Wk 2 - Persuading the New Nation. Literature & Language Essay

Running head: ANDREW JACKSON1
Andrew Jackson – Second Annual Message to Congress: A Rhetorical Analysis
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ANDREW JACKSON

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Andrew Jackson – Second Annual Message to Congress: A Rhetorical Analysis, The art of selling political messages, is sophisticated. Navigating intricate political,
economic and often socio-cultural paths, shrewd politicians often go long ways to appeal to audiences to make a message more appealing or sell a full political project. In doing so, political experience and skills are not enough. Instead, politicians, particularly at higher up levels of government, need a fine combination of personal charisma, strength of character, political backing, and, of course, rhetorical skills. The need to sell, politically speaking, assumes more significance in controversial cases and situations. In U.S. history, politicians, particularly presidents, show a wide range of political selling or campaigning strategies for a diversity of audiences spanning the U.S. full political, economic, social, racial, and cultural spectrum. The outcomes each politician has managed to achieve are a function of different situations defined by emerging and possible future expectations. Putting matters into perspective, a close examination of a political selling instance is required. For current purposes, U.S. President Andrew Jackson's second annual message to Congress (Jackson, 1830) is discussed. The primary text in the current essay centers on a critical issue echoing far and deep in U.S. politics, namely, wherein U.S. politics – and, for that matter, geography – Native Indians are and should be placed? Put differently, Native Indians, aboriginal inhabitants of America prior to European settlement, have experienced extensive extermination and relocation campaigns by different federal and state governments in pursuance of a wide range of political and economic gains including, most primarily, land development and use, settlement expansion (in the colonial period), natural resource extraction (particularly oil) and, of course, outright greed. The constitutional problem of Native Indians as citizens entitled to some property rights yet not protected by or accountable to
ANDREW JACKSON

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federal or state governments make Native Indians a unique case in U.S. political geography. To understand such intricate relationship Native Indians have in U.S. politics, Jackson's second annual address message to Congress is, rhetorically speaking, closely read. This essay aims, accordingly, to examine U.S. President Andrew Jackson's second message to Congress in 1830 in order to identify and assess used rhetorical strategies in addressing Congress on relocating Native Indians from Southeastern states further West.
The "message" U.S. President Andrew Jackson delivers to Congress is, in fact, a speech. Intended to engage Congress to approve plans to relocate Native Indians to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, the speech in question represents an interesting original text of an important period of U.S. history and politics. Using a range of rhetorical strategies to buy in approval, Jackson shows an early example of racializing a political (and economic)...