Andrew Jackson Read online

  The British commander in North America, Jeffrey Amherst, a large man with a big nose and a deeply held conviction that his talents were being wasted in the colonies, received the news of the western disaster at his headquarters in New York. Although the reports shocked him, he wasn’t surprised at the behavior of the Indians, whom he considered savages beneath regard by civilized men. This attitude was common among the British, and it had helped trigger the current uprising. (By contrast, the French, whose imperial policy relied less on displacing the Indians than on trading with them, developed a more sophisticated view of the indigenes.) Amherst terminated the practice of sending gifts to Britain’s Indian allies, and he curtailed the trade in guns and ammunition. He judged that though the Indians had been useful against the French, now that the French were vanquished it was time to make the Indians understand who the true rulers of North America were.

  While Amherst had to respect the fighting ability of the Indians, he blamed incompetence among his subordinates for the success of Pontiac’s offensive. Upon receiving a report of a massacre of the British garrison at Presque Isle, which followed the fort’s surrender by its commanding officer, he could hardly contain his anger. “It is amazing that an officer could put so much faith in the promises of the Indians as to capitulate with them, when there are so many recent instances of their never failing to massacre the people whom they can persuade to put themselves in their power,” he wrote in his journal. “The officer and garrison would have had a much better chance for their lives if they had defended themselves to the last, and if not relieved, they had confided to a retreat through the woods or got off in a boat in the night. These people are undoubtedly murdered unless the Indians may have feared to do it lest we may retaliate. There is absolutely nothing but fear of us that can hinder them from committing all the cruelties in their power.”

  Amherst determined to answer the terror of the Indians with terror of his own. Knowing that the Indians rightly feared the white men’s diseases more than anything else about the Europeans, he directed Henry Bouquet, the commander of the western district, to launch a campaign of biological warfare. “Could it not be contrived to send the smallpox among the disaffected tribes of Indians?” Amherst inquired. “We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”

  Bouquet responded at once. Some of his own troops were suffering from smallpox; he proposed to take blankets from the sick men and distribute them among the Indians. “I will try to inoculate the——— with some blankets that may fall in their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself,” he told Amherst. (Whether discretion caused him not to identify the targets or he hadn’t decided which Indians to infect is unclear.)

  Amherst approved the plan. “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race,” he said.

  Bouquet distributed the blankets. By the time he did, they may have proved redundant, as the smallpox had already jumped from the whites in the area to the Indians. Yet the outcome was certainly what Bouquet and Amherst desired. “The smallpox has been very general and raging among the Indians since last spring,” an observer wrote several months later. A subordinate of Bouquet—who, unlike his commander, wasn’t beyond pity—reported from the front, “The poor rascals are dying very fast with the smallpox; they can make but little resistance and when routed from their settlements must perish in great numbers by the disorders.”

  Aided by the epidemic, the British managed to roll back the Indian advances. Bouquet battered an Indian army at Bushy Run near Fort Pitt, and he sent his troops to burn Indian villages and drive off their inhabitants, many of whom then perished of hunger and disease. The villages were always the weak spot of Indians, for although Indian warriors were masters at raiding garrisons and terrorizing settlers, they lacked the numbers and firepower to defend their own women and children against British counterattack. In the face of Bouquet’s scorched-earth strategy, Pontiac’s allies fell away band by band and tribe by tribe, to make peace with the British.

  Yet the outcome was far from an undiluted victory for British arms. To entice Pontiac’s allies to the peace table, the British government recalled Amherst and repealed most of the measures the Indians resented. As a result, it wasn’t hard for many of the Indians to conclude that, in dealing with the Europeans, war worked. (For Pontiac personally, the failure to drive the British from the Ohio marked a defeat from which he never recovered. His fellow Ottawas turned to others for leadership, and the younger warriors derided the old man as a relic of the past. In 1769 he was fatally stabbed by a Peoria Indian at a trading post on the Mississippi River. None of the Ottawas, not even his own sons, lifted a finger to avenge him.)

  The lesson American colonists drew from Pontiac’s War was similar in content to that drawn by the Indians but altogether different in tone. The uprising had sent shudders all along the American backcountry, from New York to Georgia. In every community that lived within sight or consciousness of the great forest that stretched away to the west, the reports of the Indian atrocities—with the torture of prisoners and the mutilation and cannibalism of the murdered recounted in excruciating detail—caused hearts to clutch and eyes to examine every grove of trees for signs of the enemy’s approach. The flood of refugees from the war provided additional evidence of the scope and meaning of the Indian uprising. An inhabitant of Frederick, Maryland, noted, “Every day, for some time past, has offered the melancholy scene of poor distressed families driving downwards through this town with their effects, who have deserted their plantations for fear of falling into the cruel hands of our savage enemies, now daily seen in the woods.” A witness in Winchester, Virginia, explained, “Near 500 families have run away within this week. I assure you it was a most melancholy sight to see such numbers of poor people, who had abandoned their settlements in such consternation and hurry that they had hardly anything with them but their children. And what is still worse, I dare say there is not money enough amongst the whole families to maintain a fifth part of them till the fall; and none of the poor creatures can get a hovel to shelter them from the weather, but lie about scattered in the woods.”

