Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (17 page)

Allegations of bribery soon swirled around the federal Indian agency. The federal Indian agent was shocked. Even the agent’s brother said he was
offered $10,000 and five square miles of land in exchange for his help. Increasingly suspicious Creek chiefs stripped William McIntosh of his authority to speak for them—but this only drove him into the white negotiators’ arms. His faction of Creeks signed a document on February 12 that gave Georgia everything it wanted. It would be known as the Treaty of Indian Springs, having been signed at William McIntosh’s inn. The commissioners sent an exuberant message to Governor Troup.

We are happy to inform you that the “long agony is over.”

Soon after this, William McIntosh sent a letter “To His Excellency George M. Troup,” giving
instructions on how to send $2,000 that Troup had promised to lend him.

William McIntosh needed something besides money. McIntosh’s son and other Creeks traveled to Milledgeville to have dinner with Governor Troup, and made their main concern clear in a follow-up letter, five times using the word “protect” or “protection.”

If
[critics of the treaty]
should attempt to breed a disturbance with the friendly Indians we shall inform you for protection, and we hope you will protect us . . . we look for protection from you. . . . P.S. We wish to know from you in writing whether you could protect us, should protection be necessary.

McIntosh knew the penalty for his betrayal of the nation was death. He was unavailable to greet Lafayette as he made his way through Creek country; he may have been lying low. But his son Chilly McIntosh did come out, and welcomed Lafayette to the family’s home village. Chilly offered an explanation for his father’s act as they watched a game of stickball, the local variant of lacrosse: it was time to admit the inevitable.
Contact with white men was destroying the Creeks, who might renew themselves farther west. Chilly McIntosh would make that journey west, and would live long enough to fight in the Civil War. His father would not. On April 30, 1825, after the Marquis de Lafayette had safely passed through the Creek Nation, two hundred Creek men surrounded the house of William McIntosh and set it on fire.
He might have burned to death had not the attackers dragged him out, stabbed him to death, and shot him dozens of times.

The Treaty of Indian Springs could not stand. Newly inaugurated President Adams took a personal interest in the case, summoning the
federal Indian agent to the Executive Mansion to tell his story. The treaty was so embarrassing that even John Forsyth, a Georgia congressman, sent word that he would “
infinitely rather” the United States negotiate a new agreement that gave the Creeks more generous terms. Adams voided the treaty. But there was still that compact of 1802. The president still felt obliged to act as Georgia’s land agent; he lacked Andrew Jackson’s talent for reinterpreting his obligations when he felt them to be wrong. The Adams administration negotiated a new treaty with surviving Creek leaders who came to Washington. Negotiations grew so intense that President Adams’s diary for January 18, 1826, noted that “the first chief of the deputation, Opothle Yoholo, attempted last evening to
commit suicide.”
Finally, the Creeks consented to sell most of their land in Georgia, but the Georgians under Governor Troup refused to accept this. They wanted it all. Defying federal authority, they began surveying even the Creeks’ remaining land to sell to white buyers.

U.S. Army forces under General Edmund P. Gaines were ready to move against Georgia to protect the Creeks if ordered. Had Gaines acted, it might have become a farce, or it might have turned into a civil war in 1827. President Adams couldn’t know in advance. In what he called “
the most momentous message I have ever sent to Congress,” Adams said he had decided not to risk war with Georgia, and would instead pursue the matter in the courts. The administration was not even effective at that. Finally the federal government went to the Creeks once again, and bought what little Georgia land they had left. Georgia would soon be cleared of all natives except for John Ross’s Cherokees.

 • • • 

When the Marquis de Lafayette departed the western edge of Creek territory, he emerged in the white-occupied lands of Alabama. From there he traveled by water—downriver to Mobile, along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, and then on a zigzag course up the Mississippi Valley, stopping to visit each state he encountered along the way. Other than New Orleans, this whole section of the United States had been
established within the span of a single life. At a dinner in Nashville, Lafayette met a man described as
the first white settler in Tennessee.

