by John Demos
87. Stephen Gold to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, June 11, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 81–82.
88. “Special communication to the public,” in Semi-Annual Report of the Foreign Mission School, for June 1825, June 17, 1825. (Pamphlet with no date or place of publication. Copy seen at the Torringford [CT] Public Library.)
89. Harriet Gold to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill and Catharine Gold, June 25, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 84.
90. Ibid.
91. Elizabeth Pomeroy to Mrs. Abigail Gillett, June 25, 1825; see Barbara Austen, “Marrying Red: Indian/White Relations in the Case of Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold,” Connecticut History 45 (2006): 256–60.
92. Daniel Brinsmade to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, June 29, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 89; Cornelius Everest to Stephen Gold, July 2, 1825, ibid., 104; Harriet Gold to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill and Catharine Gold, July 25, 1825, ibid., 83–87.
93. Herman Vaill to Harriet Gold, June 29, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 90–101.
94. Flora (Gold) Vaill to Herman Vaill, September 19, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 135; Catharine Gold to Herman Vaill and Flora (Gold) Vaill, July 18, 1825, ibid., 109; Harriet Gold to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill and Catharine Gold, July 25, 1825, ibid., 84.
95. Daniel Brinsmade to Herman Vaill, July 14, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 107–8; Herman Vaill to Mary (Gold) Brinsmade, August 2, 1825, ibid., 121–22; Cornelius Everett to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, August 10, 1825, ibid., 123; Bennett Roberts to Herman Vaill, August 1, 1825, ibid., 115.
96. Mary (Gold) Brinsmade to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, July 14, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 105; Daniel Brinsmade to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, July 14, 1825, ibid., 107.
97. Flora (Gold) Vaill to Herman Vaill, September 17, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 135; Herman Vaill to Col. Benjamin Gold, September 5, 1825, ibid., 131; Abbey (Gold) Everest to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, September 5, 1825, ibid., 133.
98. American Eagle (Litchfield, CT), August 29, 1825.
99. Ibid., October 8, 1825.
100. Niles’ Weekly Register, July 9, 1825.
101. Western Recorder, October 4, 1825; Boston Recorder and Telegraph, August 26, 1825.
102. Boston Recorder and Telegraph, August 26, 1825.
103. Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. Dr. Chapin, July 5, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 326–27; Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. T. Stone, August 26, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 359–61.
104. Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. William Chamberlain, September 16, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 387–88; Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. Daniel Buttrick, September 16, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 388–89.
105. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, January 23, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 26; Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 9, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 5, no. 31; Isaac Proctor to Jeremiah Evarts, December 11, 1827, ABC 18.3.1 (1st series), vol. 4, no. 189; Rev. Daniel Buttrick to Henry Hill and Jeremiah Evarts, December 13, 1825, ABC 18.3.1 (1st series), vol. 5, no. 386. See also American Eagle (Litchfield, CT), August 29, 1825. For a “personal observation” of Cherokee ball play by a contemporary, see J. P. Evans, untitled typescript, in the John Howard Payne Papers, vol. 6, no. 689, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. According to this source, participants were not “literally naked,” as the missionaries alleged; instead, after “stripping” off their regular garb, they wore “a short covering around the loins.”
106. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 9, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 30; Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, April 2, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 41.
107. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, April 2, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 41; Rev. William Chamberlain to Jeremiah Evarts, August 29, 1825, ABC 18.3.1 (1st series), vol. 4, no. 43.
108. David Brown to Jeremiah Evarts, September 29, 1825, ABC 18.3.1 (1st series), vol. 5 (part 2), no. 285; Rev. Daniel Buttrick to Jeremiah Evarts, September 17, 1825, ABC 18.3.1 (1st series), vol. 4, no. 18.
109. Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. Charles Prentice, July 26, 1825, ABC 8.6, vol. 5, nos. 29–31; Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. Dr. Chapin, July 5, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 326–27; Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 9, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 31.