  For the refugees, and for the many more who held on to their homes but watched their cold, hungry compatriots stream by, the outcome of Pontiac’s War was decidedly unsatisfactory. Except for the traders, who required the Indians as customers, nearly all the Americans who lived anywhere near the frontier considered the Indians an existential danger. Few would have mourned had every one of the natives fallen victim to British arms or European disease. And when the post-Pontiac settlement essentially restored the status quo, the Americans once more saw the tomahawk hanging over their heads.

  Among those who fought against Pontiac were members of a peculiar tribe with origins in the foggy North Atlantic. During the first decade of the seventeenth century—at the same time as the founding in America of English Jamestown and French Quebec—King James of England and Scotland planted a colony of English and Scots in the north of Ireland. The purpose of the Ulster plantation was to subdue the unruly Irish, who were considered by the English to be fully as savage as the Indian tribes of North America. So refractory were they that few Englishmen accepted James’s invitation to emigrate to Ulster, leaving it to the Scots to claim the Irish territory James opened to them. Nor were these just any Scots, but bands of Lowlanders who had fought for centuries against rival tribesman—or clansmen—of the Scottish Highlands. The centuries of battle had forged a character equal to almost any challenge requiring courage and determination. As one Scotsman explained, “When I do consider with myself what things are necessary for a plantation, I cannot but be confident that my own countrymen are as fit for such a purpose as any men in the world, having daring minds that upon any probable appearance do despise danger, and bodies able to endure as much as the height of their minds can undertake.” Another Scotsman, perhaps more candid, character
ized those who accepted James’s offer rather differently: “Albeit amongst these Divine Providence sent over some worthy persons for birth, education and parts, yet the most part were such as either poverty, scandalous lives, or, at the best, adventurous seeking of better accommodation, set forward that way.”

  The emigrants found plenty of adventure and call for bravery on arrival in Ireland, for the Irish yielded ground most grudgingly to the newcomers, who had to fight for every acre they occupied. Nor did the struggle ease with passing time. The Irish continued to resent the intrusion, and with each generation that was born, the fight began anew. In time—after three hundred years—the Irish would succeed in reclaiming most of their island from the British. But they never succeeded in dislodging the stubborn Ulstermen.

  Yet life in Ireland wasn’t all the Scots had hoped. Their new lands weren’t markedly more fertile than those they had left behind, and the linen trade, in which many found supplementary employment, was subject to periodic depression. When their beloved Presbyterianism came under attack from some of James’s successors, many decided to decamp to other British plantations, across the Atlantic. The voyage west was often an ordeal. Unlike many other early emigrants, who pooled resources and traveled in companies, the fiercely individualistic Scotch-Irish (as they were called by the time they reached America) typically traveled individually or in single families. Hunger was a frequent companion on the crossing. Starvation wasn’t unknown, nor cannibalism. Pirates robbed the emigrants and sometimes murdered them. Those who made it to America felt they could survive anything fate might throw their way. One observer described a particular Scotch-Irishman in terms that could have applied to any number of them: “His looks spoke out that he would not fear the devil should he meet him face to face.”

  As religious dissenters, many of the Scotch-Irish were drawn to Pennsylvania, the haven for unorthodoxy established by Quaker William Penn. As men and women of modest means, most, after disembarking at Philadelphia or another of the Delaware River ports, headed for the backcountry beyond Lancaster. During the mid-eighteenth century—when famine gripped large parts of Ireland, including the north—as many as ten thousand Scotch-Irish left Ulster each year for America. The route from Belfast to Philadelphia and thence to the Pennsylvania frontier became a regular Scotch-Irish highway.

  The topography of the western land, in particular the valleys between the ridges that ran from northeast to southwest, channeled the later arrivals among the newcomers to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and eventually to the uplands of the Carolina frontier. Wherever they settled, they gained a reputation for practical piety and aggressive independence. A saying among their neighbors held that the Scotch-Irish kept the Sabbath and anything else they could lay hands on.

  Among the Ulster immigrants were a man named Andrew Jackson and his wife, Elizabeth. Andrew was one of four sons of a linen draper named Hugh Jackson, whose luck at the linen craft wasn’t sufficient to entice any of the boys to follow in his footsteps. Instead they went into farming. But they never acquired the capital to purchase land and had to content themselves with renting plots from the better-to-do. One son, his father’s namesake, went off to the army, with whom he fought against the French and Indians in America, in the uplands of the Carolinas. On returning home he told Andrew and the others what a lovely country that was and how a man who might never hope to own property in Ulster could easily become a freeholder in the Carolinas. There was the small matter of those Indians, who remained unreconciled to the presence of large numbers of immigrants, but the Ulster Scots had been fighting their neighbors for centuries, and the Indians couldn’t be any tougher than the Highlanders or the Irish.

