Scott departed his headquarters, leaving instructions for any mail to be forwarded. On the twenty-third he arrived at New Echota, intending to keep an eye on the Georgians. On the twenty-fifth he watched as two new regiments of Georgia infantry were organized; these foot soldiers would require less maintenance and be easier to control than the horsemen. The reinforcements were still en route to their stations when the roundups began on May 26, 1838.
The soldiers cleared out one farm at a time, one valley at a time. Approaching a house, the troops would surround it so that no one would escape, then order out the occupants with no more than they could carry. One Cherokee house contained Rebecca Neugin, who was about three years old at the time, one of nine children of a Cherokee family. Decades later she gave the family story of how they were led into captivity. “When the soldier came to our house my father wanted to fight,” she said,
but my mother told him that the soldiers would kill him if he did and we surrendered without a fight. They drove us out of our house to join other prisoners in a stockade. After they took us away, my mother begged them to let her go back and get some bedding. So they let her go back and she brought what bedding and cooking utensils she could carry and had to leave behind all of our household possessions.
On May 30 a Cherokee student wrote a letter to a friend in the North; her letter was published in newspapers, its author described only as a “young Cherokee girl.” She was staying at a missionary school near Red Clay, Tennessee. She heard drums beating “as we were going from school to dinner,” and briefly feared the school was to be invaded, but the soldiers were leaving the mission alone for the moment. “Two hundred or more” men marched past “with their bright gems glittering in the sunshine and beating their drums, and playing fiddles and fifes, which seemed to the people who were very sad, as if they meant to mock at them.” Many people “expected speedy extermination… . The whites just take the Indians without waiting or warning. They then lock up the doors every where, and leave all their things to be valued according to their own notions.” One day she saw “a considerable number” of Cherokees passing. “They had run away from the soldiers. They had nothing with them but the clothes they wore on their backs… . The crop looks very flourishing indeed, and the wheat has begun to head, and our garden looks very nice; but every body seems very much plagued, and there has been a considerable number of deaths in the neighborhood.”
Though some Cherokees fled, there was no organized resistance. On May 29 a white engineer was encamped “in a pretty section of the country” near New Echota, where his crew was surveying a future road: “Many of our friends are troubling themselves about our danger from the Indians. We never think of the subject … the Cherokees are a peaceable, inoffensive people.” General Scott believed the troops also were peaceable, although there was no way to minimize the shocking moment when the soldiers came over a fence or through a door. Long afterward, an ethnographer who lived among the Cherokees listened to some of their stories: “Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play.” Sometimes civilians followed the detachments of soldiers, waiting to plunder the homes left vacant, or even digging up graves, “to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead.”
A captain in the First Artillery Regiment, L. B. Webster, ranged out in June to round up eight hundred Cherokees in far western North Carolina. Escorting them toward one of the main emigration camps near Calhoun, Tennessee, Webster’s company picked up about a hundred additional Cherokees on the way. The Cherokees greatly outnumbered his troops but made no move to resist. “I experienced no difficulty in getting them along,” he wrote home to his wife, “other than what arose from fatigue, and … the roads over the mountains, which are the worst I ever saw. We were eight days making the journey (80 miles) and it was pitiful to behold the women & children, who suffered exceedingly—as they were all obliged to walk, with the exception of the sick.”
There were varied descriptions of the detention camps in which the Cherokees were held. People who did not have to live in them remembered them more fondly than people who did. Long afterward General Scott recalled the camp where Captain Webster brought his prisoners as “happily chosen,” a “well shaded” area that was twelve miles by four and bounded by a river—a place where sullen, protesting Cherokees at first refused even the food they were offered, but finally accepted generous sustenance. Scott was at least correct when he suggested that the Cherokees were spread over a considerable distance. A doctor who treated them did not describe them as penned in like cattle, but instead “scattered and dispersed” in “family camps” that fell within a “general encampment.” Yet in a letter written at the time of his military operations, General Scott confessed that the Cherokees suffered from the loss of their cooking utensils, clothes, and other goods “consequent upon the hurry of capture and removal.” Evan Jones, a missionary who lived among the Cherokees, described them as “prisoners” who had instantly been hurled from “comfortable circumstances” into “abject poverty.” Captain Webster, the Tennessee volunteer, was overcome with feelings of foreboding as his company guarded the prisoners. He wrote a letter to his wife to say there were “seven or eight thousand” Cherokees in various camps around his company, “and they are the most quiet people you ever saw.” The only consistent sound was that of preachers, white and Cherokee, who went among prisoners and soldiers alike trying to save souls. Captain Webster was not consoled. “Among these sublime mountains and in the dark forests with the thunder often sounding in the distance,” the talk of God only made him wonder what would “fall upon my guilty head as one of the instruments of oppression.”
So efficient was General Scott’s operation that thousands of Cherokees had been rounded up into the emigration camps before he finally received the letter from Secretary of War Poinsett in Washington making it clear that none of this had really been necessary, and that John Ross would arrive soon to take charge of a voluntary emigration.
