Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  PART FOUR

  Young Prince

  1820–1828

  Eleven

  This Unexpected Weapon of Defence

  Several times in his life John Ross had reason to send letters to Andrew Jackson. One occasion came in June 1820, when General Jackson was still based in Nashville, with authority over military affairs in the South. Ross wrote the letter from his home, which stood by a spring in a little settlement known as Rossville. The U.S. map would have shown the house just inside the northern boundary line of Georgia, about 150 miles southeast of Nashville. The Indian map showed that Rossville stood a few miles from the Tennessee River, the current boundary of the Cherokee Nation.

  The house said a lot about Ross. While Andrew Jackson the orphan had left his hometown behind to start anew in the West, Ross had grown up surrounded by his relatives, as a kind of frontier prince. At age thirty he was living not many miles from his birthplace, in a settlement named for his family. He was sharing this solid house with his wife, Quatie, and their steadily increasing brood of children. It was a dogtrot house, meaning the first floor consisted of two large rooms separated by a breezeway. The second floor stretched the length of the house, which had the long and comfortable look of a lodge, with a chimney at either end. The furnishings were solid. Maybe even then Ross was sleeping in a bed like the one he was believed to use in later years, with an elaborately carved headboard as tall as a man. Having arrived at home late one night in June, he’d fallen into bed for a night’s rest before he turned to his correspondence.

  Rossville Cherokee Nation

  June 19th 1820

  Sir

  I have the honor of informing you that I arrived here last evening.

  Ross used up a line or two before getting around to business. He was wise to write carefully. He was informing General Jackson of his effort to do something that, in the long term, was the opposite of what the general wanted: pushing white settlers off Cherokee soil.

  I have been induced to accept of the command of the Cherokee Light horse ordered into service by the Honble. Secry. of War, for the removal of Intruders off Indian lands on the Northern frontier of this nation.

  By the “Northern frontier” Ross meant the legal boundary between Cherokee land and what he called the whiteside. Settlers were crossing the Tennessee River into Cherokee territory—asserting the white map and ignoring the Indian map. Cherokees had gained the federal government’s agreement that it would evict these “Intruders,” by force if necessary, but the government did not act. In particular General Jackson did not act. “I have no troops within three hundred miles of the cherokee nation,” he complained when asked for help in early 1820. The general said his orders from Washington called for him to concentrate his troops elsewhere; the sale of Florida was not yet consummated, and he wanted to be ready for anything.

  Having served under the general’s command, Ross probably knew what to think of Jackson’s explanation. Jackson would have reinterpreted his orders had it suited his strategic purposes. But in this matter of the intruders on Cherokee land, General Jackson declared that he must strictly follow instructions. He could do nothing except “talk big,” sending a note threatening the intruders with arrest, and hoping that bluster would scare them off. Jackson’s hesitation was even more awkward because the intruders had ignored a January first deadline to depart or face consequences. Jackson said he would attend to the problem as soon as he could spare troops from work on a military road. There were bridges to be repaired. Shrubbery must be cleared. The “shrubing” work was “indispensible,” Jackson stressed. In the meantime, Jackson suggested that the Cherokees employ their own force to remove white settlers. This was the Cherokee Light Horse, a company of lightly armed cavalry, for which John Ross was a natural choice as commander, having military experience, a calm temperament, and the ability to speak the white man’s tongue. Cherokees had the law on their side but didn’t know what would happen when they turned their guns on white men.

  On the 17th inst. the Detachment was ordered out on duty under my command. The first object presented itself was a place occupied by a man (Atkinson) who had officially threatened opposition.

  Atkinson was a man who had moved his family across the river to a spot within a day’s ride of Rossville. There was no doubt he was encroaching. The Tennessee was an unmistakable border. Just as surely, the settler regarded the land as his own, having labored to improve it.

  “There has been threats of opposition breathed from almost every quarter,” Ross wrote. With that in mind, his men on horseback carefully approached the Atkinson farm, weapons at the ready. But no shots rang out.

  On our arrival to the spot, it was found evacuated. The crop was ordered to be distroyed.

