Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2013
This essay examines the development of Andrew Jackson's ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty within the southern borderlands of the post-Revolutionary United States. It argues that he was in many respects a conventional borderlands leader—that is, someone with little sense of attachment to any particular polity, who speculated in Indian lands while pursuing commercial ventures through American, Spanish, and Native jurisdictions. But an especially devastating war between the settlers of Middle Tennessee and some Cherokee warriors during the 1790s forced Jackson and others to articulate their attachment to the United States in new ways. Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new “protection covenant,” whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence. In addition to a fresh look at Jackson, the article demonstrates the importance of international as well as Constitutional law in the formation of early American nationalism.
The author wishes to thank Peter Onuf, Jeffrey Selinger, Catherine Desbarats, Elizabeth Elbourne, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Melissa Gismondi, Eliza Wood, Katherine Wilson, and Nicolas Magnien for their help in reading and revising this manuscript, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support.
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33. “Conference Held at Tellico Blockhouse, 7–8 November 1794,” Box 2, James Robertson Papers, 1784–1812, TSLA; “Proceedings with the Cherokee, Tellico Blockhouse, December-January 1794–95,” TSLA. The recovery of slaves may well have been a factor in the attack itself, given that one of its major organizers, James Logan of Kentucky, had lost five slaves.
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38. Andrew Jackson to Willie Blount, Jan. 25, 1812, in PAJ, 2:277; Andrew Jackson Account Book Collection, 1804–1806, TSLA. For evidence of the Spanish checking passports and passes on the Mississippi, see Nasatir, Abraham P., Spanish War Vessels on the Mississippi, 1792–1796 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, 206. On the Burr conspiracy, see Isenberg, Nancy, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (London: Viking, 2007), 271–366.Google Scholar
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42. Andrew Jackson to Willie Blount, Jan. 25, 1812, in PAJ, 2:278. In this letter, Jackson says that he did find some buyers for the slaves he had picked up, but that when he applied for a permit to sell the slaves within the Choctaw nation, the sitting governor refused. Jackson took this as proof of a “combination to compel me to take a passport.”
43. Passports for Labon Cason and William Ivy, in Bryan, “Passports Issued by Governors of Georgia,” 5 (these were signed on the same day, Sept. 12, 1803, and made out by the same four officials); [Enclosure], William Eustis to Silas Dinsmoor, March 23, 1812, in PAJ, 2:296. The absence of general complaints in the hundreds of legislative petitions to the Tennessee Assembly is especially noteworthy, given that they touch on a vast range of issues and grievances. See Tennessee Legislative Petitions, 1799–1801, and Tennessee Legislative Petitions, 1805–12, TSLA. On nuisances and public safety in early American legal thought, see Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).Google Scholar
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46. [Andrew Jackson], Democratic Clarion, “The Massacre at the Mouth of Duck River,” July 7–8, 1812, PAJ, 2:310; Andrew Jackson, “To the Second Division,” March 7, 1812, in PAJ, 2:290.
47. “Treaty with the Creeks, 1814,” in Indian Treaties, ed. Kappler, 107 and 107–110; Heidler and Heidler, Old Hickory's War. For Jackson's negotiating tactics, see Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 25–34.Google Scholar
48. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, August 5, 1814, in PAJ, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, Sharon MacPherson, and John H. Reinbold, vol. 3, 1814–1815 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 105; Heidler and Heidler, Old Hickory's War; Cayton, “When Shall We Cease to Have Judases?”
49. Willie Blount to Return Meigs, April 12, 1811, Box 3, George Edward Matthew Collection, TSLA; Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 2:391–97; Benjamin W. Crowinshield to Daniel T. Patterson, Jan. 22, 1816, in Letter from the Secretary of the Navy…Sundry Documents Relating to the Destruction of the Negro Fort in East Florida in the Month of July, 1816 (Washington, DC, 1819)Google Scholar; Patterson to Crowinshield, August 15, 1816, ibid.; “Negro Fort on Appalachicola,” NWR, Nov. 20, 1819; Barber, Eunice, Narrative of the Tragical Death of Darius Barber and his Seven Children (Boston, 1818)Google Scholar. For early complaints about Florida as a haven for runaway slaves, see Report of the Commons House of Assembly, May 16, 1749, in The Colonial Records of South Carolina: The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, ed. J.H. Easterby (Columbia, SC, 1962), 8:105; John Reynolds to the Board of Trade, Dec. 5, 1754, in Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, ed. Kenneth Coleman and Milton Ready, vol. 27, Original Papers of Governor John Reynolds, 1754–1756 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 33–34.Google Scholar
50. Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 2:475 and 2:544 (“pirates”) and generally 2:463-88; Memoirs of General Andrew Jackson, Together with the Letters of Mr. Secretary Adams, in Vindication of the Execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and other Public Acts of Gen. Andrew Jackson in Florida (Bridgeton, NJ, 1824)Google Scholar, 24, 36; Heidler and Heidler, Old Hickory's War. The extent to which President Monroe knew about and approved of Jackson's incursion into Florida has long been a point of debate, with the general claiming that he had received a letter authorizing aggressive measures through the intermediary of Tennessee Representative John Rea. For a recent review of the debate and a convincing argument against Monroe's approval, see Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands, 288–89n.
51. Providence Gazette, Dec. 19, 1818; Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands, esp. 27–31, 120–21, and 198–202. For fears of military ambition in Republican thought, see Opal, Beyond the Farm, 7–8.
52. Rep. Thomas Cobb (GA) in “Debate on the Seminole War,” NWR, Feb. 20, 1819, 113 ran this special edition to include all the debates from January and early February); Rep. Joseph Hopkinson (PA) in Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, From 1789 to 1856, ed. Benton, Thomas Hart (New York, 1858)Google Scholar, 6:290; Rep. Henry R. Storrs in Benson, ibid., 6:265; Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 2:532–56; Heidler, David S., “The Politics of National Aggression: Congress and the First Seminole War,” Journal of the Early Republic 13 (Winter 1993): 501–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
53. Rep. James Tallmadge (NY) in “Debate on the Seminole War,” NWR, Feb. 20, 1819, 174 (“civilized savages”); Rep. John Rhea in “Debate on the Seminole War,” NWR, Feb. 20, 1819, 183 (“supreme law”); Rep. Alexander Smyth (VA) in “Debate on the Seminole War,” NWR, Feb. 20, 1819, 142-55; [John Overton], A Vindication of the Measures of the President and His Commanding Generals, in the Commencement and Termination of the Seminole War, By a Citizen of Tennessee (Nashville, 1818?), 19, 5, 21, 21n; Tatum, Edward Howland Jr., The United States and Europe, 1815-1823: A Study in the Background of the Monroe Doctrine (New York: Russell and Russell, 1936), 226–32Google Scholar (Adams' defense). At the outset of his congressional speech, Rep. Smyth declared that his whole purpose was to show that all of Jackson's actions were “justified by the law of nations.” See “Debate on the Seminole War,” NWR, Feb. 20, 1819, 142.
54. Sen. Philip Barbour (VA) quoted in Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, ed. Benton, 8:124, 114; “Indian Fur Trade,” Annals of the 18th Congress, 1st Session, 432-60 and 507, in A Century of Lawmaking, at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html (accessed 25 April 2013); “Jackson's Recorded Votes in the United States Senate, 1823–25,” in PAJ, ed. Moser, Harold D., Hoth, David R., and Hoemann, George H., vol. 5, 1821–1825 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 463–67.Google Scholar
55. Andrew Jackson to John McKee, May 16, 1794, in PAJ, 1:49.
56. Cornell, Saul, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar