Disturbing History - Andrew Jackson: Democracy, Blood, and the Trail of Tears

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Andrew Jackson sold himself as the champion of the common man. His face has been on the twenty dollar bill since 1928. There are statues of him in city squares from Tennessee to Washington. He's been claimed, in successive eras, by Democrats and Republicans, by progressives and conservatives, by every politician who ever wanted to wrap himself in the language of populism without owning what that language actually delivered when Jackson was the one speaking it.This episode is the other side of that mythology.We start in north Georgia in the spring of 1838, the morning soldiers arrive at a Cherokee family's door with orders to clear them out. Then we cut back to the man who set that morning in motion. Born in the Carolina backcountry in 1767.Orphaned by the Revolution at fourteen. A lawyer, a duelist, a slave owner, a planter who built his fortune on the forced labor of more than one hundred and fifty enslaved men, women, and children at the Hermitage. The general who broke the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, took 23 million acres of their land in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and went home to grieve over the death of a Creek child he'd adopted from a different battlefield in the same war.We follow him into the White House. The Bank War. The cabinet shakeups. The temperament that made him willing to ignore his own Treasury Department, his own Congress, and eventually his own Supreme Court when they got in his way.We walk through the Indian Removal Act of 1830, passed by five votes in the House after Theodore Frelinghuysen spoke against it for six hours over three days. We follow the Cherokee Nation's legal fight to John Marshall's bench, where they won the ruling that should have saved them, and we sit with the fact that a Supreme Court decision is only as strong as the executive willing to enforce it.Jackson was not willing. We talk about the Treaty of New Echota, signed by fewer than five hundred Cherokee out of a nation of more than sixteen thousand, ratified by the United States Senate in 1836 by a single vote. We talk about what happened to the men who signed it. We talk about the bureaucracy that turned removal from chaos into policy: the muster rolls, the contracts, the chain of small decisions made by ordinary people in offices who could tell themselves they were just doing their jobs.We don't retell the Trail of Tears in this one. That road has its own episode. This one's about the man who pointed at it, and the country that picked up his face and put it in our pockets.If you've ever wondered how a democratic republic, working more or less the way it was designed to work, ends up administering an atrocity, this is that story.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner, of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

Victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. A spring morning in North Georgia. 1838. There's a small farmhouse with a stone chimney, a worked field, a barn that leans a little because the wind off the ridge has been pushing at it for 40 years. Inside, a woman is pulling biscuits out of a Dutch oven. Her husband is in the yard splitting wood because the mornings up there are still cold, even in late spring. The children are asleep. She hears the horses before she sees them. Soldiers. Federal troops and Georgia militia. Mounted men in dust-colored coats coming up the path her grandfather cleared with his own hands. They don't bother knocking. They don't have to. The orders have already been written. The paper exists. And in this country, the paper is now stronger than anything else she

owns. She steps outside. Her husband looks at her, then at the men on horseback. Then at the men on horseback. then at the door of his own house, and something quiet breaks in his face. The officer reads the order out loud. The family has an hour, maybe less. Whatever they can carry, they carry. Whatever stays, somebody else will own by sundown. That's the image most people remember when they hear the words, Trail of Tears, the knock, the march, the graves along the road.

We've walked that road on this show before. We're not going to walk it again today. Today we're going to talk about the man who built it. This is the story of Andrew Jackson, not the war hero on the $20 bill, not the populist underdog from your sixth grade textbook, the actual man, the decisions he made,

the doors he kicked open, the machine he set in motion, and the people who lived and died on the other end of it. Because if you want to understand the Trail of Tears, you don't start with the road. You start with the road. man who pointed at it. Take a 20 out of your wallet, or just picture one. That face on the front belongs to a man who personally owned more than 150 human beings over the course of his life.

A man who fought duels and killed at least one of his opponents in cold practiced fashion. A man who, as a major general, ordered the execution of enlisted soldiers under his own command for what he considered desertion. A man who invaded a foreign country without authorization from his own government and then executed two foreign nationals to make a point. A man whose policy, signed into law and carried out by his successor, removed tens of thousands of native people from their homes and killed thousands of them in the process. That face has been on American currency since 1928. It's printed roughly three billion times every year.

You carry it in your pocket. You pay for gas with it. You hand it to a kid at a birthday party. You don't think about it. That's the point. That's how mythology works. You stop noticing because it's everywhere. The man who built the Trail of Tears is the same man you used to buy a pizza. That's the whiplash. Once you see it, you can't really unsee it. So let's talk about who he actually was. Andrew Jackson was born in March of 1767 in a strip of forested country called the Waxhaws on the border of North and South Carolina.

His parents were Scots-Irish, recent immigrants. His father died before he was born. The story passed down is that his father was crushed by a log he was trying to move. Andrew was raised by his mother, with two older brothers, in a poor backcountry settlement, where the work was hard and the violence was casual. When the revolution came, the Jackson family went all in for the rebel side. Andrew was 13 years old when he started running messages as a courier in the Carolina back country of 1780. The next April at 14, he and his brother,

brother Robert were captured. Here's the moment everyone remembers. A British officer ordered the boys to clean his boots. Andrew refused. The officer drew his sword and slashed at him. Cut his face open. Cut his hand to the bone when he raised it to defend himself. Robert refused too and took a blow to the head. Andrew carried his scars to the grave. His older brother Hugh died of heat exhaustion after a battle. His brother Robert was captured with him and died of smallpox shortly after they were released. His mother volunteered to nurse wounded American prisoners on a British prison ship in Charleston Harbor, caught cholera and died too. By the time Andrew Jackson was 14 years old, every single member of his immediate family was in the ground. He hated the British until the day

he died. That's not a literary flourish. He said it out loud, in private letters and in public speeches. for the next 60 years. But here's what people miss when they tell that story. He didn't just hate the British. He came out of that childhood with a particular view of the world. A view that said, The strong take what they want, that paper and treaties are written by people with armies,

and that if you don't have an army of your own, you're going to lose. He carried that worldview into everything that came next. He went west. He studied law, more or less by hanging around with lawyers who'd let him copy their book. He passed the bar in 1787, at the age of 20.

