Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (19 page)

Jackson informed the Creeks that “you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace. . . . Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you,” Jackson said. “My white children in Alabama have extended their law over your country. If you remain in it, you must be subject to that law.”

This is a straight and good talk. It is for your nation’s good, and your father requests you to hear his counsel.

Andrew Jackson

Jackson, of course, was not ordering them to depart. He left them the freedom to choose, and merely set the conditions so that they would have only one choice.

 • • • 

The principal chief of the Cherokee Nation did not seem to understand at first what Jackson was doing, though he was in Washington at the time. When Jackson promised “a just and liberal policy” toward the Indians, it is likely that John Ross was in the crowd. He was staying at Williamson’s Hotel, which faced Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Within a few years Williamson’s would be rebuilt and rechristened the Willard, a seat of luxury and political intrigue for generations to follow. It was an ideal location, a little more than a mile from the inauguration, a straight walk down Pennsylvania
toward the green copper Capitol dome. After the inauguration, Ross’s walk back to his room would have led him on the same path as Jackson, meaning that he would have been walking among those masses (“boys, women and children, black and white”) who trailed after their new president on his way to the Executive Mansion. Even if Ross did not continue all the way to the reception at the president’s house, he surely knew of the chaos there, and might have heard it from Williamson’s, two blocks away.

Ross, like Jackson, had arrived in Washington after a tragic end to the year. The Cherokee’s family tragedy is difficult to detail, for he was never as personal in his letters. His only known comment on this disaster came in the final phrase of a short letter to Cherokee lawmakers on an unrelated subject.

I return herewith the resolutions of the Committee passed on this 28th inst. regulating the issuing of permits, which I am of opinion requires some alteration. Circumstances prevent me at present from stating the objections I have to approving it in its present shape; being compelled to return home immediately in consequence of the death of my infant child on this morning.

This infant was the only one of Ross’s six children with Quatie to die young. Whatever grief the child’s death caused them went unrecorded, as did the cause; they buried the boy and went on with their lives, Quatie bearing another boy the following year. The chief’s reticence may have reflected a stoical nature, or a stoical culture, or his feeling of responsibility as a leader. It may even have reflected the experience of a man who had grown up suspended between the white and Indian worlds, and had learned never to reveal too much of himself. Ross returned to work the day after the baby’s death. He sent another letter to Cherokee lawmakers, offering the details on his veto of legislation from the day before, and making
only an oblique mention of his dead child.

The matter Ross was addressing in that letter demonstrated the
intensifying emotions of the conflict between Cherokees and white men. If Georgia was moving to disinherit the Indians, Cherokees were moving to reorder relations with whites. Cherokee lawmakers approved legislation forbidding white men from working inside the Cherokee Nation without a costly permit. In rejecting this plan, Ross softened the blow by telling lawmakers only that the legislation was badly drawn, though he likely understood that it was simply a bad idea. Every white person who lived or worked in the Cherokee Nation was a resource and a potential ally, a link to the white electorate on whom the Cherokees’ fate depended.

But if Ross handled his own legislature deftly, his political instincts seemed to fail him once he reached Washington as part of the annual Cherokee delegation to the capital. His correspondence included no report of the inauguration, a revealing omission. His actions that winter suggested that he did not yet grasp the historic significance of the election. The Cherokees spent February trying to do business with officials from the outgoing Congress and administration, depressed and defeated lame ducks who would have no influence with the new powers in the capital. Ross had to start over again after the inauguration, beginning with the new president. “Respected Sir,” he wrote Jackson on March 6—addressing the president as a fellow man, not as the Great White Father—“
the present U.S. agent for the Cherokee Nation . . . does not . . . inspire . . . confidence.” Ross complained of the agent’s “apparent incompetency” and his unwarranted seizure of a hundred acres of Cherokee land. Ross’s grievances went deeper than that: the agent had been seeking to infiltrate the Cherokee Nation with Cherokees from the western band. Some Cherokees who had been living beyond the Mississippi since 1808 had been recruited for a secret effort to persuade the main band of Cherokees to emigrate out of the east and join them. The effort produced another exposé in the
Cherokee Phoenix
, which somehow obtained the agent’s correspondence about his secret mission. It was all published on March 11, including the Indian agent’s
embarrassing admission that despite all of his covert efforts “only a single Indian has yet enrolled” to move west. On April 6, after this well-timed scoop, Ross complained again to the president. But in the eight years that followed this complaint, as Jackson went through an unprecedented clearing out of the federal bureaucracy, he never got around to replacing the Cherokee agent.

