In the fall of Jackson’s first year in office, his secretary of war, John Eaton, ordered William Ward, the Choctaw agent, to expel from the tribal territory all white men who did not have federal permits to reside there. Councilman David Folsom condemned the order as an unlawful intrusion into tribal affairs and a disruption of its long-standing trading and business practices. The Jackson administration ignored him. The Choctaws responded to the government’s indifference by threatening a public campaign to win popular support for their right to regulate their own territory. The newly elected district chief Greenwood LeFlore traveled to Georgia, where he forged an alliance with the Cherokees (sealed by the Choctaw leader’s marriage to the niece of their new principal chief, John Ross) and promised to take the Indians’ case to Washington, D.C.66 Unimpressed, the Jackson administration pressed forward with a removal bill authorizing the president to initiate the wholesale relocation of eastern tribes to the West. By early 1830, with Jackson’s proposal moving toward passage, Folsom and LeFlore decided to take the initiative. They called a meeting of the tribe’s general council for the purpose of defining a consensus position on removal. McDonald, who had returned to Mississippi from Ohio at the end of 1827, decided to attend.
When the Choctaw leaders gathered at their new tribal meetinghouse on March 15, 1830, they decided that absolute resistance was impractical. The white population vastly outnumbered them, and worse, federal officials appeared indifferent to their plight. The council chose to draft a removal treaty of its own. Reviving negotiating tactics employed in 1824, the council offered a compromise: it would give up its tribal land and leave Mississippi, provided federal officials agreed to distribute generous tracts of Choctaw territory (640 acres for heads of families; 320 acres for every other “young man”) to every tribal member who opted to remain in the state. In addition, the council’s proposal called for financial compensation for Choctaws whose property would be abandoned when they moved west and generous material subsidies for tribal members who stayed in the East. In their view, the United States was obligated by its former treaty agreements to subsidize and support those who chose to remain in Mississippi as well as those who agreed to remove. The council also proposed naming a delegate to Congress who would represent the Choctaws in the House of Representatives. The leaders authorized Greenwood LeFlore to present the draft agreement to the administration in Washington, D.C.
The Choctaws hoped that their proposal would win Jackson’s support. After all, the president’s Removal Act had demanded only negotiations—it did not order immediate removal—and the statute’s mild language had been approved by only slim margins in both houses of Congress. The president had repeatedly assured his growing ranks of critics that the planned expulsions would take place peacefully and that any Indians wishing to remain in the East and live apart from their tribes would be allowed to do so. If Jackson was being disingenuous, the draft treaty seemed perfectly suited to unmask him. The widely circulated Niles Weekly Register spoke for many when it noted in May that the Choctaws’ draft treaty deserved support. “What they ask,” the Register declared, “if it can be so managed as to inure to their benefit, and prevent them from being the prey of speculators and contractors, would be reasonable enough.”67
McDonald had mixed feelings about these events. He applauded the tribe’s conciliatory stance, but worried that it had acted in too great haste and conceded too much. On his journey home from the council, he wrote a remarkably candid letter to his old friend Peter Pitchlynn, a fellow supporter of the measure. “I have had more thoughts rushing thro’ my head within the last few days than I could reduce to writing in a month,” he declared. “I was at times on the point of losing all hope—but then my favorite motto would occur to my recollection—nil desperandum. Let us never despair.” McDonald encouraged Pitchlynn to “follow with energy whatever your judgment dictates as the line of duty, and in time all will be well.” He also wondered whether in the end he would join the tribe on its journey across the Mississippi. “I have a strong idea of embarking my fortunes with the Choctaw and going west with them. It would break in on many of my old schemes,” he added, “but is not this the very crisis in which my services would be useful to my countrymen?”68