110. Jeremiah Evarts to Henry Hill, February 9, 1826, ABC 11, vol. 2, no. 31; Starr, “Outlines of the Story of the Pupils of the Foreign Mission School,” 91.
111. Bennett Roberts to Herman Vaill, August 1, 1825, in Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian, 115; Herman Vaill to Harriet Gold, ibid., 141–42; Mrs. Eunice (Wadsworth) Taylor, “Recollection,” in Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, 155; T. S. Gold, Historical Records of the Town of Cornwall, 85–86.
112. Mrs. Eunice (Wadsworth) Taylor, “Recollection,” in Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut, 155; Church, “Elias Boudinot,” FMS Archive, folder 61.
113. “Ishmaelite” document (typescript), FMS Archive, folder 17. Italicized words in the text are direct quotes from this document. The ms. original cannot be located, but it was apparently seen by researchers in the early twentieth century. The latter included E. E. Dale, whose book Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family (Norman, OK, 1939) includes a mention of it.
114. E. E. Dale reached the same conclusion as to Boudinot’s authorship; see Dale to Emily Marsh, February 12, 1938, FMS Archive, folder 32.
INTERLUDE The Cherokee Nation
1. Benjamin Gold to Herman and Flora (Gold) Vaill, October 29, 1829, in Theresa Strouth Gaul, ed., To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold & Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823–1839 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), 166.
2. Abraham Steiner to John Heckwelder, March 6, 1820, Vaux Family Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia; quoted in Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2d ed. (Norman, OK, 1986), 142.
3. Benjamin Gold to Hezekiah Gold, December 8, 1829, quoted in Mary Brinsmade Church, “Elias Boudinot: An Account of His Life by His Grand-daughter,” Town History Papers of the Woman’s Club of Washington, Connecticut (1913), typescript copy, FMS Archive, folder 61.
4. Atlanta Constitution, December 1, 1889, quoted in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 196. Harriet’s father described the Boudinot residence as “a large and convenient framed house, two stories, 30 by 40 feet on the ground, well off and well furnished with the comforts of life.” See Benjamin Gold to Hezekiah Gold, December 8, 1829, quoted in Church, “Elias Boudinot.”
5. For much valuable information on these matters, see William H. Banks, Plants of the Cherokee (Gatlinburg, TN, 2004). On both flora and fauna, with special attention to the period of Cherokee occupancy, see Gary C. Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775 (Chicago, 1977). Signage along the nature trail at the New Echota Historic Site is also very useful.
6. See Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition.
7. Valuations in Floyd County, Georgia, by Agents Hemphill and Liddell, appraised September 20, 1836, 12–13; quoted in Don L. Shadburn, Cherokee Planters in Georgia, 1832–1838: Historical Essays on Eleven Counties in the Cherokee Nation of Georgia (Cumming, GA, 1900), 128.
8. John Ridge to Dr. Samuel Gold, January 2, 1831, quoted in T. S. Gold, Historical Records of the Town of Cornwall, Litchfield County, Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1904), 350.
9. See Patrick H. Garrow, The Chieftains Excavations, 1969–1971 (Rome, GA, 2010), chapter 5.
10. Ibid., 73. John Ridge’s letter to Dr. Samuel Gold (cited in note 8) noted the “limp … in my gait in walking, occasioned, as you know, by the disease of my hip.”
11. Garrow, The Chieftains Excavations, 18; Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 188; Shadburn, Cherokee Planters in Georgia, 1832–1838, 127–28.
12. Garrow, The Chieftains Excavations, 53, 55–56, 88, 94–95, 98 passim.
13. Robert Battey, “Remarks Upon the Medicinal Plants of Cherokee Georgia,” American Journal of Pharmacy 29, no. 5 (1857): 59,
quoted in Garrow, The Chieftains Excavations, chapter 17.
14. Garrow, The Chieftains Excavations, chapter 17.
15. Valuations in Floyd County, Georgia … September 20, 1836, pp. 12–13, quoted in Shadburn, Cherokee Planters in Georgia, 126.
16. Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America with Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of the Principal Chiefs, ed. F. W. Hodge, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1933), vol. 1, 305.
17. The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 10 (1825–26), 280–81, quoted in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 170.
18. On details of the John Ridge residence, see W. Jeff Bishop, Running Waters (report under the sponsorship of the National Park Service and Chieftains Museum, 2008). There is, to be sure, some controversy about the matter of origins. The present-day occupants—a family named Rush—believe that the house was constructed by an ancestor of theirs around 1840, after the original John Ridge residence was taken down. But the close correspondence of the current structure with all the period evidence suggests otherwise. (What sense would it make to destroy a handsome, capacious building, then almost immediately construct another to nearly identical specifications?) The authors of the National Park Service report decided, after careful consideration, to reject the Rush attribution and confirm the link to the original Running Waters.
19. John R. Ridge, Poems (San Francisco, 1868), 6.
20. Shadburn, Cherokee Planters in Georgia, 130.
21. Ibid., 129–31.
22. Ibid., 129.
23. Census of Cherokees in the Limits of Georgia in 1835, as Taken by Geo. W. Underwood, Esq. (copy seen at Chieftains Museum, Rome, GA).
24. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, vol. 41, February 6, 1832, quoted in Bishop, Running Waters, 14.
25. The painting was done at the direction of the Federal Indian agent Thomas McKenney, to hang alongside portraits of other native leaders in the Indian Office in Georgetown. It was McKenney’s practice to have copies made for the sitters; this was done in Ridge’s case. At some point, the original passed to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was destroyed in a fire in 1865. The copy is said to have hung in an upstairs room at Running Waters, John Ridge’s house on the Calhoun Road. Subsequently, it descended through several generations of his family, and was recently consigned to auction. It is currently in a private collection. A lithograph made from the original was published in McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America; see the image of this in Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 176.
CHAPTER SEVEN American Tragedy: Renascence and Removal
1. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (New York, 1974).
2. Ibid. For an overview of the politics and ideology of removal, see Reginald Horsman, The Origins of Indian Removal, 1815–1824 (East Lansing, MI, 1970). See also Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Norman, OK, 2002), especially chapter 1. On the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” see Daniel Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780–1880 (Baltimore, 2008), 145–46, 178–89, and Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, 2010).
3. David W. Miller, The Taking of American Indian Lands in the Southeast: A History of Territorial Cessions and Forced Removals, 1607–1840 (Jefferson, NC, 2011), chapters 2–3.
4. See David W. Miller, Forced Removal of American Indians from the Northeast: A History of Territorial Cessions and Relocations, 1620–1854 (Jefferson, NC, 2011).
5. United States Statutes at Large, vol. 2, 227, quoted in Grant Foreman, Indians and Pioneers, rev. ed. (Norman, OK, 1936), 11–12.
6. Miller, Forced Removal of American Indians from the Northeast, chapter 33.
7. Miller, The Taking of American Indian Lands in the Southeast, chapters 27–30.
8. On Cherokee population size at the time of first contact with Europeans, see Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln, NE, 1990), 16–18.
9. For a fine summary of the Cherokee way of life in the colonial era, see William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1986), chapter 1. See also David Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier, 1740–1762 (Norman, OK, 1962), chapter 1; Charles M. Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville, TN, 1976); Grace Steele Woodward, The Cherokees (Norman, OK, 1963), chapter 3.
10. Thornton, The Cherokees, chapter 2; Gary C. Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition: A Study of Changing Culture and Environment Prior to 1775 (Chicago, 1977), 105–49.
11. Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition, 105–49; See also McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 18–22; Woodward, The Cherokees, chapter 5; and Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier, chapters 10–15.
12. For a detailed picture of Cherokee land cessions, see Charles Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians (Chicago, 1975), especially the table on p. 256. See also the map in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 27.
13. Chief Skiagunsta to the governor of South Carolina, “Indian Books of South Carolina,” vol. 3, 321, quoted in Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier, 14.