  Ross, the short man on horseback, signaled some of his troops to dismount. They began to set Atkinson’s abandoned food stores on fire. Ross kept his eye on the edge of the woods, waiting for any sign of the “threatened opposition.” Atkinson was out of sight but not necessarily gone. Ross studied the abandoned farm—the empty house, the quiet fields. The family seemed to have fled quickly, having left their livestock behind. Sheep bleated and geese honked as the flames began to rise.

  • • •

  Three years of maneuvering had led up to this moment when Cherokees tried to police their land while General Jackson stood back. During those three years Jackson believed he was making arrangements for Cherokees, not white intruders, to evacuate the Cherokee Nation. His efforts did not succeed—but they helped to explain both his reluctance to protect the Cherokees and the Cherokees’ increasing determination to defend themselves.

  Jackson’s treaty with the Cherokees in 1817—the same one that captured former Cherokee land that became Florence, Alabama, without making any payment for it—contained other provisions, designed to obtain still more land over time. In fact it included a mixture of incentives that “will give us the whole country in less than two years,” as Jackson predicted in a letter to John Coffee. Individual Cherokees would be invited to relocate voluntarily, moving westward to join the small band of Cherokees who had been living across the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River since 1808. Each Cherokee who agreed to the move would receive transportation, a rifle, a blanket, assorted supplies, and western land. No Cherokees would remain on their ancestral land, Jackson believed, “except those prepared for agricultural persuits, civil life, & a government of laws.”

  It must have been frustrating for Jackson to realize as time passed that the vast majority of Cherokees weren’t taking the deal. They hated his treaty. It was not “Just,” a concept that meant as much to Cherokees as it did to Jackson. The deal had been negotiated with a small group of Cherokee leaders, using Jackson’s customary pressure tactics, and imposed over the protest of dozens of other leading figures. In 1819, finding Cherokees still in place, the government negotiated yet another treaty, purchasing still more land, and including provisions designed to peel away individual Cherokees. Some would receive individual plots of land. Some accepted; yet both treaties intensified Cherokee debate about how they could improve their governance and avoid being sucked into such land cessions. A resolution grew among tribal leaders that the territorial concessions in the 1819 treaty should be the last they ever made.

  It was also in 1819 that John Ross boldly wrote a letter to President James Monroe. Amid a few flourishes of deference toward the president (Ross appealed for “the interposition of your Fatherly hand”) the rising Cherokee diplomat complained of the government’s “evil” tendency to call assemblies of Indian leaders and demand territory with no notice. Ross said he hoped “the Government will now strictly protect us from the intrusions of her bad citizens and not solicit us for more land—as we positively believe the comfort and convenience of our nation requires us to retain our present limits.”

  This “positive belief” lay behind Ross’s order in 1820 that the Cherokee Light Horse should begin its mission by torching the Atkinson farm. But another
aspect of Ross’s thinking shaped what happened next. He was capable of understanding his antagonist’s point of view, and this empathy made him reluctant to go to extremes.

  As his men set aflame the food stores at the farm, Ross had been waiting for the response—the sound of hooves, the gunshot from the woods. But when at length he saw figures approaching, it was not a party of white gunmen. It was one man, one woman, and some children.

  Atkinson came across the river with his wife & family to defend it, not by the force of powder & lead, but by the shedding of tears, this unexpected weapon of defence had more effect on the minds of the men, than if he had resorted to the measures threatened… .

  His conviction of error & pitiful acknowledgements &c &c induced me to permit him to recross the river to the whiteside unmolested with a few sheep & geese—his crop was all distroyed.

  Ross watched Atkinson go away, driving his livestock before him. It was probably all he owned. Though the strategy of gaining great strips of land for white settlement was a central project of the frontier elite, illegally occupying Indian land was a job for the poor. Not just any farmer would risk his life, labor, and possessions to improve land that might be snatched back. This white farmer had probably taken Cherokee property because he couldn’t afford the abundant real estate on sale nearby in Alabama. Atkinson did not even have the support of relatives or other white Tennesseans. Nobody had rallied to help defend his farm. Surely his poverty was evident to Ross as soon as his weeping family appeared.

