And the Senecas fought a “heroic battle” against the fraudulent Treaty of Buffalo Creek of 1838. Even while he was still a student at Dartmouth College, Seneca Maris Bryant Pierce helped wage a campaign to have the treaty overturned. He gave speeches, wrote a letter to President Van Buren, organized petitions to the Senate, and traveled to Washington as part of a delegation to present their case to the secretary of war. Despite the protests, the Senate ratified and the president proclaimed the treaty, but the Senecas kept up their efforts to renegotiate it. An amended treaty, signed in 1842, fell far short of meeting their expectations, but it did preserve a foothold in their homeland. The Senecas regained the Allegany and Cattaraugus reservations but not Buffalo Creek and Tonawanda (although the Tonawanda Senecas were “allowed” to buy back a small portion of their reservation in 1857).75
And the Cherokees turned their fight against removal into a national debate in print, in Congress, and in the Supreme Court.
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New Echota, 1835
IMPLEMENTING REMOVAL
In the 1830s, the Cherokee Indians of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina became the focus of a national debate and the test case in a number of interrelated issues: Would the United States honor its Indian treaties—described in the Constitution as the supreme law of the land? Did Indians’ treaty rights trump state rights? What was the status of an Indian nation within state boundaries? Was there indeed a place for Indian people in American society? For many Americans, Native and white alike, these questions were vital to the future growth and moral character of the young nation. The Treaty of New Echota provided the answers. Four days after Christmas in 1835, in an action illegal under Cherokee law, twenty Cherokees signed away the tribal homeland in exchange for $5 million and lands in the West. Ratified by the Senate and signed by the president in clear defiance of the will of the majority of Cherokee people, the Treaty of New Echota raised a storm of protest among Americans as well as Cherokees but it gave the United States justification to relocate the Cherokees beyond the Mississippi. As many as four thousand Cherokees died on the resulting Trail of Tears. The key signers, as they knew they might, perished at the hands of fellow Cherokees. The Treaty of New Echota plunged the Cherokee Nation into enduring internal conflict and stands as an enduring indictment of a nation that broke treaties and trust to implement a policy of ethnic cleansing.
Renaissance to Removal
The Cherokees had had plenty of experience with treaties, both fair and fraudulent. From their first treaty with South Carolina in 1721 to the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the eastern Cherokees negotiated thirty-eight treaties with Britain, colonial governments, states, and the United States and “refused almost yearly to negotiate other agreements.”1 By 1835 Cherokee territory was a fraction of what it had once been (see figure 4.1).
FIGURE 4.1 The Cherokee Homeland by 1835. (Adapted from James Mooney, Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–98 [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900], plate 2, and Francis Paul Prucha, Atlas of American Indian Affairs [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990], map 23)
Despite escalating pressure on their lands, the Cherokees experienced a renaissance after the devastation of the American Revolution. They rebuilt their economy, remodeled their society, and sustained their national identity and sovereignty in a world increasingly dominated by Americans. Many Cherokee males made the transition from hunting to agriculture; some had prosperous farmsteads; some owned plantations and slaves.2 Many Cherokees displayed more of the attributes of supposedly “civilized” society than did the American frontiersmen who were so eager to occupy their lands. A census conducted in 1825 showed that Cherokees owned 33 gristmills, 13 sawmills, one powder mill, 69 blacksmith shops, two tanyards, 762 looms, 2,486 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 2,923 plows, 7,683 horses, 22,531 cattle, 46,732 pigs, and 2,566 sheep. The Cherokees seemed to be doing everything the United States required of them to take their place in the new nation as a self-supporting republic of farmers.
