Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great Ame

Description: Jacksonland by Steve Inskeep The Washington Post"The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it meant, not only for Indians, but also for the future and soul of America.""The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it meant, not only for Indians, but also for the future and soul of America." -The Washington PostFive decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy.One man we recognize- Andrew Jackson-war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South-whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure- John Ross-a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat-who used the United States own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson.Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers, Ross championed the tribes cause all the way to the Supreme Court, gaining allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committedcivil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and defined the political culture for much that followed.Jacksonlandis the work of renowned journalist Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPRs Morning Edition, who offers a heart-stopping narrative masterpiece, a tragedy of American history that feels ripped from the headlines in its immediacy, drama, and relevance to our lives. Jacksonlandis the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Steve Inskeep is a cohost of NPRsMorning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the United States. His investigative journalism has received an Edward R. Murrow Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. He is the author ofInstant City- Life and Death in Karachi. Follow him on Twitter- @NPRinskeep. Review Washington Post: "Surely everyone knows, or should know, about the Cherokee Trail of Tears - an ordeal imposed upon thousands of Cherokees, who, after fighting and winning a judgment in the Supreme Court against their removal from the Eastern Seaboard, were nonetheless dispossessed of their tribal lands and marched to Indian Territory in the early 1830s. The scale of the removal was staggering. Not only the Cherokee but also the Muskogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and many of their African-American slaves were removed in one of the largest and most brutal acts of aggression ever committed by the United States. But not till now, with the coming of NPR journalist Steve Inskeeps magnificent book, focusing as it does on the two key players - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross - has this episode in American history been rendered in such personal detail and human touch. . . The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it meant, not only for Indians, but also for the future and soul of America." Chicago Tribune: "Grounded in vivid primary sources, it is also a moving tale of leadership, betrayal and (violated) minority rights, culminating in the tragedies we know as Indian removal and the Trail of Tears. . . "Jacksonland" successfully transports readers to an era when travel was slow and dangerous, racial and sectional divisions growing, and America very much a work in progress . . . Inskeep writes with the urgency of a thriller, a cinematic eye and a consciousness that even historys apparent losers won occasional important battles. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "The narrative reads as if written by a watchful observer. It brings a part of history alive that is not usually discussed with this much depth."Kirkus: "Confident, lucid prose. . . . The author knows how to hold an audience. . . Well-researched, -organized, and -presented, this is a sober, balanced examination of the origins of one of the more regrettable chapters in American history. " JON MEACHAM, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House"Steve Inskeep has found an illuminating and provocative way to talk about the American past—and, truth be told, the American present and future too. By taking us back to the epic struggle between Andrew Jackson and Chief John Ross, Inskeep tells an essential story of geography, greed, and power: and the forces he so clearly delineates are the ones that shape us still."CANDICE MILLARD, author of Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt"Inskeep tells this, one of the most tragic and transformative stories in American history, in swift, confident, colorful strokes. So well, and so intimately, does he know his subject that the reader comes away feeling as if Jackson and Rosss epic struggle for the future of their nations took place yesterday rather than nearly two hundred years ago." JAMES McPHERSON, author of Embattled Rebel and Battle Cry of Freedom "This narrative of the forced removal of Cherokee Indians from their ancient homeland in the 1830s is framed as a contest between two determined and stubborn adversaries who had once been allies. President Andrew Jackson eventually prevailed over Cherokee chief John Ross in a conflict that culminated in the infamous Trail of Tears. Steve Inskeep skillfully captures the poignant drama of this tragic tale." DANIEL FELLER, director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson, University of Tennessee "Few episodes in American history evoke greater controversy and bitterness than Indian removal and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Steve Inskeeps Jacksonland brilliantly illuminates this troubling story. Told with pinpoint accuracy, evenhanded sympathy, and sparkling prose, this is truly a tale for our times." PRINCIPAL CHIEF BILL JOHN BAKER, Cherokee Nation"Steve Inskeep has paid incredible attention to detail and his references are impeccable and well researched. History often overlooks, or briefly mentions, that one of Andrew Jacksons major initiatives as President of the United States was the removal of