by John Demos
In December 1829, as part of his first presidential message, Jackson restated the case for removal and urged legislative action. Soon thereafter, a bill to achieve that goal reached the floor of both congressional houses. Several weeks of intense and bitter debate were followed by votes of approval—first, rather easily, in the Senate, then, by a narrow margin, in the House of Representatives. The Cherokees responded by sending John Ridge and two others back to Washington for further negotiations. As these dragged on, the focus shifted to the Supreme Court, where two separate cases involving the Cherokees were being readied for trial. In December 1831, Ridge and Boudinot set out on a new speaking tour through northern cities, hoping to rally white supporters of the Cherokee position. Each of their several appearances drew an enthusiastic reception. Each elicited participation by civic and religious leaders; in Boston, for example, Lyman Beecher—erstwhile agent of the Mission School—joined Ridge and Boudinot on the speakers’ platform. And each yielded “a collection [of money] to assist the Cherokees in maintaining their cause before the Supreme Court.”52
The tour did much to enhance the reputation of the two young leaders on whom the fate of all Cherokees would increasingly depend. Press coverage was mostly positive. Catherine Beecher, daughter of the minister and herself on the way to a significant career as a writer, wrote of the two visitors in the Boston Courier: “No person can be in their society without being struck with their appropriate use of language, their extent of information, and readiness of expression”; Ridge, in particular, she praised for “his thrilling and unpremeditated eloquence.” (Other news accounts noted his “loftiness of mind, decision of purpose … keenness of wit, and strength of argument; his manner was a rare combination of dignity and ease.”) At one point, Boudinot paid a visit to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, and was favorably appraised by a local dignitary: “He is a full blooded Cherokee, and was educated … at Cornwall, Con. He is about 35, of pleasing and gentlemanly manners, and speaks English as fluently as tho a native.… I asked him a great many questions concerning the ancient history of his nation, and he answered all my enquiries readily and sensibly.” He did, however, seem extraordinarily sensitive “when anything was said touching the present controversy between the people of Georgia and the Cherokees…[and] intimated his belief that the nation would soon be exterminated, unless the General Government should interpose its arm and shield them from the sword of the Georgians.”53
In late March, the Supreme Court rendered its verdict in the second, and most crucial, of the Cherokee cases—Worcester v. Georgia—rejecting any right in the individual states to supersede federal authority over Indian tribes; no longer could Georgia, on its own, set limits to Cherokee sovereignty and governance. John Ridge wrote to a cousin, “It has been a day of rejoicing with patriots of our country.” Still, he noted, “the contest is not over.… The chicken snake General Jackson has time to crawl and hide in the luxuriant grass of his nefarious hypocrasy [sic].” Events would soon confirm Ridge’s fears. The Jackson administration refused to involve itself in enforcing this decision, and Cherokee hopes were dashed once more.54
In fact, both John Ridge and Elias Boudinot had already begun to doubt the wisdom of further opposition to removal. According to a somewhat later account, they had “intimated” to others a sense that “the case was hopeless” even as they toured the country that spring. Soon after the Worcester decision, Ridge obtained an interview with Jackson in order to learn the president’s views firsthand. Reportedly, he left with “a melancholy feeling … convinced that the only alternative to save his people from moral and physical death was to make the best terms they could with the government, and remove out of the limits of the States.” Gradually, in the months that followed, he made his new position known to close friends and colleagues within the Nation, while not as yet revealing it more widely. Boudinot went through a similar transition. And Major Ridge, too, was brought around—albeit with great reluctance. Meanwhile, white supporters of the Cherokee cause, including many in government, were reaching the same conclusion, urging the Nation to accept removal and focus henceforth on securing the most favorable possible “conditions.”55