14. See McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 25–32, 55–57.
15. Ibid., chapter 14; McLoughlin, “Who Civilized the Cherokees?” Journal of Cherokee Studies 13 (1988): 55–81. On changing settlement patterns, see Goodwin, Cherokees in Transition, chapters 3 and 6. See also Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2007), chapter 2.
16. Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, passim.
17. On schools for the Cherokees, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (New York, 1976), chapter 2; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 72–76, 173–74. On religious proselytizing among the Cherokees, see William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries (New Haven, CT, 1984); Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, “A Family Affair: Cherokee Conversion to American Board Churches, 1817–1839,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 36 (2005): 264–83.
18. On intermarriage between Cherokees and whites, see Thornton, The Cherokees, 52–53, and McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 69–70, 169–71. On Cherokee concepts of citizenship, as relating to intermarriage with whites, see Fay A. Yarborough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2008), especially chapter 1. On internal divisions among the Cherokees, see McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, chapter 16; McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, chapter 6.
19. For a summary of these events, see Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, 54–59. On Georgia’s part, in particular, see McLoughlin, “Georgia’s Role in Instigating Compulsory Indian Removal,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 70 (1986): 605–32, and Mary Young, “The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 43–63.
20. Ard Hoyt to Samuel A. Worcester, April 10, 1819, and Samuel A. Worcester to Charles Hicks, March 4, 1819, both quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 258.
21. For a brief overview of the Second Great Awakening, with special attention to mission work, see John A. Andrew, Rebuilding the Christian Commonwealth: New England Congregationalists and Foreign Missions, 1800–1830 (Lexington, KY, 1976), chapter 1.
22. Seventh Annual Report, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, (Boston, 1823), 10, quoted in Oscar P. Bollman, “The Foreign Mission School of Cornwall, Connecticut,” Master of Sacred Theology thesis, Yale University Divinity School (1939), 57; Edward Dorr Griffin, The Kingdom of Christ (Philadelphia, 1805), 27. See also Clifton Jackson Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half-Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
23. Missionary Herald, vol. 29 (1828), 193–94.
24. On the question of w
hether “civilization” (including formal education) was a necessary precondition of conversion, see Paul William Harris, Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (New York, 1999), 20–23. For discussion of this matter within the leadership of the American Board, see Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. J. E. Darneille, July 28, 1826, ABC 1.01, vol. 6, nos. 220–22.
25. See McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries. See also O’Sullivan, “A Family Affair,” 264–83.
CHAPTER EIGHT “Even the stoutest hearts melt into tears”
1. Sixteenth Annual Report, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston, 1825), 96; Rufus Anderson to Jeremiah Evarts, July 19, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, no. 332; Semi-Annual Report of Donations to the Foreign Mission School, June 1825 (Boston, 1825), 7.
2. Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. T. Stone, August 26, 1825, ABC 1.01, vol. 5, nos. 359–61.
3. Fifteenth Annual Report, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston, 1824), 131; Seventeenth Annual Report, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston, 1826), 106.
4. Jeremiah Evarts to Amos Bassett, November 10, 1826, ABC 1.01, vol. 6, no. 349.
5. See The Religious Intelligencer, vol. 10 (1825–26), 610.
6. Report of the Prudential Committee, October 26, 1825, Evarts Family Papers, box 4, folder 158, Division of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
7. Jeremiah Evarts to Amos Bassett, October 7, 1826, ABC 1.01, vol. 6, no. 309. See also Edward C. Starr, A History of Cornwall, Connecticut: A Typical New England Town (New Haven, CT, 1926), 137.
8. Jeremiah Evarts to Amos Bassett, November 10, 1821, ABC 1.01, vol. 6, nos. 347–49; Jeremiah Evarts to Rev. Timothy Stone, October 7, 1826, ABC 1.01, vol. 6, nos. 310–11; and Jeremiah Evarts to Revs. R. Emerson and H. Hudson, November 8, 1826 (typescript copy), FMS Archive, folder 17.