Why Is Andrew Jackson Called Indian Killer?

Andrew Jackson was an insistent advocate for Indian removal, earning him the nickname “Indian killer”, he was referred to as a “fire-breathing frontiersman obsessed with Indian presence and the need to obliterate it” by Historian Robert Remini. Jackson made his first effort towards fighting the Indians in a war against the Creeks, though he was not president at the time. To accomplish this task he suggested that troops methodically kill Indian women and children, resulting in the Creeks losing 23 million acres of their land in central Alabama and southern Georgia, making way for cotton plantation slavery. More land was gained by the United States when Jackson’s troops invaded Spanish Florida to punish Seminoles for harboring fugitive slaves in 1818, this sparked the first seminole

During this dissension two british men who were living among the Seminoles were captured, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Ambrister, one in which had written about his support for the Seminoles’ land and rights in the form of letters that were found on a boat. These letters were used as “evidence” to accuse the men of

This however only benefited white men; Africans, Indians, and women were not included. As you might expect, Jackson was a slave owner, possessing more than one hundred slaves. The Hermitage was Jackson’s cotton plantation, spread over 1’000 acres and maintained by nearly 300 African American slaves. Though he pledged to treat his slaves kindly, and in most cases he did, he was also known to occasionally punish them with severity. One slave in particular, Betty, was brutally whipped in full view of the other