Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab

by Steve Inskeep

  the conduct of the Americans of the United States toward the Indians exhibits the purest love of formalities and legalities. Provided the Indians remain in the savage state, the Americans do not interfere in their affairs and treat them as independent peoples. They will not occupy Indian land until it has been duly acquired by contract. And if by chance an Indian nation can no longer live within its territory, the Americans offer a fraternal hand and lead the natives off to die somewhere other than in the land of their fathers. The Spaniards, despite acts of unparalleled monstrousness that left them indelibly covered with shame, were unable to exterminate the Indian race or even prevent the Indians from sharing their rights. The Americans of the United States achieved both results with marvelous ease, quietly, legally, philanthropically, without bloodshed, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. To destroy human beings with greater respect for the laws of humanity would be impossible.

  In saying that removal proceeded “without bloodshed,” Tocqueville was not entirely correct. Occasional gunfire erupted on the frontier. In 1832 a group of Indians had crossed the Mississippi into Illinois, attempting to reoccupy land they had lost through a disputed treaty many years before. Indian fighters battled militia forces and killed white settlers. Their best-known chief was Black Hawk, and the fight to repel this Indian incursion came to be known as the Black Hawk War. Abraham Lincoln volunteered for service in a militia company whose men, in the democratic style of the age, elected him captain. His company saw no combat and he later said he shed no blood except from “mosquitoes.” Other white units battled and defeated the Indian band. Black Hawk surrendered and was escorted into captivity by a pair of young U.S. Army officers, Robert Anderson of Kentucky and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.

  Black Hawk was sent to Washington, where he received a scolding from President Jackson, and onward to prison at Fort Monroe on the coast of Virginia. Federal authorities soon approved his release, but ordered him to tour eastern cities so he would go home knowing the size and power of the United States. He was driven in a carriage through the prosperous city of Baltimore. In that city on June 6, 1833, he sat through a performance called Jim Crow, featuring a popular white actor in blackface. A more incredible experience awaited Black Hawk when the play was over. President Jackson was in the audience, having just taken his historic train ride into town that day, and on the way out of the theater the Indian leader chatted with his acquaintance the Great Father of the nation. “You will see,” Jackson told Black Hawk of his eastern tour, “that our young men are as numerous, as the leaves in the woods. What can you do against us?” Black Hawk replied, “I ought not to have taken up the tomahawk. But my people have suffered a great deal.” The Sauk chief was becoming an object of public fascination, drawing crowds nearly as large as those attracted to the president. Finally the masses became so disruptive that Black Hawk had to be taken out of the center city and put up for the night at Fort McHenry.

  The white settlement of former Indian lands continued at an incredible rate. In 1810, the future states of Mississippi and Alabama had a non-Indian population of 16,000. By 1830 the two states had a combined population of 450,000. Between 1830 and 1840 the populace would more than double again, to 965,000. Georgia was enjoying its own steady growth; prominent citizens were planning a new city at the head of the Coosa River, as soon as the land could be cleared of its current occupants, including Major Ridge and John Ross.

  Other Georgia cities were growing in wealth and in cultural refinement. A theater in Augusta hosted a traveling company performing Metamora, the smash-hit play from New York about an Indian chief killed by white men. The Augusta stage echoed with the chief’s final words (“From the east to the west, in the north and in the south shall the cry of vengeance burst, till the lands you have stolen groan under your feet no more!”). Metamora was just beginning its decades-long run as one of the most popular performances on stages across the country, but its premiere in Georgia was not received nearly as well as it had been elsewhere. “Long before the climax was reached,” an observer reported, the crowd began to show “evident dissatisfaction.” The actor playing Metamora was the target of “loud yells and a perfect storm of hisses from the excited audience, who seemed [ready] in their fury to tear everything to pieces. Order was with difficulty restored, and the performance continued until the curtain fell upon the dying chief amid unqualified evidences of disapprobation.” No one attended the play the following night.

