated settlement with the Cherokee and Creek and find some way to stop encroachments on Indian lands and thefts of Native horses. (Federalists heard about these abuses from Indian agents like Dinsmoor.) In the meantime, they were to engage in defensive operations only—that is, to remain inside the boundaries prescribed in the 1790 and 1791 treaties, only crossing into Native land if in actual pursuit of fleeing warriors.Footnote ²⁴

During this extended nightmare, Andrew Jackson was not only attorney general for a besieged district but also a messenger and advisor to Governor Blount. In 1791, he had personally delivered and explained Blount's plans for the defense of the Mero District to James Robertson. At that time Blount recognized the need to prosecute squatters on Cherokee lands pursuant to the recent treaty—a job that fell to Jackson. “I have no doubt but [Jackson] will readily do it,” Blount reported. One year later, the settlements were reeling from constant attacks, and both the governor and his trusted attorney bore some of the blame. The people of Tennessee expected that I should not “suffer them to be killed or robbed,” Blount wrote during some of the worst violence in early 1793, but all he could do was urge restraint and write passports authorizing them to go into Indian lands in search of stolen horses. “My situation is that of daily hearing their complaints, without the power of redress,” he lamented.Footnote ²⁵

At least Blount lived in the relative safety of eastern Tennessee, in the capital deferentially named for the increasingly hated Knox. From the end of 1792 until the middle of 1794, the Cumberland settlements sometimes went weeks without any word from the rest of Tennessee. Nor could they turn to the Spanish, who were now providing weapons to the Chickamauga. Once more the survival of the settlement was very much in doubt. In September 1793, Jackson narrowly survived an ambush outside a fort on the eastern reaches of the Cumberland. The two men with him, reported the Knoxville Gazette, were put to death “in a most cruel manner” while Jackson “made his escape, and got to a neighboring station, from whence the whole frontier [was] alarmed.” Alas, the paper noted, the retaliatory force that quickly assembled could not pursue the attackers once they crossed the Tennessee River, because “our government restricts our operation against them [there].”Footnote ²⁶

While pleading for help from Philadelphia, Blount argued that Tennesseans had abided by federal treaties. In so doing he and others routinely referred to the Law of Nations. Responding to Native accusations in early 1793, for example, the governor refuted each charge point by point, except for the one about surveying parties and speculative plans deep inside Indian lands. Tennesseans were being attacked inside their homes and within the proper boundaries, he insisted. Certainly they could retaliate, not least because the Law of Nations stipulated that, in the event of war, all existing treaties were suspended. By picturing the settlers inside the boundaries drawn for them by national negotiators, such accounts drove home the claim that they should have enjoyed the protection of the national state.Footnote ²⁷

In the antigovernment narrative taking form, then, federal authorities were both invasive and negligent, in that they tried to regulate their own citizens' trade and movement while ignoring their natural right to life itself and to nature's first law, self-defense. Newspapers echoed this argument and reprinted horror stories taken from across the borderlands. Often the editors printed these atrocity accounts directly alongside quotes from Indian agents, who assured their superiors that the Natives had no hostile intentions. In December 1793, for example, they published a list of twenty-one “citizens of the United States” who were held as captives in the Creek nation, all but two of whom were women and children and all of whom were supposedly “sold from master to master…in the same manner as negroes are sold.” They then reproduced two Indian agents' optimistic accounts of a coming peace. Does slavery sound like peace, the paper asked bitterly and rhetorically, “or do not these gentlemen consider this Territory as part of the United States?”Footnote ²⁸

Perhaps the most affecting attack on national policy came in an August 1793 reply to an earlier editorial calling for the rigid observance of existing treaties. The Federalists, the writer(s) argued, appeared to forget that the Law of Nations was “originally no more than the law of nature applied to nations.” In forming civil societies and making treaties, men “do not cease to be men.” They retained their original sovereignty, defined simply as the power to use force without asking anyone. And it was obvious, this article declared, that the people of the southwestern borderlands were very much like those original agents, living in savage lands filled with savage peoples. They did not live “under” governmental protection or civil law at all. Instead they dwelled in a state of nature: not the gentle imaginary nature of Rousseau but the kill-or-be-killed nightmare associated, somewhat unfairly, with Hobbes. The article ended with an account of the most recent trauma to their body politic, the murder and mutilation of a pregnant settler. Apparently she was found about one mile from her burned-out home, where her husband and children also lay in pieces. She was strapped spread-eagle to the ground and with a gaping wound in her womb.