He drifted into what was then the Tennessee frontier, riding into Nashville when it was still a stockade settlement on the edge of Cherokee and Chickasaw land. He was tall, gaunt, red-haired, and ready to fight anyone over anything. He was perfect for the place. He prospected. He speculated in land. He traded in horses, in cotton, in human beings. He bought enslaved people early and kept back. buying them for the rest of his life. He built a plantation outside Nashville called the hermitage,

and at its peak it ran on the forced labor of around 150 enslaved men, women, and children. That's not a footnote in his biography. That's the financial foundation of everything he ever did. He married Rachel Donaldson Robards in 1791. There was a problem. Rachel's divorce from her first husband, a man named Lewis Robards, wasn't actually finalized at the time. Whether Andrew and Rachel knew that is still debated by historians. What's not debated is that they had to remarry in 1794, once the divorce was officially recorded. By then, every gossip in the state knew the story. Jackson spent the rest of his life ready to kill anyone who brought it up, and he sometimes did. In May of 1806, a Nashville lawyer named Charles Dickinson made some comments

about Rachel that got back to Jackson. Jackson challenged him to a duel. They met at a clearing in Kentucky because dueling was illegal in Tennessee, 24 feet apart. Dickinson was known as one of the best shots in the south. He fired first. The ball struck Jackson in the chest, just inches from his heart. Jackson stayed standing, took aim, pulled the trigger. The hammer caught at half cock and didn't fire. Jackson, by the rules of the code duelo, was a allowed to recock and fire again. He did. Kill Dickinson on the spot. The bullet stayed in Jackson's chest for the rest of his life. So did the cough he developed from the lung injury. So did the fury. That's the man we're following into the 1810s. That's the man who's about

to meet the United States Army. In 1802, Jackson got himself elected Major General of the Tennessee militia. He'd never commanded troops in a real campaign. He just wanted the title and the authority. He got both, and he sat on them, more or less, for a decade, until the War of 1812 broke out. The War of 1812 gave Andrew Jackson three things he had wanted his whole life, a real army, a real enemy, and a national stage. His chance came in the form of a civil war inside the Creek nation. A faction of the creeks called the Red Sticks, influenced by the Shawnee leader Tocomsa and by their own spiritual leaders had risen up against the more accommodationist Creek leadership and against American settler expansion.

In August of 1813, the Red Sticks attacked a settlement called Fort Mims in what's now Alabama and killed somewhere around 250 people, including women, children, and enslaved Africans. The contemporary count was higher and rumor inflated it further, but the modern estimate sits around 250 dead. It was still one of the largest native attacks on American settlers in a generation. The country wanted blood. Jackson volunteered to give it to them. The campaign lasted about seven months.

Jackson marched his Tennessee militia south, picked up Cherokee and Lower Creek Allies along the way, and ran the Red Sticks to ground. In March of 1814, he caught them at a horseshoe bend in the Talapusa River, in what's now east central Alabama. About 1,000 Red Stick Warriors with, their families behind them, were trapped in the bend by a log barricade they'd built across the neck of the peninsula. Jackson's men breached the barricade. What followed was not a battle. It was a slaughter

that lasted into the night. Around 800 redstick fighters were killed. Some drowned trying to swim the river. Some were shot from the bank as they tried to surrender. By the count, Jackson sent back to his superiors. More native fighters died at Horseshoe Bend than had died in any single engagement with American forces in the country's history up to that point. He came out of it a general. He came out of it a hero. He also came out of it with the political capital to dictate the terms of peace. The Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed in August of 1814, took 23 million acres of land from the Creek Nation. Roughly half the modern state of Alabama and a sizable piece of Southern Georgia. The treaty didn't just punish the red sticks.

It took land from the creeks who had fought alongside Jackson, who had bled for him, who had saved his life at one point during the campaign. He took their land too. He'd needed them when he needed them. He didn't need them anymore. That's the template. Pay attention to it.

Because it's going to come back. Four and a half months before Horseshoe Bend, on November 3rd of 1813, troops under one of Jackson's officers destroyed a red-stick town called Talashatchie in what's now Alabama. Around 186 Creek men were killed. Most of the women and children were taken prisoner. When Jackson's men were walking the field, they came across a Creek infant, somewhere around 10 or 12 months old, found alive in the arms of his dead mother. The surviving Creek women refused to take the child. By the customs of that

moment, the boy was now part of the enemy. He had no people left. The child was brought to Jackson. He wrote about it in a letter to Rachel. He said he felt unusual sympathy for the baby. An orphan, alone, with no one left in the world. He sent the boy back to Tennessee. He gave him a name, Lincoya. He and Rachel raised him alongside their own adopted son at the hermitage.

They educated him. They treated him by all accounts with a kind of fierce affection. Lincoya died of tuberculosis at the age of 16 in 1828. The same year Jackson was elected president. Jackson buried him on the grounds of the hermitage and grieved him for the rest of his life. I'm telling you that story because if you want to understand Andrew Jackson, you have to understand that he was not a man who hated native people in any simple sense. He had native allies.

He fought beside Cherokee warriors and Lower Creek Warriors. He adopted a creek child and raised him as a son. He believed in his own way that he cared about native people. And in the same lifetime, with the same hand, he engineered the destruction of their nations. There's no clean way to hold both of those things in your head. You're not supposed to be able to. That's part of what makes the story so unsettling to tell. The cruelty does not come from a man without affection.