While staying in Nashville, Lafayette climbed aboard a carriage for a trip out of town. A short distance into the countryside he arrived before the increasingly opulent farm known as the Hermitage, where Andrew Jackson stood to greet him. The failed presidential candidate had arrived home a few weeks earlier, having made his own trip west from Washington. Jackson had followed the customary route westward—up to Pittsburgh, then down the Ohio—and his acts along the way revealed his state of mind, for the defeated man did not act defeated at all. He was reaching out to political supporters. Passing through Pittsburgh, he missed connections with an iron and glass manufacturer who had passionately backed him, but the man sent a letter racing down the Ohio River after Jackson. The manufacturer, Henry Baldwin, pledged to continue his political activity, “
having in view the same object—the same purpose—& the same policy which have hitherto guided all my conduct.” The object, purpose, and policy were the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency: his supporters were already thinking of a second run in 1828. Jackson remained the most popular man in America. Though his health was wrecked beyond redemption, his destiny still lay before him. When Lafayette took Jackson’s hand at the Hermitage, he was touching not the nostalgic past but the American future.

Jackson was a genial host for the national guest. The two men looked around the prosperous and orderly farm, with black servants always close at hand—Lafayette portly and nearing exhaustion from his monumental tour; Jackson sticklike and white-haired but feeding on the energy of the moment. Inside the house, Jackson produced a brace of pistols and asked: Do you recognize these? Lafayette did. Many years earlier, the pistols had belonged to Lafayette. He’d made a gift of them to George Washington. Now Jackson had obtained them. “
I believe myself worthy of them,” he said, “if not from what I have done, at least for what I wished to do for my
country.”

1828–
1829

L
ong afterward, it became clear that the year 1828 was a watershed. It was the year of a momentous presidential election. It was a hinge point for American culture, which previously had leaned heavily on its European forebears,
and increasingly afterward became its own self-confident creation. And it was the year that a Native American culture took a step toward self-empowerment and self-preservation. In a wooden house in New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, a printer rolled ink across a page of metal type. Some of the type on the page was in English. The remainder was in Cherokee, using symbols for Cherokee syllables in the system developed by Sequoyah. It was the first written language for any Native American nation. And it was the first time a native nation ran a newspaper. The printer laid a sheet across the inked type, pulled a lever to press it between two metal plates, and afterward probably hung the sheet over the rafters to dry. The inaugural issue of the
Cherokee Phoenix
was dated February 21, 1828.

Until that day natives relied on oral history, passed from one generation to another, while the wider American public mostly read accounts filtered through white observers. The speeches of famous chiefs passed
through multiple hands and were likely romanticized on their way to publication. Even the Harvard library with its twenty thousand volumes would have contained few words of Indians recorded by Indians. Now some natives would add their perspectives in two languages.

No evidence shows that John Ross conceived of the newspaper, but he understood its potential. The
Phoenix
came into existence after the Cherokee legislature, where Ross was a leader, committed $
1,500 toward establishing the newspaper and a National Academy. Though the academy never amounted to much, Ross valued the newspaper so highly that when its subsidy seemed insufficient in later years,
he paid bills from his own pocket. Having grown up in a home stocked with the latest newspaper editions, and having spent time in Washington, he intuitively grasped the link between the media and power in a democracy.

Cherokees needed the newspaper in order to play their emerging role as part of the American body politic. Since their agreements with the federal government could no longer be backed by force, they must rely on the law, which was made, interpreted, and applied by the people’s representatives. Cherokees depended on the democratic system. They worked that system even though they had no right to vote for federal officials, only for Cherokee leaders. Ross put it perfectly in the closing line of his 1827 letter telling federal commissioners that Cherokees would not sell land: “With great respect, we are
politically
your friends and brethren.”

Ross still had a copy of that letter, along with the whole correspondence in which the frustrated federal commissioners demanded an advantageous place and time for negotiations, and accused Ross of “subterfuge,” only to have Ross subtly mock them. Somehow in the spring of 1828 these letters made their way from the council house in New Echota to the printshop of the
Cherokee Phoenix
, which was only a short walk away. The editor took an interest in the letters, which the printer began to set in type.

