by John Demos
Boudinot’s views were exactly of a piece, and no less forcefully expressed. He, too, stressed the matter of degradation owing to “the promiscuous settlement of whites among the Cherokees.” He elaborated on the same point in a bitterly reproachful letter to chief Ross: “I notice you say little or nothing about the moral condition of this [Cherokee] people.… [Instead] you seem to be absorbed altogether in the pecuniary aspects.… But look, my dear sir, around you and see the progress that vice and immorality have already made.” He noted especially “the spread of intemperance and the wretchedness and misery it has already occasioned…[and] the slow but sure insinuation of the lower vices into our female population.” Hence: “[I]t is not to be denied that, as a people, we are making rapid tendency to a general … debasement.” The previous rise of the Cherokees from “a savage state” to “civilization” was now gravely imperiled.85
The moral aspect of this viewpoint—its language and tone—distinctly recalled the attitudes of the missionaries among whom Ridge and Boudinot had once been schooled. And some of their statements in defense of removal offered a grateful bow in that very direction. Ridge, for example, praised the efforts of the American Board, without which “the U States would not have a white spot on which the blackness of infamy could make any shade.… I know there is a good spirit in the Christians of America. I know it dwells in New England, because I have seen it.”86
If mission work in general retained value for these two, what of the Foreign Mission School in particular? Their writings made no mention of it. However, their intense concern with degradation, contamination, and pollution through contact with racial and cultural others—together with the danger posed by actual, or potential, amalgamation—seems, at the least, highly suggestive. In fact, the same concern was widely prevalent among “benevolent” white advocates for Indians, especially those who had come around to supporting removal. But with Ridge and Boudinot it touched a special, acutely sensitive nerve. For it reinvoked the struggle they had personally endured when, a decade before, they had taken to wife two “fair flowers” of white womanhood. The removal crisis framed a similar struggle—in reverse. Now it was the Nation that would try to hold the line for “civilization” against “savage” and dissolute intruders pressing in on every side. Even the color imagery was turned around. In Ridge’s pungent phrasing, the “U States” encompassed “the blackness of infamy”; hence, by implication, the Cherokees were whitened.
As time passed, the pragmatic ground for favoring removal seemed more and more solid; if the Cherokees tried to hold on in Georgia, their odds of survival were bleak. Both Ridge and Boudinot acknowledged this, accepted it, and voiced it fervently; reason and judgment allowed no other conclusion. But their fervency, too, demands attention, and leads to a crucial question. Might they not have retained, at some level, a dark lesson from their time at the school—nothing less than a profound default of trust? Surely they remembered what they had felt at the time; perhaps it went something like this: We acted unfailingly to reach the goals that our teachers and sponsors set for us. We were model “scholars”; we were drawn as well to Christian faith and practice. (Elias had quickly become a convert and a member of Cornwall’s First Church; John had approached, without quite reaching, the same point.) For these reasons, we enjoyed widespread, apparently genuine, approval. Even our engagements might have been viewed in a similar light. That a pair of previously “heathen” youths should court and win the hearts of two fine local women: What better evidence of our progress toward “civilization”? But no; for most white Americans, “intermarriage” is a different thing entirely, a red flag of transgression. And so they abandoned us—excoriated us—humiliated us—cast us out.
Their experience as Cherokee leaders would follow a parallel course. Both began by defending the Nation’s ancient territorial rights in whatever way they could—Ridge as a principal negotiator with federal authorities, Boudinot through his editorials in the pages of the Phoenix. Both counted on the ultimate goodwill and good sense of the white public, as represented by its leaders in government. However, these hopeful expectations were cruelly upended—first by congressional passage of the 1830 Removal Act, then by the Jackson administration’s refusal to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Worcester v. Georgia. At that point, they swung completely around; from then on, they insisted that emigration was the only possible course. Another desertion, another betrayal: We have seen this script before. Nothing more heard from white leaders can be trusted. Better, then, to go—to take our people as far away as possible. Amalgamation? Never! That way lies “degradation” and disaster.