It comes from a man whose affection had limits and whose certainty about his own rightness was infinite. He could love a creek child as a son and take 23 million acres from the child's people. He could weep over Lenoya's grave and sign the Indian Removal Act. He could call himself a friend to the Indian and still be the most efficient deliverer of suffering Native people had seen in a generation. That's the man. Carry the contradiction with you. You're going to need it for the rest of this story. A few months after Horseshoe Bend, in January of 1815, Jackson became a house.

hold name. He commanded the American defense at the Battle of New Orleans. British regulars, veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, marched in formation against entrenched American positions. They were cut to pieces. The British commander, General Pachanam, was killed. American casualties were a few dozen. British casualties were over 2,000. The detail history textbooks sometimes leave out is that the war was already over when the battle happened. The Treaty of Ghent had been signed on December 24th, 1814, two weeks before New Orleans. The news just hadn't crossed the Atlantic yet. Jackson didn't win the war.

He won a fight that the war's official ending should have prevented. None of that mattered to the public. He was the man who beat the British. The country picked him up and put him on its shoulders. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Three years later in 1818, the federal government sent Jackson to Spanish, Florida, to deal with Seminole and Creek refugees who were conducting raids across the border.

The orders he was given were vague on purpose. Jackson, characteristically, treated the vagueness as permission. He marched into Spanish territory. He seized Spanish forts. He captured two British subjects, a Scotsman named Alexander Arbuthnot, and a younger Englishman named Robert Ambrister. He tried them in a military court. He executed them.

You cannot understate how reckless that was. He was a major general of the United States acting on his own authority, executing foreign nationals in foreign territory. It nearly started two wars at once. The cabinet wanted to censure him. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended him. Spain, weakened and embarrassed, eventually sold Florida to the United States, rather than fight over it.

That's the pattern. Jackson moves. The system catches up. The land is American. Nobody asks too many questions. By the 1820s, he was the most famous man in the country. The hero of New Orleans, the slayer of the Red Sticks, the Conqueror of Florida. He was also, increasingly, a political figure. The election of 1824 is one of the strangest in American history. Four major candidates ran. Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford. Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote and a plurality of the electoral vote, but not a majority.

Under the 12th Amendment, when no candidate gets a majority of the electors, the choice goes to the House of Representatives. Clay, the Speaker of the House, threw his support to Adams. Adams won the House vote. Adams then named Clay his Secretary of State, which at the time was considered the stepping stone to the presidency itself. Jackson called it the corrupt bargain. He said it out loud, over and over, for the next four years. Whether or not Clay and Adams actually struck a deal is something historians still argue about. What's not in doubt is that Jackson believed they had, and he spent every day from 1824 to 1828,

building the political movement that would tear them out of the White House and put him in it. That movement is what we now call the Democratic Party, the original one. Jacksonian Democracy. It was built on a specific story. The story said that there was a corrupt Eastern elite, that they had stolen the presidency from the people, that the people deserved a champion who came from the frontier and lived among them,

and that the champion's name was Andrew Jackson. The election of 1828 was one of the ugliest in American history. Both sides went after each other in the press in ways that still feel shocking. The Adams camp called Jackson a murderer for executing the militiamen at Mobile. They printed something called the coffin handbill with six black coffins on it, one for each of the soldiers Jackson had ordered shot. They went after his mother, suggesting she'd been a prostitute. They went after Rachel, accusing her of bigamy and adultery, which was technically true on the bigamy point, but ignored every shred of context. Jackson hit

back with everything he had. He won by a landslide, carried 15 of 24 states, won 56, of the popular vote. The voter turnout was triple what it had been in 1824, in part because eligibility had expanded. And then, before he could take office, Rachel died. She had been ill for some time. The cause was likely a heart attack. She was 61. She died on December 22nd, 1828, three days before Christmas, about 10 weeks before her husband

was sworn in as the seventh president of the United States. He blamed Adams. He blamed Clay. He blamed every editor in every paper that had printed the bigamy story. He stood at her grave at the hermitage and said, in front of a crowd of mourners, that may God forgive her murderers, because he never would. He meant it. He arrived in Washington alone. He took the oath of office on March 4, 1829. The crowd was enormous and unruly. Thousands of his supporters had ridden into the city to celebrate. After the swearing in, they followed him to the White House for the reception. The official reception was supposed to be for invited guests.

Nobody told the crowd that. They poured into the East Room. They stood on the furniture. They broke glassware. They tracked mud across every carpet. Jackson was supposedly hustled out a side door for his own safety. The story is that the staff eventually rolled barrels of whiskey-laced punch out onto the White House lawn to lure the crowd back outside. The papers wrote about it for weeks.

Some saw it as the triumph of democracy, others as the arrival of the mob. Both reeds were accurate in their own way. Here's what's worth saying clearly. The democracy that Andrew Jackson celebrated, the democracy his movement claimed to expand, was a democracy for a very specific set of people. White men.

Not all white men, but more of them than ever before. Property requirements for voting had been falling in most states, for a generation. And by the late 1820s, in most of the country, white men could vote without owning land. Jackson hadn't created that change, but he was its political beneficiary. Everyone else was outside the circle. Women could not vote. Free black men who had been able to vote in some northern states under earlier rules were being stripped of that right during this exact period. Inslave people, of course, had no rights at all. Native nations, whatever their treaties were about to find out exactly how much their legal status was worth.

When you hear the phrase the common man in the context of Andrew Jackson, that's what it means. The expansion of political voice for one demographic, built on top of the deepening exclusion of every other. And here's the part that's harder to talk about. Jackson genuinely believed he was on the side of the people. He wasn't faking it. He was not cynical in the way some politicians are cynical.

