27 pages • 54 minutes read
Andrew JacksonOn Indian Removal
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1830A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Concession
Content Warning: This section references ethnic cleansing and racial prejudice.
Concession is a rhetorical device that involves acknowledging the merits of a counterargument. It typically heightens the perceived strength of the speaker’s own argument by broadcasting that they have considered their position carefully. Jackson uses concession in this way when he allows, “Doubtless it will be painful [for Indigenous Americans] to leave the graves of their fathers” (4), signaling that he has weighed the negative consequences of his proposed policy. What’s more, he uses this concession to pivot towards further arguments in favor of his position, reasoning that the grief the relocated tribes will experience is no different than the grief the first European colonists experienced in leaving their homes (ignoring the voluntary nature of the latter migration).
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition involves placing two things (words, characters, images, etc.) side by side to highlight the similarities and differences. Jackson juxtaposes white and Indigenous Americans several times throughout his speech to contradictory ends. The comparison is most commonly meant to emphasize the supposed difference in their natures: the “savage” Indigenous tribes versus the “civilized” and Christian white settlers who, Jackson argues, would by their very nature put tribal lands to much better use. This form of juxtaposition is key to developing the theme of Savagery Versus Civilization. However, Jackson also uses this comparison to suggest a similarity in the two group’s respective situations: Both, he suggests, have been asked to leave their homelands in the name of God and country. This of course ignores the fact that European settlers came to the US voluntarily (if sometimes under various kinds of duress). The omission allows Jackson to stress the importance of accepting “events which [the Government] cannot control” and striving to develop “the power and facilities of Ian in their highest perfection” through their trials and tribulations (4), thus casting ethnic cleansing in a positive light.
Rhetorical Question
Rhetorical questions are questions that a speaker poses but does not directly answer; the response is typically implied. Jackson uses rhetorical questions to stress the need to relocate Indigenous Americans in order to preserve and expand American territory and culture. In the middle of his speech, for example, he poses a question that contrasts the land as occupied by Indigenous versus white Americans:
What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion? (3).
The question challenges listeners (who presumably want to think of themselves as “good men”) to choose the latter path.
Jackson uses another series of rhetorical questions to villainize the Indigenous people who refuse to accept the government’s offer with “gratitude and joy” and to blame them for their potential “annihilation” (4, 5). He questions, for example, whether it is “more afflicting to [the Indigenous person] to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to [white Americans’] brothers and children [to leave their own homes]” (5). Such questions downplay the negative impact of forced relocation by appealing to the audience’s emotions while omitting facts that might lead listeners to a different conclusion (e.g., that relocation is likely less “afflicting” when voluntary).
Imagery
Imagery is language that appeals to the senses, most commonly sight. Jackson frequently uses such visual imagery to conjure tropes of the “savage” Indigenous man in conflict with the “civilized” white man and to promote The Expansion of American Culture. For example, he refers to the “waves of population and civilization” that are “rolling westward” (4), depicting the spread of Western society as a natural process akin to the ocean’s movement. He similarly questions the utility of “country covered in forests” (3)—economically and culturally languishing, he suggests, because it remains in the hands of Indigenous Americans. Towards the end of his speech, Jackson uses imagery to address the moral question of forcibly removing people from their homelands. He concedes that the removal will be painful, but he argues that Indigenous Americans, like white Americans, can find “joy” in the their new homes, which will afford ample space to “range unconstrained in body or mind” (4)—a phrase that evokes a sense of the continent’s vastness.
