The Heathen School

by John Demos

  That August, having gathered a small force of willing followers, Humehume plots a nighttime raid on a nearby fort where his enemies have stored a large quantity of weapons. But the attack is discovered when barely begun, and easily repulsed (at the cost of approximately a dozen lives); the defeated warriors flee in order to regroup in Humehume’s own village a few miles away. He makes one final effort to rally support from local chiefs. But now the military might of all the other islands stands arrayed against him. The ensuing battle is a rout. Three hundred on his side, including many women and children, are killed; he escapes to the rain forest high in Kaua’i’s remote interior. For a month, he survives alone in this wild area, eluding search parties and living off fruits and other native edibles. But finally the ordeal becomes too great, and he offers himself for surrender. With hands tied and head bowed, he is marched back down to the shoreline and ordered to undergo a speedy trial. He anticipates a death sentence—but, in the end, he is spared.36 (Mercy shown to helpless prisoners is an island tradition.) Soon thereafter, he is relocated by the “ruling powers” to Honolulu (on Oahu, a hundred miles to the south). There he rejoins his wife and young child, and “is suffered to go at large.” He seems, however, a broken man. The following year, an outbreak of influenza engulfs Oahu (one of many such epidemics that would eventually destroy some 90 percent of the native population). Humehume is among the victims; he dies quietly, and all but unnoticed, on May 3, 1826. (He is not yet thirty years old, but has seen more of the world—and known more of life’s ups and downs—than all but a few of his contemporaries.) At that moment, six thousand miles to the east, the Mission School, too, is in its death throes.

  Of all the school’s students—and of all their life stories in the aftermath—only two achieved a high level of public significance. These were the young Cherokees John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. Both were destined for a quick rise to the forefront of their nation’s leadership. Both would play a major role in galvanizing opinion and action across the full sweep of the United States. Both became closely acquainted with presidents, cabinet secretaries, congressmen, and other officials of the federal government—sometimes in friendly, but most often in oppositional, contexts. Both achieved a measure of public fame (or infamy, as the case may be). And both took with them, in their personal and public journeys, the women they had wed in Cornwall, Sarah Northrup and Harriet Gold.

  Actually, John Ridge had been drawn toward public affairs while still enrolled at the Mission School. In March 1821, “at the request of my Instructor [presumably Rev. Daggett]” he composed a letter to President James Monroe. The apparent stimulus was Jedediah Morse’s recent report to the federal government on the status of the country’s Indians. Ridge, as well as Daggett, wished to support Morse’s recommendation that (in the latter’s words) “assistance may be proffered to this long neglected and despised people.” Ridge’s main theme was the way “my dear Nation now begin [sic] to peep into the privileges of civilization.” He recalled how, “when I left them two years ago … they were at work: the tools of the whites were used, some possessed large farms—cattle—horse—hogs &c. Their women were seen at the wheel, & the weaver’s shuttle was in motion.” He invoked his own “dear Parents, [who are] both ignorant of the English language, but … exert all their power to have their Children educated like the whites.” The theme of Indian—and specifically Cherokee—“improvement,” of rapid progress toward “the privileges of civilization,” was already well established among missionaries and others of the “benevolent” persuasion. Appropriated here in his youthful letter to an American president—he was only nineteen—it would find in Ridge its most forceful spokesman for many years to come.37

  Almost immediately upon his leaving the school to return home, Ridge became deeply absorbed in Cherokee politics. He spent much of the year 1824 in Washington, D.C., as part of a delegation defending the Nation’s territorial integrity against the threat of encroachment by the state of Georgia. While there, he helped draft memorials to Congress, attended “levees” (parties) at the White House and in the homes of cabinet secretaries, and made a generally favorable impression; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described Ridge and his colleagues as equivalent to “well-bred country gentlemen.” (It was at the end of this same trip that he traveled on to Cornwall to claim Sarah Northrup as his bride—and then was obliged to endure the bitter public reaction generated by their “intermarriage.”)38 In 1825, he made two more trips to Washington, on behalf not only of Cherokee interests but also those of the Creek Indians.39 Meanwhile, during the intervals when he remained at home, he assumed a key role in the workings of the Nation’s governing National Council.

