The War Department had hired a “conductor” to guide the Cherokees, one B. B. Cannon, who kept a terse daily journal. In the early weeks he remarked on the worsening condition of his charges (“the Indians appear fatigued this evening—road extremely rough”), but not until after leaving Nashville did he record the first death.
Nov. 1st 1837
Marched at 8 O’C A.M. buried Ducks child, passed through Hopkinsville Ken … issued corn & fodder, Flour and bacon. 19 miles today.
By November 8, Cannon was describing stragglers who could not continue “without endangering the lives of their children.” As the party crossed the Ohio River, southern Illinois, and the Mississippi, the reports of mortality became frequent.
Nov 29th 1837
Remained in camp. Sickness still increasing. Buried Corn Tassle’s child today.
• • •
Dec. 4th 1837
Marched at 9 O’C A.M. Buried George Killion, and left Mr. Wells to bury a waggoner (black boy) who died this morning. Scarcely room in the waggons for the sick.
• • •
Dec. 8th 1837
Buried Nancy Big Bear’s grandchild. Marched at 9 O’C A.M… . Several drunk.
On December 15 Cannon’s record of bacon distributed, miles marched, and bodies buried was punctuated by news from a woman who had walked or ridden hundreds of miles in recent weeks:
Joseph Starr’s wife had a child last night.
On December 17 they buried two people as it snowed. The entry for December 25 recorded a march of fifteen and a half miles and made no mention of the holiday. On December 28 a child born the day before was buried. The survivors reached their destination in time for the New Year, having been two and a half months on the road.
These were journeys of people who had agreed to move, chosen the timing for their departure, and prepared for it. Behind them in the eastern Cherokee Nation were thousands who had not agreed, had not prepared, and would not have a choice of time. For these thousands the journey would be harder, physically and spiritually, should they finally be forced out on May 23, 1838. And they would be forced, according to a handbill circulating in the Cherokee Nation. “We will not attempt to describe the evils that may fall upon you, if you are still obstinate, and refuse,” read the warning authored by federal commissioners and copied on a printing press at Athens, Tennessee. John Ross “may have deceived himself,” but must no longer deceive his people. Reality was about to arrive on the point of a bayonet.
Ross faced a choice in the spring of 1838. He could see his people sacrificed in a futile defense of their rights. Or he could admit defeat and attend to their survival.
Ross refused to do either. He decided that if his people were to be removed, they must at least get a better deal.
• • •
The last census of the eastern Cherokees before their emigration was conducted in 1835. It showed a people who, after being severely diminished by centuries of war and disease, were beginning to grow in numbers again. The total population of 16,542 was very small but very young, with a median age around eighteen. In other words there were at least as many minors as adults, as was also the case in the wider United States. A little less than one-third of the entire population was able to read in English or Cherokee. The Cherokee Nation had a relatively diverse rural economy—2,809 farmers growing corn and wheat, 339 mechanics, 3,129 spinners, and 2,484 weavers. There were 24 mills as well as the inexplicably precise number of 66.5 ferryboats. Nobody was listed as a “hunter” or a “warrior,” the activities that advocates of removal described as the sole occupations of the Indian. The census drew elaborate racial distinctions: about three-quarters of the nation were counted as “Fullbloods,” and the remainder were “Halfbloods” with one Cherokee parent, “Quarterbloods” with a Cherokee grandparent, or else people like John Ross who had less than one-quarter Cherokee ancestry. A few were “Mixed Spanish” or “Mixed Negro.” There were 1,592 slaves.
To evict them all, President Van Buren assigned the army’s ablest officer, Major General Winfield Scott. It was Scott who now assumed the command that had once been held by General Wool, overseeing all military matters in the Cherokee country. Scott was a hero of the War of 1812, a recent veteran of the Second Seminole War, and the author of an army manual on infantry tactics. He was a superb bureaucratic infighter who managed to keep his job even though he was a Whig with ambitions to succeed the Democratic presidents he served. An oversize man with a love of fine food, Scott also had an oversize ego, often vindicated by his ability.
General Scott received his orders in Washington at the start of April, less than seven weeks before the deadline. He heard that John Ross was in the capital and left his card at the Cherokee chief’s lodgings. As Ross recalled, they met later and “had a long talk.”
Scott … says his object is avoid the shedding of blood if possible, and should it so happen that one drop of Cherokee blood be spilt that he will weep!
