The differences in positions between President Andrew Jackson and US Senator and vice-presidential running mate of Henry Clay, Theodore Frelinghuysen, are largely to due the differences in perception of the value of the Cherokees history in America and the superiority of the white man. Jackson believed that the Natives were savages that did not deserve the vast lands of the country but rather that the whites were entitled to it because they were much more “civilized” and “prosperous” as he claims in his Case for the Removal Act in 1829, rhetorically questioning,“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and raged 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, …show more content…
He says that there are only a “few thousand savages” that “rage” the forests of the nation creating a largely negative connotation whereas for the white men he says that there are “12,000,000 happy people” that are all joyously frolicking with the novel ideas of “liberty, civilization, and religion”. Jackson’s view is that any “good man” could see that the natives are simply inferior the whites and thus they must be moved in order to let the American people live in peace. However, opposing the bigotry of the heroic villain, Jackson, is Frelinghuysen, who made the case that the rights of man and civil liberties extended beyond the barriers of color and race. In his own protest speech, he maintains that, “Our ancestors found these people, far removed from the commotion of Europe, exercising all the rights, and enjoying the privileges, of free and independent sovereigns of this new