Another prop was being knocked out that winter. Ross’s brother Andrew joined a small group of Cherokees who created an opposition delegation to Washington. They arrived in the capital with a letter of introduction from the governor of Tennessee, who said they would “be of great use in accomplishing the objects of the government.” The opposition delegation were not credible enough to pose as leaders of the Cherokee Nation, and Jackson did not negotiate a treaty with them. But the president now knew that the fault lines in the Cherokee Nation ran very near Ross’s feet, and Ross, gathering intelligence about the rival delegation at the Indian Queen, knew that Jackson knew.
• • •
Outside the windows of the Indian Queen, the traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue would have given Ross no sign of the political turmoil in the capital. President Jackson was still driving to destroy the Bank of the United States, while Senator Henry Clay and his emerging Whig Party were determined to save it. Arguing that the bank’s excessive power was a danger to a free republic, Jackson began withdrawing the federal government’s deposits in 1833, overriding the objections of virtually all his advisers. The law did not permit him to withdraw the deposits unless the bank was unsafe, which nobody believed; his act was so far beyond the law that his treasury secretary resigned rather than give the order. Senator Henry Clay orchestrated an investigation, and when Jackson refused to produce a document as demanded, the Senate voted for the only time in history to censure the president. The Bank of the United States also retaliated. From its headquarters in Philadelphia, a stone-columned building modeled on the Parthenon, bank president Nicholas Biddle began calling in business loans, so swiftly contracting the credit available to the economy that it triggered financial chaos. Some contraction was necessary to protect the bank as it lost such a large portion of its deposits, but Biddle went beyond what the emergency required. He was hoping that the risk of calamity would prompt businessmen to pressure Jackson to relent. But when businessmen complained to Jackson, the president simply told them to complain to Biddle.
If Ross took notice of the crisis, he did not write down his thoughts. He was preoccupied. March 28, the day the Senate took its historic vote on censure, was the day Ross wrote a new proposal to the president. This latest letter showed just how desperate the chief’s position had become, although it began on a personal note.
Twenty years have now elapsed since we participated with you in the toils and dangers of war, and obtained a victory over the unfortunate and deluded red foe at [Tohopeka], on the memorable 27th March 1814, that portentous day was shrouded by a cloud of darkness, besprinkled with the awful streaks of blood and death. It is in the hour of such times that the heart of man can be truly tested and correctly judged. We were then your friends—and the conduct of man is an index to his disposition. Now in these days of profound peace, why should the gallant soldiers which in time of war walked hand in hand thro’ blood and carnage, be not still friends? We answer, that we are yet your friends.
It was only one of the extraordinary paragraphs in the most extraordinary letter he ever wrote. There is something jarring about Ross’s choice of words, and so carefully did he deploy language that the choice could hardly have been accidental. “The unfortunate and deluded red foe,” he said, referring to red men as if he were not an Indian himself, as if he regarded himself as something rather different. It is hard not to believe that John Ross was subtly leaning away from his Indian ancestry, and leaning toward his Scottish forebears—leaning, in other words, toward the side of his ancestry that he shared in common with Andrew Jackson. Ross was straining to make a connection with a ruthless and prejudiced man, who would do anything to smite his enemies but would also do anything to aid his friends. The principal chief of the Cherokee Nation was seeking one more time to pass as white.
Ross made this emotional appeal in support of a new proposal. He went far beyond anything the Cherokee legislature had authorized him to do; he would face sharp criticism for it when he returned home. All he wanted was the protection of federal law, which should already have been assured him by treaties and by the courts. For this he was now willing to pay an extraordinary price.
Will you agree to enter into an arrangement on the basis of the Cherokees becoming prospectively citizens of the United States; provided the Nation will cede to the United States a portion of its territory for the use of Georgia? And will you agree to have the laws and treaties executed and enforced for the effectual protection of the nation on the remainder of its Territory for a definite period?
Georgia would be offered a slice of land—while Ross looked forward “prospectively” to a day when Cherokees would become citizens, abandoning their final shreds of national independence. His delegation regarded this as the ultimate concession.
