Free Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party by Dinesh D'Souza Page A

around the law; he made the law. He was a law unto himself. That’s because he had the troops and the guns to make the Indians do his bidding. Of course Jackson wasn’t getting the Indians off their land simply because he wanted to help poor whites to have their own land. What Jackson also wanted was the votes of those people. He was willing to make land available to them knowing that this would make them into his lifelong supporters and constituents.
    To restate Jefferson’s formulation, Jackson had something that poor whites wanted—namely land—and they had something he wanted—namely their political support. Jackson thus established the Democratic Party’s vote-getting strategy for nearly two centuries right up to the present day: rob Peter to pay Paul.
    In order to win the votes of poor white settlers, Jackson had to prove that he was more ruthless than they were. This was necessary because Jackson had to convince them that he could deliver something that they could not obtain for themselves, namely the possessions of some very powerful and warlike Indian nations. In the early nineteenth century, the Deep South region south of Tennessee and all the way to Florida was occupied by several tribes: the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek, the Cherokee, and the Seminole.
    Of these, the Creek were known to be the most recalcitrant. Jackson proved his mettle by showing he could mow them down and massacre them into submission, earning his subsequent reputation as an “Indiankiller.” Today we may wince at the title, but it was considered a compliment among Jackson’s Democratic supporters.
    Just as much as his exploits with the British, Jackson’s popularity was fired by his actions against the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend. In 1813, a militant band of Creeks called the Red Sticks attacked Fort Mims in the Mississippi Territory and slaughtered several hundred whites. Eyewitnesses who arrived on the scene days later found the victims scalped, including women and children. Today we think of native Indians as disconsolate, victimized people but we should not forget that they could be bloodthirsty warriors, and this is how Jackson and many other frontiersmen experienced them.
    Jackson—by this time the general of the Tennessee militia—issued a proclamation calling for retaliation. Among those who responded were the frontiersman Davy Crockett. Jackson also recruited allies from other Indian tribes, notably the Cherokee leader John Ross, who was descended from Indian and Scots-Irish ancestry. Jackson’s militia surprised the Creek attackers and routed them. In Davy Crockett’s account, “We shot them like dogs, and then set the house on fire, and burned it up with the warriors in it.” 23
    Jackson’s troops then went on a rampage, torching Creek villages and slaughtering villagers. At Horseshoe Bend in the Mississippi Territory (now southern Alabama) they settled into a hill overlooking a Creek camp and aimed their cannon at the Creeks gathered there. While Jackson apologists would later speak of a Battle of Horseshoe Bend, in reality the Creeks there were refugees, not warriors; they were seeking shelter from the crossfire.
    Jackson’s force wiped them out. As he put it in a letter to his wife Rachel, “It was dark before we finished killing them.” Jackson estimated that beyond the 557 corpses on land, an additional three hundred Indians were “buried in their watry grave.” Jackson’s men cut off the noses of dead Indians as they counted the bodies. Afterward there were few regrets, one of Jackson’s soldiers chuckling that he had killed a boy “five or six years of age” for the reason that “he would have become an Indian someday.” 24
    Jackson’s Horseshoe Bend massacre could be considered a case of frontiersman “excess” but in this case Jackson intended to go too far. He wanted to terrorize the Indian tribes in the region, and he largely succeeded. After Horseshoe Bend, Jackson found the other tribes