by Simon Schama
But Meigs also knew that the Cherokee world had already been badly hurt by history. Choosing the British in the Revolutionary War had forced punitive land cessions out of them so that only about a third of the territory they thought of as ancestrally tribal was actually now theirs. Pressure from white settlers was relentless and supported by the Georgia politicians who wanted their votes. The whites, often ex-Patriot militiamen who had fought against the Indians, could not have been further from the high-minded paternalism of Washington, Knox, Jefferson, and Meigs himself, whom the Cherokee honored with the name of White Path. The settlers thought the Indians heathen savages who needed to be cleared out of the way or exterminated so that decent white Christian people, who understood what a hoe was, could make a go of it and make the wilderness bloom. So if for some incomprehensible reason the federal government was tender to the Indians, they would do their best to give the red men good reason to leave, making them understand there could be no cozy living together in Georgia and Tennessee.
So even as Meigs labored to persuade those among the Cherokee themselves (generally the older chiefs and the younger braves) who were skeptical of the good faith of the government, that the White Father meant what he said, the sorry record of casual theft, knife attacks, and murders, with American culprits going scot-free, undermined his best efforts. In 1812, after a series of eight murders of Cherokee for which no one was brought to justice, a furious Meigs wrote that “the Indians are condemned and executed on the testimony of any white citizen of common character and understanding, when at the same time a white man can kill an Indian in the presence of a hundred Indians and the testimony of these hundred Indians means nothing and the man will be acquitted.”
To add insult to injury, the federal government, distressed by the impossibility of offering true justice to Cherokee victims, offered cash instead. Secretary Dearborn thought $200–300 for each murdered man or women would be about right. Knowing how abhorrent this was, Meigs decided to offer it anyway as the only form of reparation the Cherokee would get. Initially the chiefs were horrified, but there were so many cases of suffering, that after 1803 they accepted some payment while keeping, as William McLoughlin writes in his extraordinary work Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, a different account in their own books of the lives owed to them. A deadly pattern established itself. The frontier settlers stole land and attacked Cherokee and could not be held to account. The Cherokee retaliated by stealing horses, which gave the settlers further reason to treat them as red outlaws.
The inability of the United States government to deliver on its promises stirred up a faction among the Cherokee who saw no reason why they should meekly discard their traditional way of life. They also suspected (correctly) that at least part of the motive for turning them into model farmers was so that millions of acres of their land could be ceded and sold. To be satisfied with cotton and corn and be surrounded by a world of hostile, brutal whites who wished them to be gone was to die the death by a thousand cuts. The colonel, when he was honest with himself (as he often was), knew they had a point and believed, incorrectly, that the Cherokee heart could never be in sedentary agriculture. But he was conscientious in doing what he could to realize Jefferson’s dream of Indian Progress. He distributed farming tools, mattocks, and plows, as well as carding machines and spinning wheels for the cotton, which he noted, somewhat to his surprise, the Cherokee women had already made a success of cultivating. He also believed that the true salvation of the Indians would be in education (a Meigs dynasty trait, this) and encouraged the cession of land in return for sums of money that were applied to the creation of schools and the payment of teachers.
Caught between lawless white encroachment on the one hand, and hard-line Indian resistance on the other, Meigs believed he had no alternative but to cultivate chiefs who were inclined to sell and settle. The most prominent was Doublehead, and the colonel knew well that he had adopted the new way as a means of enriching himself as much as his village. But was not that, after all, the American way? When Meigs and Doublehead together embarked on a campaign for the sale of old hunting grounds, the consequence was predictable. After a ballplay in August 1807, Doublehead was killed by a group of young chiefs incensed at his betrayal of their homeland.
Meigs ought to have seen this coming. He had himself written to Dearborn that “they have long resolved not to part with any more land. There is not a man in the nation who dares advocate it.” And yet the pressure for land was unrelenting. Iron ore deposits long known about but unexploited became yet another reason for dispossession. The first decades of the nineteenth century were a time of heroic road building in the United States. To connect the interior with the coast, the federal government as well as the states wanted a route that linked Nashville and Chattanooga with Augusta and the eastern seaboard, a line that went straight through Cherokee territory.
A gloomy fatalism began to make its way into Return Jonathan’s canny old head. He had just buried his second wife, Grace, and with every day of trouble that passed he had second thoughts about the eventual fate of the Cherokee. If sedentary agriculture was not going to work, either through white aggression or Indian reaction, what would? Around 1808–9, he began to entertain an idea that Jefferson himself had raised five years earlier, that of an “exchange” of land; hundreds of thousands of acres of territory west of the Mississippi in return for abandonment of their present territory. Put another way, this was a policy of “removal,” for the moment voluntary. Jefferson rationalized what he was proposing in terms of treating the Indians more like white pioneers rather than less. Why would they not want to remove west, where they would be rid of white marauders and squatters and where game was surely plentiful, if they insisted on keeping to their older way of life? For those who wished to farm, the money paid for their land in the East could be enough to buy western acres. They would be native homesteaders. Why would they not jump at such an opportunity? The answer of course was that this plan represented the abandonment of Jefferson’s fine promise that Indians would share American destiny and abundance and the two races march forward together as one farming people. Besides, as the president who clung through thick and thin to his Virginia hillside knew perfectly well, land was more than territorial inventory. Land was a place impregnated with poetic or even mystical qualities, and the specific place that the Cherokee called home were those hills draped in wild azalea that had so elated William Bartram. Home was the strawberry fields. In this sense the Cherokee were not, by Tocqueville’s standards, true Americans at all. Moving was not an opportunity; it was a calamity. Besides, the Cherokee knew nothing of what lay beyond the Mississippi except that some white men called it “the Great American Desert.”