Thus removal, their their own journey west, resettlement in the Indian Territory, the hope for renewed prosperity, and, finally, on a languid summer morning, fulfillment of the Blood Law … and violent death.
As summer moved along, news of the assassinations traveled across the entire country. Press coverage traced a widening set of concentric circles—from nearby Little Rock, Arkansas, where a “rumor” arrived within two days, to major urban centers, to towns and villages in the rural countryside. As was typical of that era, the means of transmission were personal: “by a gentleman who arrived here [Alexandria, Virginia] Monday evening from the West,” or “by a letter received in this city [Charleston, South Carolina] yesterday from one of our citizens at Fort Gibson, Arkansas,” or “by passengers who arrived here [Philadelphia] in the Cinderelle [apparently a steamship] on Sunday last.” Literally hundreds of local newspapers would, sooner or later, receive and print reports. Their titles ran a considerable gamut: “Murder of Ridge and Boudinot,” “The Cherokee War,” “Trouble Among the Cherokees,” “Outrages Among the Cherokee Indians,” “Indian Murders” were among the favorites. Most commentary was favorable to the deceased. John Ridge was praised for his “gentlemanly bearing and stirring eloquence.… He was fond of distinction, wealth, and power, pleased with rich apparel and ornaments, jealous of his supposed rights, and seemed to be an affectionate husband and father.” Major Ridge, “formerly one of the principal chiefs of his nation … was altogether a man of strong and discriminating mind.” Boudinot had become “a distinguished leader…[who] as editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, displayed talents of no ordinary character.” Some accounts mentioned the connection to the Mission School, an “institution established … something like fifteen years since … by the exertions and munificence of a number of philanthropic individuals, at Cornwall, Connecticut.” One that was widely reprinted, under the title “The Cherokee and His Beautiful Bride,” retold the story of the Boudinot-Gold courtship and marriage, including “incidents … that partake somewhat of the romantic.” Of Harriet, it said this: Having “bade farewell … to the holy ties that bound her to all that was lovely and sacred to her on earth…[she] with her youthful forest lord pushed afar off to her wigwam home in the lone forests of the Cherokee land.… She was represented as appearing contented and happy with her lot, in the midst of her little family of half-papoose, half-Yankee urchins.” (A “romantic” picture indeed!)87
Harriet, of course, was not present to witness the shattering events of June 22, 1839. And it fell to Elias’s second wife, Delight (Sargent) Boudinot, to arrange for the disposition of their six children. Their friend and neighbor, Rev. Worcester, wrote as follows to some of the Gold in-laws in Connecticut: “Mr. Boudinot had requested his wife, if he should be taken away, to go with the children to their friends and hers in New England, which she intends to [do] as soon as circumstances allow.” At first, she was so stricken by “the circumstances of my dear husband’s death, and the … alarming scenes that followed” as to feel “unfit to perform almost any duty.” Within a month, however, she was “recovering … strength” and making plans to travel north; the children, ranging in age from three to twelve, would accompany her.88
They set out in the fall. Delight Boudinot had been born and raised in Manchester, Vermont, and returned there now. On the way, she stopped in Washington, Connecticut, to leav
e two of her stepdaughters with their aunt Mary (Gold) Brinsmade, who would care for them thereafter. The rest went on with her to Manchester. Some years later, one of the sons was apprenticed to an engraver in Philadelphia, and a second to a civil engineer in Vermont. As time passed, the Boudinot and Brinsmade households remained in close touch, with the Boudinot siblings paying frequent visits back and forth. There was also regular communication and visiting between the children and their Gold grandparents in Cornwall. For example, in August 1845, William Penn Boudinot (the eldest of the sons) wrote in loving tones to his “dear Grandma & Grandpa … who have in solicitude for me taken the place of my own father & mother.” And the following month his sister Mary sent a letter of her own to “my dear grandparents,” providing the latest news of “our little family”—her stepmother and two brothers—in Vermont. Mary also mentioned a lapse in communication with “our Arkansas relatives for a long time.” She meant the Cherokee branch of the family—her “Uncle Stand” [Stand Watie, her father’s brother] and various cousins, for whom, evidently, she yet retained warm feelings of connection.89
