Jackson sees his path ahead, parading to 16 th Avenue in Washington, D.C. While previous presidents Madison and Monroe thought Jackson's brand too intense, these men, nonetheless, Grandin states, "came to depend upon" him. After all, the Native Americans aren't really human and the dead are the good dead!
For all these men, including Jefferson, the road to a white nation had only three obstacles now: Native Americans, Africans and African Americans (both enslaved and free), and "the multihued citizen of Mexico."
**
This Andrew Jackson is a thug. Not the first to operate on American soil for the benefit of American people that is, Caucasian Americans. Mean-spirited and hateful, yet, his narrative isn't far off from another American narrative that speaks about a dream to keep anything and anyone from taking away his freedom.
Grandin paints John Quincy Adams in a different light. Adams, opposed to slavery and the "dispossession" of Native Americans, nonetheless, favors expansion. And given all that Grandin has told us about the idea of expansion of land and resources beyond the Mississippi, the settlers would have to amass tons of wealth and that wealth is gained on the back-breaking work of enslaved blacks. We know too that expansion is a word that conceals a multitude of horrors if seen and understood from the perspective of the Indigenous people.
We aren't talking about Mexico because another committed group of American settlers and citizen vigilantes are waging a battle at the "border" where Mexico and the US divide against the Indigenous people who live there and who, because of the dream of expansion, must be exterminated so white settlers can continue enjoying their freedom.
For Adams, the US was "'destined by God and nature to be co-expensive with the North America continent.'" But how to have expansion and avoid war with Mexico, protect Native Americans too? And slavery can't be abolished?
Adams ran unsuccessfully against Andrew Jackson' in 1828.
Jackson was thought of as "a proletarian orgy," arriving in Washington D.C. among "crude supporters" who together "'descended upon the city like a great swarm of locusts, by stagecoach, and wagon, on horseback and on foot.'"
Cotton boomed and plantations grew.
Happy days for some Americans whom Jackson declared should be free to grow wealth and free to own property, including "the right to own human beings as property."
In the 1830s, writes Grandin, the Jacksonian machine hummed like a water wheel." It's not surprising that the Federal government with Jackson at the helm "mobilized to defend a system of racial domination."
Racial animosity toward Indigenous populations and African and blacks "unique to white American supremacy" is an idea that the "central government" had to maintain. Resentment against people of color on this soil had to be maintained if white supremacy were to take hold once and for all.
The Indian Removal Act was Jackson's answer to helping "push Native Americans beyond the Mississippi" while in the meantime, the average white citizen was free from restraints when it came to pushing down blacks. "The first removal resulted in about twenty-five million acres of formerly Indian land, including large tracts of Georgia and Alabama, freed up from the market and slave economy."
In foreign lands, writes Grandin, countries wage class terror, but in the US, it was "race terror."
An already weaken people are further terrorized by "unjustifiable aggressors." But little did that matter. The policing of Native American begins with white American itself recognizing itself as "guardians" of a people made passive. Protecting the victims of white violence from themselves becomes a cultural recognition of a people too childlike to be free.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