It is plausible that Ross did not really mean it. He may have intended only to buy time to reach the end of Jackson’s administration, leaving the “prospective” plan for eventual citizenship to be pushed into the future and finally discarded. Or Ross may well have meant it, understanding that it was time for a step that had been on his mind at least since the mid-1820s. Ross faced a choice between the perpetuation of the Cherokee Nation as a political entity and the preservation of at least some Cherokee land—and he decided that the land was more important.
The principal chief’s true intentions would never be known, because Jackson did not test them. Although the letter was addressed to Jackson, there is no record that he answered it personally. Instead a disapproving note came from an aide, and the president maintained his course. A partial solution would not satisfy the Georgians, and according to Jackson it was the Georgians alone with whom Ross must come to terms. Georgia, not Jackson, was destroying the Cherokee Nation; the president was merely standing aside to let it happen. So it was with the national economy—the Bank of the United States, not Jackson, was wrecking it. So it had been twenty years earlier when his soldiers were preparing to execute John Wood. “Between [the] law & its offender,” he had written then, “the commanding General ought not to be expected to interpose.”
Twenty-nine
Should They Be Satisfied with the Character of That Country
On December 28, 1835, a federal Indian agent went for a walk in central Florida. The agent’s name was Wiley Thompson, and his walk took him outside Fort King, the army stockade near which he worked. Thompson strolled with an army lieutenant who had earlier joined him for lunch. They were walking through a lightly populated area, with fields that were brown in this chilly month but verdant in season. Thompson had a plantation in this wide and fertile country, which was connected to the outside world by a narrow trail. It pointed southward toward Tampa Bay, and northward toward the old Spanish fortress at St. Augustine. A branch of the trail also led to Jacksonville, the town named in honor of the man who once had conquered Florida.
Wiley Thompson was in his fifties, a former congressman and a Jackson man. He had seen service in one of the forces fighting the war against the Creeks in 1813–14, and afterward was named a major general in the Georgia militia. As a congressman from Georgia, he had been in the House in May 1830 to cast his vote in favor of the Indian Removal Act. Thompson closely followed the struggles of the Cherokees of his state, and in 1833 wrote a letter expressing his “deep regret” at the “sudden and unaccountable” resistance of John Ross to Jackson’s $2.5 million offer for a “speedy adjustment.” Shortly afterward Thompson left Congress, and President Jackson appointed him to oversee Indian affairs in Florida for $1,500 a year. Thompson was supposed to work himself out of a job, ushering the Seminoles out of Florida and closing down the federal Indian agency. But two and a half years later the plan to close the agency had been delayed, and the Seminoles were still in place.
In the 1820s the Seminoles had been pushed away from the coastal areas and into about four million acres of the interior of the peninsula. In 1832 they were asked to give up the remainder. James Gadsden, a former officer in Jackson’s army, summoned Seminole h
eadmen to Payne’s Landing, in central Florida, and caused their marks to appear on a treaty of removal. Gadsden was the diplomat who years later would negotiate a famous purchase of land from Mexico that completed the American Southwest. In this case he bought central Florida for about 2 cents an acre. And the terms grew even better through their interpretation. The treaty seemed to say the Seminoles were not actually obliged to give up their land unless their representatives visited and approved of their proposed new territory in the West—the natives would move “should they be satisfied with the character of that country”—but the United States took the view that the Seminoles must depart whether they liked it or not.
Thompson was having trouble enforcing the treaty. Some of the fifteen Seminole leaders involved, all of them apparently illiterate, began denying that they had ever put their marks on such a document. Whether they marked it or not, the chiefs were having trouble persuading their people to follow it. Seminoles were an exceedingly complex people. Their numbers included descendants of generations of migrants, survivors, and refugees—Creeks and others who fled to Florida to escape Indian warfare or marauding white settlers, or who lost their land through treaties. (The Creeks who retreated to Florida after the Battle of Horseshoe Bend were following a century-old pattern of migration.) There was another kind of refugee too: escaped slaves lived among the Seminoles, some of them accorded free status and others enslaved by Indians. In either case their social status was different than in white society. Some intermarried with the Seminoles and even held positions of influence. Many opposed the treaty, knowing that if they ever came out of central Florida, they would probably end up in a slave market. Preparations for migration stalled. Gunfire and Seminole raids had been reported before Agent Thompson and his companion took their walk on December 28.
