On November 24th, I visited a holy place.

The location is in the far western part of South Carolina near the junction of the North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia borders. It is a high place, 3200 feet above sea level and within the ancestral sphere of the physical homeland of the Cherokee nation. It is now called 'Caesar's Head'. This is where the eagle and bear lived and did so alongside a great people, the Cherokee.

The best-known episode in Cherokee history was also the worst: the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the Cherokee people from their ancestral home in the southeast to Oklahoma. The Cherokee had been one of the most acculturated of Indian societies--an urban, Christian, agricultural, largely intermarried people who supported the United States against other tribes. In the end this was all for nothing. Though some prominent Americans, such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster, spoke against Removal, and though the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, President Andrew Jackson, declaring "Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it," sent in the army.

Fifteen to twenty thousand Cherokee and their Indian neighbors (Choctaw, Muskogee, and others) were rounded up and herded to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-1839. Driven from their homes without first being allowed to collect their possessions, even their shoes, these prosperous and largely citified Indians were no better equipped for an 800-mile forced march than a white suburb today would be. Between four and eight thousand died of exposure, starvation, disease, and simple exhaustion along the Trail of Tears. If you understand this, both the extent to which the Cherokees had adopted American standards of civilization before the Removal and the ultimate futility of it, you will go a long way towards understanding the Cherokee mentality and also the attitudes of other Indian peoples towards those who initially came and colonized what was to become the United States.

I've reached into this sorry episode of United States' history because it illustrates just how draconian a presidential administration will become in order to achieve its goals. The 'goals' are defined by each new administration and usually fall within two areas of procedure: objectives that satisfy special interests within the country or objectives that satisfy the needs of the peoples within the country.

When the United States was being formally set up by the founding fathers both in the Articles of Confederation and during the Constitutional Convention, there was clearly divided thought as to the purpose and extended power of any federal government. Those who favored a vested-interest, mercantilist-protectionist form of central government did so with one thing in mind: empire building. Alexander Hamilton argued for this cause in the "Federalist Papers", John Adams stood on this side along with Henry Clay as did James Madison. But with Madison also went the admonition that the ultimate power of government resided with the individual states and if they desired, they could secede from the union.

On the other side of the stood the democratists -- those who firmly believed that it was the people of the individual states in whom resided the power of any confederation of states and it was the people of those states who should have the right to secede from the union of states if they felt so disposed. Counted in these numbers were Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun.

In response to British piracy of American shipping, President Jefferson in 1807 imposed a trade embargo against England. The New England Federalists were so outraged at this limitation on their trade, they plotted to secede from the Union. The vested interests of the 'Whigs' were not being served at the hand of the Democratic president, Jefferson. Later on, during the 1850-early 60's, it was the South that wanted to secede from the Union because by that point in time, it was the Northern states Federalists who were were imposing economically disastrous tariffs upon the South; tariffs that began in earnest with the administration of President Andrew Jackson.

Jackson began his political career as a Jeffersonian democrat, but it became quite clear that once in office, he was to become the first president to do a political 'flip-flop' and become a powerful advocate for federalist empire building. Federal monies were poured into subsidies for northern corporations to expand shipping infrastructure throughout the north, but very little of those monies found their way into the South. It was the 'expansionist philosophy' that placed the Cherokee nation in jeopardy. Rich, powerful industrialists -- 'Empire Builders' -- wanted the Cherokee land.  President Jackson, in the opinion of this writer, was owned by the country's moneyed aristocracy and his administration fulfilled the greedy desires of the powerful by taking the mountain home from the Cherokee. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such a move unconstitutional, Jackson thumbed his nose at the ruling and went ahead and nearly destroyed a proud nation of people, the Cherokee. The mercantilists-protectionists', once again, won the day.

Draconian measures by a presidential administration were not unique to the Jackson administration. President Lincoln, again in this writer's opinion, was the United State's first, true dictator. During the first three months of his administration, Lincoln suspended the Constitutional right of habeas corpus and had arrested by federal troops thousands of individuals who either spoke against the Union, advocated secession for the South or who spoke out against Lincoln himself. Fort Lafayette in New York City's harbor, at one time held 13,000 political prisoners, compliments of Abraham Lincoln. What follows, dear readers, will come as a shock to those of you who believe Lincoln to be the 'gentle and benevolent' leader.