In this account, the appalling image of an innocent body—or really two innocent bodies—as a desecrated temple dramatized a betrayal of paternity and blood relation. Indians had not just killed the mother and her child but had perversely replaced them as the objects of federal affection and protection.Footnote ²⁹

In many ways such accounts were simply the latest versions of a frontier genre that the historian Peter Silver has called “the anti-Indian sublime.” Developed during the Seven Years' War, this style emphasized the trauma done to white bodies—especially pregnant bodies—and appealed directly and without apology to readers' most intense passions. The people of the southern borderlands had thus inherited a way to narrate their own suffering. Because this new episode of extreme violence took place as the Federalists were trying to assert national jurisdiction by reference to international law, though, southwestern protests focused more on the terms of territoriality and citizenship. Asserting their “love to the Union,” a grand jury in Georgia nonetheless wondered if they had “sacrificed their resentment” for too long. If indeed we are “a part of the united government,” noted a petition from Tennessee, “we have a right to expect protection.” In any case they could not believe that their government would prevent them from taking measures “to secure us from the immediate outrages of savage barbarity.”Footnote ³⁰

Some of the most common anecdotes to circulate in the borderlands described atrocities committed during treaty talks, when, the Indians knew, the whites could not fight back. Such treaties simultaneously granted “savages” the status of legitimate states and deprived American citizens of the right to self-defense. “Why do we attempt to Treat with a Savage Tribe that will neither adhere to Treaties, nor the Law of Nations?” Andrew Jackson asked in 1793. The next year he more or less repeated himself: “why Treat with them” if peace talks were only “Delusions” that caused settlers to lower their guard, thus “opening an Easy door for the Indians to pass [through to] Butcher our Citizens”? In the long run, as well, treaties imperiled the people by making retributive expeditions into Indian lands illegal. Indeed, the very presence of border lines between the United States and Natives, no less than the terms of the 1790-91 treaties, announced that a citizen only carried his rights as far as a line made by an uncaring government.Footnote ³¹

Jackson and other Cumberland leaders were especially enraged at a new treaty signed between the United States and the Cherokee at the end of June 1794, shortly after John Sevier led yet another scorched-earth campaign through southern Tennessee and northern Georgia. Most Cherokees clearly wanted peace, not least because many were starving due to Sevier's raid. In the Cumberland, however, attacks by mixed war parties of Chickamauga, Creek, and Shawnee continued that summer. June 11, 1794, was the worst day: in addition to a scalping four miles from Nashville, six men, three women, and three children traveling by boat were killed and their twenty-two slaves captured. How could the people of the Cumberland respect any treaty under such conditions? Its military leader, James Robertson, apparently told Blount that he and a few militia captains and colonels from Kentucky would therefore organize a raid and then take the blame that would surely come from Philadelphia. A force of about 550 men set out toward two Chickamauga towns thought to be harboring the attackers. The attack was nominally led by James Ore of eastern Tennessee, who was a trusted informant to the secretary of war and could give the mission the imprimatur of higher authority.Footnote ³²

