Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (21 page)

D
enied the right to defend their territory by force, Cherokees were reminded again that they depended on the power of the people. They must persuade the wider American public, as Jeremiah Evarts had tried to do with his much-reprinted essays of 1829. It was through Evarts that the campaign on behalf of the Cherokees now spread.

Evarts was composing his William Penn essays in Boston in 1829 when he had a visitor from out of town. He knew her through his friend Lyman Beecher, a Boston preacher. This was the same Lyman Beecher who had sent word before the presidential inauguration that Andrew Jackson would “distinguish himself as a patriot” if he would close the post offices on Sundays. Beecher and Evarts were allies on the matter of the Sunday mails. Their efforts on that issue were hopeless—limited Sunday mail service would continue until 1912—but their relationship proved productive for Evarts, because he came to meet Lyman Beecher’s oldest daughter.

Catharine Beecher was twenty-nine years old in 1829, a woman notable for her self-confidence, independence, and sly wit. Neither wealthy nor married, she supported herself by running a school for girls in Hartford, Connecticut. Her pupils included her little sister Harriet, eleven years her junior and a precocious writer. Catharine was on her
way to writing dozens of books on subjects ranging from housekeeping to child-rearing to education. When she met Jeremiah Evarts in Boston, he made a profound impression. Still thin and hollow-cheeked, sickly and unconcerned with his appearance, he was nevertheless filled with the passion of his beliefs. Inevitably the subject turned to Indians. As Beecher recalled many years later, Evarts warned of the “
distressing and disastrous consequences” of removing the Cherokees, and then he made a suggestion. “He said that American women might save these poor, oppressed natives, and asked me to devise some method of securing such intervention. I was greatly excited,” Beecher said, as she surely was. Jeremiah Evarts had just proposed the first mass political action by women in the history of the United States. Catharine Beecher agreed to take part.

What happened next was done in secrecy, using extraordinary measures to shield the identities of the women involved. Women were expected to play no direct part in politics. The accepted ways for women to express themselves were to quietly advise their husbands, or to participate in
charitable organizations that promoted public virtue. They could not vote. The general broadening of voting rights for men was slowly provoking Americans to ask if women should also participate (within a few years young Abraham Lincoln, running for the Illinois legislature, would endorse voting rights for all taxpayers and veterans, “
by no means excluding females”), but the discussion was not far advanced. Susan B. Anthony was nine years old in 1829. The historic Seneca Falls convention at which influential women would discuss and debate their rights would not come until 1848. Few women would be publicly credited with a major effect on mainstream political life before 1852, when Catharine Beecher’s little sister Harriet, by then known as Harriet Beecher Stowe, published
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
her best-selling novel on the evils of slavery.

Yet in 1829 Catharine Beecher was one of a number of women Evarts urged to speak out. Beecher made herself heard, though she did not make herself known. So thoroughly did she keep her name from
being associated with her campaign that the inside details seem not to have been disclosed until forty-five years later, when she finally published an account of them. But the results of the work by Beecher and other women were visible almost immediately.

 • • • 

A photograph of Catharine Beecher in middle age shows a woman with calm, curious eyes. There is a hint of mirth about the upward slant of her eyebrows, and a hint of the Puritan in the white lace about her neck. She has a shawl draped carelessly over her shoulders, giving her the slightly rumpled look of the scholar. She is sitting on a wicker chair, with a writing tablet balanced on her knee, pencil and paper poised at the ready. It is plausible that she was sitting in a similar pose when she began drafting an essay about the Cherokees.

The present crisis in the affairs of the Indian nations . . . demands the immediate and interested attention of all who make any claims to . . . humanity.

She quoted from the Georgia laws that nullified the Cherokee government and prevented Indians from testifying. Describing such laws, Beecher chose a word in common use in 1829, albeit in a different context. “If these laws are permitted to take effect, the Indians are no longer independent nations, but are slaves.”

Never having spent time among the southern tribes, she was less successful than Evarts in describing them in terms of equality (“Will the naturalist, who laments the extinction of the mammoth race of the forest,” she asked in an unfortunate comparison, “allow this singular and interesting species of the human race to cease from the earth?”), but she seemed to relate to the Cherokees on a certain level. The Cherokees were politically powerless, rather like women. Lacking the vote, they had to rely on their voices. And much as John Ross of the Cherokees had done, Beecher performed an act of political jujitsu. Ross used
George Washington’s historic Indian policy to strengthen the Cherokee hold on land rather than weaken it. Beecher redefined women’s political weakness as strength. She suggested that women’s forced isolation from politics put them in a morally superior position.

The females of this country . . . are protected from the blinding
influence of party spirit, and the asperities of political violence. They have nothing to do with any struggle for power nor any right to dictate the decisions of those that rule over them.

But because women were free of “blinding influence” and “violence,” they could “feel for the distressed.” To a woman “it is given to administer the sweet charities of life, and to sway the empire of affection.” This meant that women had a proper role to play in the Cherokee debate after all, because the Indians were distressed, and women had “duties” to help them. Women might in the end discover that they were “forbidden” from venturing into politics, but they should try the experiment. “It may be, that female petitioners can lawfully be heard, even by the highest rulers of our land.” She referred to the biblical story of Queen Esther, who intervened to save the Jews from extermination. She added a postscript to the anonymous paper: “This communication was written and sent abroad solely by the female hand.”

So it was: Beecher said years later that she recruited “judicious and influential” Hartford women to attend a meeting. She read her letter aloud, and the women agreed to act. “
The circular was to be printed anonymously by a printer enjoined to secrecy, and all the ladies pledged themselves to similar secrecy. Then each lady gave the name of lady friends in some of the principal cities of the Northern, Middle and Western states; and it was remarkable how large a number was thus collected. Then a printed letter was sent to these ladies with a large number of the circulars, requesting each lady . . . to send them through the Post-Office to the most influential and benevolent ladies of her acquaintance.” The Hartford women were starting a kind of chain letter, urging
people across the country to organize public meetings on behalf of the Cherokees and, ultimately, to circulate petitions signed by thousands.