And yet, for all their forebodings, a few hundred of the Cherokee who felt most under pressure or who put faith in White Path’s reassurances did indeed make the journey west to Arkansas. Many of the chiefs who opted for transplantation did so armed with the reassurance, given by Meigs, that they would “take their land with them”—that an acre of Georgia or Tennessee would entitle them to precisely the same allotment in their new home. By far the greater part of the Cherokee opted to stay and pinned their faith in the security of their land title promised by successive treaties. Encouraged by Meigs, they joined, for once, the right side in an American war, making up a volunteer force in 1812–14 that served under Andrew Jackson, Indian fighter and land speculator. Their neighbors, the Creeks, made the wrong choice, siding with the British, and were duly punished. But to their horror, part of the land cessions imposed on the Creeks included a cool two-million-plus acres belonging to the Cherokee, America’s ally! President Madison had actually decorated Cherokee warriors for bravery in the war but had been unable to stop Jackson’s white militia from a spree of killing and destruction of Cherokee farms and livestock on their way back from the battle. For the militia it seemed like sport. Warriors returned home to sacked villages, the rotting carcasses of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, h
ouses in charred ruins. The idea, of course, was to use the opportunity of wartime to terrorize the Cherokee into vacating their lands as soon as possible. Aghast, Meigs computed the damages for losses suffered by the Cherokee at the hands of the demobilized marauders at nearly $21,000, a huge sum by the standards of the day, so enormous that it made Andrew Jackson chuckle at the idea that anyone would actually believe the word of an Indian, much less pay out damages.
For a few months, Meigs thought he had prevailed on their behalf in Washington. Damages were authorized, and the 2 million acres that the colonel had proved indisputably belonged to the Cherokee were returned to them. But this only brought the wrath of the frontier, led by Jackson, down on the head of President Madison. His message to Meigs was: make them cough up some of it if they don’t want to lose it all. Meigs tried but in vain. And now, for all that the Cherokee had suffered by way of violations of the treaties of earlier administrations, the colonel was beginning to think that their presumption of being treated as a sovereign nation was deluded if not doomed. He detected something unprecedentedly brutal in Jackson, and he was right. Years of famine in 1816 and 1817 only persuaded the colonel that his pessimism was justified. Perhaps the Cherokee would indeed be better off somewhere else. At Hiwassee, where Meigs was based, he heard Jackson spell out to the Cherokee chiefs their alternatives: removal to Arkansas, the government providing a gun and a blanket, or staying and abiding by the laws of Georgia or Tennessee. They must understand they did not have ancestral “territory”; they would get 640 acres each. The chiefs replied “we wish to remain on our land and hold it fast. We appeal to our father the president to do us justice.” They wanted neither to go nor to be American citizens. They had supposed they already had a nation and that Presidents Washington and Jefferson had thought so too. If they were forced to go west, they would be reduced to a “savage way of life,” and had not Washington and Jefferson wanted them to “remain on our lands and follow the pursuits of agriculture and civilisation”? Jackson told them their third way was no longer an option and they must choose between the two he offered. If they refused, they would be considered “unfriendly.” Intimidated by the sinister threat, half—but only half—of the sixty-seven chiefs signed.
Meigs told his Indian friends he thought the move was for the best. If they stayed, they faced eventual “extinction,” while in the west they might still be a nation. This was also the language Jackson used, but “extinction” was not something preordained by history, just because of the numbers of white immigrants. It was an actual policy determined by actual men. What Jackson meant was that they could no longer expect the federal government to protect them in the name of some old treaties signed in a sentimental generation. What was government supposed to do: establish forts to fire on their own kind? Really, the idea was ridiculous. And the sorriest part of the story is that White Path had begun to talk like this too. The most adventurous of the great Meigs dynasty had become a moral coward, rationalizing that he was doing the right thing by the Cherokee, when a large part of him must have known the opposite was true.
What made it worse was that seeds that he himself had planted among the Cherokee in the Jefferson years were now bearing fruit, belying Jackson’s slander that the Indians would never be capable of modernizing themselves. They had a cotton culture (including, lest it be forgotten in the Indian romance, slaves); they spun and wove. Their schools were starting to produce Cherokee children literate in their own language and English, and the influence of fairly benevolent Moravian missionaries had even succeeded in some conversions.