  A few years earlier, Ross had denounced “the conduct of the malitious and lawless class of our white Brethren on our frontier our property frequently stolen our lands forcibly occupied & the blood of Country people spilt all in cold blood & unprovoked.” But now, finding himself with power over one such land grabber, he could summon no wrath. He showed as much mercy as circumstances allowed, and went home. Delegating a lieutenant to oversee his men’s next moves, he rode away from the Light Horse for a few days, returning to Rossville, where he could write his report to General Jackson in his two-story cabin of his ancestors.

  Atkinson’s sorrow and submission left Ross feeling optimistic about other white intruders. “I am induced to believe they will mostly cooperate like Mr. Atkinson,” he wrote, but here he was wrong. Later that summer, other settlers would resist the Cherokee Light Horse, assembling a little army of about seventy. Their force was strong enough that the Cherokee horsemen decided to hold off their assault until federal troops at last arrived. But for now Ross was able to report his mission successfully begun.

  I have the honor to be Sir, yr. vry. obt. Hble. Servt.

  Jno Ross.

  While Jackson’s reply to this note, if any, has not survived, it is easy to calculate from other letters what Jackson thought of it. He almost certainly disapproved. He would never have let Atkinson walk away. Jackson believed it was a mistake to allow white squatters to depart with their livestock. The squatters would simply wait until the troops had moved on, and then return. While Jackson showed little enthusiasm for removing white settlers, he had none at all for doing a job badly, or for giving anyone a chance to flout his will. If white settlers were to be removed at all, the job should be thoroughly and irresistibly done. Once his troops finally arrived, he would order them to hold white settlers and deliver them to the nearest civilian lawman for prosecution.

  Here was a subtle but significant difference between the two men who would contend over the years that followed. Andrew Jackson could show mercy and respect. He could have empathy for others; he could never have succeeded as a politician otherwise. But these qualities were governed by his ruthlessness. He must never lose a fight. He must always uphold his authority. Ross, too, proved to be fiercely and stubbornly competitive. But there were moments when Ross let his stubbornness give way to generosity and, Ross hoped, to justice.

  Twelve

  Ominous of Other Events

  Running off squatters was an accomplishment, but Ross next needed to run off an entire state. The bulk of Cherokee land lay within Georgia, which was demanding control of what it considered its own real estate. It was the Georgians above all who insisted that the old ambiguity must end, that the Indian map must vanish in favor of the white man’s map. By the 1820s Georgians were beginning to get their hands around a lever that could be used to expel the Cherokees.

  Georgia’s leverage grew out of the strange and convoluted history of Georgia itself. It was the last of the thirteen colonies to be established, founded in 1733, more than a century after the start of British settlement in Virginia and New England. Established as a refuge for debtors, it instead became a state of slave plantations, where the number of black workers was growing so rapidly that it approached the number of free white residents. The bulk of the populace was concentrated near the Atlantic coastline and along the lower reaches of the rivers. Farther inland, the colony of Georgia was a work of imagination, defined purely by mapmakers rather than by any actual governance or development.

  Georgia as first imagined had a much different shape than the Georgia that appears on maps today. The British decreed that the northern and southern borders of the colony consisted of two straight lines, which stretched westward for as far as the mind could conceive, crossing every river, valley, and mountain “in direct lines to the South seas.” These lines formed a strip of land that crossed the entire continent to the Pacific, even though white men had scarcely seen the territory, other colonial powers claimed it too, and Indians controlled it. Georgia’s claim was so extravagant that Georgians could not even describe it. As late as 1798 they approved a constitution declaring that the northern boundary of the state would be determined by drawing a straight line westward, starting from the point where a stream branching off from the Tugaloo River met the boundary of South Carolina, unless the stream never touched South Carolina, in which case the boundary would be determined another way. The border was an either/or hypothetical, made necessary by a boundary dispute. On the southern side of the state, a map from 1799 included a blank space labeled with the words “These parts are little known.”