The later lives of these second-generation Boudinots would go in various directions. Two of the sons made their way back to the Indian Territory, reclaimed their Cherokee roots, and sought to play a role in the Nation’s affairs; one was a lawyer and businessman, the other a lawyer, writer, and editor. The third became an actor and operatic performer in New York City, enlisted in the Union army during the Civil War, and died while in service of a fall from a horse. (Other family members fought on the opposite side; for example, “Uncle Stand” Watie became a Confederate army general.) Their descendants have carried the Boudinot name, and a sense of Cherokee identity, to the present day. Of Elias and Harriet’s daughters, one died in childhood, while the other two remained in New England, found “Yankee” husbands, and left little trace behind them. Presumably they, with their children and grandchildren, passed quietly into the white community.90
In the immediate aftermath of the killings, Sarah Ridge faced her own set of terrible challenges. A friend described her as “sinking under the weight of sorrow,” and overwhelmed by “fearful apprehensions & undecided anxieties”; one of her sons feared “that she would not live under it.” Indeed, so long as she remained at Honey Creek, she expected “every night that our sufferings would be terminated by assassination from the murderers of my husband.” After several days, “interested persons” persuaded her that she must pull together and leave without further delay, considering the “danger…[to] herself & children.” Thus on July 1, she gathered the family together and traveled some fifty miles to the town of Fayetteville, Arkansas. There she bought a “dog-trot” log house reminiscent of a traditional Cherokee style. (Later she would expand it into a two-story “salt box” dwelling with clapboard exterior; it remains today the oldest still-standing house in Fayetteville.) For months more, she remained “overwhelmed by grief…[and] complained … that her faculties were destroyed, that she could not remember common things, that she should never be able to take care of her family.” Yet eventually “skillful physicians…& the tender & judicious sympathy of some friends did much to bring her back.” In the mid-1840s, she moved to the village of Osage Prairie (later Bentonville) in Benton County, but she returned to her Fayetteville home in 1853. She struggled through years of court proceedings concerning the settlement of her husband’s estate; at one point, some of her Cherokee in-laws brought suit to deny her (and her children’s) inheritance rights entirely, since she was “a white lady and had no clan.” She obtained income from hiring out her slaves. By some accounts, she never recovered fully from the trauma of John’s death; as one put it, “she bore a dead heart in a living bosom.” Still, when she died in 1856, she was said to be “very highly esteemed by the best people” of Fayetteville.91
It is not clear that she ever revisited Honey Creek. In any case, the Ridge farm was despoiled soon after her departure. As she wrote later, with evident bitterness, “The Indians considered my property as public plunder and immediately commenced their depredations on whatever they could find. They destroyed or stole my poultry, killed my cattle and hogs, and not satisfied with camping in my fields and eating just what they wanted, they turned their horses into the fields, evidently designing to destroy all the corn in their power.” This description was part of a plea she made to the federal government for financial assistance. In 1846, she received “an appropriation” of $5,000, ratified by the U.S. Senate, “as compensation for the losses sustained by the family of John Ridge, in consequence of his death and the subsequent confusion into which his affairs were thrown.”92
Her children would grow to adulthood around her in Arkansas. Two of her daughters married and raised a family there; the third was “feebleminded” (as they said in those days) and died at a relatively young age. Among her sons, the eldest, John Rollin Ridge, would have a particularly colorful and consequential life. He began by venturing back to Honey Creek and purchasing a farm there. However, he was soon embroiled with followers of Ross, his father’s enemies, one of whom he shot and killed in the course of a personal quarrel. Anxious to avoid prosecution—and urged by his mother to leave the Nation forever—he set out for California at the time of the gold rush, and began a career as a writer and editor. He worked for a Know-Nothing newspaper and inveighed against Mormons and abolitionists; he was also a vocal supporter of the Democratic Party