• • •
In two follow-up letters, Poinsett advised the general of his concern that “sickness may result from the Indians being collected in great numbers at the depots.” The longer the Cherokees stayed at their collection points, the greater the risk of disease. Perhaps, Poinsett suggested, it would be better to “consult the dictates of humanity as well as prudence,” and gather the Cherokees only a short time before their actual journey west. It was sage advice, had it arrived in time for Scott to follow it. The camps were death traps. If there were “seven or eight thousand” Cherokees spread around Calhoun, Tennessee, that was in 1838 the equivalent of a bustling large town. Any settlement of that size would have grown over the course of years, allowing development of a corresponding infrastructure to deliver food, shelter, basic sanitation, and clean water. The Cherokee camps had been populated in weeks. Neither the sites nor the people were prepared.
But the people were already in the camps, and General Scott had concluded that there could be no going back. The Georgia land lottery winners believed that they had possession of their plots of land as of May 24. To send large numbers of Cherokees home, or even to stop collecting them from the countryside, would expose them to murderous encounters with the new owners of their houses and fields. In Alabama many Cherokee properties had already been taken over by white squatters, “and the squatters,” Scott said, “are as likely to annoy, to dispossess, and make war upon the Indians, as if each squatter and occupant were the hereditary owner of the ground, and the poor Indians the intruders or invaders.” If sending home the Cherokees was not an option, neither was sending them forward. Two parties of emigrants were shipped westward in early June, but it was becoming impossible to move large parties in the height of summer. Severe drought had struck. Even great str
eams like the Tennessee were not navigable in places, and the land route would be desperately short of drinking water. Scott decided to put off the migration until the fall. “Not only the comfort, but the safety of the Indians … has forced this decision upon me.”
Rather than send them back to their homes to die, or send them out on the road to die, the Cherokees were left in their camps to die. J. W. Lide, one of the doctors contracted to care for the emigrants, reported
a high grade of Diarrhea, hazardous Dysentery, and urgent Remittent Fever prevailing to a great and deplorably fatal extent. Measles and Whooping Cough appeared epidemically among the Cherokees about the first of June which Diseases more generally much aggravated by the Circumstances connected with the assemblage.
It was all a “natural result” of collecting “men, women and children of all ages and conditions, changing suddenly, and very materially all their habits of life, especially in reference to Regimin, Exercise, &c., with exposure to the intense heat that has prevailed in this country.” Doctors moved among the Cherokees attempting to treat them but encountered constant frustration. The doctors often did not speak their patients’ language, and could not persuade suspicious natives to take prescribed medicines. Given the level of medical science in 1838, some Cherokees may have been making rational decisions. The lack of records makes it impossible to estimate the number of fatalities in the camps, but the claims made at the time were devastating. One missionary with the Cherokees (Elizur Butler, the same man who, with Samuel Worcester, went to a Georgia prison in 1831 for ministering to the Cherokees without a license) wrote home that he had heard claims that “two thousand” people had died in the camps. If this claim was even half true, it meant that more people perished in the camps than would die on the road during the migration to follow.
Winfield Scott and some Cherokees (including Major Ridge, following these events from his new home in the West) knew who was to blame for the catastrophe. “The loss was the fault of the Cherokees,” said Scott, “for having faith in the ability of John Ross to save them.” Ross and his people, they said, should have recognized sooner that they must depart. Nobody died in Major Ridge’s party, which had moved at a good time and in good order. It was undeniably true that Ross bargained until the very last day. He had used his people as a bargaining chip. Had he told them to prepare for emigration, he would have lost his leverage. Instead he forced the government to deal with him.
But to blame Ross for not capitulating sooner presumes too much. This argument presumes that the people would have followed his directions no matter what those directions were. It suggests that ordinary people among the Cherokees could not think for themselves, even on a subject that directly affected their homes, their families, and every other aspect of their lives. They had thought for themselves, and truly, deeply did not want to surrender their homes. Ross had some power to shape events, but had to govern his actions by what public opinion could bear. If he had abruptly announced in 1835 or 1837 or even at the start of 1838 that he favored removal, it is not clear how many people would have followed him. Major Ridge, with all his power and prestige, had persuaded only a small minority. Even after Ross agreed to lead the emigration, a significant fraction of Cherokees defied the decision to move west, and faded into the North Carolina mountains. The principal chief’s political situation demanded that he fight to the end, proving to his people that absolutely everything possible had been done in their defense. That was the only way he could have the credibility to rescue them from the true cause of their trouble: the government that was compelling fifteen thousand people to move against their will.
Even after his agreement with Poinsett was struck, Ross remained in Washington for several weeks, until he was certain that the government was producing what it promised.
1838 June 25
Paid to John Ross, by requisition of the Treasury … arrears of annuities, per act 12th June, 1838
25,000.00.