  Twenty-seven

  I Have the Right to Address You

  At last the endgame approached, though none could say how near the end might be. Once the missionaries Worcester and Butler withdrew their Supreme Court case at the start of 1833, it was clear that the Cherokees had been blocked at every level and before every branch of government. Even when they won, they lost. Other Indians were doing no better. The Choctaws had been the first to agree to depart under the Indian Removal Act, signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. The U.S. negotiators included Jackson’s friend John Coffee. The Chickasaws too would be crossing the Mississippi, and if the Creeks or Seminoles would not leave, the army was ready to use force.

  One thing changed for the Cherokees beginning in 1833. President Jackson demonstrated a more generous attitude. He was still determined to obtain Cherokee land, but wanted the conflict settled. So did Van Buren, now the heir apparent to the presidency, who still had his niece’s invective ringing in his ears (he would remember her tongue-lashing vividly enough to include it in his memoirs more than twenty years later). Years of resistance had finally forced Jackson to take the Cherokees seriously, and the administration now offered a treaty with far more liberal terms than in past negotiations. In 1816, as we have seen, Jackson paid tens of thousands of dollars for more than a million acres of Cherokee land; in 1817 he took additional land for no money at all. In 1830, an enraged president declared that Cherokees were holding out for money, and that the “speculating tribe” hoped to “make fortunes out of the United States”; Jackson vowed to leave them to suffer “anihilation.” Now Jackson decided that money could solve the problem. The president offered $2.5 million for the remaining Cherokee real estate, or $3 million if the Cherokees would assume the cost of transportation to the west. Comparing Jackson’s 1833 offer with his previous ones allows us to estimate the market value of the nationwide political support that Cherokees had generated in the meantime: instead of a few cents per acre at most, Jackson was offering something close to 50 cents. But Ross, as an occasional speculator in land and reader of newspapers, would have known that the market value of Cherokee land was greater than that. In any case he was bound by his nation’s policy never to sell. He made another of his clever counterproposals, which Jackson must have found infuriating: instead of relocating Indians, the United States should spend its money relocating white settlers who had won Georgia’s lottery for Cherokee land. Having delivered this rapier thrust, which was not accepted, Ross began packing for the journey home to the Cherokee Nation and another season of struggle.

  Ross believed his resistance reflected his nation’s will. Just as Jackson always believed that the majority of the people supported him, Ross had reason to believe that the overwhelming majority of his people supported him. Yet as he traveled toward home in 1833 he also knew that Cherokee unity was cracking under pressure. Crucial members of the Cherokee elite believed Ross was deluded, that he had no realistic path to victory, that he was leading his people toward doom.

  • • •

  During all of Ross’s adult life there had been Cherokees who sensed that the land of their fathers could no longer be the land for them. He was still a teenager when the 1808 treaty had opened the way for the first large band of Cherokees to relocate to the Arkansas country. Ross himself seemed to be flirting with the idea of living among the western Cherokees when he started his boat journey to visit them at the end of 1812. We have seen that other Cherokees migrated over the years
, such as the Cherokee woman at Melton’s Bluff, who left her white husband as well as the eastern land after Jackson obtained the area in 1816. Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, took his writing system westward when he moved in the 1820s. By 1833 several thousand lived in the Arkansas country. They had been established for so long west of the Mississippi that they even had time to be removed; a few years earlier, white settlers had elbowed them out of what was now called the Arkansas Territory, pushing them into land even farther west, which was once again promised to them forever.

  Now some of the principal chief’s most significant allies were asking if life beyond the Mississippi might rescue the rest of their nation. When Supreme Court justice John McLean told Cherokees in 1832 that the ruling he had just approved was useless to them, those absorbing this shock included the son of Major Ridge. John Ridge had heard the same depressing news in an audience with the president himself; he was the one who left the Executive Mansion in “despair.” It may have been no coincidence that Ridge returned home and aired his own doubts. In early 1833, Ridge composed a letter to his chief. “The usual scenes which our afflicted people experience are dreadfully increased,” he reported. Cherokees “are robbed & whipped by the whites almost every day.” The subtext was that Ross’s stubborn course left Cherokees exposed to suffering. Ridge hoped Ross would find some way to relieve his people.