Scott nevertheless had his orders, and went southward to the Cherokee Nation prepared to use force if necessary to move Cherokees on May 23. The War Department assured him that he would receive a regiment of infantry, a regiment of artillery, and six companies of dragoons or mounted soldiers from the regular army. Most of these soldiers would arrive late or not at all; the insurgencies in Alabama and Florida had stretched the army to the limit. Even cadets at the military academy at West Point were being ordered that spring to prepare to be thrown immediately into active duty. Instead of regular troops, Scott would rely mainly on about three thousand volunteers raised by the affected states, especially the Georgians, whom he did not trust. He was convinced that every Georgia volunteer left home vowing “never to return without having killed at least one Indian,” and feared the Georgians might commit abuses that would trigger war. He issued orders that any soldier seen committing “acts of harshness” was to be immediately arrested, and decided to supervise the Georgians personally. He at least had help overseeing such men from a small staff of regular army officers—phlegmatic veterans such as his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Robert Anderson. In 1861, Anderson would become famous as the Union commander who defended Fort Sumter on the opening day of the Civil War, but in 1838 he was known as an Indian fighter; he was one of the men who had taken Black Hawk into custody a few years before.
Arriving at Athens, Tennessee, fifteen days before the deadline, Scott wrote out an address to the Cherokees and had copies run off on the local printing press. His message was a mixture of bluster and grace. The general said his “powerful army” was large enough “to render resistance and escape alike hopeless.” Dismissing his private misgivings about this force, Scott assured Cherokees that the soldiers were “your friends… . The desire of every one of us is to execute our painful duty in mercy. We are commanded by the President to act toward you in that spirit, and such is also the wish of the whole people of America.”
In surrounding white communities there was an atmosphere of anticipation. A North Carolina newspaper noted that “a company of volunteers marched through Morganton on Thursday … toward the Cherokee service, in fine spirits and to the cheers of their friends.” North Carolina also announced its plan to begin selling former Cherokee land. Among Cherokees there was anticipation of a different kind. John Ross’s brother Lewis, monitoring developments at the federal Indian agency near General Scott’s headquarters, sent a letter to Washington. “Dear Brother… . Nothing but destruction stares us in the face. What is to be our fate god only knows.” The only people who seemed entirely unaffected by the crisis were ordinary Cherokees, who were supposed to be the focus of it. Early that spring, the federal Indian agent had made an observation so disturbing that the agent forwarded his discovery to Washington. He had seen Cherokees serenely planting their corn crops, as if expecting to be present for the harvest in the fall.
Unrolling maps on a table, peering into the mountains, General Scott reviewed the infrastructure for removal that was already in place. The prev
ious commander, General Wool’s successor, had established twenty-three military posts throughout the Cherokee Nation, most including stockades. From these posts, when Scott gave the order, troops would range out to round up local Cherokees until the stockades were filled. The troops would then send their prisoners under guard to one of three embarkation points, and afterward repeat the operation, refilling the stockades. To man these posts, the army had enrolled so many volunteer soldiers that Scott was tempted to send some home. In particular there were too many Georgia horsemen, who moved too quickly to control and were no good for standing guard duty.
General Scott was writing a report to his superiors in Washington about his final plans when an officer asked to see him. The officer had come across some intelligence: a piece of paper. Scott read the paper and then, stunned, resumed his report to Washington: “Whilst writing the foregoing, a letter has been brought to me,” Scott reported. It was a letter that was circulating among wildly excited Cherokees. “The letter is substantially credited by almost every body here but myself.” It came from Washington—from the Cherokee delegation that included John Ross. It said Ross and the government were on the verge of delaying the emigration for two years.
If the letter was accurate, then Scott’s address, the volunteers, and the stockades were all for nothing. If the letter was false, and the emigration must proceed, then Scott’s job would be infinitely harder, because no Cherokees would voluntarily leave if they believed their principal chief might have found a way for them to stay.
Scott had to treat this news as a rumor. He had no official word either way. He finished his own report with a request for the War Department to clarify the situation. It was May 18. It would take up to two weeks for his letter to reach the capital. The deadline for emigration was five days away.
• • •
It may have been the corn planting that finally moved federal authorities to begin talking seriously with John Ross. There was something unnerving about Cherokees plowing the same fields that they had plowed for years. White men had said long ago that Indians “in a wandering state” could not really claim land simply because they passed through it while hunting. The way to claim land was to improve it—to build a house, to put up fencing, to work a farm. To become the owner of land in this way was a natural right of man. Indians failed to exercise this right, it was said—except that the Cherokees had done it for decades now, long enough that the one-half of the Cherokee Nation who were under eighteen could not remember any other way. Now in the spring of 1838 the farmers of the Cherokee Nation proved their ownership of the land one more time. White men who missed the philosophical depth of this act of peaceful defiance thought they instead detected madness. Calamity loomed.
Until news of the corn planting arrived, Ross had spent a frustrating winter in Washington. Federal authorities seemed to have lost interest in him. Then, early in April, a War Department official named Samuel Cooper met with President Van Buren; they apparently discussed the Cherokee corn crop. Soon afterward Cooper went to meet with John Ross. Ross reported afterward that Cooper brought up the corn planting, and said the Cherokees
were evidently deluded—that if I and the Delegation would write a letter home advising the people that they were compelled to move under the Treaty by [May 23] and that they must prepare to do so—that a proposition from us for a new arrangement would then [be] received and considered.