This is from the James Randall book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln --"During the Lincoln administration, the suspension of habeas corpus and the declaration of martial law in the North led to the imprisonment of thousands of anti-war protesters, including myriad newspaper editors and owners and even priests and preachers. Secretary of State Seward actually established a 'secret police force' that made thousands of arrests on mere suspicion of 'disloyalty', which was broadly defined as disagreement with Lincoln's war policies. Prisoners were not told why they were being arrested, no investigations of their alleged 'crimes' were carried out, and no trials were held." There was no legal process at all and many Northern citizens were imprisoned for such alleged infractions as 'being a noisy secessionist,' selling Confederate trinkets, or 'hurrahing for Jefferson Davis. An Episcopal minister in Alexandria, Virginia, was arrested for omitting a prayer for the President of the United States in his church services as required by the Lincoln administration.

This from David A. Nichols in his book, Lincoln and the Indians --"In 1851, the Santee Sioux Indians in Minnesota sold 24 million acres of land to the federal government for $1,4100,000. By August 1862, thousands of white settlers were pouring onto the Indian lands, but there was such corruption in the government that almost none of the money was paid to the Sioux. A crop failure that year meant that the Sioux were starving. The federal government refused to pay what it owed, breaking yet another Indian treaty, and the Sioux revolted. A war ensued with Lincoln putting General John Pope in charge. Pope told a subordinate, 'It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux.... they are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.'

"The Indians were overwhelmed by the Federal army by October, at which time the 'war' was over and General Pope held hundreds of 'prisoners of war,' many of whom were women and children who had been herded into military forts. Military 'trials' were held, each lasting ten to fifteen minutes, in which most of the male prisoners were found guilty and sentenced to death. The lack of hard evidence against the accused was manifest; many men were condemned to death just because they were present during a battle.

"Three hundred and three Indians were sentenced to death, and Minnesota political authorities wanted to execute every one of them, something that Lincoln feared might incite one or more of the European powers to offer assistance to the Southern Confederacy, as they were hinting they would do. So his administration pared the list of condemned men down to thirty-nine, with the promise to Minnesota's politicians that in due course the Federal army would remove every last Indian from Minnesota. This was the bargain: Lincoln would look bad if he allowed the execution of three hundred Indians, so he would execute only thirty-nine of them. But in return he would promise to have the Federal army murder or chase out of the state all the other Indians, in addition to sending the Minnesota treasury $2 million.

"On December 26, 1862, Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in American history -- and yet the guilt of the executed could not be positively determined beyond reasonable doubt." 

Now, we come to today and now we are facing the prospect of a whole new and awesome entity in the United States, an entity that may prove to become this country's undoing: Homeland Security. Will this government entity prove to be today's Dracula? Will unconscionable governmental measures be enacted to the point where the peoples of this great nation will be insidiously stripped of their freedoms and rights? Who will really gain from the machinations of Homeland Security? Will the country be better protected as the result of some kind of overriding benevolent philosophy, or will, somehow, the mercantilist's come out the winners. More and more of the security of the United States is being turned over to -- and based upon the technology of -- those who prefer a powerful federalist, protectionist government.

Some would argue that individual members of a confederation of states would be ill-equipped to take on the threat of organized terrorism. Well, only history (and lengthy debates) would reveal the outcome of such an argument. What worries this writer is whether Homeland Security will have to resort to 'draconian measures' in order to better protect the nation. From my point of view, our history is on the razor's edge. There's a chance that Homeland Security will be beneficent, or there's a chance that we in this country will have an opportunity to experience an Americanized form of the Nazi Gestapo or worse, the Soviet KGB. Only time will tell whether or not the current or future presidential administrations become so draconian that entire groups of people, their cultures, their freedoms and rights will suffer the same fate as the Cherokee.