by Paul Harvey
Evolving traditions, stories, and religious beliefs and customs suggested the struggles waged by Indians to comprehend the new world coming into being in the Southeast. The Moravians recorded the stories of a visiting group of Cherokees. While they were traveling, they went to an unoccupied house near a mountain. They heard a noise and looked out to see “a whole host of Indians arrive on the mountain from the sky. They rode on small black horses and their leader beat a drum and came very close to them. They were very afraid and wanted so to go back into the house.” The leader urged them not to be afraid, for God had come to him and commanded him to let the Indians know that
God is dissatisfied that you so indiscriminately lead the white people onto my land. You yourselves see that your game has gone. You plant the white people’s corn. Go and buy it back from them and plant Indian corn and pound it according to your ancestors’ ways. Make the people go away. The mother of the nation has left you, because all her bones are being broken through the milling. She will return, however, if you get the white people out of the country and return to your former way of life. You yourselves can see that the white people are completely different from us. We are made from red earth, but they are made from white sand. You may always be good neighbors with them but see to it that you get your old “beloved Towns” back from them.
Eventually the Moravian mission succumbed to the same pressures of land possession and Indian dispossession that dominated the story of southeastern Indians. Their presence there, however, suggests some of the complexity and nuance of a story that otherwise appears fated and inevitable.
Many native nations were riven between Christianized and “traditionalist” factions. And even those in the Christianized factions came to recognize that they were not going to be accepted in the white man’s Christian Republic but instead usually simply forcibly removed from it. One of the climactic episodes of the encounter of the expansionist American state with its aboriginal peoples occurred in the early nineteenth century in the Southeast. The result was an expansion of Georgia and the creation of the state of Alabama in 1819. It involved the bloody crushing of a prophetic revolt, which drew from the native tradition of the “spirited resistance” dating from the mid-eighteenth century.
Internally riven by an incipient civil war between factions aligned economically and politically with Anglo-Americans and others who resisted all white influence, tormented by problems with alcohol, and economically devastated by a rapid decline of the economically essential trade in deer skins, the Muskogees cried out for a prophetic interpretation of contemporary catastrophes. As was the case with many prophets of the eighteenth century, Muskogees who sought renewal listened intently to natural signs. A series of earthquakes in 1811–1812 seemed to signify the displeasure of the Maker of Breath. Drawing from their own traditions of purging rituals and renewals, replayed yearly in the Busk, or Green Corn, ceremony, Muskogees sought to imbue their struggle for survival with sacred power.
By this time, however, the alliance between nativists and accommodationists which had formed in the revolutionary-era struggles had disintegrated, largely due to the growing power of the American presence. In the case of Alabama, Lower Muskogee chiefs, many of whom had economic ties with American agents, mostly refused to join the Redstick Revolt of the early 1810s. Their residence directly next to the state of Georgia instilled in them an awareness of their imminent peril. But some Muskogees had been listening to the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother and prophet Tenskwatawa. They viewed themselves not as members of individual tribes but as red men militantly opposed to white men. To purge themselves of white influence was a necessary first step in a collective act of purging and a prelude to the renewal necessary for a recapturing of sacred power sufficient to resist the growing secular power of the Anglo-Americans. As historian Joel Martin writes, “By performing material acts of renunciation, they purified themselves of old identities and cleansed themselves of polluting symbols, spirits, and substances. . . . By renouncing their dependence on Anglo-American civilization, the people readied themselves for the assumption of a new collective identity.” The targets of the Muskogee prophets were at first the chiefs friendly to the United States. Eventually, they fought against formidable forces of the United States, who squashed the Redsticks. U.S. Commander Thomas Pinckney declared that Almighty God had “blessed the arms of the United States” against the “insolent” and “perfidious” Muskogees.
American Protestant missionaries made inroads among the Cherokees in the 1820s and 1830s, especially through educating children in institutions such as the Brainerd School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. John Ridge, son of a Cherokee warrior who was educated in Moravian mission schools and later served as an assistant to Albert Gallatin in the federal government’s dealings with the Creek Indians, noted the spread of Christianity among his people: “Portions of Scripture & sacred hymns are translated and I have frequently heard with astonishment a Cherokee, unacquainted with the English take his text & preach, read his hymn & sing it, Joined by his audience, and pray to his heavenly father with great propriety & devotion. The influence of Religion on the life of the Indians is powerful & lasting.” One Indian schoolgirl noted that President Jackson’s message about Indian removal had been read in school: “Miss Ames has been talking to the scholars and she felt bad and told them that they must get a good education soon as they can, so they can teach if they should be removed where they could not attend school and says that we must try to get religion for all the instructors ought to be christians. It seems that it will be a trying season to us and the missionaries if we should be separated from them, but she says if God suffers it to be, we ought not to complain.” She recounted one child saying, “‘if the white people want more land let them go back to the country they came from,’” and another adding, “‘they have got more land than they use, what do they want to get ours for.’”