He was something more dangerous than that. He was certain. He was certain that the small farmer in Tennessee was the moral backbone of the country. He was certain that the eastern banks were corrupt. He was certain that he, personally, was the only thing standing between the Republic and ruin. And he was certain that the lands held by Native nations in the southeast were going to be cleared, one way or another, because the future of the American yeoman required it. That certainty is what made him effective, and it's what made him dangerous. Before we get to the removal story itself, there's one more piece of Jackson that's worth pinning down. The way he ran the executive branch. Because the man who ignored a Supreme Court ruling in 1832 had been training for that move his entire presidency.

Jackson came into office believing the executive was the only branch of government that spoke for the whole country. Senators and representatives spoke for states and districts. Judges spoke for the law as they interpreted it, which often meant for whichever faction had appointed them. Only the president in his telling had been chosen by the whole American people. Only the president could claim to act on their behalf. That was a new theory. It would have been unrecognizable to George Washington, who saw the presidency as a careful administrative role bounded by the other branches. It would have horrified John Adams. In Jackson's hands, it made the office of president the most powerful single position in the federal government during his

time in it, and it established a pattern for the modern presidency that every successor has had to navigate. He used that power on the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a federally chartered institution that handled federal deposits, regulated state banks, and was in Jackson's view, a vehicle by which a small eastern elite manipulated the country's money supply for its own benefit. In 1832, Congress passed a renewal of the bank's charter. Jackson vetoed. it. His veto message was a kind of populist manifesto. He framed the issue as a battle between the producing classes, meaning farmers and laborers, and the moneyed interests. He framed himself as the People's Tribune, standing alone against corruption. The bank in his telling was not just a bad

policy. It was an enemy of the Republic. Then he did something almost no one expected. He withdrew federal deposits from the bank before its charter expired. His first Treasury Secretary Louis McLean was reluctant to do it, so Jackson moved him sideways to the State Department. He appointed William J. Dwayne in his place. Dwayne refused. Jackson fired him in September of 1833. The third man, Attorney General Roger Taney, took the job as a recess appointment and carried out the order. Jackson rewarded him a few years later by nominating him to the Supreme Court, where Taney eventually became Chief Justice and wrote the Dred Scott decision. That chain of consequence is its own story for another day.

The point about the bank war in our context is the temperament it reveals. Jackson was willing to break institutional norms, push executive branch officials out of his way until he found one who would do what he wanted and ignore the protests of Congress and the press in pursuit of what he saw as the people's interest. He won the bank war. He destroyed the second bank of the United States.

The country went without a central bank institution for the next eight decades. The same temperament that won that fight is the temperament that was about to meet John Marshall on the question of Cherokee sovereignty. The man who pushed his own cabinet aside until he got the policy he wanted was not going to be moved by a Supreme Court ruling he disagreed with. So let's talk about how that fight unfolded. The South in the 1820s was running out of land. Cotton was the engine of the southern economy. Cotton wore out soil fast. The Plantations of the original colonies in Virginia and the Carolinas were getting tired. Yields were dropping.

Planners were looking west and south for fresh ground. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida. Land that could grow cotton and that could be worked by enslaved labor was the most valuable commodity in the country. And much of the best of it was held by the five tribes. The Cherokee, the Creek, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Seminole. Each of these nations occupied land that white settlers wanted. Each of them had treaties with the United States government,

some of them going back to the Washington administration, that recognized their territorial rights, and each of them, in different ways, had begun to adopt the institutions of the surrounding white society, not because they were giving up their identity, because they thought, very reasonably, that if they could speak the language of the new country, that country would honor its agreements with them.

The Cherokee went farthest down that road. They had developed a written form of their own language thanks to a man named Sequoia, who created a syllabary in the 1820s that turned the spoken Cherokee language into something that could be printed and read. Literacy spread through the nation in a matter of years. They started a bilingual newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix, published out of their capital at New Akota in North Georgia in 1828. They wrote a Constitution in 1827. They built schools.

They built farms. They built mills. They had a court system. They had a national council. They had, in every formal respect, a functioning constitutional government. The standard story about Indian removal tends to slide past it. The Cherokee Nation in the 1820s was not some isolated band living the way they had a thousand years before. It was a constitutional republic, with a written.

legal code, with elected officials, with a published press, with a public school system, with established religious denominations, with property law and tax collection, and infrastructure. Sequoia's syllabary had spread so fast that within a few years of its introduction, literacy rates among the Cherokee were higher than literacy rates among the white settlers crowding their borders. They were sending diplomatic delegations to Washington. They were arguing constitutional law in the press. They had cotton plantations along the rivers. They had ferries on the trade routes.

They had stores and inns and post offices. This matters because the public justification for removal rested on the idea that native nations were savages who could not coexist with civilization. The Cherokee, by every measure the 1820s recognized as civilization, were already there. They had done the assignment. They had completed every step the federal government had asked them to complete,

since the days of George Washington's Indian policy. They had farms instead of hunting grounds. They had law instead of war. They had a printing press in their own alphabet. And it didn't matter. Because the actual reason for removal was never civilization. It was land. Some Cherokee painfully also owned enslaved Africans.

That's a piece of the story that gets uncomfortable for everyone who tells it, including the Cherokee Nation today, which has done significant work in recent decades to reckon with that history. The point in our context is simply that the Cherokee were not, as 19th century propaganda liked to pretend, a primitive people standing in the way of progress. They were a republic, with institutions modeled in many respects on the surrounding country,

with a written language, with a press, with a treasury, with a treaty relationship with the federal government that was older than most of the white states, making demands on them. None of that saved them. In 1828, gold was discovered in North Georgia on Cherokee land. A man named Benjamin Park supposedly stubbed his toe on a yellow rock while deer hunting.

Within a year, thousands of white prospectors had poured into the area. Georgia was already pushing legislation aimed at stripping the Cherokee nation of its sovereignty. The gold rush poured kerosene on a fire that was already burning. Georgia passed laws extending state Georgia. jurisdiction over Cherokee territory. Laws that voided Cherokee government acts. Laws that prohibited Cherokee from testifying in court against white people. Stay tuned for more disturbing history.