Indian tribes, including the Cherokee, from their ancestral homelands. The honest and factual detailing of how Cherokee traditional lands were usurped is compelling, and I hope it gives contemporary American readers a new perspective on our collective history. Andrew Jackson and his political allies in Congress wanted what we had and they simply took it by any means necessary. Clearly, our ancestors didnt stand a chance. Steve Inskeep tells the story fairly and pays proper due diligence to the politics of the day, especially the treatment of the Five Civilized Tribes."H.W. BRANDS, author of The Man Who Saved the Union and Andrew Jackson"History is complicated, and in its complications lies its appeal. Steve Inskeep understands this, and his elegantly twinned account of Andrew Jackson and John Ross shows just how complicated and appealing history can be. Each man was a bundle of contradictions; together their lives illuminate the confusing, sometimes infuriating adolescent years of the American republic."MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, author of Presidential Courage"With brisk, original storytelling and insight, Steve Inskeep brilliantly illuminates a crucial too-little-known chapter in American history, and show us how the confrontation between Andrew Jackson and John Ross resonates today." Review Quote Washington Post : Excerpt from Book Prologue: The Indian Map and the White Mans Map This story follows two men who fought for more than twenty years. They fought over land in the American South, which is where they lived, though some said it wasnt big enough for the two of them. One man was Andrew Jackson, who became a general, then president, then the man on the twenty- dollar bill. Those honors merely hint at the scale of his outsize life. The other man was John Ross, who was Native American, or Indian as natives were called. He became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, though this title, too, fails to capture his full experience. Before he was chief, and before he met Jackson, Ross was a young man navigating his complex and perilous world. That is how we first encounter him. At the age of twenty-two,he bought a boat. It was a wooden flatboat, essentially a raft with some housing on the deck. And on that boat, near the end of 1812, he set out on the Tennessee River. Starting somewhere around the site of present-day Chattanooga, the boat and its crew floated westward with the current, a speck on the water, dwarfed by riverside cliffs that marked the rivers passage through the Appalachians. Ross was traveling several hundred miles, toward a band of Cherokees living west of the Mississippi. He intended to sell them the cargo on his boat: calico, gingham, buttons, beaver traps, and shotguns. But the westward course of the Tennessee River had a way of testing travelers. Ross struggled to navigate currents so perilous that they had ominous names such as Dead Mans Eddy and the Suck. He grew so frustrated after days on the water that he stopped at a riverside settlement to sell his boat, trading for a keelboat that was narrower and more maneuverable. His crew heaved their cargo from one boat to the other. Then Ross and crew crashed through forty miles of whitewater known as Muscle Shoals, scraping on shallows and passing islands piled with driftwood. At last the water calmed, and the boat followed the rivers great bend northward toward the Ohio. Anyone covertly studying the boat would have seen four men on board. Ross was black-haired, brown-eyed, slight but handsome. Each of his three companions could be described in a phrase (a Cherokee interpreter, an older Cherokee man named Kalsatee, and a servant), but Ross was harder to categorize. He was the son of a Scottish trader, whose family had lived among Cherokees for generations in their homeland in the southern Appalachians. Ross was an aspiring trader himself. Yet he also had a solid claim to his identity as an Indian. A man of mixed race, he had grown up among Cherokee children and, in keeping with Cherokee custom, received a new name at adulthood: Kooweskoowe, said to be a species of bird. Whether he was a white man or an Indian became a matter of life and death on December 28, 1812. In Kentucky, as Ross later recorded in a letter, "we was haled by a party of white men." The men on the riverbank called for the boat to come closer. Ross asked what they wanted. Give us the news, one called back. Something bothered Ross about the men. "I told them we had no news worth their attention." Now the white men revealed their true purpose. One shouted that they had orders from a garrison of soldiers nearby "to stop every boat descending the river to examine if any Indians was on board as they were not permitted to come about that place." Come to us, the men concluded. Or well come to you. Ross didnt come. "Damn my soul if those two are not Indians," one of the men shouted, referring to two of Rosss crew. The man added that he would gather a company of men to pursue and kill them. Ross came up with an answer: "These two men are Spaniard," he called back. The white men demanded the "Spaniards" prove their identity by speaking Spanish. Peter, the servant, actually could, but the white men still "insisted it was an Indian boat & mounted their horses & galloped off." Ross had to assume the white men were serious. The United States had declared war on Britain that year, and some native nations had joined the British side, killing white settlers, fighting alongside British troops, and throwing the frontier into turmoil. The white horsemen would not pause to find out that Rosss Cherokees were loyal to the United States. The Cherokees could travel in only one direction, and would have little chance to escape if the men on horseback arranged an unpleasant reception downstream. Ross decided on a precaution: he whitened the boat. He had told the horsemen there