American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  With this expansionary invasion came an inevitable intermingling of white and Indian cultures. Cherokee homes and towns gradually came to resemble those of the colonies. More and more Cherokee spoke the English tongue. The lifestyle, habits, clothing, and economy of the Cherokee gradually took on more characteristics common to their white neighbors. Colonial men took Cherokee wives, gave their children English names, and a robust, talented, new generation of mixed English and Cherokee began to emerge that would take the proud tribe of the ancients known as the Ani-Yunwiya into the future.

  All these changes came slowly, one adaptation leading to another, and that leading to yet another. Much stemmed directly from the leadership and convincing oratory of Attacullaculla, and his determined loyalty to the British. To the end of his life he remained convinced that such progress was in the Cherokee’s best long term interest. The great chief invited Moravian missionaries to live among the Cherokee on the condition that they would build schools and teach Cherokee youth in the language and ways of the English. Many of these changes were forced upon him by circumstance, and by the knowledge that resisting change would result in the needless slaughter of his people. At the same time, Attacullaculla saw the benefits of such adaptation and change. He was a realist who would rather cede portions of ancient Cherokee land than see the blood of both Indians and colonists spilled upon it. It was a realism that found advantage for his people where it could. But these changes toward cultural integration did not come without growing pains, conflict, and bloodshed.

  Everywhere the same story was being told in a thousand distinct but similar ways. The world and its populations were exploding—in knowledge, in economics, in culture, in art, in technology, in the understanding of freedom. Former barriers were being pushed aside. And at the edge of all change existed the conflict between the old and the new. Thus, as the colonies expanded westward, absorbing and assimilating native populations in a massive intermingling of peoples, there was conflict. The entire New World was a microcosm of newness, change, and conflict. The great melting pot of “American” peoples and races was forging a new identity whose meaning each racial group—white, black, native—would discover for itself.

  For whatever reason the Cherokee in time became one of the most widespread and mightiest of native tribes, not because of its ability to make war like the Sioux or Apache, but because of its ability to adapt and grow from change. Even in the seeming defeat of the Cherokee, by adapting to new ways and by using their gifts and intelligence to move their people forward, they became a modern people rather than an anachronistic historic footnote that posterity would forget. Instead of a forgotten race, the Cherokee became a race of energetic people like the Scots, assimilated but never eradicated, a people with a language, a culture, a heritage, a written history, books, and a Bible in its own native tongue, yet at the same time less pure Cherokee and gradually more American.

  The Cherokee came to represent all the peoples of native America who had sprung from common roots. They were one people, The People, and in truth none was more principal than any other. They were The People of America.

  In many ways, the examples of cruelty upon Indian peoples, though numerous, tell but one portion of the story. Many white settlers were good and hard-working men and women who did not realize the implications of their westward expansion. They saw the Indian natives as their neighbors. Many desired friendship, and were kind and devoted husbands to Cherokee wives. In 1772 a group of settlers met with Attacullaculla to forge a lease and friendship pact in which all sides could maintain peace and positive relations. It resulted in a ten year lease of Cherokee land for which the Cherokee were to receive some £400 in trading goods, along with the promise not to advance farther into the Cherokee Overmountain territory. As always, some were sincere and abided by the agreement, others did not.

  In the 1760s and 1770s, some fifty Cherokee towns and villages were burned, all crops and livestock destroyed or taken, and hundreds of men and women killed, scalped, or sold into slavery. By 1775, the nation of the Cherokee was desperate and nearly facing extinction if something was not done. By then Attacullaculla and Oconostota were aging. The war party, ironically, was now led by Attacullaculla’s son, himself a chief, Dragging Canoe. His daughter Nakey Canoe was one of many of her generation to marry a white man, and Dragging Canoe was increasingly isolated as a voice from the past, even within his own family.

  A major treaty was concluded, more sweeping than any that had come before, with the Henderson Purchase of 1775, which sold all lands north of the Cumberland River which included most of what eventually became the state of Kentucky and mid-Tennessee. In exchange, the Transylvania Company gave the Cherokee £10,000 in trade for goods, including guns and ammunition, on display in a log cabin next to the Cherokee Council ground beside the Watauga River at what was called Sycamore Shoals. Neither Attacullaculla nor Oconocstota were able to resist the huge payment and the enormous quantity of goods to be gained in exchange for the land. Both of the great chiefs sanctioned the purchase.

  Dragging Canoe did everything in his power to prevent his father and uncle from signing the gigantic Henderson Purchase. His eloquent speech at Sycamore Shoals after the fateful deed was done poignantly symbolized the dying gasp of the old times.

  “Whole Indian nations have melted away like snowballs in the sun before the white man’s advance,” said the proud son of Attacullaculla. “We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains. Now that hope is gone. They have passed the mountains, and have settled upon Cherokee land. They wish to have that usurpation sanctioned by treaty. When that is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land… finally the whole country, which the Cherokees and their fathers have so long occupied, will be demanded, and the remnant of the Ani-Yunwiya, the Real People, once so great and formidable, will be compelled to seek refuge in some distant wilderness. There they will be permitted to stay only a short while, until they again behold the advancing banners of the same greedy host. Not being able to point out any further retreat for the miserable Cherokees, the extinction of the whole race will be proclaimed…. Should we not therefore run all risks and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further loss of our country? Such treaties may be right for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me. We will have our lands. I have spoken.”