In September 1794, this small army completely wiped out the towns of Nickajack and Running Water, killing somewhere between fifty and one hundred Indians and taking twenty women and children as hostages. (In response to Federalist anger, Blount pled ignorance and Robertson resigned.) That winter, leaders from Tennessee and Kentucky made their own treaty with the Cherokee. Jackson was probably there, as were several Indian agents. Because the Cherokee had already agreed to stop fighting, these talks centered on the exchange of bodies, with the whites offering the hostages in return for a small number of prisoners—and a much larger number of slaves. “The Negroes in your hands whether captured or absconded from their Masters are to be considered as Prisoners in your hands,” Blount reported. During talks that dragged on for weeks, Tennessee's leading men inquired about every slave that had been reported stolen. They were disappointed. For the most part, the Cherokees reported, such fugitives were “in the woods and could not be collected to be exchanged at this time.” The freedom of movement that borderlands leaders demanded for themselves ironically made slavery more difficult to maintain.Footnote ³³

III.

Having earned his stripes under the tutelage of Tennessee's leading men, Jackson took part in its 1796 constitutional convention and then made his way to Philadelphia as the first U.S. representative from the new state. He served one term and then sat in the Senate until 1798, at which point he returned to Tennessee as a member of its supreme court. His major preoccupation in Congress was to make sure that the men who took part in the Sevier and Ore expeditions of 1793-94 were repaid, since they had been given IOUs (in which Jackson's partner, John Overton, had massively invested). Deeply embittered by the Federalists' failure to protect Tennessee in its most desperate hour, he condemned them as Anglophile traitors and weaklings. In pursuing good relations with the hated British they violated not only the Constitution but also the law of nations: “Vatel B[ook] 2, P[aragraph] 242, S[ection] 325 Says that the rights of Nations are benefits, of which the Sovereign is only the administrator.” In Jackson's selective reading of Vattel's text, The Law of Nations, the president had no right to sign Jay's Treaty, because “the Nation of america” clearly hated it. With Tennessee in the Union, however, Congressman Jackson adapted his regional grievances into a standard Jeffersonian call for states' rights. Jefferson's election further marginalized secessionist beliefs among the borderlands elite, enabling Jackson to stress Tennessee's “sovereignty” without threatening to quit the Union.Footnote ³⁴

As his secretary of war reported in an 1802 letter, President Jefferson was “extremely anxious” to promote white settlement in the southern borderlands. The West in general was for Jefferson the ultimate safeguard of a republican social order in which ordinary citizens would enjoy the independence for which nature intended them. At the national and international level this meant pursuing land cessions that culminated with the Louisiana Purchase; at the local level it meant opening more land offices where settlers could exchange their existing titles (including Spanish ones) for American grants. With these shifts in national policy came a subtle change in Indian diplomacy. While holding to the letter of the Intercourse Acts and promising Natives that all treaty lines would be “sacredly preserved,” Jefferson channeled more money and resources toward new roads and trading stations throughout the southwestern territories. U.S. negotiators pushed for road cessions through the Creek and Choctaw lands, to the rich lands of the Tombigbee River, while the number of trading posts jumped from three to fourteen during Jefferson's two terms. Ever the optimist, the president sometimes imagined that Native people would embrace Anglo-American agriculture. He was also confident that the tribes' accumulating debts would eventually force them to sell away their land.Footnote ³⁵

Jefferson made sure that those who could write passports—governors, military officers, and Indian agents—continued to do so, thus suggesting that U.S. citizens still needed permission to traverse Native ground. But there is no evidence that anyone was ever turned down for a passport, and every reason to think that this was what the president wanted. After all, he was one of the earliest and most emphatic theorists of the universal and natural right of all people to move about in search of happiness, even if that meant quitting their native country and switching national allegiances. The passports themselves began to reflect such priorities. A typical one from 1803 declared that the undersigned head of household was “determined to settle himself and famoley on or near the river Tom or dunbigbee [Tombigbee River] and wishes your excellency's sanction for it that he may pass and repass threw the Creek nation unmolested.” The governor and other officials readily obliged, firing off passports that offered perfunctory praise for the bearer—they were “sober” and “peaceable” and “in Good Credit”—and a head count of all dependents in tow. In most cases they seem to have simply transferred what the applicants had said about themselves onto the passport, and offered them wide latitude to move about. One passport described the four men named with the revealing malapropism, “setterzens.”Footnote ³⁶

