Gentlemen: I send for your paper two numbers of a series of Essays on the pending … controversy between the United States and the Indians, and hope you will insert them… . This is a subject which must be abundantly discussed in our country… . Some able members of Congress, to my certain knowledge, wish to have the matter discussed.
The Intelligencer had been linked with presidential administrations since the start of the century. No longer was it so: the paper was part of a capital elite that the new president did not like or trust. Jackson would steer business and information instead to the Jackson man who ran a rival Washington paper, the United States Telegraph, and when that editor proved insufficiently loyal, Jackson would import an editor from Kentucky to start yet another paper. This left the National Intelligencer free to speak, a paper that was still widely read and a clever choice for Ross’s ally to use. As an “inducement” to encourage the paper to print his essays, “Penn” promised this paper that was now part of Jackson’s opposition that “I shall not agree with the present Executive of the United States … [who] has been greatly mistaken in his powers and his duty.”
The Intelligencer printed this letter with an advisory: “The Essays shall be published.”
It was common in the nineteenth century to write such articles pseudonymously, though the editors of the Intelligencer surely understood whom they were publishing. Word of his identity spread among the elites, many of whom knew his name and his work. He was a former magazine editor based in Boston, a sickly, hollow-cheeked New Englander known for the luminous intensity of both his feelings and his prose. “William Penn” was his avatar, to use the language of a later era, chosen because Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had set an example of recognizing Indian rights.
The writer’s real name was Jeremiah Evarts. He had visited Cherokee country and now worked for an organization that supported missionaries there. It was called the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Evarts was the board’s corresponding secretary. In modern terms he was the communications director, an influential voice in an organization that sent missionaries as far away as China and as near as New Echota. Samuel Worcester, the missionary in the Cherokee capital, was the American Board’s man. He regularly wrote to Evarts and Evarts to him. Back when the missionary needed help obtaining a printing press for the Cherokee Phoenix, Evarts was the one who helped to have a press sent from Boston. Evarts was also an ally of John Ross. When Ross wrote his letter of May 6, 1829, outlining his strategy to “passively” resist removal, he sent it to Evarts. Ross was assuring him that Cherokees were not about to do anything foolish, that the growing religious movement could act in support of Indians without fear of embarrassment. Evarts acted.
Evarts, like Ross, was in Washington on the day of Jackson’s inauguration, close enough to see that the new president kissed the Bible on which he took his oath of office, but not close enough to follow the new president’s speech. “I could hear some words distinctly; but could not keep the connexion,” he remembered later. It may have been just as well that Evarts did not hear the president’s promise to pursue “a just and liberal policy” toward the tribes, because Evarts would not have believed it. He had been staying the past three weeks at Gadsby’s and had met his fellow lodger, the president-elect. They talked about Indians. In a letter written afterward, Evarts said Jackson understood the “evil” of “a direct collision between the national and state authorities,” but that Jackson was unwilling to do anything about it. “He is not now prepared to interpose, and defend the Cherokees from Georgia; and you may easily judge, whether it is probable he will be in more favorable circumstances hereafter to decide in favor of the weakest party.”
“No relief can be hoped,” Evarts decided, “except through the influence of the press. This may operate upon the members of Congress.” Soon he was crafting his essays. He understood how to make an article spread from one newspaper to the rest of the media. Though the Intelligencer was a daily paper, he proposed to provide two essays each week, so that “they may be copied into semi-weekly papers, if their Editors see fit.” He also understood his subject. In his first essay, printed on August 5, 1829, he quoted from a letter written by the secretary of war, the dismissive note telling John Ross that the government would not protect the Cherokees. In his following essays, William Penn shredded the substance of that letter.