It was only after raising these comparatively small complaints that Ross turned to the truly existential issue, the danger posed by Georgia. At Ross’s request, the new secretary of war conferred with the president to determine whether the United States would protect the Cherokees. On April 18, 1829, the answer came back: No. The United States could “never” interfere with Georgia’s legitimate exercise of its authority. Secretary of War John Eaton said it was the Cherokees’ fault that Georgia was taking their land, because “
the tribe established an independent government within the territory of the state.” Cherokees must yield to Georgia’s laws if they remained in Georgia, although the more “humane” alternative would be moving to the West, where “
the soil shall be yours, while the trees grow or the streams run.” This must have been the moment when John Ross fully understood the meaning of the election of 1828. Days later he acknowledged that his talks with federal officials had failed, and he left Washington for the season.

He didn’t go straight home. He went northward first, up the East Coast. He intended to travel to New York and Albany, returning to the West by way of the new Erie Canal, but having remained in Washington “
much longer than desired or anticipated,” he didn’t have time to see this latest wonder of the world. He made it no farther than Philadelphia, where he wrote a letter acknowledging that he had not achieved his objectives in Washington.

What will be the result of the unnatural course which Georgia has taken, or the ultimate fate of the Cherokee nation, I dare not attempt to predict—but . . . the nation is prepared passively, to meet the worse
of the consequences; than to surrender their homes, their all and to emigrate.

It was a downbeat letter, yet it influenced future events. Just as Jackson signaled his strategy in his letter from Gadsby’s in 1825, John Ross expressed his strategy in this May 6, 1829, letter from Philadelphia. “Passively” resisting oppression, Cherokees would neither rise in arms nor “surrender.” They would remain in place and demand that the United States keep its obligations. In a later age, minority groups would commit acts of civil disobedience to highlight rights they were denied. John Ross contemplated civil
obedience,
following the law while highlighting rights he believed Indians already had.

I
n the summer of 1829 a letter reached the offices of the
National Intelligencer
in Washington. A bundle of papers arrived with the letter. The writer proposed that his letter and the papers should be published under a pseudonym: “William Penn.”

Gentlemen: I send for your paper two numbers of a series of Essays on the pending . . . controversy between the United States and the Indians, and hope you will insert them. . . . This is a subject which must be abundantly discussed in our country. . . . Some able members of Congress, to my certain knowledge, wish to have the matter discussed.

The
Intelligencer
had been linked with presidential administrations since the start of the century. No longer was it so: the paper was part of a capital elite that the new president did not like or trust. Jackson would steer business and information instead to the Jackson man who ran a rival Washington paper, the
United States Telegraph
, and when that editor proved insufficiently loyal, Jackson would import an editor from Kentucky to start yet another paper. This left the
National Intelligencer
free to speak, a paper that was still widely read and a clever choice for
Ross’s ally to use. As an “inducement” to encourage the paper to print his essays, “Penn” promised this paper that was now part of Jackson’s opposition that “
I shall not agree with the present Executive of the United States . . . [who] has been greatly mistaken in his powers and his duty.”

The
Intelligencer
printed this letter with an advisory: “The Essays shall be published.”

It was common in the nineteenth century to write such articles pseudonymously, though the editors of the
Intelligencer
surely understood whom they were publishing. Word of his identity spread among the elites, many of whom knew his name and his work. He was a former magazine editor based in Boston, a sickly, hollow-cheeked New Englander known for the luminous intensity of both his feelings and his prose. “William Penn” was his avatar, to use the language of a later era, chosen because Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, had set an example of recognizing Indian rights.

The writer’s real name was Jeremiah Evarts. He had visited Cherokee country and now worked for an organization that supported missionaries there. It was called the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and Evarts was the board’s corresponding secretary. In modern terms he was the communications director, an influential voice in an organization that sent missionaries as far away as China and as near as New Echota. Samuel Worcester, the missionary in the Cherokee capital, was the American Board’s man. He regularly wrote to Evarts and Evarts to him. Back when the missionary needed help obtaining a printing press for the Cherokee Phoenix,
Evarts was the one who helped to have a press sent from Boston. Evarts was also an ally of John Ross. When Ross wrote his letter of May 6, 1829, outlining his strategy to “passively” resist removal, he sent it to Evarts. Ross was assuring him that Cherokees were not about to do anything foolish, that the growing religious movement could act in support of Indians without fear of embarrassment. Evarts acted.