In fact, Cherokee society was a mixture of change and tradition, and the new developments also created fracture lines—younger Cherokees generally favored more rapid acculturation than did the older generations; wealthy Cherokees participated in the market economy, spoke English, and “got ahead,” whereas the majority of Cherokees retained an economy based on subsistence, kinship, and communal sharing. As more southeastern Indians became slaveholders, many Cherokees adopted increasingly racial attitudes toward Africans that conflicted with traditional notions of kinship. James Vann, a Cherokee chief, established a plantation and a manor and by 1809 owned more than one hundred slaves, which not only made him probably the wealthiest man in the Cherokee Nation but also placed him among the elite of southern planters. Vann bought and sold slaves and by all accounts treated them as harshly as any white slaveowner. Following the black codes in most southern states, the Cherokee Council in the 1820s began to adopt a code of laws to regulate black slaves.3
Cherokees who adopted American ways did not necessarily abandon Cherokee ways and values. Born at Hiwassee in Tennessee in 1771, the chief known as The Ridge (an abbreviation of the translation of his Cherokee name Kahmungdaclageh, “the Man Who Walks on the Mountaintop or Ridge”) had fought against Americans as a teenager, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century he was taking up the life of a small southern planter (see figure 4.2). He also rose in influence as a member of the Cherokee National Council and took the lead in defending what remained of the Cherokee homeland. In August 1807, Ridge was one of three men appointed to carry out the execution of Doublehead, an overbearing chief who had grown rich selling Cherokee lands and accepting American bribes. He had received cash and lands from the Americans for his role in brokering two treaties in 1805. Ridge shot Doublehead through the jaw, and the assassins finished him off with knives and tomahawks.4 Soon after, Ridge was appointed to the Lighthorse Guard, two six-man companies charged with “riding the judicial circuit” to enforce the laws of the Cherokee nation as “the judges, jurors, and executioners of justice.”5 In the Creek War of 1813–14, Ridge fought alongside Andrew Jackson’s forces, as did fellow Cherokees John Ross and Stand Watie. At the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Ridge and the Cherokees led the encircling movement that trapped the Creek warriors after Jackson’s forces had breached their defenses.6 Ridge kept his military rank of major after the war but Jackson paid no attention to former allies as he drove to acquire Indian land.
Some Cherokees had begun moving west voluntarily as early as the 1790s and the trickle continued. In face of growing pressures, however, Cherokees who remained in the East adopted a harder line on land sales. In 1809, the Cherokee National Council established a thirteen-member national committee to manage the Nation’s affairs; the next year the council declared that Cherokees who had emigrated to the West were guilty of treason and had forfeited their citizenship. In 1817 the Cherokees drew up “Articles of Government,” a written constitution providing for election and terms of membership for the national committee. Major Ridge joined sixty-six other chiefs in signing a remonstrance against the policy of Indian removals. Dealing with colonial males who expected to deal only with men and whose interests focused on war and trade had given Cherokee women a less direct voice in the Nation’s affairs than they had exercised in the early eighteenth century, but they, too, were adamant that there be no more land sales: “keep your hands off of paper talks,” they advised the National Council. Jackson managed to push through land cession treaties in 1817 and 1819, which provided for equivalent amounts of land for those Cherokees who had migrated to Arkansas, but there were no more land sales after that. By the 1820s, Ridge and the Cherokees were committed to selling “not one more foot of land.”7
FIGURE 4.2 Major Ridge. (From History of the Indian tribes of North America, with biographical sketches and anecdotes of the principal chiefs. Embellished with one hundred and twenty portraits, from the Indian Gallery in the Department of War, at Wa
shington, by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, 3 vols. [Philadelphia: J. T. Bowen, 1848–50], Dartmouth College, Rauner Library)
Major Ridge served with Jackson again—in 1818 he led a company of seventy-two Cherokees in Jackson’s Seminole campaign, technically an invasion of Spanish Florida8—but he continued to resist the American assault on tribal lands. In 1823 John Ross exposed the venal Creek chief William McIntosh for offering the Cherokees bribes to sell their lands. Ridge, as speaker of the council, denounced his former comrade-in-arms and “cast him behind my back.” Two years later, when the Creek National Council condemned McIntosh to death for the Treaty of Indian Springs, Ridge approved of the execution.9
