Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  John Quincy Adams—son of President John Adams and a contender for the presidency himself—was present for these cabinet meetings in 1824, for he was secretary of state. He noted in his diary that President Monroe arrived at a moment of truth: “The President spoke of the compact as a very unfavorable bargain to the United States—as it certainly was.” Georgians had received something for nothing. They’d signed away their claim to western land they had never effectively possessed. In return they’d washed their hands of the Yazoo fraud, collected a federal payout of $1.5 million, and obtained the Indian removal clause they were now using to bully the federal government. The compact was like a second Yazoo fraud.

  Adams had some respect for Cherokees. They’d been working on him. John Ross, Major Ridge, and other visiting Cherokees regularly attended Mrs. Adams’s Tuesday night social events. Mr. Adams found their “manners and deportment” to be no different “from those of well-bred country gentlemen… . They dress like ourselves,” added Adams, except for a “young and very handsome man” who wore a “purfled scarf.” The Cherokee leaders were prosperous, each worth $50,000–$100,000. Ridge, with his limited English, remained so quiet that Adams thought he did not speak the language at all, but Ross and others spoke well, and apparently took advantage of those Tuesday socials to feed Adams propaganda about Cherokees. “They are now, within the limits of Georgia, about fifteen thousand,” Adams wrote—certainly an overestimate—“and increasing in equal proportion to the whites; all cultivators, with a representative government, judicial courts, Lancaster schools, and permanent property.” Adams noted that the Cherokees “write their own State papers, and reason as logically as most white diplomatists … Ross is the writer of the delegation. They have sustained a written controversy against the Georgia delegation with great advantage.”

  Adams was present when the delegation paid a call on President Monroe. Ridge, the leader, made a few remarks in Cherokee. Ross understood enough Cherokee to interpret, with another leader, George Lowrey, there to pick up when Ross faltered. The president replied with “general expressions of kindness.” Secretary Adams watched the Cherokees depart the Executive Mansion, most likely without telling them what was on his mind: Their improvement in civilization made them more threatening to the Georgians, not less, since it made them harder to dislodge. Adams had heard John C. Calhoun, the secretary of war, say as much in a cabinet meeting: “The great difficulty arises from the progress of the Cherokees in civilization,” he said. Not arises despite Cherokee progress. Arises from.

  The unresolved conflict made Adams uneasy, and the recalcitrant Cherokees bothered him less than the aggressive Georgians. Though the South’s effort to secede from the union was decades in the future, Georgia politicians were already talking of their membership in the union as conditional, to be maintained only as long as Georgia’s own definition of its sovereignty was honored. Something was happening in the South that the Massachusetts diplomat didn’t fully understand, though he was prophetic enough to sense that calamity loomed. “I suspected this bursting forth of Georgia upon the Government of the United States was ominous of other events,” he said.

  Thirteen

  The Taverns Were Unknown to Us

  Facing such powerful demands for Cherokee land, Ross knew he could not simply refuse. He must offer an alternative. Around the time of Georgia’s political eruption in 1824, Ross joined with other Cherokees to write down a suggestion that contained a hint of humor, even mockery. The Cherokees said that if Georgia needed more land, it should forget about the Cherokee Nation and take over part of Florida.

  He added that if the Cherokees were ever to come under state authority, it should be a state of their own. Ross proposed that Cherokees should someday “enter into a treaty with the United States, for admission as citizens under the form of a Territorial or State government.” A year later, in 1825, Ross and two other leaders fleshed out this vision. If Cherokees remained where they were, “the day would arrive when a distinction between their race and the American family would be imperceptible; of such a change the nation can have no objection.” Even racial distinctions could be overcome: “Complexion is a subject not worthy [of] consideration in the effectuation of this great object.” The Cherokees would happily “extinguish” traditional culture “for the sake of civilization and preservation of existence… . The sooner this takes place the great stumbling block prejudice will be removed.” In short they would change almost everything in order to preserve their rights to the land, and in the late 1820s they built up their political defenses with this vision in mind.

  Preserving their land required a stronger Cherokee government. A stronger government required a better system of laws, so they made plans to draft a new constitution. John Ross was president of the constitutional convention, which chose to begin its work on a date whose symbolism nobody could miss: July 4, 1827. As presiding officer, Ross held the same position at the Cherokee constitutional convention that George Washington had held in the meetings that produced the U.S. Constitution forty years earlier, in 1787. Like Washington, Ross soon afterward became the first leader to be chosen under the basic law whose creation he had just overseen.