  Such maps did not assure the Georgians title to the land. Even Europeans, who made the rules of colonialism, could not articulate any principle by which they should own a giant strip of a continent because they said so. Rather than strictly indicating Georgia’s control of real estate, the colonial map marked off a sphere of influence where Georgia colonists were supposed to be able to trade or do business without interference from other colonies or rival European powers. The real estate within those areas was understood to be owned by the natives unless they were displaced by treaty, purchase, or war. But the maps of British territory came to mean more than that. A map made by a Virginian in 1755 showed numerous British colonies, including Georgia, stretching right across North America, each of them tinted different colors like stripes in a rainbow flag. The map became powerfully influential, inspiring Americans with the idea that a whole continent was already theirs, needing only to be occupied. It was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a doctored photograph, a projection of a notion rather than of reality.

  After the Treaty of Paris secured American independence in 1783, speculators acted on the notion. They began buying and selling rights to the Georgia backcountry, the distant lands between the East Coast and the Mississippi River. Investors formed companies to deal in land that had not yet been obtained from the Indians and that in some cases was not even clearly within the United States as its boundaries were drawn at that time. Federal authorities opposed such enterprises, insisting that they would create pressure to snatch Indian land and provoke wars. “The government is determined to exert all its energy for the patronage and protection of the rights of the Indians,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state, in 1791. Georgians shrugged, and in 1795 sold four companies the rights to thirty-five million acres. State legislators were given shares in the mind-boggling enterprise in exchange for supporting it; this became known as the Yazoo
fraud, named after a distant river in the countryside that was to be put up for sale. Chastened by such revelations, in 1802 the Georgians surrendered their western lands for good, ceding to the federal government what became the bulk of Mississippi and Alabama.

  In the compact with Washington, the Georgians managed to slip in a special provision that proved decisive in the years to come. This provision said that the newly shrunken state must be cleared of Indians. The federal government undertook to “extinguish the Indian title” to all lands inside the state of Georgia as soon as the title could be “peaceably obtained, on reasonable terms.” This meant that the Indians could not be removed until they agreed to it, but Georgia leaders chose to interpret the compact as a sacred commitment to move out the Indians no matter what. This commitment was imaginary, rather like the map of Georgia—but as with the map, Georgians set out to make it real. This was the lever they could use to dislodge the native population.

  Georgians were so determined to remove the Indians that some regarded even Andrew Jackson as a laggard. Jackson’s 1814 treaty after Horseshoe Bend had removed the Creeks from a large part of Georgia, but Georgia politicians deemed this an injustice, since Jackson allowed the Creeks to maintain a portion of their territory. “The same treaty ought to have extinguished for Georgia the Indian claims to all the lands within her limits,” complained a rising Georgia politician, George M. Troup. Instead, Georgia “was not noticed in it.”

  • • •

  In early 1824 a Cherokee delegation including John Ross visited Washington. The federal government, honoring its duty to Georgia, made an offer to buy Cherokee land. The Cherokee diplomats, honoring their duty to their people, refused to sell. Georgia’s congressional representatives exploded in fury, and signed a bombastic letter to the federal government “insisting” on an “immediate fulfillment” of the government’s “obligations.” If the Cherokees would not sell, the government should simply “order” them out, said the Georgians. The Georgians implied that if Washington failed to act, Georgia would evict the Indians—nullifying federal authority and prompting a national crisis. A shocked President James Monroe called the letter an “insult” at the first of several cabinet meetings that were consumed in discussing it. To read accounts of those meetings is to imagine the frustrated Founding Father pushing the letter across the table for his cabinet secretaries to read for themselves. He called for “defiance” in response, although his reply became more moderate as Monroe and his aides drafted and edited. They did not want to provoke conflict with a state that described its sovereignty in terms that sounded like Georgia was an independent nation. (The governor was sometimes styled in official documents as “His Excellency, Governor and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of this State and of the Militia thereof.”) The administration finally sent a letter that did no more than remind Georgia of federal efforts to follow what the compact actually said.