The End of the Myth, page 7
4.
In 1837, on the cusp of a fearsome seven-year recession, the United States prepared for war on its many frontiers. “There is not,” the New York Journal of Commerce wrote, “at this moment, a single portion of our vast frontier, whether inland or maritime, that does not require attention. On the south, we have the Seminoles to contend with; on the S.W. is Mexico, with which we have unsettled relations.”29 Enemies were everywhere, harrowing the geopolitical imagination of second- and third-generation republicans. The Canadian “frontiers” are “overhanging us from sea to sea like a lowering storm-cloud,” warned Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts member of the House of Representatives.
The threat gathering on the west—a “long inland frontier, of river, and plain, and lake,” as Cushing described it, “utterly incapable of being guarded by fortifications or armies”—dominated public debate.30 With Indian removal well under way, some feared retribution. An anonymous artillery officer, writing from east Florida to the Charleston Courier in 1838, described the horrors he had helped inflict on the recalcitrant Seminoles. He and his fellow soldiers had driven them “into the swamps and unwholesome places of their country,” where they clung “with the last efforts of despair to their beloved homes.” He reminded readers that “equilibrium” is a moral as well as physical concept and that “retribution will inevitably follow dereliction.” The penitent soldier continued: “Like the Southern winds of a summer’s day, congesting thunderous clouds in the north, we have been crowding and condensing disaffected Indian tribes between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, and as by an electric spark, these clouds turn and rush forth, lavishing their fury upon the earth, so may a foreign enemy, or one among themselves, arouse these tribes to come down upon us in such numbers as shall desolate a large portion of our new happy country.”31
Others were less soul-searching yet still understood that a policy of biblical-level dispossession would most likely provoke some kind of reaction. In France, when republicans executed the king, deposed the aristocracy, and launched a reign of terror, they incited all the various branches of Europe’s ancien régime to mobilize against them and lay siege to their revolution. In North America, republicans presided over a different sort of terror, not class terror but race terror. Decades of horrific violence against Native Americans didn’t so much provoke as produce enemies. “We must bear in mind,” said the Journal of Commerce essay cited above, “that the many thousand Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminoles, and other Indians, who have been, or will be, removed to the far west, will cherish there a lurking spirit of hostility against the people who have injured them, which ever and anon may break out into open war. A general war waged by the Indians, who will soon be concentrated on our western frontier.” Or will be is a powerful tense shift, moving swiftly from the past—discussing the possible effects of something the United States did do—to the expectant future, the predicted consequences of something it would do. In 1837, the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated that there existed 66,499 potential “warriors” among the remaining Indian population in North America and that if they “ever combined” they would make a “formidable” force capable of sweeping “away the whole white population west of the Mississippi.”32
The Indian Removal Act, in addition to removing Native Americans, mandated the federal government to protect Native Americans once they were removed. The United States was to assure removed nations that it would “forever secure and guaranty” their new lands and protect them from “all interruption or disturbance” from “any other person or persons whatever.” “We are as a nation,” Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, wrote, “responsible in foro conscientiae to the opinions of the great family of nations” regarding the post-removal treatment of Native Americans, “a people comparatively weak, upon whom we were perhaps in the beginning unjustifiable aggressors, but of whom in the progress of time and events, we have become the guardians, and, as we hope, the benefactors.”33 It wouldn’t be too contrived a point to make that the United States was charging itself with the duty of protecting its victims from itself.
The act blurred the line between foreign and domestic policy. Was Indian Country a different country, outside the authority of the United States? A series of Supreme Court rulings in the early 1830s answered the question by splitting the difference, saying that the Cherokee nation was and wasn’t sovereign, was and wasn’t part of the United States. “Perhaps,” said one decision, indigenous polities could be called “domestic dependent nations.” “Indian Country” was foreign, in the sense that removal treaties—the agreements Washington signed with specific indigenous peoples that formalized their expulsion—acknowledged the sovereignty of individual nations. But to hold to the letter of those documents and to treat Indian Country as a foreign sovereign power would give an opening to European rivals, especially the British, who were still being regularly accused of using indigenous grievances to destabilize frontier society. “They were neither foreign nations, nor states of the union, but something different from either,” said one newspaper of Native American communities, following a particularly confusing Supreme Court ruling on the Cherokees.34 “Baffling,” wrote one historian of the situation.35
The location of Indian Country, in relation to what was considered the United States proper, added to the bafflement. At this point, in the 1830s, the United States’ outer reaches were laid out thusly, east to west: First there was the Mississippi River. Not too far beyond that was the line of Anglo settlement, from Lake Superior down to Natchez. Next was the Army’s military defense perimeter, plotted along a series of forts running from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Then came Indian Country, generally used to describe Oklahoma and a portion of Kansas but sometimes also referring to land running up to the Dakotas. Past Indian Country was the nation’s internationally recognized legal limit, north out of the Gulf of Mexico, first along the Sabine River (which today separates Louisiana from Texas), then the Red and Arkansas Rivers. Beyond that border was Mexico, which reached north to Utah and Montana and west to California.