The next day McDonald remained uncertain. In a letter to McKenney, McDonald despaired that the tribe had placed too much trust in LeFlore. He had hoped that the council would appoint a small committee “to visit the President and to learn from him distinctly and fully what terms would be granted.” He believed such a strategy could produce a better treaty drafted “with the utmost care” and “with provisions the most . . . explicit.”69 Clearly, McDonald was thinking of his experience with the Choctaw delegation headed by Pushmataha in 1824 and 1825. Over the next several months it became clear that LeFlore would not enlist him as an adviser and that the pro-removal Choctaws were largely acting out of a self-interested desire to secure property for themselves in Mississippi. It was apparent that LeFlore and other wealthy leaders cared little for the future of the tribe. “I am lying on my oars doing nothing,” McDonald wrote Pitchlynn later that year. “I have no wish to go on a visit to the President . . . [unless] it is with ample authority and with the view of being really useful to the Choctaws.” He feared that removal was “inevitable,” but he still hoped for “a good treaty—a treaty that shall construct the permanent and lasting good of the whole. . . .”70
In the end the Choctaws’ preemptive strategy didn’t work. The majority of the tribe—small farmers who wished to continue living in the state—responded angrily to the concessions in the draft treaty, and several of the traditional leaders who had been ousted by Folsom and Leflore accused the young councillors of treason. At the same time, Jackson’s supporters in Congress dismissed the tribe’s proposal as too conciliatory to the Indians’ position and too expensive. Exploiting the widening divisions between rich and poor within the tribe, the administration quickly dispatched Secretary of War John Eaton and the president’s old comrade-in-arms John Coffee to Mississippi to strike a deal with the tribe’s general council.
When they arrived in Mississippi in September at a meeting place near Dancing Rabbit Creek, the U.S. treaty commissioners were confronted by near-unanimous opposition. At the center of the council grounds sat seven elder women, probably the matriarchs of the tribe’s major towns, who represented the group’s deep attachment to its homeland. The council began with speeches of welcome and friendship, but the situation rapidly deteriorated. While a young councillor delivered a speech on behalf of a compromise treaty, one of the elder women rose and waved a butcher knife under his nose, crying, “I could cut you open with this knife.” Referring to his white father and Indian mother, she added, “You have two hearts.”71 Most of the six thousand Choctaws assembled for the negotiations voiced their approval. They insisted they remained loyal to the United States, but they would not accept removal.
Faced with such stiff opposition, the secretary of war and his colleague fell back on the tactics Jackson himself had used a decade earlier at Doak’s Stand. They warned of impending chaos and violence, and they hinted that the president might dispatch federal troops to the area to force the tribe out. They also sought out the most moderate of the Choctaw leaders (beginning with LeFlore) and pressed them for an agreement. After several days of talk, supplemented with a steady supply of alcohol, they succeeded in exploiting the divisions within the tribe. Gradually several opposition leaders and town groups drifted away from the council grounds, leaving behind the American officials and the Choctaws willing to sign the agreement. On September 27 the members who remained present voted to approve the government’s plan.72
McDonald was present at the treaty grounds throughout the proceedings. He even signed the agreement. He told Cyrus Kingsbury, a missionary with whom he spent several days immediately following the negotiations, that the U.S. commissioners had reacted angrily to the tribe’s initial rejection of their demands. He
reported that Eaton and Coffee had insisted that LeFlore and other elected tribal leaders bring their people into line. When it became clear that the assembled crowd could not be persuaded to accept the government’s demands, the men who had framed the tribe’s March proposal suggested forming a new committee consisting of McDonald and six other “young men” to draft yet another alternative treaty. McDonald reported that Coffee and Eaton at first accepted his group’s proposal but then unexpectedly substituted a new government draft in a final meeting with the tribal leaders and demanded their acceptance.