We'll be back after these messages. Laws that required white men living among the Cherokee to take loyalty oaths to the state of Georgia. Laws designed, not very subtly, to make life in the Cherokee nation impossible. The Cherokee appealed to the federal government. The federal government under the previous administration of John Quincy Adams had largely held the line on treaty obligations. Adams had not actively defended the Cherokee, but he had not actively destroyed them either.

That changed on March 4, 1829. The new president had been on record about Indian removal for years. He had argued, going back to his Creek war days, that native nations could not coexist with white settlement, that the federal government's policy of treating them as sovereign entities was a polite fiction that needed to end, and that the only humane solution in his telling was to relocate them to land west of the Mississippi. He used the word humane. He used it in speeches. He used it in messages to Congress. He used it in private letters. He believed it. This is one of the

most important sentences in the whole story. He genuinely believed that what he was doing was the most compassionate option available. He thought he was saving native people from the most. He thought he was saving native people from extinction by separating them from white settlers. He thought removal was a kindness. He compared it, more than once, to a father moving his children to a place of safety. This is what makes Jackson's removal policy more disturbing than if he had been a straightforward racist demagogue. Jackson was something subtler and harder to dismantle. He was a man with absolute moral certainty about a policy that destroyed entire nations, and he was articulate enough to make that certainty sound like mercy. In his first annual message to Congress, in December of 1829, Jackson laid out the case for

removal. He framed it as a choice. The Native nations could either submit to state laws and assimilate as individuals, which would mean losing their lands and their identity, in fact, if not in name. Or they could move west, where they would be given new territory and be allowed to govern themselves under federal protection. He described the second option as their best chance. He did not say out loud that the first option was a setup, that state laws like Georgia's were designed to be unlivable. He didn't have to. In February of 1830, his allies in Congress introduced the Indian Removal Act. The debate that followed is one of the most important and least taught moments in American political history.

It deserves more attention than it gets. The bill was on its surface, voluntary. It authorized the president to negotiate treaties with Native Nations, to exchange their eastern lands for territory west of the Mississippi. It appropriated $500,000 for the process. It promised compensation for improvements like houses and farms. It promised protection of the new western lands forever, which was the word that was used, forever.

The bill's opponents knew the word, forever was a lie. They knew that what was being authorized was not a voluntary exchange, but a coerced expulsion. They said so on. the floor of the Senate and the House. The clearest voice was Theodore Frelingheisen, senator from New Jersey. He spoke for six hours over three days. He went through every treaty the United States had ever signed with the Cherokee and the other southeastern nations. He laid out, line by line, the federal government's repeated guarantees of

Cherokee sovereignty and territorial integrity. He asked simply what the value of an American Treaty was if it could be broken whenever the convenience of expansion required it. He asked whether the country was prepared to declare that its word meant nothing. He didn't win. He came close. The bill passed the Senate 28 to 19. It passed the House 102 to 97. Five votes.

That's how close the country came to a different history. Five votes in the House. Davy Crockett, the Tennessee Congressman, voted against it. He was from Jackson's own state and his own political base. He said publicly that he could not look his constituents in the eye if he supported the bill. He lost his seat in the next election partly because of it. He's the kind of person history books tend to flatten into a coon skin cap and a frontier joke. He was, in this moment, the rare politician who chose conscience over career.

Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830. That was the door. From the day he signed it, every conversation between the federal government and the southeastern native nations was conducted under threat. Not in those exact words. The threat didn't need to be spoken. Every native leader who sat down with a federal commissioner from May of 1830 forward knew what the alternatives were. Sign a treaty or refuse. And watch your land get taken anyway by a state government.

The federal government would not restrain. The Choctaw went first. In September of 1830 at a place called Dancing Rabbit Creek in Mississippi, federal commissioners negotiated with Choctaw leaders for the session of all Choctaw land, east of the Mississippi. The Choctaw had been told in private conversations and in public statements that Mississippi was going to extend state law over their territory, regardless of what the federal government did, and that they would have no protection. They signed.

About 15,000 Choktall began moving west in the year. years that followed. Around 2,500 died on the journey or in the first months after arrival. That was the test case. It worked. The Creek were next in 1832. The Chickasaw signed in 1832 as well. The Seminole signed a treaty under coercion in 1832 and then fought a war for the next seven years rather than honor it. That war, the Second Seminole War, killed somewhere around 1,500 American soldiers and an unknown larger number of Seminoles. It was the longest and costliest of the Indian Wars of the 19th century. It happened because the Seminoles, having seen what removal looked like for everyone else, decided they would rather die in the swamps of Florida than

walk west. The Cherokee took a different path. They tried the law. The Cherokee Nation, under the leadership of Principal Chief John Ross, decided to fight removal in the federal courts. Ross was an interesting man. He was about one-eighth Cherokee by blood, raised among the Cherokee, and elected by them to lead their nation. He was educated, fluent in English, a wealthy planner himself. He believed with what looks in retrospect like almost unbearable optimism that the American legal system would protect his people if they presented their case properly. He hired one of the best constitutional lawyers in the country. William Wirt, former Attorney General of the United States, Cherokee case. In 1831, Wirt brought the first major case to the Supreme Court,

