American History Campus

Indian History 1800-1828 As we have seen, the American Indian was a tragic casualty of imperial expansion, First by the European nations and, after 1776, increasingly by the United States. The rise of the American nation on the Atlantic seaboard and its rapid expansion into the trans-Appalachian interior produced drastic change in attitude toward the indian. American pioneers entered the wilderness as families. Their society was agrarian-based; the father, mother, and many children of each family provided the labor required to open a frontier farm. Thus, American pioneers did not need the indians. However, because of their rapidly expanding population and changes in agricultural technology and markets, they needed the Indians’ land.

In the evolution of public processes and techniclues, or policy, for Native Americans two men exercised the greatest influence: Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Jeffersonian influences were strongest in the period 1800-1828. The Jeffersonian Philosophy President Jefferson did not subscribe to the popular view that Indians were inferior; Be believed that "in body and mind" they were "equal" to whites. The essence of Jeffersonian Indian policy was coexistence and gradunlism, that is, the steady if slow accommodation of Indians to Angle-American lifestyle through the transforming process of civilization, culminating in their actually intermarrying into the dominant Anglo-American society. Jefferson believed that "civilization would bring peace" between Indians and settlers. Thus under his leadership the national government placed its "greatest hope in its policy of bringing civilization to the Indians." Jefferson constantly urged tribal leaders to change their life-style in order to require less land for their people.

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