Penn acknowledged that proponents of Indian removal believed they were performing “the greatest kindness,” whether the Indians liked it or not. But “no subject, not even war, nor slavery, nor the nature of free institutions” would be so closely examined by the world. “If, in pursuance of a narrow and selfish policy, we should at this day, in a time of profound peace and great National prosperity, amidst all our professions of magnanimity and benevolence, and in the blazing light of the nineteenth century, drive away the remnants of the tribes, in such a manner, and under such auspices, as to ensure their destruction … then the sentence of an indignant world will be uttered in thunders, which will roll and reverberate for ages after the present actors in human affairs shall have passed away.”
That was the first essay. Twenty-three more came after it.
• • •
Evarts was a man whose thinking wove together several of the great strands of the early American intellect. He was a product of strict New England religion, with a terror of idleness and an intense consciousness of the sinfulness of man. But if mankind was marked by “narrow and selfish” behavior, Evarts was also conscious of living in “the blazing light of the nineteenth century,” when advances in technology and communication sparked tremendous optimism. For many Americans, the greatest innovation was America itself, a nation destined to play a special role in the world. For some, America’s special role was offering a beacon of liberty to a world ruled by kings. For others, including Evarts, America’s destiny was also to spread God’s word to the “heathen lands” around the globe, including the lands of Indians near home.
He was a Vermont farmer’s son, and a product of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. A Yale classmate said Evarts looked about the same in college as he would twenty years later: “There sat Evarts, in a plain rustic garb, with which fashion evidently had never intermeddled; his stature of middling height; his form remarkably slender; his manners stiff; and his whole exterior having nothing to prepossess a stranger in his behalf, except a countenance which bespoke as much honesty as ever falls to the lot of man.” Intense, focused and in time deeply religious—he became a committed Christian during his senior year—young Evarts was ferociously self-critical. He excoriated himself for wasting time with “idle talking” or even “reading,” and wrote once in his journal: “In my leisure moments I think over the sins with which my whole life has been filled. They appear dreadful.” Evarts could be as hard on others as he was on himself. Long before Evarts the writer publicly challenged the president of the United States, Evarts the student found the courage to challenge the president of Yale. During a class discussion of the question “Is dancing a useful employment?” the young man was shocked to hear President Timothy Dwight say that dancing and balls were perfectly fine, if properly conducted. Evarts rose to say that dancing was a “temptation” and that a man of such prominence ought to know better than to endorse it.
If his intense focus on personal morals makes him seem like an ancestor of the modern religious right, the politics he espoused after leaving Yale also make Evarts seem like an ancestor of the modern pacifist left. From 1810 to 1821 he edited the Panoplist, a Boston religious journal. He wrote in its pages that America should commit to establishing schools and churches “in every part of the globe; the alleviation of human suffering of every kind … in a word, the entire subjugation of the world to Christ.” He wrote antiwar articles. In 1811, when Britain and France were at war, he denounced generals who instilled in their soldiers “a stupid contempt of death.” When the United States joined the global conflict by declaring war against Britain
in 1812, Evarts did not allow patriotic sentiment to lead him away from his principles. Precisely as activists would do two centuries later during the war in Iraq, he attempted to crystallize opposition to the war by putting a price tag on the conflict. His newspaper calculated that the cost of weapons, ammunition, destroyed property, economic disruption, and ruined lives totaled $3.235 billion in 1813 alone. Once he became acquainted with Cherokee issues it was inevitable that he would attack those issues too, based on his own passionate morality.