and a sympathizer with the South during the Civil War. Under the pen name Yellow Bird, he wrote poems and a popular romance based on the life of a notorious Mexican-American bandit. (Reputedly, this was the first novel published in California; it brought its author a measure of fame.) He took up the cause of California Indians, the so-called Diggers, adapting his family’s long-standing goal of “civilization” to their particular circumstances. He never returned to the Nation, but remained passionately concerned with its affairs, scheming at several points to avenge his father’s death. Shortly after the Civil War, he went to Washington with a delegation of “Southern Cherokees” (legatees of the old Treaty Party) for negotiations to close the still-festering cleavage within the Nation. He died in 1868 of “brain fever” (apparently a form of encephalitis); the obituaries were long and laudatory.93
Of the other sons, one—named Herman Daggett Ridge, after the Mission School principal—had a farm near Fayetteville, “cultivated by his negroes”; later he was killed fighting for the Confederacy. A second went for a few years to California, returned, took ill, and died in his twenties. The youngest studied law, moved briefly to Texas and then to California, where he began a long career as an attorney. Like later generations of Boudinots, Ridge descendants are today scattered across the country, many of them successful professionals and businesspeople.94
It is impossible to know in detail how news of the 1839 assassinations was received in Cornwall. Some in the town must have read the several accounts published in the new county newspaper, the Litchfield Enquirer—beginning with “Outrage Among the Cherokee Indians Near Fort Gibson,” on July 25. Surely, a good many remembered John Ridge and Elias Boudinot in quite specific, even personal, ways. But most of those who had been closest to them were gone by now. Herman Daggett, the intrepid, ever-hopeful (but unsmiling) principal, had died in 1832, and Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the American Board, the year before. Timothy Stone, onetime agent and devoted supporter of the school, was forced from his ministry in the First Church (1826), apparently as part of the fallout from the “intermarriage” crisis (even though he had declined to perform either of the actual wedding ceremonies). Lyman Beecher had moved on from Litchfield to bigger things: a pastorate in Boston (1826), another in Cincinnati (1834), the presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary (also 1834), and a leadership role in the Second Great Awakening.95
Meanwhile, memory of the school itself had begun to fade. From its original position as “an institution … famous throughout the country,” “an experiment…[that] stands alone in the Christian w
orld…[with] not its like in Europe or America,” “a school [that] had a celebrity beyond all expectation, and [made] the vale of Cornwall … known in almost all the world,” its public reputation would shrink and recede as the years went by, until, finally, it became just a piece of local history.96
Epilogue
Throughout the nineteenth century, the story of Henry Obookiah remained alive and vibrant. The famous Memoirs were reissued again and again, informing new generations of his conversion to Christianity and “civilized” ways, and his tragic, yet transfiguring, early death. This was especially true in Hawaii itself, where missionaries regularly invoked his example for their native charges. His status as the islands’ “first Christian” was widely acknowledged and celebrated.
The same pattern continued into the twentieth century. Moreover, with long-distance travel becoming faster and easier to manage, Hawaiian Protestants began appearing at Cornwall as pilgrims bent on honoring Obookiah in more personal ways. Often they would bring seashells, bottles filled with island soil, or other Hawaii-related artifacts, to festoon his grave site.1
In 1968, on the 150th anniversary of his death, a semiofficial delegation from the Hawaiian Christian community came to conduct a prayer service at the grave (and to spread dozens of decorative leis alongside). At the same moment, in carefully coordinated fashion, thousands of worshipers gathered at two different sites in the islands—one group at the first mission church in Honolulu, the other on the bay shore at Napo’opo’o, from where Obookiah had originally set out. In addition, the Hawaiian Tourist Bureau donated a special “warrior marker” for his grave in Cornwall; this “coveted honor…[was] the only one of its kind to be granted outside of the islands.” (In fact, the marker would quickly be removed to the local Historical Society for safekeeping, and has remained there ever since.)2