McDonald reported that “a majority had left the ground before the treaty was signed . . . and most of those that signed it now regret it.” Threats, bribery, and individual land grants to LeFlore and other leaders, including McDonald, had sealed the agreement. These would likely doom any effort by others to overturn the deal. LeFlore and his allies had been bought, and they would not now retreat. After speaking with McDonald, Kingsbury reported darkly that bribes and land grants had made the difference. “Those who could do anything,” he wrote, “are too much interested in [the treaty’s] provisions to oppose it.”73
The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek guaranteed the Choctaws a new homeland west of Fort Smith, Arkansas, in exchange for all the tribe’s territory in Mississippi. The agreement, like the council that produced it, was a disaster. The tribe was now completely polarized. New rounds of recrimination and accusations of treason undermined the credibility of the leaders who had accepted the agreement and shattered whatever unity might have been possible a few months earlier. Kingsbury passed on McDonald’s pessimistic assessment: “[T]he nation is ruined. . . . The instability (some say ‘duplicity’) of LeFlore and Folsom have sunk all my hopes.” The treaty retained a few fragments from the original March proposal—land grants were made to tribal leaders and to each head of family who wished to remain in Mississippi—but there was little hope that even these provisions would be enforced. The commissioners also promised to take up the tribe’s proposal for a congressional delegate with the president, but it was unlikely that Jackson would be interested. Within months, emigration parties were beginning to leave for the Arkansas Territory.74
McDonald remained in Mississippi. He now owned, thanks to the treaty, nearly one thousand acres of land. But he left no explanation for his decision. Perhaps he was discouraged by the chaos surrounding the approval of the removal treaty, or perhaps, like other tribal leaders, he decided to cash in on the land he would receive under its provisions. He may also have wanted to pursue the dream of opening a law practice in Jackson. For more than a decade he had committed himself to working out a way of living with the Americans and playing the role of cosmopolitan community leader; perhaps that was still possible. He had been capable of remarkable optimism. In a speech to a mixed audience in Jackson, delivered a few weeks before the start of negotiations with Eaton and Coffee, he had urged white citizens of the state not to “inflict unnecessary suffering upon a weak and defenseless people. Do not oppress those who have . . . reposed in your magnanimity.”75 In the wake of the government’s shameful conduct at Dancing Rabbit Creek, however, few would now agree with him. McDonald played no role in tribal affairs after 1830, and the tasks he identified as crucial—constructing a unified tribal authority, training a new generation of leaders, and negotiating a place for Choctaws within the United States—remained unfinished.
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INTERNAL RIVALRIES AMONG Choctaws continued in the postremoval era, but unlike the Cherokees, who fought a guerrilla civil war among themselves for most of the decade following their departure from Georgia, the emigrants from Mississippi managed to achieve a measure of unity after resettling in their new homeland. This effort was no doubt aided by the absence from their midst of polarizing leaders from the removal era. Greenwood LeFlore, for example, widely condemned as a traitor to his tribe, remained in Mississippi, where he established himself on a prosperous plantation assembled from former Choctaw land. Mushulatubbe, Jackson’s former comrade and a tenacious advocate of negotiation and peace, left Mississippi with his kinsmen, but he died soon afterward. It would be left to younger men, such as McDonald’s comrade Peter Pitchlynn, to rally the tribe behind them and reorganize its government in the West.