From this point forward, the Nation was convulsed by bitter controversy and dissension. With his views finally out in the open, John Ridge became the acknowledged leader of a faction favoring emigration. On the other side stood a much larger number, led by principal chief John Ross, who remained doubtful, or fully opposed. The issue was argued back and forth at every level—from individual firesides to the National Council. The Phoenix was, necessarily, in the thick of it; but since he was now on the minority side, Boudinot was obliged to resign as editor. Ridge and Ross would travel again and again to Washington to meet with federal officials, sometimes together and sometimes as heads of separate (and rival) delegations. The animus between the two men, personal as well as political, grew more and more intense. At the same time, Ridge and Jackson forged an unlikely alliance (sufficiently close for Ridge to name his last child after the president). Meanwhile, Georgia authorities were enacting specific measures aimed at removal: surveying Cherokee lands for transfer to whites, holding a lottery among would-be owners, and harassing resisters with arrest or other legal action. Moreover, the problem of white intruders—squatters and vigilantes—had by now touched all corners of the Nation; in many cases, individual Cherokees were forced off their property by actual or threatened violence. A jaunty, and cynical, bit of doggerel, sweeping through the South’s white population, captured the spirit of the moment: “All I ask in this creation / is a pretty little wife and a big plantation / way up yonder in the Cherokee nation.”56
In the fall of 1834, John Ridge, his father, and other advocates of removal convened a special council at John’s home (Running Waters). Its members decided to send a memorial to Congress, explicitly signaling their willingness to leave. At the same time, they appointed yet another delegation to go to Washington for a new round of negotiations, with a removal treaty as the presumed object; John Ridge would be its leader and Boudinot a fellow participant. The eventual result was a package of proposals featuring a vast territorial swap—most Cherokee land in the Southeast for a large federal grant in Arkansas and Oklahoma, plus a onetime payment of $4.5 million by the federal government to the Nation. (Later that sum would be raised to an even $5 million, and later still to nearly $7 million.) Following their return to the Nation, Ridge, Boudinot, and their allies held additional meetings at Running Waters to explain, and justify, these terms. But interest was low and attendance poor. And even as they met, unidentified men wrapped in blankets were seen lurking menacingly on the edge of the property. Clearly, most Cherokees remained opposed, and many felt cruelly betrayed. Both then and later on, treaty supporters might be waylaid and beaten. Several were murdered; direct threats were made on the life of John Ridge himself. Both Ridges—and Boudinot, too—were suspected of receiving secret payoffs from the federal government in exchange for their pro-removal advocacy. That idea would persist for decades, though bitterly denied by all three men and never substantiated with any hard evidence.57
Month by month in the following year (1835), events approached a point of culmination. In December, a rump gathering of Cherokee leaders met in New Echota with federal commissioner John Schermerhorn for formal consideration of a treaty that largely reinstated the previous removal proposals. John Ridge was still away in Washington, but his father was present and spoke in favor. The treaty was approved on the twenty-eighth of that month, and signed in the parlor of Boudinot’s house the following day. Upon affixing his mark, Major Ridge reportedly said, “I have signed my death warrant.” John would add his own signature—with a similar sense of foreboding—a few weeks later; indeed, he would tell others that he was quite ready for death if it came. Elias, for his part, told the assembled group, “I know that I take my life in my hand.… But Oh! What is a man worth who will not dare to die for his people?” Finally, the treaty was sent
on to Washington for consideration by the U.S. Senate. There it occasioned renewed, and intense, debate—with some supporters of the Nation pronouncing it an outright “fraud”—before gaining passage by a single vote.58
While these public events moved inexorably along, life inside the Ridge and Boudinot households traced its own, more intimate patterns. About the former, the evidence is limited. In January 1831, John Ridge wrote to Samuel Gold, the doctor who had cared for him a decade before in Cornwall: “My health has improved, but I am not altogether well. I limp a little in my gait in walking, occasioned, as you know, by the disease of my hip. My wife Sarah is the happy mother of three Indian children, two girls, and one boy named John Rollin. They are all well. I have eighteen servants, stock of horses and cattle, etc., and a delightful place six miles from father’s, which I calculate to improve.… My wife is very good to me and I love her dearly. She is a good wife.” (His “servants” were actually slaves. Did anyone note the bitter irony that Indian victims of the color line in Cornwall were now enforcing, and profiting from, a related line drawn around dark-skinned African Americans?) There is also one brief comment by a near contemporary, the daughter of a Cornwall friend: “She [Sarah] remained at home, taking care of her servants, for she had thirty living in the back yard. She simply said to this one, go, and he goeth, and to another, come, and he did so. She dressed in silk every day.” She was also said to have had a “fine carriage” at her beck and call.59 Considered all around, hers was the life of an affluent plantation mistress.
