an american betrayal; cherokee patriots and the trail of tears

8/4/2019 An American Betrayal; Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears

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Henry Holt and Company, LLC

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Henry Holtand are registered trademarks of

Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 2011 by Daniel Blake Smith

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Daniel Blake.

American betrayal: Cherokee patriots and the rail of ears / Daniel

Blake Smith.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-0-8050-8955-4 (hardcover)

1. Cherokee IndiansHistory. 2. Cherokee IndiansRelocation.

3. rail of ears, 18381839. I. itle.

E99.C5S632 2011

975.004'97557dc22 2010052594

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First Edition 2011

Designed by Kelly S . Too

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2


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Te Cherokees tragic saga commenced ironically on a note of

progress. Te new national government in 1789 that GeorgeWashington presided over was determined to reframe the nations

relationship with native peoples. Te federal government, Wash-

ington insisted, would no longer treat Indians as conquered ene-

mies without any legal rights to their ancestral lands. Washingtons

secretary of war, Henry Knox, could not have been clearer: Te

Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right to soil. Itcannot be taken from them unless by their free consent. . . . o

dispossess them . . . would be a gross violation of the fundamen-

tal laws of nature, and of that . . . justice which is the glory of a

nation.1 Having just concluded a diffi cult and costly war for

independence, Washington and Knox believed that the nation

could ill afford a belligerent approach to the Native Americans

on its frontiers. Te Revolutionary War had also dislocated many

Indian nations. Te Cherokees were left reeling from the dev-

astations of war, with more than fifty towns destroyed, fields

1

Becoming Civilized


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Cherokee country prior to removal

Map by Rebecca L. Wrenn


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decimated, livestock slaughtered, and population loss due to

exposure and starvation from military incursions. Te war had

depleted more than twenty thousand square miles of valuablehunting grounds for their deerskin trade.2

Empowered by the newly ratified Constitution, the United

States government determined to redefine its relationship with its

Indian neighbors. Guided by federal policy, Indian tribes were to

be viewed as sovereign, independent nations entitled to respect-

ful treatment by the new American government. Aggressive

encroachment upon Indian lands that had often sparked bloody

frontier warfare was to end because the national government

promised protection against troublesome white intrudersor so

the nations first president expected. Not only did Washington

foster peace with Indians; his federal government would protect

Native Americans from extinction, though most thought it inev-

itable, when uncivilized people confronted civilized ones.3

Tere was a catch: upon taking offi ce, President George Wash-

ington made it clear that Americans wanted peace with their

Indian neighbors once they were remade as red citizens of a

white republic. Te first condition was that hunting and trading

in fursthe principal livelihood of most tribes, especially those

in the Southeastwould be replaced by the more civilizedoccupation of raising crops and livestock. Abandonment of

huge Indian hunting grounds for small farming plots guaran-

teed whites the strategic advantage of freeing up enormous

tracts of Indian landland that whites (from President Wash-

ington down to the smallest subsistent farmers on the frontier)

coveted. Washington and Knox drew on the prevailing Enlight-

enment notion that all people can learn and have the ability to

reason. Tey and other Americans also subscribed to the white

belief that ultimately Indians would have to surrender their


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lands to the expanding white population. For reasons never

articulated, the founding fathers expected this could happen

without conflict or harm to the Indian population. After all,Washington and Knox contended, Indians led uncivilized

lives not because of some inherent inferiority but because they

had not yet been able to imagine a better future for themselves

and their children. Ignorance, not race, then, had made them

uncivilized heathens. But with the right education and proper

training they could become respectable citizens, in a fully assi-

miliated (excluding black slaves) American society. Tus one of

the early treaties of the Washington administration with the

Cherokees, the 1791 reaty of Holston, called for precisely this

sort of give and take between the civilized and the uncivi-

lized: Tat the Cherokee Nation may be led to a greater degree

of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead

of remaining in a state of hunters, the United States will, fromtime to time, furnish gratuitously the said nation with useful

implements of husbandry. Americans would trade draft animals,

plows, and spinning wheels for Indian willingness to abandon

the hunt and chase after white civility.4

o carry out the new national Indian policy, federal agents

were sent out as middlemen between the chiefs and the policymakers in the federal government. Te agents were deployed to

protect Indian boundaries and set up trading posts where Indi-

ans would exchange their furs and skins for seed and hoes,

horses and plows.