Regardless of the efforts of the Moravians and (beginning in the 1820s) northern Baptist missionaries, southeastern Indians found themselves hemmed in. Economically, their sources of tribal sustenance were challenged. Politically, they were internally riven between factions advocating opposing responses to white encroachment. In Georgia, state legislatures employed every means necessary to clear out areas for land-hungry settlers and for the coffles of slaves being transported overland to the newly opening regions. When missionaries among the Cherokees were ordered to clear out as well, they refused to obey. State authorities arrested them. Eventually, in Worcester v. Georgia, the famous case that arose from this incident, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in the Cherokees’ favor. He suggested in effect that as semi-sovereign and semi-wards of the federal government, the state of Georgia did not have legal authority to disperse them and enforce laws within the bounds of the Cherokee lands. President Andrew Jackson was just as famously contemptuous of the court’s edicts. He knew that military force, not Supreme Court doctrine, ultimately would triumph.
Jackson supported Georgia’s position of maintaining sovereignty within its own borders. In an address to Congress, he summarized the advantages of Indian removal from the Southeast and the settlement of those lands by whites:
It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.
Many religious Americans in the Northeast opposed Jackson’s policies. The most prominent was Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Jeremiah Evarts was a Whig Unionist who staunchly defended the role of the federal government in dealing directly with Indian nations, without the intermediary of state governments. He argued vigor
ously against removal, pointing out that “they will hardly get settled in their new location, before they will be urged to remove again.” He concluded, “May a gracious Providence avert from this country the awful calamity of exposing ourselves to the wrath of heaven, as a consequence of disregarding the cries of the poor and defenseless, and perverting to purposes of cruelty and oppression, that power which was given us to promote the happiness of our fellow-men.” Jackson was unmoved; he signed the act in 1830, which eventually displaced approximately 100,000 Indians. Whites were soon streaming into Cherokee lands.
In response to missionaries and idealists such as Jeremiah Evarts and Samuel Worcester, the well-known antebellum politician Lewis Cass defended the necessity of removal. Matching Evarts’ legal arguments, Cass ultimately was more concerned with those who would mount falsely philanthropic crusades and thus retard the progress of civilization. The “rapid declension and ultimate extinction” of Indian nations had long been foreseen, he suggested, and many were “carefully taught at our seminaries of education, in the hope that principles of morality and habits of industry would be acquired. . . . Missionary stations were established among various tribes, where zealous and pious men devoted themselves with generous ardor to the task of instruction, as well in agriculture and the mechanic arts, as in the principles of morality and religion.” All was to no avail, Cass felt: “Unfortunately, they are monuments also of unsuccessful and unproductive efforts. What tribe has been civilized by all this expenditure of treasure, and labor, and care?” Cass insisted that there was no doubt that the “Creator intended the earth should be reclaimed from a state of nature and cultivated; that the human race should spread over it, procuring from it the means of comfortable subsistence, and of increase and improvement.”
Cherokees split over the wisdom of removal. “The land was given to us by the Great Spirit above as our common right, to raise our children upon, & to make support for our rising generations,” Cherokee women petitioned in 1818 their leaders to resist the sale of tribal lands. Also, as they pointed out, many had been Christianized, “civilized & enlightened, & are in hopes that in a few years our nation will be prepared for instruction in other branches of sciences & arts.” A number of Cherokees, including the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, Elias Boudinot, noted the irony that Indian removal was occurring at precisely the same time that the Cherokees were farming, creating an alphabet and spreading literacy among their people, expanding their slaveholding economy and attending Christian churches: “That the Cherokees may be kept in ignorance, teachers who had settled among them by the approbation of the Government, for the best of all purposes, have been compelled to leave them by reason of laws unbecoming any civilized nation—Ministers of the Gospel, who might have, at this day of trial, administered to them the consolations of Religion, have been arrested, chained, dragged away before their eyes, tried as felons, and finally immured in prison with thieves and robbers.”