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. The argument was that the Cherokee Nation was a foreign nation under the Constitution, that Georgia's laws extending jurisdiction over Cherokee territory were therefore unconstitutional, and that the court should issue an injunction stopping their enforcement. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for the court, ruled against the Cherokee on a technicality. The Cherokee Nation, he said, was not a foreign nation in the constitutional sense. It was something else. He coined a phrase for it, domestic dependent nation. The relationship of the Cherokee to the United States, he wrote, resembled that of a ward to a guardian. The court therefore lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. That was not the answer Ross wanted,

but it was not a total loss either. Marshall's opinion made clear that the Cherokee did have a kind of sovereignty, even if it was not the kind that could be defended directly in the Supreme Court. The legal door was still open. A different case came through the next year. Samuel Worcester was a white missionary who had been living among the Cherokee, helping with the printing of the Cherokee Phoenix and supporting the Cherokee cause. Georgia had passed a law requiring white residents of Cherokee territory to take an oath of loyalty to the state. Worcester refused. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to four years of hard labor. His case reached the Supreme Court as Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. This time the issue was clearer. A white American citizen on Cherokee

land prosecuted under Georgia law. The constitutional question was whether Georgia had the authority to apply its laws inside Cherokee territory at all. Marshall in the court answered no. The Cherokee Nation, the court ruled, was a distinct community of occupying its own territory in which the laws of Georgia could have no force. Federal treaties recognized Cherokee sovereignty. Georgia's intrusion on that sovereignty was unconstitutional. Worcester was ordered freed. This was the answer Ross had been waiting for. The highest court in the country had ruled that the Cherokee nation existed, that its land was its own, and that the state of Georgia had no right to take it. It should have been the end of the

removal effort. It wasn't even close. The most famous line associated with this moment is something Jackson supposedly said. John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. Most modern historians think Jackson never actually said those words. The first written record of the quote is in a book published decades later, and it doesn't appear in any of his contemporaneous letters or in any reliable firsthand account. But the line stuck because it captured what actually happened. The Supreme Court in 1832 did not have an enforcement mechanism. It had no army. It had no marshals that could deploy in numbers sufficient

to free a prisoner from a Georgia jail or to restrain the Georgia state militia. Its rulings depended on the cooperation of the executive branch. And the executive branch, under Andrew Jackson, did not cooperate. Worcester stayed in prison until Georgia eventually let him go on its own terms in 1833. Georgia continued to apply state law on Cherokee land. Cherokee citizens continued to be evicted, prosecuted, and dispossessed under those laws. The federal government under Jackson did nothing to stop it.

Ross kept appealing. He went to Washington. He wrote letters. He delivered petitions signed by thousands of Cherokee. He met with cabinet officials. He met with Jackson himself, more than once. Jackson received him politely and told him, In different words each time, the same thing.

Removal was coming. The Cherokee could move with dignity on negotiated terms, or they could move under worse terms later. Those were the options. Ross refused to accept that. The Cherokee National Council, almost unanimously, refused to accept it. So a new strategy was tried. In December of 1835, a small faction of the Cherokee,

led by a man named Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and a newspaper editor named Elias Boudinot met with federal commissioners at the Cherokee Capitol at New Akota. They were not authorized by the Cherokee National Council to negotiate. They were not authorized by principal chief John Ross. They represented themselves, and perhaps a few hundred Cherokee who shared their view, out of a nation of around 16,000 people. Their argument was that removal was inevitable, that Ross's resistance was going to get everyone killed,

and that signing a treaty now on the best available terms was the only way to preserve any future for the Cherokee nation. They signed the Treaty of New Akota on December 29, 1835. The treaty ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for $5 million, new territory in what's now Oklahoma, and various other guarantees that were not in the end honored. Fewer than 500 Cherokee signed it. maybe a few hundred more supported it without signing.

The vast majority of the nation, including its elected government, rejected it outright. The treaty was sent to the United States Senate for ratification. Senator John Forsyth of Georgia and other allies of the administration pushed it through. The ratification vote was 31 to 15. It passed by one vote over the two-thirds majority required. That's how the legal pretext for forced Cherokee removal cleared the United States. state Senate. One vote. Once ratified, the Treaty of New Akota became in the eyes of the federal government the law. The fact that it had been signed by an unauthorized minority faction did not

matter. The fact that more than 16,000 Cherokee, including their entire legitimate government, had rejected it, did not matter. The fact that the Cherokee National Council had submitted a petition signed by something like 15,000 Cherokee opposing the treaty did not matter. The paper is existed. The Senate had ratified it. The two-year clock for removal had started ticking. This is what I mean when I say paper can be a weapon. The Treaty of New Dakota was not a treaty in any honest sense. A treaty implies two parties with the authority to bind their respective nations. The Cherokee signers did not have that authority. Everyone knew they didn't. The federal commissioners knew. The Senate knew. Jackson knew. They went ahead anyway, because the form of a treaty

was what they needed for the legal record, and the form was what they got. There's a quiet detail about Major Ridge that's worth pausing on. He had been a respected war leader. He had fought alongside Jackson, on Jackson's side, at Horseshoe Bend in 1814. He had saved Jackson's life at one point during that battle, according to some accounts. He had cooperated with the United States for decades. When he signed the Treaty of New Akota, he reportedly said, I have signed my death warrant.

He was right. He and his son John, along with Elias Budino, were assassinated by other Cherokee in June of 1839, after the removal was complete, for what was seen as the betrayal of the nation. The assassinations happened on the same day, by coordinated parties, in three different locations in what's now Oklahoma.

Major Ridge was shot from ambush as he rode his horse. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. John Ridge was pulled from his bed and stabbed to death in front of his family. Elias Boudinot was lured away from his house and killed with a knife and a tomahawk. The Cherokee Nation in Exile spent the next decade tearing itself apart over the question of who had been right. Here's the thing nobody wanted to admit. Both sides had been right about something.

The treaty party had been right that removal was inevitable, that no amount of legal effort was going to save the land, that resistance would cost lives. Ross had been right that the treaty was a fraud, that signing it would not actually protect the Cherokee Nation, that the federal government would dishonor its terms within years. Both sides had been right, and both sides watched the predictions of the other come true,

and neither one had been able to find a way out. The blood feud that followed was the cost of being trapped between two true things. There's something else worth saying about the machinery of what came next. The removal was not chaos. That's important. It was administered. The federal government maintained muster roles of the Cherokee population, family by family, name by name.