  War broke out the next year between England and the new nation that would call itself the United States of America. It was hardly to be wondered at that the Cherokee, frustrated and angered by twenty years of greed, duplicity, lies, and cruelty on the part of the colonies, sided with the British and did everything in their power to assist them.

  Despite the treaty and Henderson Purchase, one faction of Cherokee, the Chickamaugas, led by Dragging Canoe, refused to honor it and continued to raid settlements of the region for another quarter century. Dragging Canoe stole from and killed and scalped whites throughout Tennessee. He murdered one David Crockett and his wife (whose grandson of the same name would become famous in the next century), killed some of his children, and took two as prisoners and kept them for seventeen years.

  As America gained its independence from the British in 1783, it assumed a right to all lands belonging to native tribes. Tennessee became a state. A young congressman who had fought the Cherokee in the wilds years before, made his voice heard in the new nation’s capital in favor of brooking no compromise whatever with the Indians. The young congressman’s name was Andrew Jackson. His prejudice against and hatred of Indians would doom the Cherokee fate forty years later.

  As the old century gave way to the nineteenth, many Cherokee joined the life of the new nation. The Cherokee became known (with the Chickasaw, Seminole, Choktaw, and Creek) as one of the five “civilized” tribes—with houses and businesses and plantations and farms and slaves. Henceforth neither Indian nor British would determine the course of events in this land. Now known as the United States of
America, its people would forever after be called Americans. Diverse ethnic backgrounds and races had to look forward to changing times with realism, rather than trying to preserve that which no people can ever preserve—the past. They must now somehow forge a future… together.

  Some Cherokee began to acquire wealth in plantation life as the economy of tobacco and cotton took over more and more of the South. Yet they also worked diligently to preserve their traditional native heritage, and continued to fight to keep what remained of their native land. But with statehood now surrounding them, it was a losing battle. There continued to be treaties and token payments. But the result in every case was a continual shrinking of the lands that had once been theirs.15

  The land cessions which the Cherokee Nation was pressed into making with the federal government in the latter part of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries did not please the Cherokees. The methods used by the various administrations between 1798-1819 were disillusioning to a people who had written laws and were seeking to pattern their government after that of the United States.

  President Adams’ administration sought to gain land cessions from the Cherokees by settling their overdue debts with trading companies or with the government-operated store or factory at Tellico. The Cherokees had bought more goods and supplies than they could pay for. Adams’ commissioners artfully arranged with the council to revoke Cherokee debts in exchange for cessions of land. Pressed in this way, the Indians had no alternative but to cede their land from time to time to the federal government. Thus, between 1791-1819 the Cherokees negotiated twenty-five land cessions with the federal government.

  Since the government goods sold to them at the factory were frequently things that had been damaged in their conveyance from the east, the Cherokees asked Presidents Adams and Jefferson to discontinue the factory and permit them to buy their supplies from traders as in the early days. But both Adams and Jefferson refused.

  Instead (during Jefferson’s administration particularly), manufactured goods were forced on the Cherokees by the factor (storekeeper), who had instructions from Jefferson to keep the Cherokees in debt so that their lands could more easily be obtained by the government (The Cherokees, Grace Steele Woodward, pp. 127-8).

  Note 5—The Old Settlers vs. the Eastern Cherokee

  Many of the Cherokee who migrated early on from Georgia and North Carolina owned houses and lands and even plantations, which they sold to whites before leaving. They were later called the Old Settlers. Whites were capable of paying more than their fellow tribesmen. Better to receive something for the lands than be driven off later and receive nothing. But their exodus was bitterly resented by those in the east who hated to see their holdings of land shrinking all the more. In spite of persecution against them, small bands continued to trickle West.

  The Old Settlers considered themselves the true lineage from the past, and saw their move westward as the only means of preserving the purity of the proud and ancient race. They saw the impossibility of preserving the Cherokee nation through treaties and laws and accommodations. The Creek and Seminole wars of recent years demonstrated clearly enough the fate of native tribes who tried to resist the growing might of the white man’s government. The same fate was sure to come to the Cherokee eventually. They hoped that in the West where land was plentiful, in a place that seemed remote from the white man’s thirst for settlement and conquest, they would be free to live in freedom as in former times.

  Those who sold their land and migrated West, however, were seen as traitors by hard-line eastern Cherokees, who vowed, under penalty of assassination, that no more would sell their homes and lands and move West to join the traitors.

  Note 6—Progressive Change in the Cherokee Nation

  The years of the 1820s brought great change to the Cherokee and the others of the five civilized tribes of the southeast United States. While the Old Settlers in the West attempted to live by the old ways as much as possible, the Cherokees of Georgia and Tennessee continued moving their people forward into new times. The Cherokee language was codified into a written script by Doublehead’s nephew George Gist, known as Sequoyah.