In contrast, many of Harriet’s letters to her Connecticut kin—some including a page or two added by her husband—have survived. And they open a wide window on the Boudinot family’s everyday doings.
Often there are details of domestic activities: “I am baking rice pudding for dinner today.” Or: “Today our people have had a corn husking & I have had a quilting.” There are references to Elias’s work: “He has just finished a tract the translation of which is entirely his own work. I will send you a copy of it.” Occasionally, Harriet sends a special request to one or another of her relatives: “If you are disposed to send a box … any kind of clothing would be very acceptable.” Sometimes she writes about the weather: “It has been snowing most of the day—seems quite like New England.” Their children are a particular focus: “Eleanor [the eldest daughter] is a great girl now—begins to talk smartly.… Mary [second daughter] has real black Indian eyes.… William Penn [eldest son] goes to school & he & little Br[other] Charles are beginning to read.” (At one point, Harriet sends her parents several locks of Eleanor’s and Mary’s hair. Preserved to the present at the Cornwall Historical Society, they are straight, fine, and somewhat blond.) They speak also of each other, with Elias referring playfully to “Harriet my squaw,” and her describing him as “truly worthy of my warmest affections—my tenderest love.”
From time to time, Harriet expresses a wistful nostalgia for all she left behind: “I have thought much of my Father’s family of late, & especially my Sisters. I suppose you sometimes get together. Let Harriet be remembered, though absent, I sometimes very much wish to compose one of your circle again.” In particular, she mourns a continuing breach with her sister Abby “whom I tenderly loved. Does she ever talk about Harriet with affection? Or are the feelings she cherished two years ago, still unalterable?” (Abby and her husband, Cornelius Everest, have remained the most vehemently opposed, among all the family, to Harriet’s “intermarriage”; there is no evidence they ever became reconciled to it.) She might also reverse the direction of her longings: “I wish … you could just step in, & sit … with us this evening. Susan [an unidentified housemate] sits in one corner, mending her stockings, and I in the other writing this letter—while the children are all a bed & asleep.” She mentions visitors, including Sarah Ridge: “Last week, I had a very unexpected visit from Cousin Sarah.… Her husband … sent her in their Coach with a driver & little black girl to take care of Clarinda.” (Because their husbands are cousins, Harriet and Sarah now consider themselves related. Clarinda is Sarah and John Ridge’s infant daughter. The black girl is one of their slaves.) She makes scattered references to religion and missionary goals: “Pray for the Cherokees that they may all be brought to truth.” She regrets public ignorance of Cherokee ways: “I wish you to see how Indians can live—how families, & how a nation of Indians can live.” Her wedding anniversary moves her to a more extended reflection: “[I]t is this day 6 years since I received the hand of Mr. Boudinott & gave my own in the covenant of marriage.… I am thankful. I remember the trials I had to encounter—the thorny path I had to tread, the bitter cup I had to drink—but a consciousness of doing right—a kind affectionate devoted Husband, together with many other blessings, have made amends for all.”60
On both sides—the elder Golds in Cornwall, the Boudinots in New Echota—there was talk of arranging visits in one place or the other. Then, in September 1829 the Golds began a journey, in their own horse and carriage, southward to the Nation. Benjamin (Harriet’s father) would describe their experience to relatives back in Connecticut. They were “47 days on the road…[but] upheld & preserved all the way in good health & free from any material harm.” As they went along, they felt themselves to be “on Harriotts [sic] track”; indeed, they “heard of her & her husband often in many places where the people appeared to remember them with much interest & told us many interesting things about them.” When at length they reached their destination and “met our Dear children & friends in health,” they experienced “feelings of Joy that may be better conceived than expressed.”61