All of this was more than enough to secure the national loyalty of most borderlands residents. John Overton, for example, spent much of Jefferson's first term lobbying the state of North Carolina to give Tennessee final jurisdiction over all land claims. In 1804 he replaced Jackson on the Tennessee Supreme Court, giving him final jurisdiction over the lawsuits that his own speculations often provoked. In 1805 and 1806, federal officials completed two new treaties with the Cherokee that turned over virtually all of the land between the Cumberland and eastern Tennessee to the United States. By expanding the total amount of available land, these treaties alleviated potential frictions between settlers and speculators. And with the initial phase of frontier land acquisition ending and short-staple cotton spreading through the Mississippi Valley, Overton transitioned from a speculator and merchandiser to a plantation owner and magistrate. In 1802 he had convinced his brother to emigrate from Virginia with thirty-one slaves, and within a few years he was exporting the cotton they harvested down the Mississippi, through lands secured by Jefferson.Footnote ³⁷

In part because he was late in making a similar transition, Jackson remained less comfortable with the administration's continued performance of national boundaries. After returning to Nashville in 1798, he tried again to import goods to the Cumberland District. In 1802 and again in 1804 he launched new general goods stores, borrowing credit from investors on the Atlantic Coast and buying goods from Spanish and American suppliers along the Gulf Coast. His account books reveal a jack-of-all-trades merchant who sold ladies' hats, porcelain tea cups, wool hats, shovels, and candlesticks along with tobacco and cotton cards. He found ample consumers but also ran into high transportation costs. With the Spanish still in control of the Gulf Coast east of New Orleans, goods had to move along the Mississippi and then overland to the Cumberland. The Spanish had already earned the undying hatred of Jackson and most other Tennesseans by supporting the Cherokee during the 1792-94 war. Now they were blocking access to the Gulf and checking passports on the Tombigbee River, a practice Jackson later described as “despotism.” Small wonder that he was eager to help Aaron Burr in what he thought was a filibuster to conquer New Spain in 1806.Footnote ³⁸

In 1804, Jackson had to sell his best farm to satisfy creditors. He even told his wife that they might face “the calamity of poverty.” That same year, one of Jackson's slaves escaped from the new plantation. In addition to “hands” for picking, cleaning, and packing cotton, Jackson's enslaved workers served as units of credit and exchange. Like the horses to which they were habitually compared, they were both mobile and stable in value—ideal as collateral or currency. In any case, Jackson could ill afford an escaped slave when his finances were so precarious. He waited three months before printing the following advertisement in the Tennessee Gazette:

Whatever else this says about Jackson as a master, it highlights some of the security concerns specific to borderlands slavery. In the old slave-owning areas, slave patrols enforced strict pass laws for all black persons, and state governments compensated owners whose chattels were executed. In the borderlands, the institutions of the racial police state were far weaker, and the proximity of foreign jurisdictions enabled blacks not only to escape but also to elude recapture.Footnote ³⁹

Especially after the Embargo and the end of the Atlantic slave trade induced a new wave of slave owners to head west, these problems became even more glaring. Once again, passports open a useful window onto what was happening in the remote borderlands. Until 1808, only a tiny fraction of all passports signed by Georgia's governor mentioned any black slaves. But in the eighteen-month period from November 1809 to July 1811, 104 of the 245 passports (42%) issued by the Georgia governor enumerated “negroes” along with other dependents traveling with the men named. They indicate that more than 1,140 slaves were taken through Creek territory during those months, presumably on the roads Jefferson kept pushing for. One man from Scriven, Georgia, moved west with his wife, their two children, “and forty-four negroes.” Another arrived with his wife, their nine children, and forty slaves, while one “Mrs. Dubose” of Sumpter District, South Carolina, came with one child—and fifty-eight slaves. All of this attracted the increasingly hostile attention of Creek revivalists, who could plainly see that these whites were not just passing through to trade.Footnote ⁴⁰