• • •
Evarts gained his acquaintance with Cherokee issues because he traveled numerous times over the years from New England to the South. At first he went for his health, having been sickly all his life; doctors suggested that he seek restoration in the warm air of South Carolina and Georgia. After 1821 he was making the journeys for work too. That was when he became corresponding secretary of the American Board, the missionary organization. Evarts realized that he could support the board’s work by prospecting for donations on his southern travels. “I was never in a place where so many people might give largely,” he wrote once, strategizing about what kind of fund-raising letters might move their hearts. Of course, he knew the reason many in the South were able to “give largely,” and he brooded over it. His hosts in Charleston once took him to see a slave auction, which he watched while taking notes with a pencil. Enslaved individuals and families were made to stand on a table, looking “exceedingly disconsolate, much as if they were led to execution.” A carpenter and his wife were sold for $1,000 each, a “field woman” for $560. Many of the enslaved tried to recruit buyers whom they believed to be kind masters, for “they dread to be sold to a bad, or an unknown master,” and if they failed to avoid this fate, they did not hide their despair. Such scenes reinforced Evarts’s belief in gradual abolition, which he called the only way to avoid a slave revolt. “Black men will at last be free; and if they are not freed by kindness, under the direction of wisdom, they will gain their liberty by violence, at the instigation of revenge.”
Slipping away from the commercial cities of the coast, Evarts traveled inland. He believed that long journeys on horseback would restore his health; one of his expense reports from those years recorded a journey of 768 miles, nearly all of it in the saddle. His journeys took him to the Cherokee Nation. He stayed for days at Brainerd, the best known of the Cherokee missions, admiring the sun setting through the open woods on the grounds. The American Board had purchased this twenty-five-acre compound from John McDonald, John Ross’s grandfather, the old Scottish trader and master of intrigue. While it is not certain when Ross and Evarts first met, they were clearly collaborating from the mid-1820s onward, and both went to Washington lobbying for Cherokees. They worked together even though neither their principles nor their motivations precisely matched. Ross worried about the advancement of Cherokees; Evarts worried about the soul of the United States. Evarts opposed slavery; Ross owned slaves. Evarts was deeply religious, and Ross only nominally so. And Evarts never defended traditional Cherokee religion or culture, instead promoting what he saw as moral progress and Christ. But in the summer of 1829, Evarts was exactly what Ross needed: a genuine ally who was willing to fight alongside him as an equal. Evarts was different from Henry Clay, who supported Indian rights but also thought Indians were doomed. While Clay thought Indians’ “disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world,” Evarts placed them on the same level as white men. His second “William Penn” essay, published on August 8, borrowed some of the phrasings of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson had written “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Evarts wrote of truths he considered self-evident:
The Cherokees are human beings, endowed by their Creator with the same natural rights as other men. They are in peaceable possession of a territory which they have always regarded as their own. This territory was in possession of their ancestors, through an unknown series of generations, and has come down to them with a title absolutely unencumbered in every respect. It is not pretended, that the Cherokees have ever alienated their country, or that the whites have ever been in possession of it… . We might as well ask the Chinese, what right they have to the territory which they occupy.
Here Evarts arrived at the strongest argument in favor of the Cherokees. They had a “natural right” to land where they had lived so long, and which they had improved by building farms and towns. Their claim of ownership was so strong that even the government of Georgia was not technically seeking to overturn it. Instead Georgia was proposing to extend state law over the Cherokee Nation while refusing to assimilate the Cherokee people. The people would be denied basic rights of citizenship—such as voting or testifying in court—which meant that they would be left with little choice but to depart. Evarts wrote that if Georgia’s assertion of power over the Cherokees “is to be endured by an enlightened people in the nineteenth century, and if, in consequence of it, the Cherokees are to be delivered over, bound and manacled, if this is to be done in the face of day … hisses of shame and opprobrium will be heard in every part of the civilized world.” Again and again Evarts emphasized that the world was watching. Certainly the nation was watching Evarts. Some forty other newspapers reprinted his essays. “The Letters of WILLIAM PENN,” the Intelligencer commented, “have had a more general circulation in the public prints than any other series of Letters that have ever been published during our time.” Evarts heard that even John Marshall, the chief justice of the United States, had read and approved of them. Probably Evarts did not anticipate that Marshall would someday rule on the Cherokees’ case. But Evarts, who early in his career had been a frustrated lawyer, could not have failed to pause upon learning that his legal and political analysis had met with the approval of the nation’s leading jurist. Perhaps Evarts even allowed himself a moment of quiet satisfaction before denouncing himself for the sin of wasting time. Jeremiah Evarts, forever seeking some great purpose that was worthy of his obligation to serve, had found his cause.