  On one of his Washington visits, he met with Albert Gallatin, former secretary of war, who had recently begun a large project to classify Indian languages and cultures. At Gallatin’s request, Ridge composed “a sketch of the progress made in the civilization of the Cherokees.” In fact, this was a substantial essay, touching on virtually all aspects of Cherokee life and culture. Near the end, Ridge noted the growing threat to “our national existence.… Strangers urge our removal.… We are in the paw of a Lion.” His very last sentence offered a strangely ambiguous reference to interracial marriage: “In the lapse of half a Century if Cherokee blood is not destroyed it will run its courses in the veins of fair complexions who will read that their Ancestors under the Star of adversity, and curses of their enemies became a civilized Nation.” In part because it was “written by a native Indian,” the essay pleased Gallatin, who used it in subsequent communications with European savants, including the great German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. It was also around this time that Ridge sat for the portrait ordered by federal commissioner Thomas L. McKenney and executed by the painter Charles Bird King. This would become part of a gallery of similar works that graced McKen-ney’s Indian Office in nearby Georgetown.40

  Still in his early twenties, John Ridge was well on his way to forging a remarkably precocious career. Many who met him were greatly impressed; “dignified,” “intelligent,” “of proper manners” were among the compliments tossed his way. But inevitably, too, there were doubters. A Georgia newspaper correspondent, resentful of his effective work for the Creeks, called Ridge and his Cherokee colleague John Vann “as arrant, cunning, and mercenary diplomatists as ever graced the Council Boards.” And when Jeremiah Evarts toured Cherokee missions during the spring of 1826, he reported on Ridge as follows: “I am sorry to say that his character and influence are at present very far from what we could wish them to be.” This was specifically about his spiritual condition. Several years later, a missionary schoolteacher would write to her sponsors, “Do pray unceasingly for Mr. Ridge. You know his talents, intelligence, taste, & refinement; but alas, for the morals of the south, a man without religious principle is in danger at every step.” His mother had converted to Christianity long before; his father, Major Ridge, would do so near the end of his life. But John himself, though outwardly respectful of the church and its doings, would never reach the same point—would never become, as his Mission School teachers had hoped, a “professor of religion.”41

  As John Ridge journeyed about on public business, his close friend and cousin Elias Boudinot struggled to find a suitable niche back in the Nation. At some point in 1823, he opened a school for Cherokee youths near the village of Haweis; a visiting missionary who spent a day there felt “very highly gratified with the appearance of it. The scholars are under excellent discipline, and are learning fast. I think there are but very few schools in New England that appear better.” However, by autumn of the following year, Boudinot had moved on, and was living at his father’s house in the village of Oothcaloga. For the next several months, he worked on the family farm and assisted in the taking of a Cherokee census.42

  Meanwhile, plans were afoot to establish a national “seminary”—a school of “higher learning”—and a printing operation; Boudinot was quickly drawn in. During the summer and fall of 1825
, with strong support from the Nation’s leadership, he prepared to set out on a fund-raising tour through white communities in the North in order to underwrite both projects. At the same time, however, his engagement to Harriet Gold became publicly known. The resulting furor threw him badly off stride—thus his ensuing “fall” (in the eyes of his missionary sponsors) by attending a traditional ball play. Still, he seems quickly to have righted himself. His tour began in January, in the city of Charleston, South Carolina; Evarts met him there, and heard him lecture on at least two occasions. “He appeared,” wrote Evarts in letters to a colleague, “to great advantage, discoursing on the benefits of a press to the Cherokees”; indeed, “very few young men could have addressed a large audience with so much propriety, & with so few mistakes in sentiment & language.” Eventually, he made his way to Washington, Philadelphia, and New York (among other cities), with results that his auditors invariably found “gratifying.”43