Indian agents Amos Kendall and Samuel C. Stambaugh, who knew Major Ridge and took his side in the conflicts that were to divide the Cherokee Nation, described him as “a man of great bravery, strong intellect, and, though uneducated, clearly comprehending the interests of his people, and zealously devoted to them.”10 Ridge knew that providing the next generation with the education he lacked would be the key to Cherokee survival. He and his wife, Sehoya, also called Susanna Wickett, had four children (another baby died). In 1810, Nancy, the eldest, and the second child, seven-year-old John, enrolled in the Moravian mission school at Springplace where John remained until he turned eleven. After a stint with a private tutor, in 1817 Ridge enrolled John and Nancy in the Brainerd mission of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The Rev. Elias Cornelius selected John (figure 4.3) and his cousin Galagina or Buck Watie (figure 4.4) to attend the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, a school established by the ABCFM to educate young men from indigenous cultures around the world so they could return them to their people as preachers, translators, teachers, and health workers. In the fall of 1818 the two young Cherokees set off for New England. Buck Watie adopted the name of Elias Boudinot, the president of the American Bible Society and former member of the Continental Congress, who sponsored him during his first year at the school.11 (Buck’s younger brother, on the other hand, dropped his Christian name, Isaac, in favor of his Cherokee name, Dagdoga, “He Stands,” and thereafter became known as Stand Watie.) Suffering from recurrent ill health because of a scrofulous hip, John was cared for in the home of the school steward and by the steward’s daughter, Sarah Bird Northrup. At one point, John’s health reached such a critical point that his father rode north to see him. “With his instinct for the proper impression, he hired for the last lap of his journey a coach-and-four, ‘the most splendid carriage … that ever entered the town’” and during his two-week stay he cut a striking figure in his white-topped boots and gold-braided military uniform.12
FIGURE 4.3 John Ridge. (From History of the Indian tribes of North America, with biographical sketches and anecdotes of the principal chiefs. Embellished with one hundred and twenty portraits, from the Indian Gallery in the Department of War, at Washington, by Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, 3 vols. [Philadelphia: J. T. Bowen, 1848–50], Dartmouth College, Rauner Library)
Impressed as they were with the Cherokees, however, the citizens of Cornwall shared the prejudices of their time. Both Ridge and Boudinot fell in love with white girls. In January 1824 Ridge married Sarah Bird Northrup; two years later, Boudinot married Harriet Ruggles Gold. The racist outrage in the community was so extreme—a mob burned Boudinot and Harriet in effigy on the village green—that the ABCFM closed the school in 1826.13 Giving speeches in cities throughout the eastern United States to raise money for a printing press, Boudinot spread the word among church groups and other interested parties that the Cherokees were a “rapidly improving … industrious and intelligent people.” They had two choices: “they must either become civilized and happy, or sharing the fate of many kindred nations, become extinct.”14 But the events at Cornwall altered Boudinot’s thinking: the Cherokees must develop their own “civilized” institutions, but they would do so to preserve their Cherokee identity and strengthen the Cherokee Nation, no longer with the expectation that they would earn an equal place in American society.15
FIGURE 4.4 Buck Watie, a.k.a. Elias Boudinot. (Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society)
The Ridges, father and son, built themselves fine homes that reflected their growing prosperity and their position as members of the Cherokee elite. At Ridge’s Ferry on the Oostanaula River, in what is today Rome, Georgia, Major Ridge built a two-story “elegant painted mansion with porches on each side as the fashion of the country is.” The house had eight rooms, four brick fireplaces, two verandas, a balcony with a glass door opening on to it, and thirty glass windows with blinds and shutters. “The arched triple window at the turn of the staircase looked out on a line of poplars.” There were two log kitchens near the back door, stables, sheds, cribs, a smokehouse, and cabins for Ridge’s thirty slaves. At the height of his prosperity, Ridge’s estate contained 280 acres of fields, in which he grew corn, cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, indigo, and potatoes. His orchards contained more than 1,100 peach trees, more than 400 apple trees, and various other fruit trees. There was a vineyard, a nursery, and a garden with ornamental shrubs. Livestock included cows and pigs. Contemporaries reckoned that “his farm was in a higher state of cultivation and his buildings better than those of any other person in that region, the whites not excepted.” In addition to the income from his ferry—estimated at $1,200 a year—Ridge was a silent partner in a nearby trading post.16 John Ridge became one of the first lawyers in the Cherokee Nation and also did well. His two-story house and plantation were not as large as his father’s but his estate was nonetheless that of a prosperous gentleman, with fields, orchards, stables, smokehouses, and slaves.17
