America The Beautiful?
Part Four
Caliban, Coyote and the Knights of the Golden Circle
Page Four
Return Jonathan Meigs And The Bonfire Of The Vanities
It must seem at this point that the history of the Cherokee is the story of the "mixed blood" élite's struggle to rise to a level of "civilisation" that would convince the whites who surrounded them that they could safely be left to their own increasingly modern devices on their own ancestral lands. Given the nature of the evidence: missionary records, government papers, the correspondence and reported conversation of an English speaking, mainly literate, leadership; given that, it must inevitably seem so. But really all that means is that the history of the mass of the Cherokee is hidden under the sneers of the whites and the accommodationists.
In order to give some perspective it must be pointed out that the Christian aspect of civilisation did not penetrate at all deeply into Cherokee society. A majority of Cherokee did take to a form of Christianity but not until after they had been forcibly removed from their lands, and even then it was very much their own form of Christianity. In the period before removal the many missionary groups had only very limited success, almost all within the self-consciously civilising élite. Describing this group as "an aspiring middle class" (i.e., an existing upper class) McLoughlin estimates that it composed…
"…not more than 8 to 10 per cent of the Cherokee families (roughly corresponding to the 7.4 percent of the families who owned slaves)…" (ibid page 127).
The context of those percentages is given by McLoughlin as:—
"A census conducted by the Council in 1825, indicated a population increase of over 7,00 since the census of 1809. There were now 14,972 Cherokees in 'the old nation' and approximately 5,000 in Arkansas; in 1809 there had been only 12,935 in the East and 300 to 400 in Arkansas. The number of black slaves owned by Cherokee had almost doubled from 583 to 1,038 in 1825 as the planting of cotton had increased." (ibid, page 125)
In 1830, having been preaching among the Cherokee for thirty years, the Moravians had made 45 converts. The much more intensive mission of the Congregationalist American Board had converted 167. I don't have any figures to hand about the numbers converted by the Methodists but it can't have been more than 300. The Baptists, because of the remarkable Evan Jones' sympathetic adaptation of Christian dogma to Cherokee spiritual practice, converted about 1,000 Cherokee to an almost native form of Christianity. Moravian and Congregationalist converts were almost entirely from among the élite; Methodist and, especially, Baptist converts were mainly "fullblood" traditionalists. In 1860, among the merged eastern and western Cherokee populations which had been thrown together in Oklahoma, no more than 12% of Cherokees had been enrolled as some kind of Christian. Scarcely an outstanding success story.
Underneath the surface, among the 90% who aspired to no class at all, life went on. It was not, and could not be, life as normal as the Cherokee had formerly lived it. Contact with the white invaders had destroyed any possibility of that. But it was a Cherokee life, decidedly not any way of the white man.
In 1811 Tecumseh visited the southern Indian nations seeking allies for his impending war. He left in November without having had much success except among the Red Stick Creeks. One month later the lands around the Cherokee were shaken by a great earthquake which traditionalists took as evidence that the ancestral spiritual powers were angry with white incursions and the accommodations these occasioned. Return Jonathan Meigs, government agent to the Cherokee from 1801 until his death in 1823, reported the activity of local 'prophets' who…
"…tell them that the Great Spirit is angry with them for adopting the manners, customs and habits of the white people who, they think, are very wicked…In some instances [after dancing and chanting all night around a council fire] some have thrown off their clothing into the fire and burned them up…Some of the females are mutilating fine muslin dresses and are told they must discontinue dancing reels and country dances which have become very common amongst the young people." (quoted in McLoughlin, ibid, page 92)
That bonfire of white vanities was a rare and brief eruption into the light of white historiography of the strong central core of Cherokee culture. It made a point of not engaging with whites and so whites rarely noticed it to dismiss it. But it was the unstructured classless heart of the Cherokee that enabled the people to survive the final removal crisis of the 1830s, the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Civil War of the 1840s and a pathological reconstruction from 1846 until the American Civil War of the 1860s when the bearers among them of white 'civilisation' went mad and the people was torn apart and slaughtered. At the end of that civil war the 90% at last entered at least their own history and saved themselves for a while, from white vanities if not from ongoing vexation of spirit.
To The Trail Of Tears
By 1828 the Cherokee had constituted and constitutionalised themselves as a civilised state. The élite owned a printing press and, on February 28, 1828, published the first issue of a weekly newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. Because of Sequoyah's creation by 1821 of a syllabary for the Cherokee language this was able to be bilingual. (Sequoyah was a 'mixed-blood' but had been raised in the native tradition by his mother. Though he fought with Ridge's mercenary force at Horseshoe Bend he had no time at all for accommodationism. In 1822 he removed himself to the western Cherokee, getting away for a while at least from white influence.)