To head off conflict, federal officials began to enforce the passport rule more stringently. Among the Indian agents charged with this duty was Silas Dinsmoor, the New England Federalist who had remained in the borderlands despite the changes in political power back east. As agent to the Choctaw nation, he began in early 1811 to enforce the Intercourse Act to the letter, requiring everyone walking or riding through to show a passport. From April to November he stopped 25 of the 212 blacks who came his way. Perhaps they were runaways, trying, like Jackson's “mulatto” seven years earlier, to pass into Indian country. Or perhaps they were free men who had been kidnapped by slave traders; Dinsmoor understood both of these phenomena as “evils” to be halted. Whether to help masters recover runaways or to stop slave-catchers from stealing free blacks, Dinsmoor understood his duty in terms of a government's responsibility for the protection of everyone living within a given territory.Footnote ⁴¹

Both the passport rule and the assumptions it conveyed provoked Jackson on a variety of levels. Although he had made the transition to planter-exporter, he still had business contacts that required him to move across boundaries. He had only decided to go to Natchez in the late fall of 1811 after assuming ownership of his former partner's chattels. Was he really expected to obtain a passport for travel through Indian country on such short notice? Moreover, he was not sure how many slaves he would be bringing back, for he was trying to sell some on the way. Even if he accepted the passport rule, how could he specify the number of dependents who would be traveling with him? Such irritants built upon his deeper feelings of hatred for the Indian agents who had represented the Cherokees during the horrors of the 1790s and his revulsion at the need to hand over a passport after the manner of a slave. As he explained while recounting the incident in early 1812, he knew “my rights as an American Citizen,” and those rights moved with him wherever he went.Footnote ⁴²

IV.

Jackson insisted that the citizens in general shared his outrage at Silas Dinsmoor and the passport rule. The humiliation of being stopped along a public road and forced to account for themselves, their dependents, and their chattels was in his terms equally felt by all Americans, or at least all Tennesseans. And they reserved the right, as in a state of nature, to use or threaten violence on the offending party, indeed to treat Dinsmoor's agency house like any other “nuisance” that could be destroyed in the name of the people's safety. It is true that a handful of his friends and the governor exchanged complaints about Dinsmoor in 1811. It is also true that two of the several hundred passports signed by Georgia's governor during the previous decade anticipated Jackson's argument: an American citizen had the right to go “wherever business takes him.” But there is no evidence of any general uproar against the Indian agent. Indeed, the very existence of so many passports suggests a rough consensus between most settlers and a Jeffersonian regime eager to oblige them. Once again, men like Jackson had interests and ambitions that made exceptional demands upon the various authorities around them.Footnote ⁴³

As during the Chickamauga War almost twenty years earlier, the outbreak of racial violence and total war defused these latent tensions and catalyzed changes in Jackson's view of nationhood. Early in 1811, a major slave insurrection near New Orleans underscored the vulnerability of the new slave territories. Later that year the Shawnee prophets Tecumseh and Tensketawa made their way down the frontiers to the Creek Nation, which was increasingly beleaguered by food shortages and constant U.S. demands for road concessions. Within weeks of Jackson's confrontation with Dinsmoor, a faction of Creek warriors from the upper towns took to the warpath. In April 1812 a small party of these “Redsticks” attacked a home in southern Tennessee, killing several family members and capturing a midwife, Martha Crowley. By the time word arrived that Congress had declared war on Britain, Tennessee's newspapers were full of lurid speculation about what the Natives were doing with Martha Crowley's captive body.Footnote ⁴⁴