As he faced the future in Mississippi, McDonald shifted his attention to new challenges. Choctaws who remained in the state would become subject to state law. What would it mean to be a citizen of the state—theoretically a part of the local community but without any guarantee of civil rights or liberties? His earliest reflections on citizenship were contained in a letter to Secretary of War Calhoun, written while McDonald was a member of the 1824 delegation to Washington, D.C. Noting that Mississippi did not recognize Indians as potential voters or allow them to testify in court, McDonald wrote that Choctaws were incapable of protecting their individual rights. “How hard the case of the Indian!” he declared. “How is he to go among a people with whose language he is unacquainted, and enter into a labyrinth of litigation in which his civilized white brothers are so frequently lost?” This situation, he declared, deprived Indians “of the privileges which are inseparable from the vindication of our rights. . . . How is a Choctaw to obtain redress,” he asked his former boss, “when he is deterred by the statutes of Mississippi from giving his testimony in a court of justice?”76
McDonald understood that officials like Calhoun believed that the Choctaws had only two alternatives before them. Either they would become citizens of the state or they would remain members of their tribe. That conceptual separation of “civilized” polities and tribes lay at the heart of the expansionist logic that Andrew Jackson had presented so forcefully to the Choctaws at Doak’s Stand: tribes were, by definition, “savage” and therefore incompatible with democratic states; they could exist only outside the settled boundaries of the United States. In his 1824 letter, McDonald traced the beginnings of a rejoinder to this reasoning. By pointing out the link between Indian “rights” and the “privileges” of citizenship, he asserted his own eligibility for recognition by American law. If American institutions recognized Indians as citizens (or perhaps dual citizens of both tribes and states), they would be able to “vindicate” their rights.77
McDonald’s view that the Choctaws had rights as tribal citizens that could be recognized and protected in American courts set him apart from many other tribal leaders of his day as well as from most U.S. officials. He believed therefore that state and tribal citizenship could coexist. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1829, the message in which he called for a general removal bill, President Jackson attacked the idea that Indians could erect “an independent government” within a state. If such a proposition were allowed, he argued, it would diminish the state because Indians could not be at once citizens of tribes and citizens of a state. By allowing tribal governments to function, the president argued, federal officials would be “destroying the state which it was established to protect.”78
The Cherokee leader John Ross held a similar view of the incompatibility of state and tribal citizenship. He argued, for example, that when they came in contact with American institutions, “the untutored Sons of nature became a prey; defrauded of their land, treated as inferior beings. . . . Such must be the fate of those tribes now in existence,” he added, “should they be merged into the white population before they become completely civilized. . . .”79 The Cherokees maintained this position throughout the removal debate, arguing that only a tribal government could protect the rights of Indians. “While he possesses a national character there is hope for an Indian,” an editorial writer in the tribal newspaper wrote in 1829. But “introduce him to a new order of things . . . [and] he droops like the fading flower before the noonday sun.” State citizenship would “cut a vital string in their national existence.”80
The Choctaw lawyer made his position evident as a remarkable series of events during the removal debate in Mississippi reached a
climax. In July 1828 McDonald wrote his friend Peter Pitchlynn that he had “thrown aside the idea of practicing law,” presumably because as an Indian he would not have been able to testify in court.81 Six months later, however, the situation unexpectedly changed. In January 1829 the unemployed lawyer reported that he was lobbying for the passage of a state statute that would extend Mississippi state citizenship to Indians.82 McDonald noted that the bill had passed the state senate but was stalled in the house. “We must make an effort [in the] next session of the legislature,” he wrote. “You and two or three others, decent and clever fellows, must come down and see me . . . and together we will deliver an address which cannot be disregarded.” Perhaps recalling his stirring appeal to Congress four years earlier, he added, “should our case be presented in as strong and forcible a manner as I think it is susceptible of being, they must certainly become advocates of our cause.”83
Perhaps because of McDonald’s lobbying or because Mississippi’s pro-removal politicians wanted to appear as benevolent as possible before their northern critics, the state legislature included a citizenship clause in an otherwise hostile statute passed in January 1830. While declaring that all tribal lands would immediately be subject to state taxation and that it would henceforth be illegal for anyone to exercise the authority of a chief, the new law extended “all the privileges and immunities” of citizenship to Indians living in Mississippi.84 The draft removal treaty framed by the Choctaw council the following March also incorporated the idea that state and tribal citizenship could coexist. That language became part of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. As naive as McDonald’s idea may have appeared in hindsight, it is significant that he rejected the idea that it would be impossible for Choctaws to coexist with whites within a settled American state. As a lawyer he would have known that groups of Indians could form corporations or other associations within the state and that there were any number of legal entities they might create to define and protect themselves in the future. Despite the forces arrayed against him, he could still imagine a future in which Choctaws might enjoy “the vindication of our rights.”
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