Evarts, like Ross, was in Washington on the day of Jackson’s
inauguration, close enough to see that the new president kissed the Bible on which he took his oath of office, but not close enough to follow the new president’s speech. “
I could hear some words distinctly; but could not keep the connexion,” he remembered later. It may have been just as well that Evarts did not hear the president’s promise to pursue “a just and liberal policy” toward the tribes, because Evarts would not have believed it. He had been staying the past three weeks at Gadsby’s and had met his fellow lodger, the president-elect. They talked about Indians. In a letter written afterward, Evarts said Jackson understood the “evil” of “
a direct collision between the national and state authorities,” but that Jackson was unwilling to do anything about it. “He is not now prepared to interpose, and defend the Cherokees from Georgia; and you may easily judge, whether it is probable he will be in more favorable circumstances hereafter to decide in favor of the weakest party.”

“
No relief can be hoped,” Evarts decided, “except through the influence of the press. This may operate upon the members of Congress.” Soon he was crafting his essays. He understood how to make an article spread from one newspaper to the rest of the media. Though the
Intelligencer
was a daily paper, he proposed to provide two essays each week, so that “
they may be copied into semi-weekly papers, if their Editors see fit.” He also understood his subject. In his first essay, printed on August 5, 1829, he quoted from a letter written by the secretary of war, the dismissive note telling John Ross that the government would not protect the Cherokees. In his following essays, William Penn shredded the substance of that letter.

Penn acknowledged that proponents of Indian removal believed they were performing “
the greatest kindness,” whether the Indians liked it or not. But “no subject, not even war, nor slavery, nor the nature of free institutions” would be so closely examined by the world. “If, in pursuance of a narrow and selfish policy, we should at this day, in a time of profound peace and great National prosperity, amidst all our professions of magnanimity and benevolence, and in the blazing light of the nineteenth century, drive away the remnants of the tribes, in such a
manner, and under such auspices, as to ensure their destruction . . . then the sentence of an indignant world will be uttered in thunders, which will roll and reverberate for ages after the present actors in human affairs shall have passed away.”

That was the first essay. Twenty-three more came after it.

 • • • 

Evarts was a man whose thinking wove together several of the great strands of the early American intellect. He was a product of strict New England religion, with a terror of idleness and an intense consciousness of the sinfulness of man. But if mankind was marked by “narrow and selfish” behavior, Evarts was also conscious of living in “the blazing light of the nineteenth century,” when advances in technology and communication sparked tremendous optimism. For many Americans, the greatest innovation was America itself, a nation destined to play a special role in the world. For some, America’s special role was offering a beacon of liberty to a world ruled by kings. For others, including Evarts, America’s destiny was also to spread God’s word to the “heathen lands” around the globe, including the lands of Indians near home.

He was a Vermont farmer’s son, and a product of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut. A Yale classmate said Evarts looked about the same in college as he would twenty years later: “
There sat Evarts, in a plain rustic garb, with which fashion evidently had never intermeddled; his stature of middling height; his form remarkably slender; his manners stiff; and his whole exterior having nothing to prepossess a stranger in his behalf, except a countenance which bespoke as much
honesty
as ever falls to the lot of man.” Intense, focused and in time deeply religious—he became a committed Christian during his senior year—young Evarts was ferociously self-critical. He excoriated himself for wasting time with “idle talking” or even “reading,” and wrote once in his journal: “
In my leisure moments I think over the sins with which my whole life has been filled. They appear dreadful.” Evarts could be as hard on others as he was on himself. Long before Evarts the writer
publicly challenged the president of the United States, Evarts the student found the courage to challenge the president of Yale. During a class discussion of the question “Is dancing a useful employment?” the young man was shocked to hear President Timothy Dwight say that dancing and balls were perfectly fine, if properly conducted. Evarts rose to say that
dancing was a “temptation” and that a man of such prominence ought to know better than to endorse it.

If his intense focus on personal morals makes him seem like an ancestor of the modern religious right, the politics he espoused after leaving Yale also make Evarts seem like an ancestor of the modern pacifist left.
From 1810 to 1821 he edited the
Panoplist
, a Boston religious journal. He wrote in its pages that America should commit to establishing schools and churches “in every part of the globe; the alleviation of human suffering of every kind . . . in a word,
the entire subjugation of the world to Christ.” He wrote antiwar articles. In 1811, when Britain and France were at war, he denounced generals who instilled in their soldiers “
a stupid contempt of death.” When the United States joined the global conflict by declaring war against Britain in 1812, Evarts did not allow patriotic sentiment to lead him away from his principles. Precisely as activists would do two centuries later during the war in Iraq, he attempted to crystallize opposition to the war by putting a price tag on the conflict. His newspaper calculated that the cost of weapons, ammunition, destroyed property, economic disruption, and ruined lives totaled $
3.235 billion in 1813 alone. Once he became acquainted with Cherokee issues it was inevitable that he would attack those issues too, based on his own passionate morality.