  And now he was drawing close to Cornwall, close enough to travel there and marry his beloved Harriet. Their honeymoon—if they thought of it that way—was a continuation of the public tour. Boudinot addressed admiring audiences in churches at Boston and Salem; then, with Harriet in tow, he doubled back to Philadelphia. In that city’s First Presbyterian Church, he offered what amounted to his stump speech. Its main content was a detailed description of Cherokee “progress,” complete with numbers of cattle, horses, and sheep privately owned, of spinning wheels and looms, wagons and plows, gristmills and blacksmith’s shops in regular operation, of schools, river ferries, “good roads,” and other such marks of “civilization.” Having reached this point, Boudinot explained, “the Cherokees have thought it advisable that there should be established a Printing Press and a Seminary of respectable character; and for these purposes your aid and patronage are now solicited.” He concluded on a somber note, designed to touch the conscience of his audience. “I ask you, shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth? With you and this public at large, the decision chiefly rests.… Will you push them from you, or will you save them?” Published a few months later under the title An Address to the Whites, this would prove a remarkably valuable fund-raising tool.44

  From Philadelphia, the Boudinot pair traveled south, through Virginia and Tennessee, and reached the Cherokee heartland late in the summer of 1826. There they were warmly received by Elias’s parents and numerous younger siblings; for a time, they would stay in the “very good two-story log-house where the family now resides.” Harriet wrote, in letters to her Connecticut kin, of feeling entirely accepted: “I love them all much & I may say—we love each other.” This was especially true of her parents-in-law, who “frequently say that I am like an own child to them.” They gave her a Cherokee name—Kalahdee—which, she said, “already sounds natural to me.” She loved the atmosphere of the household—for example, the prayer sessions “when the family are assembled [and] all are silent and attentive while Mr. Boudinot [that is, Elias] reads a portion of the Scriptures, first in English, then interprets it to father and mother.… I cannot but observe with what interesting earnestness the mother looks at her son when endeavoring to explain to them the word of God.” She sought to make herself useful by “sewing for other people—such as making bonnets & the like.” Negotiations for the press were ongoing; all sides understood that upon its arrival, Elias would be in charge. Until that time came, however, he and Harriet would feel somewhat at loose ends; according to one report, they were “poor & destitute of household furniture.”45

  A temporary solution was found by hiring them “to help conduct the school at Hightower” during the winter months. (This was one of several such schools, begun and supported by the American Board.) There they might “occupy the mission house,” in which teachers and assistants lived together as a unit. The plan was that “Sister B. would take charge of the family & teach a Sabbath school.” This proved a considerable challenge, inasmuch as Harriet was now chief cook for the entire group. She wrote to her sister and brother-in-law of having “not only [to] rise early enough to get my own food but sometimes for ten or fifteen besides.” Still, “notwithstanding all my cares,” she pronounced herself “contented.” Indeed: “I…[have] never passed my days more pleasantly than while I have been in this Nation.… Nothing appears strange, but as though I had always lived here.” She signed letters to her siblings back in Connecticut “your Cherokee sister.” Elias, meanwhile, threw himself into teaching. He also put his language skills to good use—to “interpret on the Sabbath & at other times when necessary & attend to the translation of the New Testament.” The latter project would put him in close collaboration with the missionary Samuel Worcester, who felt “more confidence in Boudinot as a translator than in any other.”46

  Likely, too, Elias was involved with John Ridge and others in planning the national “seminary.” Ridge had already picked out a suitable location near the Cherokee capital and had asked another of the resident missionaries to serve as principal. Interestingly, he hoped to bring his father-in-law down from the North “to superintend the farm.” He described himself as “anxious to have Mr. Northrup introduced in this nation as a missionary,” a move that would reunite Sarah with her parents. Among Northrup’s qualifications was his previous work as steward of the Mission School, during a period that had lasted, as Ridge put it, “until the crime was committed in the act of marriage with his daughter and myself.” (This wry comment was typical of the way Ridge would refer to his enormously difficult exit from Cornwall.)47