He also insisted that the Treasury pay his delegation’s travel expenses, $7,000 for two seasons in Washington. His bags weighed down with cash, the chief took a route home through North Carolina. This allowed him to retrieve his seventeen-year-old daughter, Jane, from the Moravian school she was attending in the town of Salem. Jane, too, would now be going west. Father and daughter took a stagecoach on one of the arduous routes over the Appalachians—Salem was near Cherokee country, but the mountains required a detour more than a hundred miles to the northwest, a painful four-day ordeal to Abingdon, Virginia, and several more days to come back south again. Along the way John and Jane Ross encountered other passengers who climbed in and out of the stagecoach, sharing bits of what Ross called “thrilling news” about “the unhappy condition of the Cherokees.” (He doubtless meant “thrilling” in an old sense of the word—piercing or penetrating.) It is not clear if the travelers knew the identity of the brown-eyed, gray-haired father to whom they passed on their information and rumors.
Arriving in the Cherokee Nation, Ross began working to ensure that the Cherokees accepted emigration. Cherokee leaders held a council in late July, at which Ross did not quite admit he had made an agreement with Secretary Poinsett; he said talks were going well until Poinsett “suddenly terminated” the discussions and dictated terms. But he also explained how the terms were better than before, and said that Winfield Scott was a man they could deal with.
Scott was such a man. He was a man of the army, determined to protect his reputation and his service, but could see the Cherokee point of view. When he learned of his superiors’ arrangement with Ross, he wrote a barbed letter to Washington. “I shall not stop here to complain that … the whole subject has been contemptuously taken out of my hands,” he wrote as part a 106-word sentence that listed all of the complaints he said he was not making. But the same letter said he would be “extremely delighted if something more could be done to soothe the feelings of the Cherokees, and to compensate them in money, at least, in part discharge of that great debt of justice due from the United States.” Scott negotiated a contract with Ross, under which designated Cherokees would arrange the emigration and the United States would pay the expenses. Ross said moving the Cherokees westward would cost $65.88 per person, probably something well in excess of $700,000. Scott found this excessive, but being “extremely unwilling to delay the emigration,” he accepted.
• • •
There was a different general who could not accept the accommodation with John Ross. It was the man who commanded Ross at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, who had been outmaneuvered by Ross for a time in 1816, and who could not spare soldiers to help Ross defend Cherokee land against intruders in 1820. It was the man who had been elected president in 1828, the same year that Ross was made principal chief, and who like Ross had made innovative use of political tools in a dawning democratic age. It was the man who had met Ross in the Executive Mansion, who had offered him $2.5 million for Cherokee land in 1833 only to see him spurn it, who believed that Ross agreed to $5 million in 1835 only to see him reject that, and who had finally gone around Ross by signing a treaty with his opposition. It was the man who sent word in 1836 that the U.S. government would have no more communication with Ross, “either orally or in writing,” about the terms of Cherokee removal. Now it emerged that Ross had been able to communicate about removal, had increased the payout, had restored his government’s revenue, and had regained some control of the situation.
At the time, the master of the Hermitage was the most well-connected and influential convalescent senior citizen in America. “I am still in the land of the living,” he began a chatty letter to Francis P. Blair, the publisher of the main Democratic paper in Washington. Friends sent him inside information on the Missouri election (“Benton is safe beyond a doubt”), offered him political advice (“It is indispensable for us to have a new candidate for the Vice Presidency”), and appealed for help (“It has been the wish of my youngest son James … to be placed at West Point”). So it was natural that an
appeal came to Jackson on August 23, 1838, from a federal official unhappy about John Ross. It was the superintendent of Cherokee removal, who was in effect being replaced by the Cherokee chief. The superintendent wrote a friend in Nashville, who personally carried his complaint to the Hermitage. The volcano erupted. Jackson sent a message to President Van Buren’s attorney general, writing in a hand so shaky as to be almost indecipherable.
private
My dear Sir,
Col. Walker has just shewn me several communications from Genl Smith removing agent for the Cherokees, & others… .
The contract with Ross must be arrested or you may rely on upon it, the expence and other evils will shake the popularity of the administration to its centre.
What madness & folly to have had any thing to do with Ross, when the Agent was proceeding well with the removal and on principles of economy that would have saved at least 100 percent from what the contract of Ross will cost.
Ross would consume so much money that the administration would be forced to ask Congress for more, creating “a fine chance” for the Whigs to attack.
I have only time to add as the mail waits, that the contract with Ross must be arrested.
And the more he repeated this, the more he sensed a partisan conspiracy.
The time & circumstances under which Genl Scott made this contract shews, that he is [no] economist, or is, Subrosa, in league with Clay & Co, to bring disgrace on the administration—the evil is done—it behooves Mr VanBuren to act with energy to throw it off his shoulders.
I enclose a letter under cover to you, unsealed, which you may read, seal, & deliver it to him, that you may aid him with your views in getting out of real difficulty.
yr friend in haste,
Andrew Jackson
P.S. I am so feeble I can scarcely wield the pen—but friendship dictates it, & the subject excites me. Why is it that the Scamp Ross is not banished from the notice of the administration
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 31