The Cherokee Phoenix was edited by Elias Boudinot who had learned nothing much more than snobbery from his time in Connecticut:—
"The editorials of the Christianized editor of the Nation's newspaper were remarkable for their condescension toward uncivilized frontier ruffians, the impoverished Irish in eastern city slums, 'the wretched creeks' (to whom he did not want the Cherokee to be compared), and the 'wild savage Indians' of the West (among whom it would be inhuman to send the Cherokees)." (McLoughlin, ibid page 131.)
His only hope for his people's future lay with the civilised whites of the east who probably hadn't rioted against Indians since last they saw him, and the missionaries who represented white civilisation in the Cherokee Nation. But the Presbyterian, Moravian and Methodist missionaries immediately withdrew from the contest.
That same year, 1828, Jackson was elected President in a contest against John Quincy Adams. His policy was openly the more secret policy of Jefferson (and Washington). Genocide was still wrapped up in the package of Christianisation and civilisation but it was now openly stated that the Indians' lands would be taken and they would be made into sturdy yeomen and saved for Jesus and civilisation someplace else, in a land far away, too desolate, infertile and worthless for whites ever to want.
The Indian Removal Bill which provided the very little money required for the implementation of this policy was passed in May 1830. In December of that year the state of Georgia moved against the Baptist and American Board (Congregationalist) missionaries who remained in support of the Cherokee. A law was passed requiring all white males resident in the Cherokee nation to swear an oath of allegiance to the state of Georgia, or remove themselves, or face 4 years hard labour in the state penitentiary.
In March 1831 eleven whites, including three missionaries, were arrested by Georgia for refusing to swear the allegiance oath. When they were found guilty on September 16, 1831, nine of them either took the oath or took themselves off. Two American Board missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, did neither of those things and went to jail.
The Cherokee were the wealthiest and best connected Indian nation in the territory of the United States. They had the money to hire the best lawyers available and the contacts to mobilise influential opinion on their behalf. In 1831 they took the state of Georgia to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall professed himself to be in sympathy with the Cherokee but ruled…
"The Court has bestowed its best attention on this question and, after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the Constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States…
"If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future." (Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, 1831)
Privately he advised the Cherokee's lawyer, William Wirt, on how a case might be brought which the Supreme Court would be competent to rule on. It was then brought forward in 1832 in the name of Samuel Worcester. On this occasion Marshall declared the judgment of the Supreme Court to be…
"From the commencement of our government Congress has passed acts to regulate trade and intercourse with the Indians; which treat them as nations, respect their rights, and manifest a firm purpose to afford that protection which treaties stipulate. All these acts, and especially that of 1802, which is still in force, manifestly consider the several Indian nations as distinct political communities, having territorial boundaries, within which their authority is exclusive, and having a right to all lands within those boundaries, which is not only acknowledged, but guaranteed by the United States…
"The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation is, by our Constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States.
"The act of the State of Georgia under which the plaintiff in error was prosecuted is consequently void, and the judgment a nullity…The Acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.
"They interfere forcibly with the relations established between the United States and the Cherokee Nation, the regulation of which according to the settled principles of our Constitution, are committed exclusively to the government of the Union.
"They are in direct hostility with treaties, repeated in a succession of years, which mark out the boundary that separates the Cherokee country from Georgia; guarantee to them all the land within their boundary; solemnly pledge the faith of the United States to restrain their citizens from trespassing on it; and recognize the pre-existing power of the nation to govern itself.
"They are in equal hostility with the acts of Congress for regulating this intercourse, and giving effect to the treaties.
"The forcible seizure and abduction of the plaintiff, who was residing in the nation with its permission, and by authority of the President of the United States, is also a violation of the acts which authorize the chief magistrate to exercise this authority…" (Worcester v. Georgia, 1832)
What is quoted there is from a very brief summary of Marshall's judgment which can be found on a variety of web sites. I am not at all sure that it gives an adequate representation of the full judgment. As of this moment I have only glanced very quickly through the full transcripts of the full judgments, including the supporting and contrary opinions of the other judges, and can only say that the impression given by those extracts is at least misleading and may be very much beside the point. The next article in this series will be a thorough review of the two judgments that may or may not justify my suspicions, but either way should provide further food for thought. Meanwhile…
On the face of it the Supreme Court judgment was a clear vindication of Cherokee resistance to white aggression and, as such, the white aggressors proceeded to ignore it. President Andrew Jackson said: "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it." The State of Georgia declared that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction in the matter, and continued with a terrorist campaign of burnings, lynchings and summary expropriation.
Worcester and Butler had one final recourse of an appeal to the Supreme Court that, in theory at least, would have forced Jackson, as head of the executive branch of a separation of powers, either to execute the judgment of the judicial branch or change the Constitution. But they backed down and, having spent a year in prison, were released.
The last Creek lands within the borders of Georgia had been distributed to the lucky winners of a land lottery in 1827. In 1828 gold was discovered on Cherokee land which had been ceded to the United States in a treaty of 1817. Soon after, more gold was found in the Cherokee Nation. So, in 1832 two lotteries were held to distribute farm land and gold claims. The winnings of this rollover jackpot were collected with arms in a terrorist campaign of summary expropriation, lynchings and burnings. This, I think, is what Americans refer to as "due process".