In the 1820s the Cherokees acquired a written language, based on the syllabary developed over a dozen years by Sequoyah (a.k.a. George Gist, c. 1770–1843). In Sequoyah’s phonetic system each symbol represented a vowel or a consonant plus vowel, with the exception of a character representing /s/. It was easily learned and literacy in written Cherokee spread quickly. People began using the new writing for personal correspondence, record keeping and accounting, notebooks containing medicinal texts, and even translated parts of the Bible, and political leaders began to produce government documents in Cherokee.18
In 1827 the Cherokees drew up a written constitution and code of laws and restructured their tribal government into a constitutional republic modeled after that of the United States, with an independent judiciary, a supreme court, a principal chief, and a two-house legislature.19 They divided their country into eight electoral districts; elected a first and second principal chief every four years; and elected representatives to the legislature every two years. The elected council made laws, established a police force and treasury, and created a court system to adjudicate civil and criminal cases. The constitution declared the Cherokees’ sovereignty and their right to remain undisturbed in their homeland “solemnly guarantied and reserved forever to the Cherokee Nation by the Treaties concluded with the United States.” Those treaties and the laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties guaranteed Cherokee rights and protected them against intruders. “Our only request is, that these treaties may be fulfilled, and these laws executed.” Elias Boudinot printed the constitution in the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix, which rolled off the presses in February 1828.
The Phoenix, much of it published in both English and Cherokee, was the first Indian newspaper and a significant weapon in the Cherokees’ public relations campaign. As editor, Boudinot managed the business of the paper; wrote articles and a weekly editorial that he translated into Cherokee; printed laws and public documents of the Cherokee Nation; and selected, translated, and reprinted news items from other papers, along with “miscellaneous articles, calculated to promote Literature, Civilization, and Religion among the Cherokees.” At the same time, he worked with the missionary Samuel Worcester to produce a fifty-page hymnal, the first Cherokee book published, and to prepare a Cherokee edition of the
gospel of St. Matthew.20 The Cherokees’ written language, printing press, and literacy (according to the Cherokee census of 1835, 18 percent of Cherokees could read English and 43 percent could read Cherokee) put them “at the center of a print culture debate over the legal status of Native nations residing in the United States.”21 As the threat of removal and assault on their sovereignty increased, the Cherokees kept up a lobbying campaign in Washington and in print, keeping in the public eye their achievements, rights, and sufferings at the hands of Georgia. They attributed their progress to their treaties with the United States and then held up those treaties as a test of national honor and morality.22
The Ridges, Boudinot, and John Ross were united in their opposition to the policy of Indian removal. In the tribal elections held in October of 1828, the Cherokees elected John Ross principal chief by an overwhelming majority; Major Ridge, as speaker of the council, was his main advisor. Ross (figure 4.5) was thirty-eight, the grandson of a Scots Loyalist, and seven-eighths Scottish in ancestry. That mattered little in matrilineal Cherokee society where his maternal line was Cherokee but it would provide fuel for enemies who tried to discredit his leadership during the furor over removal.23 Mindful of the role played by men like William McIntosh in selling tribal lands, in the autumn of 1829 the National Council reenacted an old law establishing the death penalty for anyone who sold Cherokee land without the council’s approval. According to some accounts, Major Ridge proposed the idea; the Ridges, Ross, and Boudinot all strongly supported the law.24
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