 • • • 

The birth of the
Phoenix
reflected the era. The number of newspapers was growing. In 1775, by one count, the
thirteen colonies supported 37 newspapers. This number increased until, by 1823, the nationwide total reached 598. By the presidential election year of 1828 there were 802. Some were daily papers; many more came out weekly. Within a few more years,
cheap “penny papers” in major cities would vastly expand newspaper circulation. Newspapers were multiplying far more rapidly than the population, growth that coincided with expanding commerce, speedier communications, rapid urbanization, and intensifying democratic politics. The
National Intelligencer
in Washington had been the semiofficial voice of the ruling Democratic-Republican Party since the start of the century, but a more diverse political scene demanded additional voices. Politicians subsidized those voices: officeholders steered government printing contracts to friendly newsmen, and
Henry Clay once loaned an editor $1,500. Andrew Jackson had supportive papers in key states, like the Philadelphia sheet that first printed claims that Clay and Adams were about to consummate a corrupt bargain for the presidency. As the 1828 election approached, Jackson’s men added to their network of news outlets. Many editors saw where the future lay and shifted toward the general.

Jackson, though not known to read a great many books, was the quintessential newspaper consumer. In the 1820s he subscribed to as many as seventeen papers at a time, and did not like to throw them away. He might go through them later, seeking clippings he wanted to pass to a friend or use to smite an enemy. The papers piled up so high that his household began having them bound—huge volumes, each with a year to
a year and a half’s worth of issues and as oversize as the broadsheet papers it contained. The information in those volumes could be instruments of power. And Jackson the collector of newspapers was also a collector of newsmen. Once he became president, Jackson would
draw newspaper editors into his circle of intimate advisors—especially Francis Blair and Amos Kendall, who came to his side even though they were from Henry Clay’s Kentucky.

Since newspapers were linked to the interests of specific parties or politicians, it made sense that marginalized groups sought their own outlets.
Freedom’s Journal
, widely considered the
first black-owned and operated newspaper, started in New York in 1827. To start their own paper in 1828, the Cherokees overcame numerous obstacles. There was no printing press in the Cherokee Nation, no experienced printer, and no such thing as Cherokee metal type. Fortunately the missionary in town,
Samuel Worcester, was able to write to his base in New England for help in obtaining the necessary equipment. The Cherokees found a veteran printer in Tennessee, who took the job though he had trouble distinguishing the Cherokee symbols and tended to leave that part of the job to his assistant. From February onward the lone editor came and went from the shop, handing the printers editorials and the latest news.

Murder.

We are informed of a murder being committed in the neighborhood of Sumach. The name of the person killed is William Fallen, and of the murderer Bear’s Paw. We have not heard of the circumstances.

Later issues of the paper accused local authorities of
leaving the suspect “unmolested.” Possibly stung by this unprecedented media attention, authorities finally put Bear’s Paw on trial.
He was acquitted.

A subscription to the
Phoenix
cost $3.50 a year, with a discount if paid in advance. “
Subscribers who can only read the Cherokee language” received a greater discount—a signal that those literate in English were likely more prosperous than others. The newspaper reported that the Cherokee Nation was, as a whole, accumulating wealth. One article said that the eastern Cherokees, with a
population conservatively estimated
at thirteen thousand, owned sixty-two shops, fifty gristmills and sawmills, and 7,683 horses, not to mention $200,000 worth of fencing that penned in 22,531 black cattle and 46,700 hogs. In English and in Cherokee, the
Phoenix
published the full text of the constitution (“We, the representatives of the people of the CHEROKEE NATION . . .”) as well as letters debating its meaning and texts of other laws. Readers on April 24 were informed that any person who “
shall lay violent hands” on a woman, “forcibly attempting to ravish her chastity contrary to her consent,” would receive fifty lashes and have an ear cut off. Other laws published in the paper revealed how well the Cherokees had learned the ways of the surrounding white population. “
Resolved by the National Committee and Council,
That intermarriages between Negro slaves and Indians, or whites, shall not be lawful . . . any male Indian or white man, marrying a negro woman slave, he or they, shall be punished with thirty-nine stripes on the bare back.”

The
Phoenix
also did something notable for a newspaper in the Deep South: it included criticism of slavery. One article reprinted the narrative of a writer who’d visited West Africa, from which many slaves had come. “
I stood on Cape Montserado,” the writer said. “Scenes of horror—of relentless cruelty” had taken place “along the whole border of this afflicted, this injured land.” Surely “the Omnipotent” would end “the exile, sufferings, and degradation of the Africans,” and allow them to be repatriated, as the American Colonization Society was beginning to do. This article edged up to or beyond the limits of permissible southern discourse. Authorities were increasingly anxious to suppress anything that might inspire a slave revolt. Even the Cherokees’ own slaveholding elites might not have approved.