They would remain for just over six months; by all accounts, the visit was an unqualified success. They took the opportunity to visit other parts of the Nation, including three different missionary stations. Benjamin’s letters were full of praise for all he observed: “I find the families very polite & agreeable & pleasant & fit associates for any country.… In their Council and Court are Quite a number of learned pollished [sic] & well Qualified Gentlemen fit to appear in any place in Connecticut.” He was especially pleased by his “beautiful and interesting” grandchildren, who might “pass in company for full blooded Yankees.” When safely back in Cornwall, the Golds regaled neighbors with details of life in the Boudinot household. According to one, “Mrs. Gold told me … that she never had such a store of provisions (and Col. Gold was wealthy and a good provider). In one room upstairs was a barrel of coffee; a barrel of sugar; and everything good they needed: a kind, good husband, and the smartest grandchildren we ever had. Harriett had married as well as any of our children, and you know that our children have married well.”62
There would be other visits in the years ahead. In the spring of 1832, Elias stopped to see his in-laws in Cornwall, in the midst of his speaking tour with John Ridge. And during the winter of 1833–34, the entire Boudinot family traveled north for a more extended stay in Cornwall. This visit is largely undocumented, but a Litchfield resident who passed through New York in early January wrote of seeing “Boudinot (Cherokee) & his sister & his wife (formerly Miss Gold of Cornwall) & their children. They will probably be in Litchfield on their way to Cornwall.”63
As the years passed, the removal crisis closed in, step by step, on both the Ridges and the Boudinots; Harriet’s letters told the story. In January 1831, there was still room for hope; thus she could write, “We know not what is before us. Sometimes I fear the Cherokees will see evil days—but I think they will come off victorious in the end.” Six months later, Elias was much more pessimistic: “[W]e have been in hot water ever since our last to you … we have hardly known which way to turn. Trouble upon trouble, vexation upon vexation.” He complained, too, about “our friends at the north…[who] appear to be so careless. Do they not know that a piece of great wickedness is in a course of perpetration?” Harriet agreed; decrying the “apathy which prevails in the States,” she asked, “How are the American people ever to atone for the injuries done the original inhabitants of this Count
ry?” (She seems by now to have considered “the States” a foreign land, and herself an expatriate.) By 1833, with the Nation divided within itself, she told her sister that “our Nation are [sic] in great trouble—and will no doubt feel themselves forced to give up their country to the white people.… Poor Indians, above all people, are most forcibly reminded that the world is not their home.” And two years further along, with removal a definite prospect, she wrote, “Our situation is becoming truly desperate.… I look upon this pleasant land … as no longer a home for ourselves or our children. Even should the Nation choose to remain, and meet the consequences, we have no idea that we shall do so.” Though many other Cherokees continued to hold fast—no matter what—the Boudinots had become firmly committed to leave.64
But Harriet would not be part of the actual removal. In May 1836, as the family was making preparations for the journey, she delivered her sixth child, a boy she and Elias named Franklin Brinsmade Boudinot. (The middle name invoked her sister Mary, whose husband, Gen. Daniel Brinsmade, had been an agent of the Mission School. Indeed, it was Brinsmade who, at a crucial moment ten years before, broke the news of Harriet and Elias’s engagement to the rest of the school’s leadership.) Soon after giving birth, Harriet contracted what Elias described as “a dangerous illness,” and following some weeks of acute struggle, she died on August 15. The details were presented in a long, grief-filled letter from the widower to her parents. The letter would, in turn, be published a few months later in the New York Observer, then reprinted in other newspapers around the country.65