  Gradually more and more Cherokee integrated into the life of the growing and expanding nation. Their people traveled and intermarried, took European names, built homes, established farms and successful plantations. Wealthy Cherokees owned slaves and sent their sons to the North to be educated. Ever since Attacullaculla had invited Moravian missionaries into Cherokee towns, the Cherokee people had discovered much in Christianity to confirm their own myths, religious tradition, and reverence for nature, the land, the animal kingdom, and the unifying spirit connecting them all. And now the Christianity of America with its pilgrim roots found a receptive home in the hearts of an increasing number of Cherokee. Cherokee David Brown translated the Greek New Testament into Sequoyah’s new Cherokee language. Progressive Cherokee leaders adopted aggressive educational, religious, and political programs to bring the Cherokee population, especially its youth, into the new age of mainstream America. The new constitution and capital of the reorganized nation at New Echota replaced the old tribal system of war and peace chiefs with a republic of laws modeled after those of the United States. If they could gain respect as a modern “American” people, Cherokee leaders hoped to preserve both what remained of their lands and some measure of national autonomy.

  Measured by the white man’s “land stealer” or compass, the Cherokee nation measured now but 200 miles east to west and 120 miles north to south, its greater portion lying in the Georgia area wherein were concentrated approximately two-thirds of the nation’s population. On the white man’s map the Cherokees’ holdings of approximately ten million acres resembled a small, wind-blown leaf bleakly clinging to a wet stone.

  Acutely aware of the impending disastrous enforcement of Georgia’s Compact of 1802, the Cherokee nation, between 1819-27, firmly adopted as its main objective the preservation and protection of its remaining lands.

  In a supreme effort to forestall the removal of their people from ancestral homelands promised to the state of Georgia by the Compact of 1802, progressive Cherokee leaders, many of whom were mixed bloods, undertook an ambitious and aggressive program that would further Cherokee education and religion; replace ancient Cherokee culture with that of the educated and Christianized white man; and—of utmost importance—convert the Cherokees’ tribal government (already altered by the written laws of 1808) into a republic substantially patterned after that of the United States. By adherence to this program, the Cherokees hoped to convince the United States government that the Cherokee nation merited respect. So convinced, that government would then, they hoped, bring its compact with Georgia to a close by compromise or by some method other than that of extinguishing the Cherokees’ title to their lands.

  But, ironically, the Cherokees’ phenomenal advancement—unparalleled between 1819-27 by any of the other American aborigines—hastened, instead of deterred, enforcement of the Compact. For, upon perceiving the Cherokees’ advancement, which, in some respects, outpaced her own, Georgia abandoned both dignity and ethics and through her government, press, and courts, began, in 1820, a vicious attack upon the Cherokees that was to continue for eighteen years (The Cherokees, Grace Steele Woorward, pp. 138-140).

  John Ridge, Buck Watie, and Stand Watie grew to lead a new movement of young intellectuals within the Cherokee nation, convinced that education and literacy were the paths for the survival of its people. Both John Ridge and Buck Watie married young women from white New England. After his conversion to Christianity, Buck changed his name to Elias Boudinot after his adoptive father in the North, and returned to Georgia. In 1828, he started the first Cherokee newspaper, written in Sequoyah’s native alphabet, called the Cherokee Phoenix. Major Ridge, John’s father, became a significant force in the Cherokee nation, often traveling to Washington as a diplomat, working on behalf of all Indian tribes. In the mid-1820s he helped the Creeks forge a
treaty with the government that returned much land to them that had been taken away, for which the Creeks gave Ridge $10,000 in expression of gratitude, making Ridge a wealthy man. He became a considerable land owner and cattle rancher and owned many black slaves.

  Note 7—Gold, the Ridge/Ross Split, and Cherokee Removal from the East

  With the discovery of gold on Cherokee land in 1828, whites—the “twenty-niners”—poured into Cherokee lands, more greedy now for gold than their ancestors had been for land. If the Cherokee harbored lingering doubts, it was clear now that in the eyes of the governments of Georgia and Washington they possessed no rights to the ownership of their lands. Soon after the discovery, the state of Georgia nullified all Cherokee laws and claimed the land for itself.

  Strife on all fronts escalated. Georgia appealed to Washington on the basis of Jefferson’s 1802 Compact to force the removal of all Cherokees from their state once and for all. No more pretence of fairness was left. The government of Georgia wanted all remaining Cherokee land. At last a century of appeasements, broken treaties, and ceding of vast territory seemed about to climax in the loss of what small quantity of Cherokee land remained. And the state of Georgia, lusting for Cherokee gold, could not have had a more agreeable ally in the White House. Andrew Jackson rushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress in 1830, finally placing into the law of the nation what many Cherokee had long feared—the final removal of every Cherokee man, woman, and child from Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

  Chief John Ross appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and received a favorable ruling in support of the Cherokee maintaining their lands. But Jackson’s response was defiant. “John Marshall has rendered his decision,” said the president. “Now let him enforce it.”