Eventually, the missionaries were forced to give way. In an 1840 letter, Samuel Worcester explained his position to a fellow clergyman who had urged him to withdraw his appeal before the Supreme Court. He had been condemned by Christians who had urged him to obey the powers that be, a condemnation that was “a begging of the very question at force between us and the state of Georgia—the question of jurisdiction over us.” Worcester pointed out his right to continue laboring among the Cherokees without having to ask permission of the state of Georgia or swearing allegiance to it. But after the Supreme Court’s decision, he recognized that the edict could not be enforced without Civil War. “For what, then, should we run the hazard of bringing about a civil war? For our personal liberty? It was not worth the cost . . . For our honor? Honor, when it is contended for, ceases to be honor. And very little could we have honored ourselves, if we had been willing to purchase honor from others with the blood of our fellowmen.” He would have continued on if there had been hope of advancing the cause of the Cherokees, but by the mid-1830s, there was no such hope.
For the New England Pequot Methodist convert William Apess, who preached for Methodist churches in the 1820s and 1830s while publishing prolifically, the melancholy results of white Christian ethnic cleansing appeared all too evident. His work An Indian’s Looking Glass on the White Man and Son of the Forest reflected on the consequences of white colonization to native peoples since the time of the arrival of whites to New England. What was then in the process of being transformed, by Daniel Webster and other great orators and nationalists of the era, into the mythical story of heroic pilgrims and pioneers conquering the wilderness and spreading civilization westward through empty lands, appeared to Indians such as Apess as a history of conquest, violence, and repression.
Image from William Apess, A Son of the Forest
Source: Public domain.
William Apess’s Eulogy in honor of King Philip (or Metacom, leader of the brutal conflict later known as King Philip’s War of 1676) made clear this native author’s understanding of American history:
Let the children of the pilgrims blush, while the son of the forest drops a tear, and groans over the fate of his murdered and departed fathers. He would say to the sons of the pilgrims (as Job said about his birthday), let the day be day, the 22nd day of December, 1620; let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the Rock that your fathers first put their foot upon. For be it remembered, although the gospel is said to be glad tidings to all people, yet we poor Indians never have found those who brought it as messengers of mercy, but contrawise. We say, therefore, let every man of color wrap himself in mourning, for the 22nd of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy.
What were the weapons of this vaunted Christian civilization, Apess asked? His answer: “rum and powder, and ball, together with all the diseases, such as the small pox and every other disease imaginable; and in this way sweep off thousands and tens of thousands.” And what had become of Indians under this Christian civilization? “Had the inspiration of Isaiah been there,” Apess averred, “he could not have been more correct. Our groves and hunting grounds are gone, our dead are dug up, our council-fires are put out, and a foundation was laid in the first Legislature to enslave our people, by taking from them all rights.” The pilgrims had created a “fire, a canker” designed to “destroy my poor unfortunate brethren,” and even up to the time of Apess himself the president “tells the Indians they cannot live among civilized people, and we want your lands and must have them and will have them.” Indeed, it would be the policy of the government to “drive you out, to get you away out of the reach of our civilized people, who are cheating you, for we have no law to reach them, we cannot protect you although you be our children.”
Apess’s writings were mostly ignored at the time and forgotten afterward. His recently resurrected voice, however, suggests the constant counterpoint to white expansion, settlement, and Christianization among native peoples who had counted its cost. African American writers in the early national era were making the same points, for they too saw that liberty and equality were going to be racially proscribed by a white man’s Republic.
AFRICAN AMERICAN VOICES IN A WHITE REPUBLIC
The documents of the founding of the United States enunciated universalist visions. Christianity and small “r” republicanism merged in antebellum America. In their conceptualizing of religion and the civil order, many were like the former Methodist turned Unitarian James Smith. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson that he had found “shelter under the mild and peaceable Gospel of Jesus Christ, the most perfect model of Republicanism in the Universe.” The radical Christian Elias Smith exulted in “One God—one Mediator—one lawgiver—one perfect law of Liberty—one name for the children of God, to the exclusion of all sectarian names—A Republican government, free from religious establishments and state clergy—free enquiry—life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel.”
But the early Republic was, in practice, racially exclusiv
ist and white supremacist. The free white man was the basic unit of citizenship, and the first Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to free white people. Just as the Declaration of Independence became a touchstone for African American thought, and as white idealists and missionaries took their Christianity to Indian tribes whom they defended against governmentally imposed removal and repression schemes, the universalist language of democratic Christianity provided a base for alternative visions. As James Forten, a free black man from Philadelphia who served in the colonial Navy during the American Revolution, expressed it, the truth that “GOD created all men equal” embraced the “Indian and the European, the Savage and the Saint, the Peruvian and the Laplander, the white Man and the African, and whatever measures are adopted subversive of the inestimable privilege, are in direct violation of the letter and spirit of our Constitution.”