  You very well know that other Gentlemen with myself had despaired of the existence of our dear nation upon its present Location … it may be, that the discussion of this project may be disagreeable to you. But Sir, I have the right to address you … [Once it is admitted] that we can’t be a nation here, I hope we shall attempt to establish it somewhere else! Where, the wisdom of the nation must try to find.

  Losing John Ridge was a blow. He was one of the Cherokee faces to the outside world, handsome and eloquent in English, with his Cornwall education and his white wife. Ross had relied on the younger man not only to join delegations to Washington but to travel up and down the Eastern Seaboard raising money for the Cherokee cause. Ridge was also dangerous because he had the ear of his powerful father, Major Ridge.

  Nor was Ridge the only defection. Elias Boudinot too could no longer bear to follow his chief. The newspaperman told Ross in 1832 that he intended to resign, and unlike his previous effort to quit, in 1829, there would be no talking him out of it. He wanted to allow debate in the pages of the Cherokee Phoenix about whether to stay or go; Ross was not ready for this. They were acting out the dilemma that constantly afflicted embattled minorities: whether to allow disagreement that outsiders might perceive as weakness or insist on the appearance of unity. The editor felt he was being muzzled. “Were I to continue as editor,” Boudinot told Ross, “I do not know whether I could, at the same time, satisfy my own views, and the views of the authorities of the nation.” Aside from editorial policy, Boudinot felt like a failure. He had influenced the national debate to an extent many a modern-day journalist would envy, with his stories reprinted, debated, and commented upon across the United States, but he felt it had been pointless. “The public is as fully apprised as we can ever expect it to be, of our grievances. It knows our troubles, and yet never was it more silent than at present. It is engrossed in other local and sectional interests.”

  Boudinot had always taken a relatively dark view of his people’s condition, and his work as a newsman had not brightened it. Although he traveled the cities of the East promoting Cherokee advances in civilization, he described those advances modestly. He did not proclaim, as others would, that the Cherokees were living through a golden age. And he was painfully aware that so long as the Cherokees persisted in their eastern domain they would be surrounded by the corrupting influences of white men’s intimidation and alcohol. In 1826, while giving a fund-raising speech in Philadelphia, Boudinot said of the Cherokees that it was easy to see “the evil effects of their intercourse with their immediate white neighbors … and it is evident from this intercourse proceed those demoralizing practices which in order to surmount, peculiar and unremitting efforts are necessary.” Boudinot was reaching the same conclusion as Henry R. Storrs, the New York congressman who during the 1830 debate over Indian removal had “fervently” wished that the Indians “were already removed far beyond the reach of the oppression—and, I was about to say, the example of the white man.” After quitting the Phoenix, Boudinot only grew more grim. He would eventually declare that his beloved nation was “almost a dreary waste.” His people faced “moral degradation,” yet it seemed that Ross worried only about money, about material things, about land.

  The great mass of Cherokees, the “dreary waste,” remained strongly behind John Ross. All the available evidence said so. True, it was no longer possible to test Ross’s support through an election; Cherokee legislators should have faced a vote of the people in 1832, but it was understood that the Georgia Guard would disrupt any balloting. Cherokee lawmakers by necessity extended Ross’s term along with their own. There are few detailed accounts of the views of ordinary Cherokees in 1832; there probably were conflicting currents among the suffering people, making it hard to say what would have happened if Ross had faced the pressures of a campaign. But when, a little later, white men engineered votes of Cherokees at mass meetings, hoping to prove that the people had turned against Ross, Cherokees instead supported their chief almost unanimously. Men such as Boudinot admitted that they were a small minority in their nation, which they could explain only by saying that Ross was deluding the masses. Even Cherokee traditionalists seemed to have fallen in line behind the English-speaking modernizer whose leadership they once doubted. In the winter of 1832–33, according to one account, people attending events in support of their chief “donned feathered headdresses, strapped turtle shells filled with pebbles onto their legs and ankles, beat drums, whooped, yelled, and danced all night in the manner of the ancients.”