  There was poetry in this parallel, since the Cherokee constitution was the ultimate achievement to grow out of Washington’s civilization program. Ross and the Cherokees were committing an act of political jujitsu—taking the force of an opponent’s blow and turning it against him. The Founding Fathers had offered civilization as a means to humanely pacify and displace the Indians; Cherokees accepted the offer and used it to strengthen themselves in place. The 1827 constitution claimed for Cherokees a permanent place in the American union, with inviolable borders under the auspices of the federal government, somewhat like the new territory of Florida or the new state of Alabama. When it became apparent what the Cherokees were doing, white leaders were shocked. Cherokees were acting as if federal Indian policy meant what it said, rather than what it actually meant.

  • • •

  The constitution was Ross’s triumph, though it was also the culmination of a process stretching back before he could remember. A man who had been present for much of that process was by his side as they took the final step: Major Ridge, solid and imposing as his name. He personified a large part of the Cherokee story, for the Ridge embraced new ideas, turned them into Cherokee legislation, and enforced them over a span of decades. If anyone doubted John Ross’s authenticity as an Indian leader, they could not doubt the Ridge, who was steeped in the old ways and never spent a day in a white man’s school (although he also had a mixed-race ancestry). He was a veteran of old wars. He was a killer. He concluded there must be a better way, and demonstrated it.

  A full-color portrait shows Major Ridge as he appeared around the years when the constitution was produced. Consciously or not, the painter rendered Ridge with the solidity and seriousness of a George Washington. Curly gray hair framed his broad face. He gazed a bit to the painter’s left. He wore a coat, a vest, a high white collar, and a black cravat. He looked like a wealthy southern planter, which, by then, he was.

  Ridge gave an account of his upbringing to Thomas McKenney, a federal Indian official, and the story demonstrated how far Ridge had come since his birth in 1771. His parents named him Nung-no-hut-tar-hee, roughly translated as “He who slays the enemy in the path.” His father was a full-blooded Cherokee. His mother was half white and half Cherokee, though there was very little white cultural influence in the youth he described. White people were an external threat. His family lived in Tennessee, along the Hiwassee River, where white invaders were burning Cherokee villages during his youth. He was still very young when he became a refugee. His father loaded the family onto canoes and fled down the Hiwassee to the Tennessee River, and from there southwestward to safety.

  His early education was accompanying his father on the hunt. Around the age of twelve he was taken to an aged war chief, who performed a ritual to dedicate the boy to the warrior’s
life. He scratched the boy bloody with a sharpened wolf bone, and then had him bathe in a stream. “I shall make you dreadful,” the old man promised. Ridge lived up to the prediction. In 1788 Tennessee settlers murdered a beloved Cherokee chief, Old Tassel, who had approached them under a flag of truce. The atrocity prompted Cherokee raids of reprisal, and in hand-to-hand combat, the teenage Ridge killed a white man with a spear. This earned him the status of an Outacite, or man-killer. Later Ridge joined another party that attacked a white settlers’ stockade, mounting such a sustained attack that the white defenders ran out of ammunition. The Cherokees slaughtered all the men and some of the women.

  The name he assumed as an adult reputedly referred to something he had said while on the hunt. “I came along the top of the mountain,” he informed other men when arriving in camp, and the expression evoked his lofty character. Invited in his twenties to become a representative to the Cherokee National Council, an important governing body, the Ridge gained the notice of older chiefs for his thoughtful speech. It was while serving in the council that he began the long campaign to ban the custom of blood revenge.

  The Ridge championed this reform while retaining his old ferocity. After the Cherokee chief Doublehead sold tribal land north of the Tennessee River in the treaties of 1805 and 1806, the Ridge accepted the responsibility of delivering his punishment. He shot Doublehead in the jaw and left him for dead. Learning afterward that the wounded chief had slipped away, Ridge was part of a group of men who tracked him down and finished their task with a pistol, a tomahawk, and a spade. Seven years later Ridge was on the roll of the Cherokee Regiment, and was, as we have seen, among the Indians who paddled across the Tallapoosa, causing the chaos behind enemy lines that sparked Andrew Jackson’s triumph at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

  Much like Jackson, he blended his identity as a warrior with that of a gentleman farmer. A chronicler of the family speculates that his wife, known as Sehoya or Susanna, may have spurred him in this direction. She began by cultivating cotton, which allowed her, like other Cherokee women, to spin cloth. By the 1820s, the Ridge and Susanna were living on an elegant estate. Their white wood house had four brick fireplaces, verandas, a balcony, and thirty glass windows. Their orchards included apple, cherry, quince, plum, and 1,141 peach trees. Susanna no longer needed to pick cotton, since that work could be left to thirty slaves. The house was the headquarters of a business empire including a ferry, a toll road, and a popular trading post that Ridge ran as the senior partner of a young white man.