There seemed to be no particular reason to print the article on slavery except that it interested the editor, Elias Boudinot, one of the most fascinating characters in New Echota. When his paper started publication, he was around twenty-six—round-faced, clean-cut, and sometimes eloquent. He was not an experienced newsman, and his four-page newspaper had an initial circulation of just two hundred. Yet the
structure of the nineteenth-century media gave the
Phoenix
an outsize influence. Over the years, Boudinot arranged to
receive copies of about a hundred other papers by exchange, meaning that he was also mailing copies of the
Phoenix
to a hundred other newspapers. Editors read it. They said it “
may very properly be regarded as
something new
,”
as the
Charleston Mercury
advised South Carolina readers, an assessment reprinted by the
United States Telegraph
in Washington.
Many papers reprinted
Phoenix
articles, including
religious journals that were the era’s most widely read publications. Other papers replied to
Phoenix
editorials. In modern terms, it was as if a blog or social media feed caught the mainstream media’s attention, causing its articles to go viral.

And so it was noteworthy when copies of that 1827 correspondence between John Ross and the federal commissioners made their way to the
Phoenix
printshop. On May 28, 1828, Boudinot gave over a substantial portion of the newspaper to publishing the letters. Though offered with little commentary, they read like an exposé. The commissioners came across as designing and arrogant, insisting on paying the “expenses” of native leaders they wanted to influence, and seemingly baffled by Indians who did not follow instructions. Ross seemed smooth and in control, insisting upon nothing more than the ordinary process of the law. The letters ended with the whole Cherokee government, under the new constitution, saying Cherokees “would never dispose of one foot more of land again.” It was perfect Cherokee propaganda, distributed to newspaper after newspaper. Boudinot’s services were worth what little the Cherokees were able to pay.

 • • • 

Boudinot lived with his wife and family a short walk from the newspaper office in New Echota. They occupied a wood-frame house with a “piazza,” or columned porch, and a garden. The house included the era’s closest approximation of running water,
a well with a windlass built into the porch. Such a house suited Boudinot’s status as a member of the Cherokee elite. He was a nephew of powerful Major Ridge, though
not especially affluent. His wife, Harriett, struggled to maintain the growing household on the editor’s salary of $400 a year. “
Our water is so sweet & pure that I have almost substituted it for coffee & Tea,” she wrote once, though a careful reading of the letter indicates she was really cutting back on coffee and tea because she couldn’t afford it. It cost a lot, she noted, and Elias drank it constantly, as he worked days and nights, sometimes on the newspaper and sometimes translating religious texts for the missionary Samuel Worcester. Occasionally the strain on Elias showed up in the pages of his paper:

The Editor of this paper regrets that, owing to indisposition, he is not able to render his present number as interesting as he would wish.

In another issue Boudinot expressed regret that the previous week’s newspapers had all been delivered sodden after the mail carrier fell from his horse into a stream. And then there were days Boudinot apologized on page
2
for an error on page
1
, having discovered the error only after
the printer had run off the first page and the ink had dried. He was having trouble with the printer, a preoccupied and suspicious man. A Methodist, he disliked the Congregationalist missionary Samuel Worcester, and accused him of undue influence over Boudinot and the paper. Boudinot fired the printer and found a new one.

Whatever his struggles, the young editor was well positioned to translate Cherokees to the surrounding white world. He had seen some of it. When organizing the
Phoenix
, the editor-to-be supplemented the Cherokee government subsidy with a fund-raising tour, developing a speech he delivered in eastern cities. (“
What is an Indian?” he asked a crowd in Philadelphia. “Is he not formed of the same materials as yourself?”) He had in fact been traveling since his teenage years, and during his travels had acquired both a white man’s name and a white wife.

He’d been called Buck Watie at birth, but like many Cherokees he
changed his name as he grew older. In 1818, when Buck was sixteen, his family sent him to attend school in the North, and on the way he met an old man from New Jersey named Elias Boudinot, who’d been a leader of the Continental Congress during the Revolution. The old revolutionary was sympathetic to Indians, and had written a book investigating whether native peoples were “the descendants of Jacob and the
long lost tribes of Israel”—the same theory that had long fascinated Indian sympathizers such as the eighteenth-century trader James Adair. There is no proof that Buck really believed he was an Israelite, but he was impressed enough to enroll in school a short time later using Boudinot’s name.