 • • • 

Evarts gained his acquaintance with Cherokee issues because he traveled numerous times over the years from New England to the South. At first he went for his health, having been sickly all his life; doctors suggested that he seek restoration in the warm air of South Carolina and Georgia. After 1821 he was making the journeys for work too. That
was when he became corresponding secretary of the American Board, the missionary organization. Evarts realized that he could support the board’s work by prospecting for donations on his southern travels. “
I was never in a place where so many people might give largely,” he wrote once, strategizing about what kind of fund-raising letters might move their hearts. Of course, he knew the reason many in the South were able to “give largely,” and he brooded over it. His hosts in Charleston once took him to see a slave auction, which he watched while taking notes with a pencil. Enslaved individuals and families were made to stand on a table, looking “
exceedingly disconsolate, much as if they were led to execution.” A carpenter and his wife were sold for $1,000 each, a “field woman” for $560. Many of the enslaved tried to recruit buyers whom they believed to be kind masters, for “they dread to be sold to a bad, or an unknown master,” and if they failed to avoid this fate, they did not hide their despair. Such scenes reinforced Evarts’s belief in gradual abolition, which he called the only way to avoid a slave revolt. “
Black men will at last be free; and if they are not freed by kindness, under the direction of wisdom, they will gain their liberty by violence, at the instigation of revenge.”

Slipping away from the commercial cities of the coast, Evarts traveled inland. He believed that long journeys on horseback would restore his health; one of his expense reports from those years recorded
a journey of 768 miles, nearly all of it in the saddle. His journeys took him to the Cherokee Nation.
He stayed for days at Brainerd, the best known of the Cherokee missions, admiring the sun setting through the open woods on the grounds. The American Board had purchased this
twenty-five-acre compound from John McDonald, John Ross’s grandfather, the old Scottish trader and master of intrigue. While it is not certain when Ross and Evarts first met, they were clearly collaborating from the mid-1820s onward, and both went to Washington lobbying for Cherokees. They worked together even though neither their principles nor their motivations precisely matched. Ross worried about the advancement of Cherokees; Evarts worried about the soul of the United
States. Evarts opposed slavery; Ross owned slaves. Evarts was deeply religious, and Ross only nominally so. And Evarts never defended traditional Cherokee religion or culture, instead promoting what he saw as moral progress and Christ. But in the summer of 1829, Evarts was exactly what Ross needed: a genuine ally who was willing to fight alongside him as an equal. Evarts was different from Henry Clay, who supported Indian rights but also thought Indians were doomed. While Clay thought Indians’ “
disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world,” Evarts placed them on the same level as white men. His second “William Penn” essay, published on August 8, borrowed some of the phrasings of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson had written “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Evarts wrote of truths he considered self-evident:

The Cherokees are human beings, endowed by their Creator with the same natural rights as other men. They are in peaceable possession of a territory which they have always regarded as their own. This territory was in possession of their ancestors, through an unknown series of generations, and has come down to them with a title
absolutely unencumbered in every respect.
It is not pretended, that the Cherokees have ever alienated their country, or that the whites have ever been in possession of it. . . . We might as well ask the Chinese, what right
they
have to the territory which they occupy.

Here Evarts arrived at the strongest argument in favor of the Cherokees. They had a “natural right” to land where they had lived so long, and which they had improved by building farms and towns. Their claim of ownership was so strong that even the government of Georgia was not technically seeking to overturn it. Instead Georgia was proposing to extend state law over the Cherokee Nation while refusing to assimilate the Cherokee people. The people would be denied basic rights of
citizenship—such as voting or testifying in court—which meant that they would be left with little choice but to depart. Evarts wrote that if Georgia’s assertion of power over the Cherokees “is to be endured by an enlightened people in the nineteenth century, and if, in consequence of it, the Cherokees are to be delivered over, bound and manacled, if this is to be done in the face of day . . . hisses of shame and opprobrium will be heard in every part of the civilized world.” Again and again Evarts emphasized that the world was watching. Certainly the nation was watching Evarts.
Some forty other newspapers reprinted his essays. “
The Letters of WILLIAM PENN,” the
Intelligencer
commented, “have had a more general circulation in the public prints than any other series of Letters that have ever been published during our time.” Evarts heard that
even John Marshall, the chief justice of the United States, had read and approved of them. Probably Evarts did not anticipate that Marshall would someday rule on the Cherokees’ case. But Evarts, who early in his career had been a frustrated lawyer, could not have failed to pause upon learning that his legal and political analysis had met with the approval of the nation’s leading jurist. Perhaps Evarts even allowed himself a moment of quiet satisfaction before denouncing himself for the sin of wasting time. Jeremiah Evarts, forever seeking some great purpose that was worthy of his obligation to serve, had found his cause.