The collapse of all its civilising into a pogrom that the black hundreds would have been proud of led to a collapse of the Cherokee élite. Its wealth had availed it nothing. Its contacts with failed and former Presidential candidates and Presidents had availed it nothing. Its constitution and laws were treated with contempt by the states and United States on which they were modelled. The élite then split into a minority resistance wing led by John Ross (which, being composed almost entirely of 'fullblood' traditionalists was actually an overwhelming majority) and a collaborationist wing led by the galloping Major, which was composed of almost all the other accommodationists.
In December 1835 the Quislings, led by Major Ridge, John Ridge, Stand Watie and Elias Boudinot (who was acting on the urging of the Congregationalist missionary and former prisoner of conscience Samuel Worcester), met at Boudinot's house in the Cherokee capital of New Echota with Jackson's treaty commissioner, Reverend John F. Schermerhorn, and sold the Cherokee homeland for $5 million and seven million acres in Oklahoma. In a Cherokee election, only 350 out of 17,000 endorsed the "treaty of New Echota". Congress nevertheless, to the surprise of no one but John Ross, ratified it in May, 1836. Ridge and his supporters then packed up and left for Indian Territory in Oklahoma.
Western Cherokee who had been living in Arkansas and Texas had been moved to Oklahoma in 1828. Cherokee who had been granted land in eastern Texas by the Spanish in 1819 were driven across the Red River into Oklahoma in July, 1839. The rest of the Cherokee were on their way.
In May, 1838, Martin Van Buren having succeeded Jackson as President, almost the entire U.S. army, 7,000 men under Major General Winfield Scott, moved into the Cherokee Nation to move the Cherokee nation off it. Said the very model of a modern Major General…
"The President of the United States has sent me with a powerful army, to cause you…to join that part of your people who are already established in prosperity on the other side of the Mississippi…The full moon of May is on the wane, and before another shall have passed away, every Cherokee man, woman and child…must be in motion to join their brethren in the far West…My troops already occupy many positions in the country that you are to abandon, and thousands and thousands are approaching from every quarter, to render resistance and escape hopeless…Chiefs, head men, and warriors: Will you then, by resistance, compel us to resort to arms? God forbid. Or will you, by flight, seek to hide yourselves in the mountains and forests, and thus oblige us to hunt you down? Remember that, in pursuit, it may be impossible to avoid conflicts. The blood of the white man, or the blood of the red man, may be spilt, and if spilt, however accidentally, it may be impossible for the discrete and humane among you, or among us, to prevent a general war and carnage. Think of this, my Cherokee brethren, I am an old warrior, and have been present at many scenes of slaughter…" (quoted by J. S. Dill in his article, We Must Do The Necessary Thinking For Them)
Faced with the prospect of slaughter at the hands of 7,000 heavily armed soldiers the 16,000 Cherokee men, women and children no longer had any option. Nunadautsun't, 'the trail where we cried', the trail of tears over 800 miles to Oklahoma began.
The Cherokee formed themselves into 13 columns for the trek westward. One of the columns was led by Jesse Bushyhead, one of Evan Jones' native Baptist preachers. Jones himself was second-in-command, under the 'fullblood' Situagi, who spoke no English, of another.
(Evan Jones was a Baptist missionary who was born in Breckonshire in Wales into the Church of England, was educated in London as a schoolteacher and had emigrated to Philadelphia at the age of 33, becoming first a Methodist and then a Baptist. He was a linguist who spoke English, Welsh, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He spent ten years learning the Cherokee language well enough to preach in it. In 1821 he moved from Philadelphia to the mission settlement of Valley Towns in North Carolina. In 1824 he was ordained and appointed mission superintendent.
His mission to the Cherokee was the only enduringly successful one, principally because he quickly gave up trying to adapt the Cherokee to Christianity and learned instead to adapt Christianity to the Cherokee, organising his ministry through native converts. According to McLoughlin:—
"Evan Jones dropped his initial hostility toward their dances, ball plays (an early form of lacrosse played with web-ended sticks), and medical practices. He always spoke of their medicine men as 'adoniskee', not as 'conjurors'. Some Congregationalist missionaries accused Jones of admitting 'adoniskee' to his mission churches and permitting them to continue their traditional practice of medicine…Baptists took advantage of the traditional 'purification ritual' of the Cherokees. Designed to free people from the resentments of petty quarrels and to restore harmony to the community, this ritual required entering a running stream and dipping oneself under the water while an adonisigi recited a sacred formula. The Baptists called attention to the similarity of this to their practice of total immersion as a symbol of purification from sin." (William G. McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794—1870, page 68)
Some time before his death in 1872 Evan Jones was accepted, without having married into the nation, as a full Cherokee citizen.
On the trail of tears roughly a quarter of the nation, some 4,000 individuals (the most recent estimates apparently state as many as 8,000), mainly children and the elderly, died; duly processed but nonetheless dead.