"[8] Scholars have speculated on Jackson's political and psychological motives from bringing Indigenous children into his home, but the only testimony in his letters suggests that he identified with their orphanhood, as he had lost his entire surviving family (mother and two brothers) during the American Revolutionary War.
[9] Historian Lorman Ratner described Jackson as a boy without a father, and a man without sons, which may have motivated him to accept guardianship of dozens of young people who lived with him at various times or whom he assisted legally, financially, or socially.
[12] Around the time Charley was being transported to the Hermitage, Jackson made a speech at the Horseshoe Bend battlefield expressing his feelings about the fate of the Muscogee, stating, "The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our Women and Children, or disturb the quiet of our borders...They have disappeared from the face of the Earth...How lamentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcasses of the slain!!
"[16] Contemporary historians generally challenge the 19th-century interpretation of Jackson's actions toward Charley, Theodore, and Lyncoya as benevolent, finding instead that they were part of a pattern of insidious race-based cruelty.
In the same way that Jackson assumed the role of father to Lyncoya, while at the same time destroying his people, so did Americans think of themselves as good parents to their Indian children even as they declared the necessity of Native extinction.