were no Indians on board, and the best chance of safety was to make this claim appear true. He modified the racial composition of his crew, leaving only those who could pass as non-Indian. Ross could pass, as could the Cherokee interpreter, who like Ross was an English speaker and a "mixed-blood," parlance for part white and part Indian. The servant, who may have been a black man, would be ignored. Only old Kalsatee was a full-blooded Cherokee with no chance to fool anybody. His mere presence might even cause the others to be perceived as Indians. This, apparently, was Rosss thinking, because as he confided later, "we concluded it was good policy to let Kalsatee out of the boat." The old man would have to set off overland and meet the craft later. The remaining crew put their poles in the water and shoved the keelboat toward whatever lay ahead. Ross spent two anxious days on the water, and Kalsatee had "a disagreeable walk of about thirty miles," probably along the bank opposite from where theyd seen the horsemen. Finally the old man rejoined the boat downstream, and they all floated to a safe haven, Fort Massac on the Ohio River, manned by professional soldiers who could tell friend from foe. The horsemen never reappeared. Reflecting on this afterward, Ross said he was "convinced" that "the independent manner in which I answered" the horsemen had "confounded their apprehension of it being an Indian boat." Indians were supposed to be children of the woods, in a common phrase of the era: dangerous but not too bright, and expected to address white men respectfully as elder brothers. Ross had talked back to the men in clear and defiant English. The future leader of the Cherokee Nation had passed as white. That was John Ross: careful with his language, resourceful, willing to do what was necessary to survive. Also persistent, because after leaving Fort Massac, he made it to his destination west of the Mississippi as planned, offering his gingham and shotguns for sale to the band of Cherokees living there. When he finished trading in 1813, he made the long journey back to the southern Appalachians, the ancient homeland of the bulk of the Cherokee Nation. It is upon his return that our story truly begins, because that is when he first encountered AndrewJackson. Jackson was a soldier at the time. He was a longtime Tennessee state militia general, recently elevated into federal service to help fight the British and hostile Indians in the War of 1812. The government in Washington authorized him to recruit Tennessee volunteers to serve under his command. Though his force initially consisted of twenty-five hundred white frontiersmen, it was expanded to meet an emergency in the fall of 1813. Jackson accepted the services of several hundred friendly Indians, mostly Cherokees, who organized their own regiment under the command of a trusted white officer. The Cherokee Regiment included John Ross, and from the moment he enrolled, his destiny and Jacksons were linked. They were fighting on the same side, at least at first, but they were bound for a historic collision. Each man rose to supreme leadership of his nation, and struggled for control of millions of acres. Their story is a prequel to the Civil War, and a prelude to the democratic debates of our era. It established the physical landscape and defined the political culture for much that followed. At the time they met, the United States was very different from what it soon became. Reading about it today feels like falling into a dream, exploring territory at once foreign and familiar. The nation was barely a generation beyond its founding. The chief executive was one of the original Founding Fathers: President James Madison, a member of a small governing elite. From a capital under construction, Madison presided over eighteen states with only a handful of notable cities. The population of the entire United States was about seven million, smaller than the modern-day populace of greater metropolitan Chicago. The future site of Chicago was a lonesome military post called Fort Dearborn, which had recently been burned by Potawatomi warriors. Immense territories from the Appalachians westward were native domains, as they had been since long before Europeans arrived. But settlers were pushing westward, and the War of 1812 spurred greater change, weakening natives and strengthening the movement of white farmers, who often brought along black enslaved laborers. In the decades after that war, young men such as Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen Douglas were coming of age on the frontier, while the United States was swelling into the form they would inherit by the time of the Southern rebellion in 1861. This was the era when Jackson and Ross became national figures. They rose with the country and the country with them. Jackson emerged from the War of 1812 as a hero, a full-time army general, and later the founder of the Democratic Party, whose election tothe presidency came in 1828. No man of such a humble background--anorphan from an Appalachian valley--had ever Details ISBN014310831X Author Steve Inskeep Short Title JACKSONLAND Language English ISBN-10 014310831X ISBN-13 9780143108313 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 973.56 Imprint Penguin USA Subtitle President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States Year 2016 Publication Date 2016-05-17 US Release Date 2016-05-17 UK Release Date 2016-05-17 Narrator Matthew Beard Illustrator Gregory Copeland Birth 1927 Affiliation Lecturer, University of Fort Hare Position Professor Qualifications J.D. Illustrations 8-PAGE B/W PHOTO INSERT (ON INSERT STOCK); 4 B/W MAPS Pages 464 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Audience General NZ Release Date 2017-01-14 AU Release Date 2017-01-14 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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