By 1836, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs considered these lines more or less fixed. But fixed didn’t mean clear-cut. Indian Country was east of—that is, within—the international boundary of the United States, but it was west of the settler line. The committee unintentionally conveyed the muddiness of it all when, referring to expelled Indians, it pronounced: “They are on the outside of us, and in a place which will ever remain on the outside.”36 The committee here is obviously referring to the settlement line. Whatever the case, they wouldn’t be outside for long.
The lines were in constant movement, driven west by settlers over Indian Country. As they moved, more removals followed, in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, up and down and across the west, a repeating cycle that advanced with a propulsive force. John Quincy Adams knew that this rotation—with Indians finding themselves inside, outside, then inside the boundary once more—couldn’t go on forever. The continent was vast but not infinite. “In the instances of the New-York Indians removed to Green Bay, and of the Cherokees removed to the Territory of Arkansas,” he wrote in his private diary in 1828, the last full year of his presidency, “we have scarcely given them time to build their wigwams before we are called upon by our own people to drive them out again.” The best policy, he confided to himself, would be assimilation, to make Native Americans equal citizens. But this, he knew, “the People of the States within which they are situated will not permit.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, some indigenous peoples did make a move to sedentary agriculture. But they still had their lands taken and they still were removed. Georgia’s Cherokees, for instance, had even adopted a written constitution, using the constitutional relationship established between states and the federal government to justify their existence. Adams, the president most sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans in U.S. history, thought the constitution “impracticable,” as he noted in his diary. Some communities, including Native Americans in the Old Northwest Territory, around the Great Lakes, successfully participated in the commercial fur trade while maintaining a distinct sense of cultural identity. Lewis Cass, who served as Michigan’s territorial governor before he became Jackson’s secretary of war, took this hard-won achievement—maintaining cultural and political autonomy while mastering the commercial market—as proof of backwardness. They had “successfully” resisted, he wrote in 1830, “every effort to meliorate their situation.”37
5.
The decades following Jackson’s Removal Act witnessed an evolution in the meaning of the word “frontier.” It went from identifying a military front or a national border to indicating a way of life: the “outer edge of the wave,” as Frederick Jackson Turner would later describe the concept, separating civilization from savagery. The metaphor “edge of the wave” would seem to work against itself, since it combines an image that suggests definitional sharpness—an “edge”—with one that conveys constant flux and decomposition—a “wave.” But it perfectly describes its object.
The frontier, especially after removal, had to be precise, like an edge, because it was the measure of civilization. “Well-defined lines marked the onset of civilization at the far West, and all beyond was wilderness,” wrote an early observer of the frontier. The American Revolution advanced a theory of political self-governance based on an individual’s ability to self-govern, to use capabilities, virtues, strength, and reason to contain passions and control vices. People of color—enslaved peoples within the United States or dispossessed peoples on its border—helped define the line between proper liberty, which justified self-governance, and ungovernable licentiousness, which justified domination. Native Americans especially, in their “wild freedom”—a refusal to cultivate the earth and a desire instead to roam, hunt, and gather—created what many identified as an almost childlike relationship to nature, held up as the opposite of the self-cultivation and self-possession of white people worthy of political self-rule. “The Indians are children,” Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, wrote, and “any band of schoolboys from ten to fifteen years of age, are quite as capable of ruling their appetites, devising and upholding a public policy, constituting and conducting a state or community as an average Indian tribe.” The Indian “is a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one passion save by the ravenous demands of another … These people must die out,” Greeley said. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it.”38
But like a wave, the frontier was also blurry, indistinct, a place where white settlers fled to escape routinization, even as they defined their self-command against the wildlings on the other side. In the east, it was becoming increasingly difficult for families to reproduce themselves, as the spread of capitalism—with its low wages, high prices of basic goods, and even higher rents—placed increasing pressure on the family structure. In order to survive, many households moved west. As they did, not only was the ideal of the family, including domestic order and fatherly authority, redeemed, it was sharpened in contrast to the wildness of the frontier. A little house on a big prairie, sheltered from “unrestrained” and “lawless iniquity,” as one observer described life on the frontier. There existed in the pages of western romances, poems, and newspaper reports an intense, simultaneously rageful and rueful, menacing and maudlin identification with Native Americans. “A life in the open air,” went another early description of the frontier, “freedom from restraint, and a vigorous appetite, generally finding a hearty meal to satisfy it, make difficult a return to the humdrum of steady work and comparative respectability.”39 Settlers might imagine Native Americans as their “brothers” who had a primogeniture right to the land, even as they donned hide skins and took up tomahawks to slaughter them and claim that right as their own. “Voluptuary and stoic; swept by gusts of fury too terrible to be witnessed, yet imperturbable beyond all men, under the ordinary excitements and accidents of life; garrulous, yet impenetrable,” as one Bureau of Indian Affairs agent wrote, in describing the “curious compound and strange self-contradiction” of “the red man” in his “wild life.”40
Also like a wave, the frontier had to move, it had to be “fleeting,” as the western traveler George Catlin described the line in the late 1830s, “a moving barrier” advancing over the continent as civilization progressed. The western frontier was “a zigzag, ever-varying line,” a government official in charge of Indian affairs once said, “more or less definitely marked” yet “always slowly moving west,” a threshold of constant, endless war: “an almost incessant struggle, the Indians to retain and the Whites to get possession.”41
For tactical reasons, though, the U.S. military had to continue to think of the frontier as fixed, and their mission clear-cut: “to protect … border settlements, extending along a line of one thousand miles, against the incursions of numerous savage tribes.”42 Yet however much the military imagined the frontier as stable and well defined, the boundary separating Native Americans from white settlers was constantly changing. As the United States moved west, any given major river—the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Arkansas, or the Red River—along with the tributaries that ran perpendicular into that river would become part of the defensive frontier. In this vision, the frontier looked more like a comb, or half a fishbone.
