An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

96 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

on the Mississippi. But it was not long before some began eyeing it

for settlement and others proposing an "exchange" of Indigenous

lands in the Old Northwest and Old Southwest for lands west of

the Mississippi.2 Before turning to conquest and. colonization west

of the Mississippi, the slavery-based rule of the Southeast would be

ethnically cleansed of Indigenous peoples. The man for the job was

Andrew Jackson.

CAREER BUILDING THROUGH GENOCIDE

Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of set­

tlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the

spread of its power over the entire world. Rather, the chief cause was

the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civiliza­

tions of people in order to possess their land. This trend of exter­

mination became common in the twentieth century as the United

States seized military and economic control of the world, capping

five hundred years of European colonialism and imperialism. 3 The

canny Prussian Otto von Bismarck, founder and first chancellor

(1871-90) of the German empire, was prescient in observing, "The

colonization of North America has been the decisive fact of the

modern world."4 Jefferson was its architect. Andrew Jackson was

the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east

of the Mississippi.

Andrew Jackson was an influential Tennessee land speculator,

politician, and wealthy owner of a slave-worked plantation, the

Hermitage. He was also a veteran Indian killer. Jackson's family

personified the Protestant Scots-Irish migration to the borderlands

of empires. Jackson's Scots-Irish parents and two older brothers ar­

rived in Pennsylvania from County Antrim in Northern Ireland in

1765. The Jacksons soon moved to a Scots-Irish community on the
      North Carolina border with South Carolina. Jackson's father died
      after a logging accident a few weeks before Andrew's birth in 1767.
      Life was hard for a single mother and three children on the frontier.
      At age thirteen, with little education, Jackson became a courier for
      the local regiment of the frontier secessionists in their war of in-