The First Democrat: Andrew Jackson Part 2

Jackson convinced the Madison administration to give him the right to negotiate with the Cherokees to buy some of the land in question. Jackson implemented a new, and this time successful, rip-off scheme.

Jackson’s first step was to bribe the Cherokee chiefs. Each of them received “presents” from Jackson that ranged from $50 to $100. Jackson also used threats and intimidation against Cherokee holdouts. He and his associate John Coffee warned Cherokee leaders that if they failed to sell their land, then white settlers would take it for nothing.

Jackson obviously had no intention of offering military protection to the Cherokee against these white intruders. Jackson’s offer to the Cherokee was: take my money and leave, and then your safety will be guaranteed. Many Cherokee dejectedly agreed to depart from the lands on which they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds if not thousands of years.

As soon as this happened, Inskeep reports, “Jackson and his friends moved to take advantage. The scale of their gain has rarely, if ever, been calculated. Many real estate records from the era have been lost. But records that survive show that after 1816, the names of Andrew Jackson, his relatives, and his two closest business associates appeared on the titles to more than forty-five thousand acres of newly opened Alabama land. Most was in the Tennessee Valley.”
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Jackson also teamed up separately with his brother-in-law, John Donelson, who brought a group of Philadelphia investors. While Jackson certainly intended to enrich his relatives and cronies, every one of these deals was structured to provide maximum benefit to Andrew Jackson.

Inskeep reports in Jacksonland that in order to camouflage the scale of his investments, Jackson put the land that he bought into other people’s names. For instance, he listed three tracts of land on the south side of the river in the name of Andrew Jackson Hutchings, an orphaned relative of his wife Rachel. “More than twenty-two hundred acres were purchased under the name of William Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s nephew. William Donelson was also the registered name for the purchaser of thirteen town lots in Coldwater, the former Indian village at the bottom of Muscle Shoals.”

Source: Hillary’s America. The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016) by Dinesh D’Souza.