Government contractors were hired to supply the rations, the wagons, the boats, the tools. Officers were appointed to count the people in the stockades and the columns. Mortality was recorded, when it was recorded, in unit returns and quartermaster reports. The infrastructure of a modern bureaucratic state was applied to the task of moving 16,000 people across a continent against their will. Removal was not the work of frontier raiders or mob violence, though there was plenty of opportunistic violence around the edges. The core of it was paperwork. The killings happened in the gaps between the lines on the forms. The deaths from exposure happened because the contracts for supplies had been written too cheaply,

and the schedules for departure had been set too late in the season. The deaths from disease happened because the camps had been planned for shorter stays. The administrative machine ran the way administrative machines tend to run, with delays and shortages and bad estimates, and the people who died died in those gaps. The men signing the contracts in Washington did not have to see them. They were doing their jobs. That is one of the lessons of this story that the country has tried hardest to forget.

Mass suffering, on the scale of the Trail of Tears, does not require monsters. It requires functionaries. It requires forms. It requires a chain of small decisions made by ordinary people in offices, each of whom can tell themselves they were just doing what the policy required. The monster, if there is one, is the policy itself. And the man who made the policy, in this case, was Andrew Jackson. Jackson left office on March 4, 1837, one year and three months after the Treaty of New Akota was signed.

He went home to the hermitage. He had won. He had presided over the legal architecture of the largest forced migration in American history, up to that point. He had done it under the cover of a humanitarian narrative that he genuinely believed, and he had handed off the actual execution of the policy to his vice president and chosen successor, Martin Van Gogh. That timing matters. The President most closely associated with Indian removal in the public mind is Jackson. The President actually in office when the Cherokee were marched west was Van Buren.

The two-year deadline written into the Treaty of New Dakota ran out in May of 1838. By that point, fewer than 2,000 Cherokee had voluntarily relocated. Most of the nation was still in their homes, still farming, still publishing, still refusing. refusing. Van Buren made the decision to enforce removal by military force. General Winfield Scott was given command of around 7,000 troops. The roundup began that spring. The stockades were built. The detention camps were filled. The columns started moving west in late summer and continued through the fall and winter. We've told that part of the story before on this show, and I'm keeping my promise not to retell it now. What I'll say is this. The cost of that March, in

human terms is something the United States government tracked, more or less. The estimates have varied over the decades, with serious historians arriving at different numbers depending on which records they're using. The figure most often cited is around 4,000 Cherokee dead out of around 16,000 removed. That's one in four. The dead were disproportionately the very young and the very old, because that's who exposure and disease and exhaustion kill first. That number does not include the Choctaw dead from the 1830s relocations. It does not include the Creek dead from theirs. It does not include the Chickasaw dead. It does not include the Seminole dead from the war they fought

rather than walk. It does not include the dead from the disease and starvation that followed arrival in the West, in territory that had not been prepared for them, that often had no shelter and limited food and contaminated water. The combined human cost of Jackson's removal policy, across all five major southeastern nations runs in the tens of thousands of deaths. Different historians give different figures because the records are incomplete and the methods of estimation vary. The lowest credible figures are in the low five figures of dead. The higher figures push toward 15,000 or more. Whatever the precise count, the policy worked in the terms its architects defined for it.

The southeastern United States, from the Carolinas down through Georgia and Alabama, and Mississippi, and into what would become the new state of Florida, was open to white settlement and to the expansion of cotton agriculture worked by enslaved labor. The lands of the Cherokee Nation, the Creek Nation, the Choktaugh Nation, the Chickasaw Nation, and the Seminole Nation, passed into white hands. The hermitage, Jackson's home outside Nashville, sits on land that had been part of the Chickasaw and Cherokee Territory, before various secessions in the late 1700s, and early 1800s. He knew that.

It didn't trouble him. He died there on June 8th, 1845. He was 78 years old. His last words, more or less, were a blessing for his enslaved household. The newspapers across the country mourned him as a great man. The Democratic Party which he had built

would dominate American politics for most of the next 15 years. The expansion he had championed continued without him. Texas was annexed. Next, the year he died. The Mexican War followed the year after that. The continental ambitions of the United States,

which Jackson had not invented, but which he had done more than any single individual to legitimize, kept rolling west. And here's where the mythology comes in. Andrew Jackson was, almost immediately after his death, lifted into a particular kind of American hagiography. He became the embodiment of the frontier virtues, self-made, tough,

plain spoken, loyal to his friends, brutal to his enemies, a man's man, a people's man, the kind of leader the country needed when it needed shaking up. That story, with minor variations, has been the dominant story of Jackson in American culture for most of the past 180 years. The story has been useful. It's been useful to politicians who want to claim populist credentials by aligning themselves with him. It's been useful to historians who wanted to celebrate the expansion of democracy without examining who got excluded from it. It's been useful to the kind of national self-image that prefers its heroes uncomplicated. You can trace the lineage if you want to. Theodore Roosevelt admired Jackson and wrote about him in flattering terms. Franklin Roosevelt invoked

him during the New Deal as a model of populist leadership against entrenched interests. Linden Johnson kept a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. In our own lifetime, Donald Trump publicly hung a Jackson portrait in the Oval as well, and traveled to the hermitage to lay a wreath on Jackson's tomb in March of 2017. Andrew Jackson has been claimed in successive eras by Democrats and Republicans, by progressives and conservatives, by men who wanted to wrap themselves in the flag of the common man without inheriting any of the inconvenient details of what that man's politics actually delivered. The cost of that usefulness has been paid by the people who had to be erased to make the strong story work. When Indian removal is taught in American schools, it's often presented as a tragedy,

a tragic chapter, a dark moment, the language is passive, bad things happened, mistakes were made. The implication is that nobody really meant for it to turn out the way it did, that it was a kind of historical accident, that everyone involved was a product of their time, that framing is wrong. Removal was not an accident. It was a policy. It was debated. It was voted on. It was signed into law. It was funded. It was administered.