Most Tennesseans seem to have believed that the British Empire had repeatedly incited Indian attacks on the frontier. The June 1812 declaration of war was therefore popular in the state and across the southwest. Far more integrated into the American union than they had been during the violence of the 1790s, the citizens of these now-states easily made the link between attacks on people like Martha Crowley and impressments of American sailors. In both cases the bodies of American citizens were under attack, whether on the far continental fringes or the distant maritime frontiers. Jackson made this link explicitly while raging against “the despotism of Silas.” As for the federal government, it no longer appeared the hostile force it had seemed under the Federalists. Warlike rhetoric instead pictured the national state as well meaning but hapless in the face of Indian savagery and British imperialism. National officials, after all, had continued to make treaties, recognize borders, and check passports. They had given sailors “protection certificates” to stop impressments on the high seas. But all of their good behavior had only invited more aggression and insult from America's enemies. As Andrew Jackson had declared as early as 1809, the British and French had “by the most unprecidented Edicts and orders of Council violated the laws of Nations,” while the Republic had continued to pretend that such laws were actually binding on sovereign nations.Footnote ⁴⁵

With the kidnapping of Martha Crowley, Jackson declared that the United States had turned the other cheek long enough. The government's failure to protect settlers and sailors was now obvious, and its forbearance increasingly smacked of cowardice instead of lawfulness. In a July 1812 editorial, he argued that the people of Tennessee were well to recall that the war of 1792–94 had been won “not only without the consent of the general government, but in defiance of its prohibition.” It was “the celebrated expedition against Nick-a-Jack,” which had been concealed as carefully from the Federalists as from the Indians, that had brought peace to Tennessee. Now its citizens were called to another act of heroic violence against the Native “blood hounds” now running wild along the frontiers. “Your government has at last yielded to the impulse of the nation,” he told the militiamen under his command. “The hour of national vengeance is now at hand.”Footnote ⁴⁶

During 1812 and 1813, that government continued to resist the “impulse” Jackson described. On two occasions he led the West Tennessee militia into attack positions only to receive orders to disband. He raged alternately at the cowardly government and the fickle troops, who generally wanted to go home when their commissions ended. (The war convinced Jackson and most other military leaders that the federal government should improve the nation's infrastructure and military preparedness.) Finally, in 1814, he led a force of militia and volunteer companies through the Creek Nation. They wiped out the bulk of the Redsticks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, after which Jackson wrote a treaty that has no parallel in early U.S. diplomacy for its sheer, unblinking vindictiveness. “Whereas an unprovoked, inhuman, and sanguinary war” had been repelled by the United States “in conformity with principles of national justice and honorable warfare,” it began, the entire Creek Nation, including factions that had supported the Americans, was to surrender more than twenty million acres. The Treaty of Ghent nullified this vast cession, because it promised the return of all 1811 borders. Jackson ignored his own government's agreement, and when the conquest went ahead as he planned, neither American nor British leaders lifted a finger.Footnote ⁴⁷

Jackson told his wife that he also owed the British “a debt of retaliatory Vengeance.” Of course he took it at New Orleans in January 1815, vaulting himself to the status of national hero in the process. But he had no intention of letting the Gulf Coast slip away just because peace had been declared. The war became for him a final effort to destroy not only the various enemies of the nation but also the jurisdictions from which they continued to threaten it. Assuming that protection was the goal of government, he endeavored to guarantee the safety of a mobile, slave-owning citizenry not by securing the territory they already possessed but by wiping out all relevant boundaries around them. If the goal of many postwar leaders was to “conquer space,” Jackson's was to destroy borders.Footnote ⁴⁸