  Ridge even made a profit from diplomacy. When the Creeks were forced into yet another negotiation to sell land, they asked Ridge for help. They relied on his knowledge of Washington and employed his son John Ridge as their interpreter. From the proceeds of the eventual land sale, the Creeks paid the Ridges, father and son, a breathtaking tribute totaling $25,000. Federal officials found the payment so unusual that they suspected corruption, although in a later era, the payment would simply have been described as a lobbying or consulting fee.

  By the time of the drafting of the Cherokee constitution in 1827, Ridge and Ross were among the dominant political figures in the Cherokee Nation. Pathkiller, the elderly principal chief who had been the Cherokee Regiment’s nominal leader, had died six months earlier. Death had also claimed Charles Hicks, his deputy, who had been tutoring Ross on Cherokee history. Of the remaining leaders, Ross and Ridge were particularly well positioned. Ross was the leader of the Cherokee National Council, or upper legislative body, while Ridge led the National Committee, or lower house. Ridge was the perfect ally for Ross—adept at the new ways but credible among those who clung to the old, and also credible among white men. Ridge was not literate in English: when he signed joint letters with Ross he affixed his mark, leaving no doubt which man had written the text. But Ross would have known that the mark was priceless. Should the two men ever part ways it would risk disaster. Ridge could turn his strengths against Ross, and make his own policy if he wanted.

  • • •

  Ross convened the constitutional convention at the new national capital, New Echota, which on the white man’s map was in northern Georgia. It was named after an older Cherokee town that had been ceded for white settlement. Leaders first held an assembly at New Echota in 1819, and by 1825 had gone in for modern real estate development, dividing the settlement into a hundred one-acre lots. Although the nation would retain formal possession of the land, rights to its use could be bought and sold, and a map of the planned street grid did not radically differ from the principles used in John Coffee’s 1818 map of Florence, Alabama. New Echota was never a grand capital—it was a village with a permanent population of fewer than a hundred, where even the main public buildings were made of wood—but among the typical log cabins of this frontier settlement was a scattering of frame houses, which according to a visitor from Connecticut “would be called respectable in Litchfield County & very decently furnished to be in any country & all new say built within 3 or [4] years.” There was a main street sixty feet wide, and a public square covering two acres. A council house rose next to the square; it had two floors, one for each branch of the legislature, with simple wooden benches for the legislators. From the glass windows of the New Echota council house, it was possible to look across the square to the courthouse.

  Twenty-one elected delegates and a secretary debated the constitution at New Echota. Most were mixed-bloods, whose partly white ancestry had deepened their familiarity with the white world and also, in some cases, opened doors to their education. (Mixed-bloods took disproportionate numbers of seats in the missionary schools.) The delegates had certainly been influenced by European-American legal traditions, Ross perhaps most of all. His education in republican government stretched back to his youth, when he grew up surrounded by books and newspapers acquired by his father. “From my earliest Boyhood in reading,” he once recalled, he learned “reverence” for the U.S. government. “And after I advanced far enough to understand the beautiful system under which the Constitution of the United States was established, my reverence became more firmly confirmed.”

  The U.S. Constitution he revered included this preamble:

  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

  Ross surely had this document on the table or in mind while drafting a Cherokee constitution.

  We, the representatives of the people of the CHEROKEE NATION in convention assembled, in order to establish justice, ensure tranquility, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty; acknowledging with humility and gratitude the goodness of the sovereign Ruler of the Universe … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Government of the Cherokee Nation.

  • • •

  The document completed over the next three weeks divided power between three branches of government—the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. The right of a trial by jury “shall remain inviolate,” and no citizen should be subjected to double jeopardy. Amid these familiar provisions the drafters sprinkled nods to religion, rather as some state constitutions did, starting with the preamble’s expression of gratitude to the “Ruler of the Universe.” This was not surprising, since Christian revivalism was sweeping the United States, and was making additional progress among Cherokees. In 1810, one Christian mission was at work among the Cherokees, and reported exactly one convert. In 1820, two missions reported forty-one converts. Over the next few years, four missions—Moravian, Congregationalist, Methodist, and Baptist—said they had won over about a thousand souls, and in the single year of 1827, the year of the constitution’s adoption, the missions claimed six hundred more. Ross was relying on the missionaries for another act of political jujitsu. Although they wanted to brin
g the word of God to Indians, Ross understood that they could transmit the views of Indians to the American people. They could educate white men about Indian progress. It was not by accident that a leading missionary, Samuel Worcester, was granted land to build a house at New Echota.

  Not every Cherokee approved of a constitution that borrowed so much from white culture. As Ross strengthened the national government, local leaders lost power. As he pushed new cultural practices, traditionalists resisted. These traditionalists, under the leadership of a chief named White Path, never let their resistance fully burst into the open; a later scholar reported that they did not want to expose tribal divisions to white men. This may have been the reason that the modernists were able to meet the rebels late in June and gain their quiet acquiescence.