Military strategists wanted to defend a firm line, and they produced one survey after another trying to plot the frontier’s exact coordinates. Tactical requirements, however, imagined not one but three separate lines dividing the United States from “Indian Country.” The first, according to an Army report, was the line of white settlement, of traders, farmers, ranchers, hunters, and trappers. The second was a militarized “interior line,” required for “the special protection of the settlements,” and entailed a series of outposts and forts that “must necessarily be within our boundary.” The third was an “exterior line,” west of the settlement line, identified as advancing “into Indian country far beyond our boundary.”43 Within or beyond (the emphasis is in the original report) the boundary, the geography was baffling indeed.
However they were defined, and wherever they ran, none of these lines were steady. Each interacted with the other to move the whole operation forward. Two years before Jackson’s Removal Act, the office of the secretary of war complained to Congress about the policy of “pushing our military posts”—including Fort Snelling on the Mississippi and Fort Leavenworth on the Missouri—“so far within the Indian country, and so far ahead of the regular advances of our population,” that the advance kicked off a violent cycle: the outposts “only serve to invite wild and profitless adventures into the Indian country,” leading to “personal collisions with the natives”; the government then had to mount “a military expedition, to vindicate the rights of these straggling traders.” This dynamic, in which danger caused by the United States going over the line pulled the U.S. over the land, was repeated over and over again.
* * *
Indian removal opened the floodgates, allowing, as one legal theorist would describe the Age of Jackson, “an irresistible tide of Caucasian democracy” to wash over the land.44 King Cotton extended its dominion through the South, creating unparalleled wealth, along with unparalleled forms of racial domination over both enslaved and free blacks. At the same time, Native Americans were driven west, and the white settlers and planters who got their land experienced something equally unprecedented: an extraordinary degree of power and popular sovereignty. Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.
FOUR
The Safety Valve
“There is no longer any controlling of the mania.”
1.
Consider the safety valve. Invented, apparently, in its basic form in the late 1600s, in France, after a pressure cooker used to break down horse hooves and mutton bones into jelly exploded, the device had within a century been forge-welded onto steam engines, boilers, locomotives, and furnaces—a necessary, though too often unreliable, last line of defense against accumulating gases and unsustainable pressures. Thomas Jefferson had urged Spain to let U.S. barges and keelboats moor on the west side of the Mississippi, which they needed to do to be able to tack upstream against the current. Soon, though, U.S. boats would have their own means to ply the river’s main trunk and many tributaries, moving upriver with ease and racing down with speed: steam revolutionized the pan-Mississippi world.
Steamboats carried more and more passengers and freight, including slavers and slaves, west along the Ohio and Arkansas, and south down the Mississippi, into newly incorporated U.S. territory. It was easier, though, to build steam than to release steam, and boilers began to blow ships to tinder with a startling frequency. Steam, the North American Review wrote in 1840, in a long essay on riverboat disasters, remained “an enigma even to the learned.”1
The first engineers on these boats came from the east, from New York, Philadelphia, and England, and their experience was purely practical. They had little understanding of what one contemporary report called the “theoretical idea of steam.”2 They knew how much water, more or less, they should maintain in a heated boiler. And they knew that as their boat picked up speed, they could build pressure by closing the safety valve. But their understanding of the “expansive power” of steam was intuitive and inexact. A popular idea among engineers held that only dry boilers exploded, and that as long as water remained in the tank all was well. That was not true. “Theoreticians of steam” had already worked out that the expansion created in a closed boiler filled with water increases as heat increases but at a higher rate, with expansion doubling with every fifty additional degrees. This made on-the-spot guesswork volatile. “Why not call it witchcraft?” wrote one doctor, referring to the idea that water-filled boilers can’t explode.
