100 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
their original homeland. As historian Alan Brinkley has observed,
Jackson's political fortunes depended on the fate of the Indians
that is, their eradication. 11
The surrender document the Muskogee Nation was forced to sign
in 1814, the Treaty of Fort Jackson, asserted that they had lost under
"principles of national justice and honorable war." Andrew Jackson,
the only US negotiator of the treaty, insisted on nothing less than
the total destruction of the Muskogee Nation, which the Muskogees
had no power to refuse or negotiate. These terms of total surrender
shocked the small group of Muskogee plantation and slave own
ers, who thought that they had been thoroughly accepted by the US
Americans. They had fought alongside the Anglo militias against
the majority Red Sticks in the war just concluded, yet all Muskogees
were now to be punished equally. To no avail did the "friendlies"
prostrate themselves before Jackson at the treaty meeting, begging
that they and their holdings be spared. Jackson told them that the
extreme punishment exacted upon them should teach all those who
would try to oppose US domination. "We bleed our enemies in such
cases," he explained, "to give them their senses."12 Military histo
rian Grenier observes that "Jackson's 'bleeding' of the Muskogees
marks a culminating point in American military history as the end
of the Transappalachian East's Indian wars .... The conquest of
the West was not guaranteed by defeating the British Army in battle
in 1815, but by defeating and driving the Indians from their home
lands."^13
The treaty obliged surviving Muskogees to move onto western
remnants of their homelands, and Jackson, far from being repri
manded for his genocidal methods, won a commission from Presi
dent James Madison as major general in the US Army. The territory
that would become Alabama and Mississippi now lay open to An
glo-American settlement, an ominous green light to the expansion
of plantation slavery. The Muskogee War thus inscribed a US policy
of ethnic cleansing onto an entire Indigenous population. The policy
originated by Andrew Jackson in that war would be reconfirmed
politically when he became president in 1828.1 4
The Upper Creek Muskogees who remained in Alabama surren-