Why the secrecy? Partly it was custom—we have seen that Evarts too obscured his identity—but the measures taken by the Hartford women were far more elaborate than a pseudonym. When mailing copies of the circular, the Hartford women sent them from out of town so they would not bear a Hartford postmark. Nor did they simply take the bundle of letters to a single location where the postmaster might take note of the mass mailing; they used post offices in four different cities. It was as if they were anticipating a serious investigation to find the author. Some women may have felt they could not attach their names without compromising their husbands. (So closely were they identified with their husbands that many were not even referred to except by their husbands’ names; when Catharine Beecher finally identified some of her collaborators, she called them, in the style of the age, “Mrs. Daniel Wadsworth, Mrs. Thomas Chester,” and “Mrs. Sigourney,” the last a prominent poet in Hartford. Catharine Beecher was not married, of course, but had her own reasons to keep her name hidden. She may have foreseen a backlash.

Or maybe it was just her style, because the secrecy was a kind of game, and Beecher had a playful view of the world. She was born in 1800, the oldest of thirteen children of a preacher who would struggle all his life to support so many. If Lyman Beecher was a stern figure of fire and brimstone, his first daughter was not. In her memoir, Catharine described spending her youth as an indifferent student: “
It seemed as if I had a decided genius for nothing but play and merriment,” she wrote. Sometimes, when her teacher tested the class by posing a series of predetermined questions to the students in order, Catharine’s friends would covertly change places so the question that came to her would be the only one she could answer. Through such “contrivances” and “a few snatches” of reading, Catharine made it through school, though a teacher called her “
the busiest of all creatures in doing nothing.” She may not have been getting such a poor education. Rearranging her
classmates to create the illusion that she had studied for a test, or figuring out the meaning of a book from reading a few “snatches,” probably required more wit than simply doing her assignments. In 1829 she may well have delighted in the challenge of hiding her identity.

Experience had taught her to think for herself, even though it was not easy to get away with it. From an early age she battled her father on matters of religion. Lyman Beecher favored the Calvinist doctrine of original sin—that human beings were born in depravity rather than innocence. God had chosen in advance who would be saved and who would be consigned to eternal damnation; no one could change this predetermined fate. Though that would seem to remove the incentive for moral behavior, people were nevertheless urged to avoid sin and to hope for a moment of “conversion,” an intense spiritual perception of God’s grace that was taken as a sign of being one of God’s elected. Lyman Beecher had his moment of grace as a young man, and later intensely pressured his daughter Catharine to have one too. Once while he was lecturing on her eternal fate she fell ill, apparently suffering a nervous collapse that left her unwell for days. In the early 1820s her fiancé died in a shipwreck, and Lyman Beecher said the young man was in hell, since his death had come before his conversion.
Catharine refused to accept this as a certainty, instead agonizing over his fate.

She had never found another fiancé, which explained why she was supporting herself in her late twenties by running a school. Founding the Hartford Female Seminary, she became an innovator: finding that an arithmetic book did not seem well organized,
she developed her own book. As the school grew—first filling a room above a Hartford store, then relocating to a church basement—Beecher visited leading citizens of Hartford and asked them to finance an entirely new school with a capacity for 150 girls. Men blanched, “
but the more intelligent and influential women came to my aid, and soon all I sought was granted. This was my first experience of the moral power and good judgment of American women, which has been my chief reliance ever since.” She was getting practice in politics: as the nation developed, no political
question would become as universal as that of paying for school construction. Organizing women to push their husbands created a small-scale precedent for her campaign on behalf of Indians.

The circular written “by the female hand” created a response on a scale rarely seen before. The Hartford women hoped those who received the circular would forward it; an early clue that women were responding came when Catharine Beecher and her co-conspirators themselves began receiving letters in the mail.
Women started recruiting husbands, sons, and brothers to the cause.
One young man, spurred by his mother and sister, organized opposition at Andover, the seminary he attended.
Newspapers reprinted the women’s circular. Religious journals, with their outsize circulation, were so opposed to Indian removal that some printed the women’s circular even though the
editors were uncertain of its propriety. As Beecher recalled it,
public meetings were held in every city to which the circular had been addressed, gatherings that were fed not only by the circular but also by the William Penn articles that were spreading from newspaper to newspaper. The meetings produced petitions to Congress. Although men usually signed them, women also affixed their names, however hesitantly. A letter from eighteen women in Farmington, Maine, began with an extended apology for writing at all, referring to “
that delicacy of feeling and the Duty of deportment which should ever characterize the female Sex, [which] might forbid the profanity of offending ourselves upon the notice of the Legislative Council of the Nation, on any ordinary occasion.”

People naturally began wondering who wrote the original Ladies’ Circular. Some even posed the question to Catharine Beecher, who attempted to answer without actually lying. “
I was asked one day by an outsider,” she recalled, “and I replied that it was attributed by many to [her co-conspirator] Mrs. Sigourney, but it was not at all in her style, and much more like a gentleman I mentioned.” She topped off this dissembling statement by saying of the circular that “I had never read anything that interested me so much.” The game must have been energizing, but also stressful. Some people disapproved of the circular. One
religious newspaper, the
Christian Watchman
,
said Congress should be able to see the Indian question “righteously decided” without the intervention of women. Since the circular mentioned the biblical Queen Esther, so did the editors of the
Watchman
—adding the detail that Esther spoke up to save the Jewish people not through her own acts but by appealing to her husband.