But the success story was exactly what Andrew Jackson neither believed nor wanted to hear. And after the Battle of New Orleans (won after the war with Britain had ended), he was politically untouchable. Jackson was, many people knew, a president-in-waiting, and he made it clear that he was eager to end what he called the “farce” of treaties between the government and jumped-up savages who imagined they were little kings.
It was politics as much as racism (of which there was a deep streak in Jackson, for all his adoption of two Indian children) that moved him. His was the authentic voice of the democratic frontier, both speaking for and expecting the loyalty of all those who could not wait to get their hands on Indian land. The dream of American plenty for the ordinary man was born from Andrew Jackson’s determination to evict tens of thousands of Indians—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, and Creek as well as Cherokee—from the only homelands they had ever known, because they happened to be in the way. It was absurd to the point of offensive, Jackson told himself, to pretend that Indian “nations” could ever be incorporated into the Union on their own terms as Indian states.
Return Jonathan Meigs died in 1823 at the age of eighty-two, and the manner of his going belied his grim conviction in his later years that transplantation—in effect the disentanglement of Indian and white lives that had become so braided together in the up-country—would be for the best. An elderly Cherokee chief had come to see him at the agency at Hiwassee to debate the wisdom of removal. Meigs saw that the old man was sick and offered him his lodge while he took a tent outside. But it was Meigs whose head cold turned into pneumonia, taking him away. The funeral for White Path was attended by a long file of Cherokee chiefs, braves, and women, all of whom had trusted another Meigs, perhaps too much, with their best interests. A Cherokee death chant went up over the mountains with a wreath of smoke.
Perhaps it was as well that Meigs did not live to see the denouement, which was more tragic than he could possibly have imagined. And it was made so because the Cherokee had listened all too well to their tutor White Path. By the 1820s they had a written language developed by George Gist, known as Sequoyah, based on the eighty-six syllables at the core of their spoken tongue. Once the language was established, a bilingual newspaper followed, the Cherokee Phoenix. In place of the old tribal councils meeting in the round houses, John Ross, the charismatic chief of the anti-emigrant majority, an eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scots, produced a written constitution, modeled after that of the United States. Elections were organized; law courts and magistrates, a militia, and a police force put into being. In less than ten years, with the threat of mass deportation always at their back, the Cherokee had become a true microstate comparable to many of those claiming independence in Europe.
It was as though Ross and his allies in Cherokee nationalism, many of whom like Major Ridge had fought in the Creek War and who had been embittered by Jackson’s shocking indifference to his own Indian militia, now wanted to demonstrate to the shades of Jefferson and Meigs that they could indeed make a modern political and social culture. It was precisely this striving to be like America that had periodically depressed Meigs and made him wish that they return to elk hunts and spirit dances in whatever country they could be left in peace. And it was certainly the fact of their progress in agriculture, the cotton industry, and politics that spurred Andrew Jackson to get rid of the Cherokee sooner rather than later. For who could tell what fancy notions they might get if the experiment in Indian nation building was allowed to mature? They might actually succeed in cash crop farming and then be impossible to uproot! They might get dangerous ideas that others might be called on for their protection, those others usually marching under the Union Jack, the nation that Jackson most detested in the world. As the Cherokee became more organized and aggravatingly articulate, they turned from a nuisance into a menace.
And suddenly fortune played the Cherokee a wild card. Gold ore was discovered in the hills of west Georgia in an area Bartram had traversed, by one Benjamin Parks, setting off the first “rush” in American history. The Cherokee had known about specks of alluvial ore, and the nearest town to the strike was called Dahlonega, Cherokee for “yellow money,” but they had not bothered to do anything systematic about it. Now, the mere thought that, enriched by gold, the Cherokee might be able to hold off their transplantation indefinitely provoked Jackson, elected president in 1828, to introduce the Indian Removal Act in
Congress in 1830.
Under its terms not just the Cherokee but all the “Five Civilized Tribes”—Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were to be removed from their lands east of the Mississippi and taken to an alternative settlement somewhere to the west of the river, plumb in the region straddling the 100th meridian, called by Stephen Long, and with good reason, “the Great American Desert” (now Oklahoma). What little was known of the area made it clear that it was, especially west of the 100th, arid and unsuitable for precisely the kind of settled agriculture the Indians had been told they were supposed to master. The Removal Act attempted to mask its mass deportations as a voluntary invitation to emigrate, and to make that act seem akin to the westward movement of white pioneers on the Oregon Trail. But Cherokee chiefs like Ross noticed that the Oregon emigrants traveled straight past the region to which they were being removed. Had it had any serious potential, it would already have surely attracted settlers. But the president made it clear that should any decide to remain, they would henceforth be subject to the laws of the states in which they resided. It was, in effect, a threat. Jackson would eliminate all federal protection for the Indians (in violation of guarantees made by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams) and would unleash the governments of Georgia and Tennessee on them, which would undoubtedly ride roughshod over any notion that the tribes owned much land at all, and certainly not any that white settlers and gold prospectors had their eyes on.