It was enforced. There were people in the room making decisions every step of the way. Some of them, like Fraling Heisen and Crockett, voted no. Some of them, like Jackson, drove the policy forward. None of them were unaware of what they were doing. The Cherokee Nation had a printing press in a language the missionaries could translate that was reporting on its own destruction in real time. The Congressional Globe transcribed every speech on every side of the debate.

The newspapers covered it. The pamphleteers wrote about it. The president himself spoke on the topic in messages to Congress every single year of his administration. The choice was made with eyes open. The bureaucracy was assembled. The orders were drafted. The forms were printed. The columns were counted.

The people were moved. If you've ever wondered how an ordinary modern country gets to the point of doing something monstrous. You don't have to look at extreme historical examples. You can look at this one. The Indian Removal Act was passed by a duly elected Congress, signed by a popular president, ratified in part by the Supreme Court that refused to defend its own contrary ruling and executed by a professional federal bureaucracy that did its job. There was no madness in it. There was no foreign ideology driving it. There was no temporary insanity. There was a country with land hunger, a president with certainty, a political coalition that wanted what removal offered,

and a legal system that bent itself the necessary distance to make the paperwork add up. That's how it gets done in a democracy. Slowly. With paperwork. With elections. With public speeches about humanity and progress. With courthouses and judges and ratification votes. With newspapers covering it and citizens debating it and ministers writing letters about it.

And then, at the end of all the procedure, with soldiers at the door of a farmhouse on a spring morning, telling a family they have an hour. When you put Andrew Jackson's face on a $20 bill, you are making a choice. You are saying that what he did, on balance, was worth honoring. You are saying that the expansion of voting rights for white men and the founding of one of the two major American political parties and the victory at New Orleans and the long romantic story of the frontier outweighed. the deaths of thousands of native people and the destruction of nations the United States had sworn by treaty to respect. That's a choice the country made. It's a choice the country has been

quietly revisiting in the last few years. There was a serious effort during the Obama administration to replace Jackson on the 20 with Harriet Tubman. The effort stalled. It's been talked about again, off and on. As of right now, his face is still there. There's a version of this story where we tell ourselves Jackson was a man of his time, that he reflected his era, that to judge him by our standards is to import an anachronism into history. I'm careful with that argument, because the part it leaves out is that there were people in his own time, in his own country, in his own Congress, who told him exactly what he was doing and exactly what it would cost. Theodore Frelingheisen told him. David Crockett told him. Jeremiah Evarts, a Christian reformer who wrote a series of

essays under the pen name William Penn, told the entire country in widely circulated newspapers. The Cherokee Nation told him, in petition after petition. John Marshall told him, in a Supreme Court ruling. Samuel Worcester sat in a Georgia prison for telling him. Jackson knew, the country knew. The decision was made anyway. That's not a man of his time. That's a man making a choice, with full information and the rest of the country backing him. So when we talk about Andrew Jackson, we are not talking about a tragic figure caught in forces beyond his control. We are talking about the architect of a policy that destroyed sovereign nations and killed thousands of people. We are talking about a man who used the language of democracy to expand power for some Americans and to extinguish it for others.

We are talking about a president who handed his successor the keys to a machine that ran for years after he left office, killing along the way. We are also talking about a man who was loved by millions of his countrymen, who is, in many ways, still loved, whose face you carry in your wallet, whose name is still on schools and parks and counties, and at least one state capital, who has been claimed in our own lifetime as a model and a forerner by politicians of both parties.

That's the disturbing part of disturbing history. It's not the moments when monsters show up looking like monsters. It's the moments when ordinary, democratic institutions, working more or less the way they were designed to work, produce a result that should make you sick. A spring morning in North Georgia, 1838, a family with an hour to pack, a long road west. Most of them will survive it. Some will not. The decision that put the soldiers in their yard was made eight years earlier in Washington, in a room full of men who believed they were doing the right thing. Andrew Jackson is buried at the hermitage, beside

Rachel, in a small white dome tomb in the garden behind the main house. The house is a museum now. You can tour it. The grounds are well kept. The slave cabins have been preserved as part of the historical interpretation, which is more honest than it used to be. Around 225,000 people visit every year. He went into the ground with a clean conscience. He believed he had been a friend to the Indian. His words, by moving them west. believed he had saved them. He believed until the last day of his life that he had done the right thing. That's the most unsettling sentence in this whole story. He believed it, and he had the country with him. The Trail of Tears was not the work of one man. It was the work of a republic. It was

passed by Congress. It was ratified by the Senate. It was signed by a president. It was enforced by an army. It was justified by a culture. It was paid for by taxpayers. It happened in the open. It is one of the best documented atrocities of the early American century, and it produced exactly the result its planners said it would. Land. For a particular kind of American. At the cost of every other kind.

Jackson's face on the 20 is not the cause of any of this. It's a symptom, a symbol. A reminder if you choose to see it that way, of what the country has agreed to honor and what it has agreed to forget. take it out of your wallet sometime. Look at it. Not with anger. Just look at it. Think about the spring morning in 1838. Think about the family in the doorway. Think about the soldier reading the order. Think about the hour they had to pack. Think about the road. Think about what the country gained and what it spent. And who paid for the trade. That's the moral whiplash. That's the

price of calling conquest destiny. That's what democracy with blood on its boots. looks like in practice, recorded on paper, indexed in archives, signed and countersigned and witnessed and filed. Every step legal. Every step ordered. Every step paid for. Every step done in your name and mind. With our money, by our government, in the name of a republic that has never quite found a way to say out loud what it did. We say it here. That was Andrew Jackson. Not the myth. The man. The decisions. The cost. One is out