PART SIX
State of the Union
1829–1830
Twenty
They Have Been Led to Look Upon Us as Unjust
Arguments over Indian removal came in several forms. There was, for example, the straight racist argument, elegantly phrased by Lewis Cass of Michigan. “Every Indian,” Cass explained in a magazine article, shared the identical upbringing and behaved in the same way. “Reckless of consequences, he is the child of impulse. Unrestrained by moral considerations, whatever his passions prompt he does.” Indians had decreased in population not because of war, social convulsion, and European diseases but because they resisted civilization. They were “clinging with a death grasp” to their old ways. “To roam the forests at will, to pursue their game, to attack their enemies, to spend the rest of their lives in listless indolence … and to be ready at all times to die; these are the principal occupations of an Indian.” They must be pushed away from civilized areas for their own good.
Cass was a veteran of the War of 1812. He was an unwilling participant in the war’s first great disgrace, when his commander surrendered Detroit to a combined force of British troops and Tecumseh’s Indians. He later fought in one of the war’s great victories, the Battle of the Thames, in which Tecumseh was killed. Appointed in 1813 as governor of the Michigan Territory, Cass held the job for eighteen years. Once, he led an expedition into Indian country, present-day Minnesota, and discovered a lake that he thought was the source of the Mississippi River. Cass Lake is named for him today, though he turned out to be wrong. Cass’s experience on the frontier made him an Indian expert. “We speak of them as they are; as we have found them after a long and intimate acquaintance,” Cass wrote in his article urging removal. “Government is unknown among them… . They have no criminal code, no courts, no officers, no punishments.” More pertinent than Cass’s argument was the territory he represented. It was important for Jac
kson to have such a prominent northern supporter for what was being painted as a southern initiative. Jackson liked Cass, and would eventually give him oversight of federal Indian policy.
Against the straight racist argument was the straight moral argument, spread widely thanks to Jeremiah Evarts. After the North American Review published Cass’s article in January 1830, the magazine published a rebuttal written by a student activist who became an acolyte of Evarts. The moral argument was having intriguing effects, influencing not just the people who heard it but also the people who made it. It was causing some to rethink another issue, slavery. Until the 1830s, as we have seen, the notion of immediately abolishing slavery was widely regarded as extremist, illegal, and impractical. The more socially acceptable alternative was gradually freeing slaves for transport to West Africa, but some activists opposing Indian removal now had to wonder. If it was wrong to solve white people’s problems by removing Indians, was it any better to solve white people’s problems by removing black people?
Between the straight racist case and the straight moral case lay several gradations, such as the moral argument for removal. Thomas McKenney, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs who had so many chiefs’ portraits painted and hung on his walls, argued that Indians were being destroyed by their contact with their aggressive neighbors. “We believe, if the Indians do not emigrate … they must perish.” Then there was the racist argument for Indians to remain, memorably expressed by Henry Clay (Indians were “not an improvable breed” but the United States should uphold its obligations to them).
The time came late in 1829 for Andrew Jackson to make his own case to the public. He was expected in December to send Congress his message on the state of the union. In Jackson’s time the annual message was not delivered in a speech but in a long and sober letter, dealing with everything from coffee tariffs to national defense. Jackson wrote an early draft himself, making it an unusually personal report on a president’s political preoccupations. He proposed new rules for presidential elections (he wanted to prevent anyone from working the system as Henry Clay had in 1825). He defended the firing of public officials who were being replaced by Jackson supporters (“rotation in office” would limit corruption, and experienced officials weren’t really needed for government jobs anyway). And then he turned to the subject of Indians. Here, Jackson and his aides struggled not over what to do, but how to express it.
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 19