Spanish Florida was the obvious target. Slave owners from Georgia and South Carolina had been complaining about the peninsula since the mid-1700s, and after the Revolution many merchants protested the power of a British trading firm centered there. As one Tennessee official reported to the War Department, Florida was a place where “the Spaniards and old Tories” supplied and incited escaped Redsticks and dangerous Seminoles. President James Monroe and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described the territory as the nineteenth-century equivalent of a failed state: a “derelict” jurisdiction that, under the Law of Nations, could be occupied by a neighboring sovereign. When British marines departed Florida in 1816 they left behind arms and ammunition in the hands of former slaves. Several hundred of these refugees lived and farmed near a fort on the banks of the Appalachicola River, well south of the American-Spanish line. Jackson organized a naval attack that completely destroyed the fort on July 27, 1816, killing everyone inside. Partly in retaliation, Seminoles and Redstick refugees attacked American boats in Florida waters and hit isolated settlements on the Georgia-Florida border. Among the victims were the husband and children of Eunice Barber, whose agonizing captivity narrative gave Americans yet another case of female suffering to avenge.Footnote ⁴⁹

Without clear authorization from the Monroe administration, Jackson led a force of militia, volunteers, and U.S. troops into Florida in early 1818. Besides burning all the Seminole villages he found, Jackson occupied the four Spanish forts in the northern part of the peninsula and captured two British nationals, Alexander Arbuthnot and Robert Ambrister. A makeshift tribunal found them guilty of helping the Indians and escaped slaves and sentenced them to hard labor; Jackson personally intervened to have them executed. Ambrister was shot and Arbuthnot, seventy years old, was hung from the mast of one of the supply ships after the manner of a pirate. This appears to have been a deliberate statement about the Briton's crimes; Jackson and his allies repeatedly referred to these two men as “pirates,” who, according to international law, enjoyed no protections from the wrath of legitimate sovereigns.Footnote ⁵⁰

A newspaper on the other end of the Union took issue with this notion. “According to no code of laws that we are acquainted with, is there any such thing as piracy on land,” noted the Providence Gazette of Rhode Island. The editors could only conclude that Andrew Jackson was “the maker of his own laws,” and thus a very dangerous man. The invasion thereby conjured up the long-standing fear in American political thought of loose-cannon generals who did not respect civilian authority. Monroe's predecessor in the White House had been especially keen to preserve Congress's exclusive authority to wage war, which is why Madison had only tried to acquire Florida through treaty or purchase—in ways agreeable to the Law of Nations no less than to the Constitution. To his mind and in this Republican tradition more generally, Constitutional and international law worked in tandem to contain the violent ambitions of modern-day Caesars. Moreover, Jackson's behavior had complicated relations with Europe. The killings of Ambrister and Arbuthnot had infuriated the British, who were developing their own theory of the empire's extra-territorial rights. The Spanish were understandably upset as well.Footnote ⁵¹

Such complaints and concerns gave rise to the longest Congressional debate ever held to that point, a month-long battle of speeches often overlooked because of the Missouri debates that followed later in 1819. In lieu of clear partisan or regional blocs, the congressmen who condemned Jackson's actions in Florida were united by the belief that he had violated both the Constitution and the Law of Nations, thereby shaming the Republic within the larger civil society of enlightened nations. One Virginian waved a copy of Vattel's The Law of Nations while denouncing the general. “In one day has the fair character of this nation been blasted!” declared Georgia delegate Thomas Cobb. The Republic would now stand mute before the tyrants of the world, who, tired by American claims to “justice and mercy,” could now say: “boast no more—you are not less cruel than other nations.” One Pennsylvanian lectured, “Let us not forget that we are a member of the family of civilized nations.” Such civilized nations were related by their ability to deliberate before acting, to subordinate violent or vindictive feelings to legal and moral restraints.Footnote ⁵²