Just as significantly, missionaries in the late 1790s began

arriving as well, armed with the religious values and domes-

tic tools for remaking Native Americans. Beginning in 1799,

evangelical ProtestantsMoravians, Baptists, Methodists, and

Presbyteriansfanned out into Indian country, setting up schools


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and missions where Indian boys were taught to become farm-

ers and artisans and Indian girls learned to sew, weave, and

cook. And most important, missionaries hoped to introduceChristianitythe telltale mark, whites believed, of a civilized

people. Te Federalists Indian policy under Washington and

Knox imagined a prosperous world where whites and enlight-

ened Indians would guide their people according to civilized

principles and eventually produce a nation that included assimi-

lated Indians as full citizens.5

If Washington and Knox believed they could transform

Native Americans with federal Indian agents and Protestant

missionaries, Tomas Jefferson, by the time he became presi-

dent in 1801, pointed to scientific grounds for the prospects of

such hopeful assimilation. Since a backward life in the forest

was responsible for the Indians ignorance, a more civilized

environment would significantly improve them. And once thathappened, Jefferson argued, we shall probably find that they

are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with

the Homo sapiens Europaeus. 6

Jefferson viewed Africans as inferior to whites, but as early as

1785 he observed, I believe the Indian . . . to be in body and

mind equal to the whiteman.7

Indians vivacity and activityof mind, he believed, was the equal of whites, and physically

Indians were brave, active, and affectionatethe full equal to

whites. Te orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, he observed,

did not surpass the speech he quoted from Iroquois chief Logan.

Once they exchanged the hunter state for agriculture, once they

gave up the wandering life of the chase for the stable existence

rooted in industry and thrift, Indians, he argued, would make

fully acceptable American citizens. Te steps were simple: 1st,

to raise cattle, etc., and thereby acquire a knowledge of the value


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of property; 2d, arithmetic, to calculate that value; 3d, writing,

to keep accounts, and here they begin to enclose farms, and the

men to labor, the women to spin and weave; 4th, to read AesopsFables and Robinson Crusoe are their first delight.8

Tis more positive, enlightened approach to Indian-white

relations may have offered hope to Cherokeesbut it was meant

to feel like their lasthope. It could not have been lost on the

Cherokeesor any other tribe subject to the civilization

programthat becoming civilized was their only alternative to

destruction. Becoming civilized was not, of course, a two-way

street; for whites, civilized Indians were those willingly sub-

merged into white culture. Early on Jefferson made this point:

Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the United

States, this is what the natural progress of things will, of course,

bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it. Surely

it will be better for them to be identified with us, and preservedin the occupation of their lands, than be exposed to the many

casualties which may endanger them while a separate people.9

Tinly disguised behind Jeffersons enlightened rhetoric

about the malleability of native peoples stood the bedrock deter-

mination to acquire their lands. As he noted in 1803 in a letter

to an Indian agent: In keeping agents among the Indians, twoobjects are principally in view: 1. Te preservation of peace; 2.

Te obtaining lands. For Jefferson, like most white leaders,

civilizing the Indians became simply a means for gaining access

to their lands. Hence the emphasis he placed on converting

Indians from hunters to small-scale farmers. Te Indians, Jef-

ferson wrote, being once closed in between strong settled

countries on the Mississippi & Atlantic, will, for want of game,

be forced to agriculture, will find that small portions of land

well improved, will be worth more to them than extensive forests


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unemployed, and will be continually parting with portions of

them, for money to buy stock, utensils & necessities for their

farms & families. Hunting, Jefferson believed, had alreadybecome inadequate for the Indians self-suffi ciency. So he was

intent on promoting agriculture and household manufacturing

among the Indiansand he was disposed to aid and encour-

age it liberally. As Indians learned to do better on less land,

Jefferson predicted, the expanding population of white settlers

all around them would soon take over Indian lands.10

And Jefferson made good on his plan: during his presidency,

he obtained some two hundred thousand square miles of Indian

territory in nine statesmostly in Indiana, Illinois, ennes-

see, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and

Missourian acquisition of territory that far exceeded the needs

of white settlers or interest of Indians willing to surrender hunt-

ing grounds as a step toward becoming civilized. Jeffersonspolicy was in part a military strategy aimed at clearing out Indi-

ans from the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, compressing

them into an ever-shrinking region between the Appalachian

Mountains and the Mississippi River.