  Elizabeth Jackson heard similar stories, included in letters from four sisters who had emigrated to the same vicinity her brother-in-law extolled. She and Andrew had two young sons, Hugh and Robert. Looking to their future, she saw little reason to expect better than their father had done if the family stayed in Ulster. And daunting though the uprooting and the voyage over the ocean seemed in prospect to one who had never been far from home or aboard a ship, with so many other neighbors leaving for the New World the decision to go lost some of its recklessness.

  Andrew and Elizabeth and the boys set sail from Carrickfergus, just down the lough from Belfast, in the spring of 1765. The details of the voyage have been lost, as has the identity of the port of American landing. But Philadelphia seems likeliest, or perhaps some dock on the Delaware below Philadelphia. Their goal was a region called the Waxhaw, in the piedmont on the border between North Carolina and South Carolina, in the valley of the Catawba River. Elizabeth’s sisters lived in the Waxhaw; besides making the new place feel more familiar, their presence would help Andrew and Elizabeth settle in and would afford a measure of security in the event of trouble.

  Getting from the Delaware River to the Catawba required five hundred miles of overland travel across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. That country was no longer exactly wild, and the travelers didn’t have to worry much about Indian attack, but great stretches of the road were lonely, the entire trek was wearying, and before they reached their destination Andrew and Elizabeth almost certainly asked themselves what every emigrant asked, at one time or another: why they had ever left home.

  The Catawba River was named for the Catawba Indians, whose history summarized much of the experience of Indians in America since the arrival of the Europeans. The Catawbas were a young tribe, an amalgam of peoples of the Carolina piedmont whose ancestral tribes had been shattered by disease, decimated by warfare against the English and other Indians, especially the Five Nations of the Iroquois confederacy, and demoralized by enslavement, again both by the English and other tribes. The remnants of these ancestral tribes banded together for self-defense, calling themselves Catawbas. With arms from traders operating out of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Catawbas counterattacked against the Iroquois and such Iroquois allies as the Tuscaroras. By the 1760s they had managed to hold their own. In part because of their dependence on the arms trade, they were considered fairly docile with respect to whites and hence suitable neighbors for settlers who accepted that vigilance was the price of survival anywhere near the frontier.

  The Jacksons were welcomed to the Waxhaw by Elizabeth’s sisters, who were delighted to have more of their kin among them and who were proud to show how well they were doing in the new land. One sister, Jane, was married to James Crawford, the owner of a large farm in the fertile bottomlands of Waxhaw Creek, a tributary of the Catawba River. From their comfortable house overlooking the post road the Crawfords watched gangs of African slaves till their fields. Another sister, Margaret, was married to George McCamie, who had a farm just down the road from the Crawfords and a house with an imposing stone chimney (in a place where most made do with chimneys of wood and mud). Two other sisters were married to brothers named Leslie. Though less far along the road to prosperity, these also had made a fair start.

  A start was all Andrew and Elizabeth Jackson could hope for upon arrival. The journey from Ulster had nearly exhausted their modest resources, leaving Andrew little with which to purchase land. The most fertile fields, in the flood plains of the river and creeks, were already taken and could be purchased only at a premium. Andrew might have crossed the divide into the next valley, but that would have placed him and Elizabeth and the boys farther from her sisters. So he settled for, and settled on, a rather unpromising red-clay tract in the pines above Twelve Mile Creek, about a three-hour walk from the Presbyterian meeting house that formed the center of community life in the Waxhaw.

  Establishing ownership of land in the backcountry was often a problem, and had been for decades. The problem originated in the difference between Indian and European conceptions of property ownership. To the extent most Indian tribes “owned” land, they did so communally. Communal ownership of land wasn’t historically unknown in Europe, and it still served as the basis for “commons” and other general-use zones. But
in European societies where the cultivation of crops provided the principal sustenance of the people—rather than merely supplementing hunting and gathering, as among most Indians—individual ownership of specified pieces of ground had long since become the norm. When Europeans, with their individualistic ideas of land ownership, entered Indian lands unclaimed by any individual Indians, it was tempting for the Europeans to assume that no one owned the land and that it was available for the taking.

  Even when the Europeans acknowledged Indian ownership, problems arose from differences between their notions of governance and those of the Indians. Not surprisingly, given the importance the Europeans placed on land titles, governments in Europe considered the control of land a central responsibility. Entire bodies of law, and the institutions of government that supported them, had grown up around the establishment and transfer of titles to land. The Indians had their own forms of government, which dealt with matters of war and peace but rarely with issues relating to land ownership. Consequently, on those occasions when European officials sought to purchase land from the Indians, it was by no means always clear which Indians had the authority to sell it. Sometimes the Europeans, acting in good faith, paid certain members of a tribe for what they thought was title to land, only to have other members dispute the deal. At least equally often the Europeans acted in bad faith, essentially bribing complaisant tribesmen to sell land both parties knew the sellers had no right to alienate.