The Big Lies
Despite Andrew Jackson's amazing accomplishments as a U.S. President and a U.S. Major General, some historians and journalists with an anti-American agenda have focused on propagating a stream of distortions that have maligned Jackson and duped many Americans. The essentially false negative publicity has helped justify the sudden anti-American political attempt to remove Jackson from the face of the U.S. $20 bill. Three outright lies have been propagated about Jackson and psychologically programmed into unsuspecting Americans:
Lie#1: Andrew Jackson passed a law that forcibly removed Native American Indians from their land.
An American president cannot pass laws. Only Congress can. Congress passed an act in 1830 that allowed the U.S. President to negotiate treaties with Native American Indian tribes to compensate them for relocation to areas west of the Mississippi River. Jackson's administration negotiated well over 50 treaties under the new law. Most major tribes representing about 60,000 Native American Indians signed the treaties and received millions of dollars to resettle. Jackson supported the act for national security reasons because the British had agitated tribal warriors to attack settlers. Both Jackson and some tribes like the Choctaws believed if Indians and settlers were separated by the Mississippi River they could all live in peace and freedom.
Lie#2: President Jackson caused the deaths of roughly 10,000 Native American Indians in the Trail of Tears tragedy when he forced about 100,000 of them to be removed from their land.
The federally forced relocation of Cherokees that caused at least half of the Trail of Tears deaths occurred in 1838-1839 under Martin Van Buren after Jackson was no longer president.
Most federally initiated relocations under the Jackson administration were voluntary and based on compensated agreements negotiated by treaties previously mentioned. However, the Choctaws and Creeks contracted diseases like cholera during their compensated relocation and suffered about a 15% casualty rate.
One federally forced, relocation of Seminoles was initiated during the Jackson administration after the Seminoles did not honor the Treaty of Moultrie Creek. This resulted in the second Seminole War that was carried out primarily under Martin Van Buren.
Georgia initiated a separate forced relocation of Cherokees during Jackson's administration. The Cherokees attempted to remain on their land and received a favorable U.S. Supreme Court ruling from Chief Justice John Marshall. Jackson chose not to create conflict between federal forces and the states over the ruling since the U.S. Constitution did not empower the national government to coerce states over the issue of who can be a resident.
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