At its heart, Jeffersons Indian policy viewed as hopeless all

Indians who clung to their savage ways as nomadic hunters:their game was becoming extinct, and their peoples were demor-

alized and depopulated by war, liquor, and disease. Teir only

hope, he insisted, came from selling their lands, accepting white

values, intermarrying with whites, and becoming respectable

yeoman farmers and U.S. citizens.11

White political leaders from Washington to Jefferson may

have had hope for the civilization program, but out West it was

a different matter. Most frontiersmen thought Indians could

never become the equal of whites. In fact, some westerners


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feared that once Indians became farmers they would neverget

rid of them. o most frontier settlers, Indians were simple, back-

ward, ignorant, and lazy, prone to lying, begging, and stealing.Te two races were never meant to live together. And some Cher-

okees felt the same way. As one federal agent to the Cherokees,

Return J. Meigs, observed, Many of the Cherokees think that

they are not derived from the same stock as whites, that they are

favorites of the Great Spirit, and that he never intended they

should live the laborious lives of whites.12

Tose who implemented the civilization program out West

often spoke just as bluntly about the challenge they were fac-

ing. Lewis Cass, who lived with the Indians on the Northwest

frontier as governor of the Michigan erritory, 181331, looked

on Indians as primitive savages driven by passions, self-interests,

and fears. Tey lacked all proper sense of enterprise, industry,

and thrift that had informed Casss Puritan background. Likethe bear, and deer, and buffalo of his own forests, Cass wrote

in 1827, an Indian lives as his father lived, and dies as his

father died. He never attempts to imitate the arts of his civi-

lized neighbors. His life passes away in a succession of listless

indolence, and of vigorous exertion to provide for his animal

wants, or to gratify his baleful passions. He never looks aroundhim, with a spirit of emulation, to compare his situation and

that of others, and to resolve on improving it.13And the only

hope for the improvement of Indians, Cass believed, lay

with their youth. Te adults and tribal elders simply could not

change enough to meet white needs. But perhaps the mission-

ary effort, he speculated, would bear fruit with the rising gen-

eration.

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Whereas the federal agents who fanned out into Indian country

in the 1790s brought Indians a new political and economic mes-

sage of how they could best assimilate into the new republic, themissionaries following them into the Southeast offered natives

nothing less than a cultural transformation. Tat transformation,

of course, was to be conducted strictly in the image of white,

civilized Protestants. But their attempt, both heroic and arro-

gant, served notice on the Cherokees that they were facing a very

new world, one that offered them ever-shrinking choices about

what it meant to be a patriotic Cherokee or an American.

Te earliest missionaries arriving in the Southeast were

Moravians from Salem, North Carolina, who entered the Cher-

okee Nation and established a mission at Springplace in 1801.

Presbyterian ministers came into eastern ennessee in 1804; after

the War of 1812, Methodists and Baptists moved into Cherokee

country. Te most organized missionary effort, though, camecourtesy of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign

Missions (ABCFM), who moved into Cherokee country in the

1810s. Headquartered in Boston, the American Board was an

interdenominational organization, composed mainly of Con-

gregationalists and Presbyterians, that gained strength from the

revival fires sweeping the country in the early nineteenth cen-tury. Funded by wealthy merchants and textile manufacturers

in New England, the board sought to elevate the aborigines in

the South, starting with the Cherokees. Te American Board

set up ten mission schools among the Cherokees, while the Bap-

tists established three schools, and the Moravians and Presbyte-

rians two each. Methodists funded six to nine circuit riders per

year and ran a handful of itinerating schools.14


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