Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep

ground. Trapped in the open, facing the murderous fire of the Americans behind their barricade, the British assault force lost291 redcoats killed, and more than 1,300 others wounded or captured. The Americans suffered 13 dead and a few dozen wounded or captured. The surviving British boarded ships and sailed away.
    It was true that the battle took place after the War of 1812 was over—news had yet to arrive of a peace treaty signed two weeks earlier—but only the sourest critic could dismiss New Orleans as a needless fight. The triumph of New Orleans was not its strategic importancebut its style. It embodied an enduring American ideal: that free citizens would come together in defense of liberty. Generations later, many American war movies would contain the same basic plot as the Battle of New Orleans: a diverse band of citizen soldiers, thrown together by their commander, overcame their differences and improvised their way to victory. Of course, the black men in Jackson’s army could not vote, while his Choctaw allies were under pressure to give up their land, but few people were thinking about such things in 1815. Public adulation fell on the mélange of hardy frontiersmen and the wild-haired Tennessean who led them. Jackson would spend the remainder of his life in the brilliant light of fame.
    Before 1815 ended, however, the hero was hearing a rumble of discontent. It involved his other, considerably more substantive victory. Nobody would ever debate whether Horseshoe Bend was a meaningless battle, since the general had exploited it to claim a land area larger than Scotland. Everyone knew the federal government would begin putting the land up for sale, and this knowledge lay behind a rumor that circulated around Nashville. In December 1815, Jackson’s friend John Coffee heard the rumor. He wrote Jackson to warn that two men were telling stories about “some pretext or color of fraud about you and myself with some others concerning the purchase of lands in the new country.”
    Andrew Jackson, the longtime land speculator, was being accused of planning with his friends to speculate in the real estate he had just conquered.
    Jackson seized his pen, telling Coffee of his “astonishment and surprise” at this attempt to “injure” him. “Such base ingratitude will meet its reward,” he wrote.
    It is evidence of such wanton wickedness & depravity of heart that I can scarcely believe it myself, that I have huged such monsters to my boosom, called them friend, and risqued my life for the preservation of the charector & feelings of such a man.
    Coffee went to confront the men on Jackson’s behalf. He brought along another of General Jackson’s close friends—James Jackson, unrelated to the general by blood but close to him in outlook, an Irish immigrant who had become a wealthy merchant and avid horse racer in Nashville. Coffee and James Jackson stared down one suspected storyteller and then the other.Each professed his innocence and blamed the other.
    What must have made the rumor especially galling was that it was true. General Andrew Jackson really was going to buy former Indian land in “the new country.” So was John Coffee. So was James Jackson. Coffee was going to play a special role, which General Jackson alluded to in the same letter in which he complained about the outrageous suggestion of a “color of fraud” in his conduct. At the end, Jackson dropped his tone of outrage and gave Coffee good news.
    P.S. I have the express promise that you will be appointedreceiver of Publick money—A.J.
    Jackson was campaigning to have Coffee hired to run the federal land office for northern Alabama. The “receiver of Publick money” would be in charge of conducting all the sales of former Creek land that were about to take place, putting him in an ideal position to pass on inside information.
    Coffee didn’t get the job, but Jackson engaged another agent to nose around a federal land office. “My Dear