  Ross also maintained solid majorities in the legislature, but as men like Ridge and Boudinot hardened in their opposition, political parties began to form. The men who favored negotiating for removal were called the Treaty Party. Those against were the National Party, or simply the Ross Party. This was one more way that the tiny republic in the Cherokee Nation mirrored the larger republic that surrounded it. Each was spawning a two-party system under the pressure of change. In spirit, the members of the Treaty Party were a little like Henry Clay’s emerging party, soon to be known as the Whigs: moralistic and too closely associated with the elites for their own good, but absolutely convinced that their nation’s chief executive was bent on ruin. The Ross Party, in spirit, was a little like Jackson and the Democrats—tough, politically innovative, determined to win. If Jackson fought stubbornly for principle in his economically perilous war to kill the Bank of the United States, so did Ross in his life-and-death struggle over land. If Jackson was a member of the frontier elite whose story captured the imagination of ordinary people, Ross was a member of the frontier elite whose struggle reflected the spirit of his people. In the years to come each man was forever defending, and forever defended by, the common man.

  Twenty-eight

  We Are Yet Your Friends

  Ross’s critics were right, though. He did not have a way forward, could not find a way around the Georgians or Jackson. He tried one more time at the start of 1834, beginning yet another long journey from the Cherokee Nation to Washington.

  Ross had been joining delegations to Washington for most of his adult life. There had not been a notably successful visit since 1816, when the group including Ross blocked Jackson’s effort to “run the line” and capture two million acres. But whatever else happened, Cherokee delegates typically had a chance to meet with the president, which Ross planned to do when he arrived. He checked into Brown’s on Pennsylvania Avenue, a hotel also known as the Indian Queen. Here, on the morning of February 3, the Indian chief applied his most elaborate cursive to the page.

  The undersigned Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation
, inbehalf of himself and the Cherokee delegation, present their respects to the President of the United States and beg leave to inform him that they are desirous to have an interview with him, for the purpose of having a free and full conversation …

  Jno. Ross.

  Word came back that Jackson would see them at noon on February 5. The Executive Mansion was near enough for Ross to walk there on the appointed day, about ten blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue through the unfinished city, with the green-domed Capitol at his back.

  The “free and full conversation” with the president could not have been entirely cordial. Jackson was unhealthy and distracted—in a letter that day to his son in Tennessee, the sixty-six-year-old president scribbled that he was “quite unwell, with pain in my left breast & shoulder,” the places he had been shot in the duel in 1806 and the gunfight in 1813; he went on to complain that Andrew Jr. was failing to keep him informed about the Hermitage cotton crop. Amid such personal annoyances the Cherokees arrived in his office. The men who had spurned his offer of $2.5 million in 1833 were back again. If the conversation followed the same lines as the letters the participants sent each other in the days that followed, then the Cherokees spent the meeting searching for any solution that would satisfy Jackson short of removal. Jackson said that only removal would do. The Cherokees appealed for protection from Georgia’s oppression. Jackson replied that he was powerless, and bade the Cherokee delegation a polite good-bye.

  Ross returned to the Indian Queen. In keeping with custom, additional negotiations would take place in writing, slowly, over a period of weeks. Left with time to think, he realized that he had been dealing with Andrew Jackson for two decades now. Twenty years earlier, he had received the summons to rejoin the Cherokee Regiment for the march toward Horseshoe Bend. Some of the years since then had been times of steady gains for Ross and for his people. But since Ross’s election as principal chief in 1828, the props had been steadily knocked out from under his world.