The two men were being watched. A small band of Seminoles had been waiting for an opportunity to settle some business with Thompson. Their leader was known to white men as Powell, and among Seminoles as Osceola. He was a Jackson man of a different sort: his parents were Creek Red Sticks, who had battled against Jackson’s army and other white forces in the Creek War of 1813–14 before escaping to Florida when Osceola was a boy. Now, having grown up among the Seminole populace, he was a prominent warrior.
Even from a distance, Osceola had no trouble recognizing Thompson, for they had had intimate dealings for some time. The young man had come to Thompson’s attention for his speeches on the injustice of removal. Wiley Thompson found Osceola so frustrating that he took the extreme step of having the Seminole clapped in irons. This was considered an even greater humiliation in native culture than it would have been in white culture. Thompson would not free the younger man until he agreed to sign the disputed removal treaty, which Osceola did—only to renege as soon as he was released. He said that Seminoles who agreed to move west should be killed, and then actually killed a leader whose X mark was on the treaty. Now he waited for his moment to confront Thompson—and when the agent and his companion were too far from Fort King to hope for help, the Seminoles fell upon them. It was said Thompson’s scalp was cut into pieces so that each man could take away a souvenir.
The assassination of Jackson’s man in Florida was part of a two-pronged attack. A second, much larger party of Seminoles were watching the southerly trail approaching Fort King, for they knew that soldiers were marching from Tampa Bay to reinforce the tiny garrison in the fort. One hundred eight soldiers appeared on the trail before them, bundled up against the chill of the day; the Seminoles opened fire from behind pine trees and palmettos, and their opening volley killed or wounded up to half the unprepared troops. The commander, Major Francis Dade, was among the dead. Surviving soldiers managed to blast away with a cannon they had dragged up the trail; its covering fire briefly drove off the attackers and bought the soldiers time to make a breastwork out of fallen trees. They fought until they ran out of ammunition. The attackers killed all but three wounded men, who slipped away.
What became known as the Second Seminole War was fully under way. There was no glory in it. It was fought under horrifying conditions, amid palmetto scrub or knee-deep in swamps. The bands of Seminoles were near starvation at the start of the war and suffered even more as they eluded white troops. White soldiers flailed about in swamps while their commanders flailed about for a winning strategy. In its various stages the war would last seven years, nearly as long as the United States’ formal combat involvement in Vietnam. The number of U.S. military deaths in the Second Seminole War was 1,535. As a percentage of the national population, this was considerably greater than the number of military deaths in the United States’ twenty-first-century war in Iraq. Most of the army’s deaths were from disease. Seminole deaths and white civilian deaths, though not fully counted, were considerable. No heroes emerged from the war except Osceola, who murdered a federal agent in cold blood as part of what a later generation might have labeled a coordinated terror attack—and yet before the end of the conflict, the government would treat Osceola so dishonorably that it triggered another wave of revulsion at Indian removal.
The seemingly endless conflict would relate in more than one way to the Cherokees and John Ross. For one thing, Ross was eventually lured into playing a small but embarrassing part in it. In a larger sense, the rebellion of the Seminoles illustrated the road Ross had chosen not to take. If Ross was performing an experiment in the limits of peaceful resistance, the Seminoles were performing a simultaneous experiment in guerrilla warfare. And Ross would always have to keep in mind that many senior Seminole leaders had not chosen to start this conflict. It had been driven by junior leaders such as Osceola, who felt their elders had given away too much. Ross knew he could keep most of his people united behind a peaceful policy so long as he was firmly resisting the government. But if he ever thought of giving in, he had to wonder if some Cherokee Osceola might rise up in protest and force the nation toward war.