  The seminary plan would never come to fruition; and arrangements for the press dragged on and on. At some point in 1827, the Boudinots moved to New Echota, possibly in anticipation of the birth of their first child that May. Samuel Worcester moved his own family to the capital around the same time, and the two men continued their work together on several translation projects. Finally, at the start of the next year, the press arrived from Boston, with two sets of type, one with English characters, the other specially cast for the Cherokee syllabary. The immediate goal was publication of a newspaper, to be called the Cherokee Phoenix, with Boudinot serving as editor. Its content would include “the laws and public documents of the Nation,” discussion of Cherokee progress in “the arts of civilized life,” “interesting news of the day,” and “miscellaneous articles, calculated to promote Literature, Civilization, and Religion among the Cherokees.” It would appear weekly and have both English and Cherokee print, sometimes for the same material in parallel columns. The first issue appeared on February 21, 1828. As time passed, the Phoenix would carve a unique place in the history of journalism—the first newspaper ever published by and for an Indian community. It was very much Boudinot’s personal creation—and his central preoccupation for the next five years.48

  In the meantime, both families—Boudinots and Ridges—would be steadily enlarged by the arrival of children. Harriet Boudinot bore six and Sarah Ridge seven, all within the space of a dozen years. Reports on their domestic life reaching the North were invariably received with interest—and often enough with skepticism. According to one man living “within Twenty or twenty-five miles of Mrs. Ridge … her husband treats her improperly…[and] she is an unhappy woman.” However, when Evarts visited the family in the spring of 1826, he wrote to a colleague, “As to the inquiry whether young Mrs. Ridge is contented & happy, it is certain that she often says she is, and surely she ought to know. I should think most persons believe her, but some are incredulous.” That a properly raised woman from New England could live comfortably in Indian surroundings, with an Indian husband, was still hard for a good many white people to imagine. In 1836, in their History of the Indian Tribes of North America, Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall praised Sarah Ridge for her “enthusiastic hope…[and] pious aspirations,” then opined that “it must have required great strength of affection in this young lady to enable her to overcome the aversion which is usually entertained against alliances with a race so different from ourselves.” Harr
iet, for her part, wrote unequivocally of her attachment to her husband: “[H]e is all that I could wish him to be.” Indeed, she boasted that “my sisters need not think it is saying anything against their husbands to say I have excelled them all. I know they are all good positively, but mine superlatively.”49

  In 1827, the political crisis surrounding the Cherokees entered a new phase. A key development was their enactment of a full-fledged constitution, closely modeled on that of the United States. White Georgians reacted with mounting alarm; in short order, their legislature declared the state’s sovereign claim to all the territory within its official boundaries, including that held by the Nation.50 The following year brought the election as U.S. president of Andrew Jackson, who was known for favoring removal of all southeastern Indians to locations much farther west. At around the same time, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land added a new element, with miners and assorted “squatters” rushing to take advantage. Seeking to build a spirit of resistance, the National Council approved a “Blood Law,” prescribing death for individuals who sold (or otherwise transferred) landed property to outsiders; both Ridges, father and son, were active in its passage. Meanwhile, occasions for violence began to multiply as bands of armed men from both sides squared off against one another; on at least one occasion, the elder Ridge led a well-organized reprisal raid on white intruders. Elias Boudinot fought the same battle in the pages of the Phoenix. Week after week, his passionate editorials served to rally public sentiment against removal, both within and outside the Nation. Indeed, this brought him to the attention of the Georgia Guard, which on two separate occasions summoned him for questioning about the publication of “abusive and libelous articles.” (More than once, he was threatened with a flogging.)51