Ross declined this offer. He knew by now that his people must move. He wanted to improve the terms under which they agreed to do so. But he would not tell his people to move and then seek an agreement. He needed an agreement first.
I replied that I had never deluded the Cherokees on any subject … and that the US agents had themselves enlightened them on this subject in my absence and in their own way. That so far as the Cherokees were planting corn and were not preparing for a removal, it was not a new fact nor was it to be wondered at, for their opposition to a removal was too generally known to be contradicted.
The War Department official, Ross said, was then “silenced and asked me to call again on tomorrow.”
It was a bad time for the Van Buren administration to risk a humanitarian disaster in Cherokee country. The president had difficulties enough. The financial Panic of 1837 still loomed over the nation, despite brief and illusory signs of recovery. By 1841 one study would estimate that the depression had forced the closure of thirty-three thousand businesses. Van Buren’s administration was becoming less popular, and political protest against Indian removal was growing again. More petitions were flooding Congress. Once again, religious groups led the way—this time Quakers, who had a presence in Pennsylvania, a vital state in the Democrats’ coalition. Indian removal was becoming the sort of morass in which even politicians who approved of the policy goal could score points by attacking its botched execution. Van Buren had no need of chaos, or violence, in the Cherokee Nation on May 23.
Ross was in better spirits as the talks intensified. His friend John Howard Payne was in town—Payne, the famous songwriter who’d been arrested with Ross and was now becoming obsessed with writing Cherokee propaganda for the press. The two men spent some leisure time together. On April 10 Ross received a note from a younger woman in town, and he immediately wrote back to “Miss E M,” as he addressed her.
My friend Mr. Payne and myself will do ourselves the honor of calling this evening for you & Sister, to attend Mr. Catlin’s lecture.
Mr. Catlin: that was George Catlin, the painter who had made a portrait of Osceola during the Seminole leader’s last days. Catlin was displaying many paintings in a traveling exhibition—“Catlin’s Indian Gallery,” as it was called in an advertisement in the National Intelligencer. His lecture, which the paintings illustrated, was so detailed that it required “two successive evenings” for Catlin to report on his visits with “38 different tribes” speaking “38 different languages,” and to talk of “their Villages, Dances, Religious Ceremonies &c … and also many splendid specimens of Costume, Weapons, &c.” The two sisters, John Howard Payne, and the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation paid 90 cents each to watch the show.
Refreshed by this entertainment, Ross composed a letter to President Van Buren: “The interests of your people cannot be dearer to you, than those of mine are to me.” He said he could help Van Buren achieve removal peacefully if the president would improve the treaty terms. To a War Department official he bluntly said he would do nothing to help the government unless it helped him.
You can expel us by force, we grant; but you cannot make us call it fairness.
Poinsett, the secretary of war, said later that Ross would never leave Washington unless he got a new deal. Perhaps Poinsett felt coerced by people whom the government was more accustomed to coerce: “The presence in this city of the chiefs and headmen, who alone possess the necessary influence to induce their people to yield a ready submission to the wishes of the Government, and their positive refusal to return to the nation, rendered it unavoidable to treat with them here.” A possible agreement took shape. The Treaty of New Echota would technically not be voided; doing so would meet political resistance, and a new treaty would require the approval of two-thirds of the Senate. But some added terms could be negotiated and slipped through Congress by attaching them to unrelated legislation. Ross, calculating the value of Cherokee real estate, said that “five millions of dollars” must be increased to $13 million. And the Cherokees would voluntarily migrate if given an additional two years to set their affairs in order. (It was when this deal began to seem plausible that the Cherokee delegation sent its letter back home, confounding General Scott.) The final deal was less generous, though Ross got some of what he wanted. Thirteen million dollars was more than the government would pay, but the amount could be increased to more than $6 million. More important, money would be paid to the Cherokee government instead of being spread among individuals. Van Buren rejected the extra two years for emigration, but Ross would be allowed to organize the e
migration at government expense, taking it out of the hands of the army and gaining control over the conditions under which the journey was made.
Ross had achieved all he could. He had made the transaction with the United States somewhat less unfair. He had preserved his people as a people. Now he would lead them to a new country. Poinsett had done what no other U.S. official seemed able to do: reach an agreement with John Ross. The secretary of war could feel relieved at gaining a partial reprieve for the conscience of his nation. However much they may have been coerced, the Cherokees would at last go on their own; the history of the United States need not forever be stained by the specter of soldiers rousting thousands of unarmed civilians from their homes at bayonet point. Poinsett wrote a letter to General Scott confirming the sudden change in plans, and dropped his letter in the mail for its two-week transit to the Cherokee Nation.
The date on his letter was May 23.
“No communication has reached me from Washington,” wrote General Scott on May 22. He had his orders, and had received no others; he would proceed. On his own authority, he might have put off the emigration until the news from Washington was clarified, but Scott believed the security situation demanded action. He constantly worried that if the Cherokees did not leave quickly enough, white settlers would attack them.
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 30