PART NINE
Tears
1835–1838
Thirty
Five Millions of Dollars
First they took his house. It happened in early 1835, while Ross was in Washington for more failed negotiations (the Senate raised the offer to $5 million; Ross had seemed ready to accept whatever the Senate would pay, but then backed away; he was by then demanding $20 million). While the principal chief was away in the capital, the white family that claimed Ross’s home through the Georgia lottery took possession. The Georgia Guard tried to send word to Ross in Washington that his house was gone, but the message missed him. He had no idea as he made the long journey home. He arrived at Head of Coosa late at night to discover his family missing and a different family in their place. The new owner, irked to be awakened, barked that he had no idea where the Indian’s wife and children might have gone. Softening a little, and noting the lateness of the hour, the man offered Ross a room for the night, and in the morning charged Ross a fee for the care of his horse. Ross tracked down his family and moved them to Cherokee land in Tennessee, where they took up residence in a two-room cabin.
After taking his home, they took Ross’s voice. In August 1835 the Cherokee Phoenix printing press was still located at New Echota, though publication had been suspended due to the difficulty in finding a competent staff. Ross sent a wagon to bring the press to Tennessee, but the Georgia Guard reached New Echota first. They seized the press, finally following the advice of Jackson’s onetime attorney general, John Macpherson Berrien, who had said that this instrument of Cherokee power should be removed. Generations later, archaeologists would find no sign of the Phoenix except about fifteen hundred pieces of old metal type on the ground.
After his voice, they took Ross’s freedom. On the night of November 7, 1835, he was in his Tennessee cabin with a visitor. They heard dogs barking outside, and then a hoarse voice: “Ross, Ross!” Armed men crowded into the house. “We have business with you, sir,” said one of the rifle-toting men. “You are to consider yourself a prisoner.”
; Ross’s guest at the time of the intrusion was a well-known writer and playwright, John Howard Payne. He was in the Cherokee Nation gathering material for a literary magazine, and was about to obtain more material than expected. According to the account Payne wrote soon afterward, Ross remained calm. “Well, gentlemen, I shall not resist,” Ross told the gunmen. “Why am I a prisoner? By whose order am I taken?”
“You’ll know that soon enough,” one of his captors replied.
The gunmen were members of the Georgia Guard, so zealous in protecting the sovereignty of Georgia that they had invaded Tennessee. The men loaded Ross, his visitor, and their papers onto horses and rode south into Georgia. “A wild storm arose,” Payne recalled, and “rain poured in torrents. The movements of our escort were exceedingly capricious; sometimes whooping and galloping and singing obscene songs, and sometimes for a season walking in sullen silence.” Payne claimed to have heard one of his guards humming “Home, Sweet Home,” a popular tune of the era. Payne was delighted. He was the author of that song. By dawn the dripping party had reached its destination, a windowless cabin where Ross and Payne were instructed to remain with the door always open and guards nearby. The gunmen would later accuse Ross and his guest of a conspiracy “to raise an insurrection among the negroes, who are to join the Indians against the whites.”
Payne wrote a description of the Cherokee leader at the time of his detention. Ross was “of middle size—rather under than over;—his age about five & forty: he is mild, intelligent & entirely unaffected.” Georgians had previously warned Payne not to waste time with this “sordid” and “silent” man, but Payne found Ross “different in every respect from what he had been represented to be.” Ross feared for a time that they might be lynched, but their captors became less strident as the days passed. Possibly their improving attitude was a reaction to the uproar spreading in the world outside the cabin. Tennesseans regarded the raid as a violation of their state sovereignty. A Tennessee newspaper dubbed the raiders a “mob extraordinary,” while the governor of Tennessee wrote his counterpart in Georgia demanding that he disavow the raid or else Tennessee might raise a paramilitary force of its own. Georgia’s governor danced away from the controversy, saying he knew nothing of the arrest except “common street rumor.” Ross and Payne were both released by late November.
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 27