Jackson's supporters were quick to point out that the letter, if not the spirit, of the Law of Nations authorized everything the general had done. Florida was derelict; the Seminoles were a savage nation; the British meddlers were nothing but “civilized savages.” (John Quincy Adams broke with the rest of Monroe's cabinet in defending Jackson in just these terms.) The same European theorists cited by Jackson's critics clearly approved of unlimited violence against such “banditti,” which is why one of his supporters cited Vattel no fewer than twenty-one times during his speech. Besides, the Law of Nature was antecedent to, and more important than, the Law of Nations. And “the supreme law” of nature was self-defense, the absolute right to kill those who would kill you. Jackson had simply applied that individual right to national policy. Coming to the aid of his long-time friend and partner, John Overton wrote that “the safety of the people is the supreme law, and cannot be abrogated…It is a natural right, anterior to the laws of nations, and it is a perfect right which can be asserted by force.” When faced with a “murderous, incendiary and predatory horde” of “pirates, traitors, English emissaries, negroes, and outlawed red stick Indians,” the duty of the nation was not to genuflect before European theories of international law. It was rather to obey “the first law of nature.”Footnote ⁵³

Rather than denying or rejecting the Law of Nations, then, this line of argument repositioned the American people and nation in legal and political time. Instead of dwelling in a civil society, where they had to continually perform certain laws, they were an inherently lawful people living in a pitiless, indeed savage, world. To protect the American people it was necessary to stop pretending that anything like civil order existed beyond national borders and deploy violence accordingly. Exonerated by Congress in 1819, Jackson became the most visible and vehement spokesman for this emergent ethos. As a U.S. senator from 1823 to 1825, no less than he had as a congressman during the late 1790s, Jackson fit squarely within consensus views about the economy. He was downright conservative in his response to the 1819 Panic, vigorously rejecting popular measures to relieve debtors and to establish public banks. What set Jackson apart was his extremely hawkish views of national “defense.” For example, he was one of only ten senators to vote for a bill that would have allowed U.S. ships to blockade Caribbean islands where pirates were thought to be hiding, thereby “caus[ing] vengeance to reach them,” as another supporter noted. Jackson also backed a fringe proposal to provide military support for traders and trappers operating deep inside Indian lands along the Upper Missouri. In a lawless world, how else to protect American citizens than by striking fear into the hearts of anyone who would harm them, anywhere on the globe?Footnote ⁵⁴

During some of the worst violence in the Mero District during 1794, Andrew Jackson had commented that its people might yet seek “a protection from some other Source,” that is from some other nation besides the United States. The deeper problem that he and other borderlands elites repeatedly faced was that they were very much in need of protection but even more hesitant to sign away any of their power to use force. As land speculators and slave owners and traders, they were in constant danger; as land speculators and slave owners and traders, they rejected any sovereignty but their own. The extreme traumas of the Cumberland War and the enduring menace of the British, not to mention any “derelict” territory nearby, compelled them to understand and convey these problems in broader, more ideological, and ultimately more national terms. Jackson eventually found the ultimate source of protection in “the people” themselves, imagined beyond civil society and the treaties, laws, and regulations that came with it. He described, in effect, a new protection covenant: instead of the state securing the people within a given territory, and expecting “affection” and loyalty in return, the citizens retained the full right to defend themselves no matter where they were. They received that right by virtue of being Americans, and in return “felt” insults or injuries offered to any of their countrymen as their own and took vengeance accordingly.Footnote ⁵⁵

Jackson came to the presidency as the incarnation of this new form of American nationalism. Rooted in the extraordinary dangers and profound traumas of the southern borderlands, it had evolved into a larger claim to national sovereignty within a hostile world. Jackson and his partisans went on to make the sovereignty of the American people a central component of political democracy. Of course that sovereignty could be used to challenge certain American elites and certify the right of ordinary people to political expression. In this sense, Jacksonian nationalism was indeed democratic. On the other hand, it sharply limited the scope of what “the people” could do by rejecting many of the premises of civil society. To some degree the citizens (to say nothing of their slaves) lived in a state of nature just as their nation did. Perhaps this is why the Jacksonian period saw the rise of the practice of “going armed”—carrying concealed weapons—and why Jackson himself was among the first national leaders associated with the custom. To carry a weapon on one's person, after all, was to announce a willingness and power to use deadly force without recourse to the law. It was to proclaim oneself sovereign, and thus to render passports redundant at best.Footnote ⁵⁶