Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (30 page)

were evidently deluded—that if I and the Delegation would write a letter home advising the people that they were compelled to move under the Treaty by
[May 23]
and that they must prepare to do so—that a proposition from us for a new arrangement would then [be] received and considered.

Ross declined this offer. He knew by now that his people must move. He wanted to improve the terms under which they agreed to do so. But he would not tell his people to move and
then
seek an agreement. He needed an agreement first.

I replied that I had never deluded the Cherokees on any subject . . . and that the US agents had themselves enlightened them on this subject in my absence and in their own way. That so far as the Cherokees were planting corn and were not preparing for a removal, it was not a new fact nor was it to be wondered at, for their opposition to a removal was too generally known to be contradicted.

The War Department official, Ross said, was then “silenced and asked me to call again on tomorrow.”

It was a bad time for the Van Buren administration to risk a humanitarian disaster in Cherokee country. The president had difficulties enough. The financial Panic of 1837 still loomed over the nation, despite brief and illusory signs of recovery. By 1841 one study would estimate that
the depression had forced the closure of thirty-three thousand businesses. Van Buren’s administration was becoming less popular, and political protest against Indian removal was growing again. More petitions were flooding Congress.
Once again, religious groups led the way—this time Quakers, who had a presence in Pennsylvania, a vital state in the Democrats’ coalition. Indian removal was becoming the sort of morass in which even politicians who approved of the policy goal could score points by attacking its botched execution. Van Buren had no need of chaos, or violence, in the Cherokee Nation on May 23.

Ross was in better spirits as the talks intensified. His friend John Howard Payne was in town—Payne, the famous songwriter who’d been arrested with Ross and was now becoming obsessed with writing Cherokee propaganda for the press. The two men spent some leisure time together. On April 10 Ross received a note from a younger woman in town, and he immediately wrote back to “Miss E M,” as he addressed her.

My friend Mr. Payne and myself will do ourselves the honor of calling this evening for you & Sister,
to attend Mr. Catlin’s lecture.

Mr. Catlin: that was George Catlin, the painter who had made a portrait of Osceola during the Seminole leader’s last days. Catlin was displaying many paintings in a traveling exhibition—
“
Catlin’s Indian Gallery
,” as it was called in an advertisement in the
National Intelligencer
. His lecture, which the paintings illustrated, was so detailed that it required “two successive evenings” for Catlin to report on his visits with “38 different tribes” speaking “38 different languages,” and to talk of “their Villages, Dances, Religious Ceremonies &c . . . and also many splendid specimens of Costume, Weapons, &c.” The two sisters, John Howard Payne, and the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation paid 90 cents each to watch the show.

Refreshed by this entertainment, Ross composed a letter to President Van Buren: “
The interests of your people cannot be dearer to you, than those of mine are to me.” He said he could help Van Buren achieve removal peacefully if the president would improve the treaty terms. To a War Department official he bluntly said he would do nothing to help the government unless it helped him.

You can expel us by force, we grant; but you cannot make us call it fairness.

Poinsett, the secretary of war, said later that Ross would never leave Washington unless he got a new deal. Perhaps Poinsett felt coerced by people whom the government was more accustomed to coerce: “
The presence in this city of the chiefs and head-men, who alone possess the necessary influence to induce their people to yield a ready submission to the wishes of the Government, and their positive refusal to return to the nation, rendered it unavoidable to treat with them here.” A possible agreement took shape. The Treaty of New Echota would technically not be voided; doing so would meet political resistance, and a new treaty
would require the approval of two-thirds of the Senate. But some added terms could be negotiated and slipped through Congress by attaching them to unrelated legislation. Ross, calculating the value of Cherokee real estate, said that “five millions of dollars” must be increased to $13 million. And the Cherokees would voluntarily migrate if given an additional two years to set their affairs in order. (It was when this deal began to seem plausible that the Cherokee delegation sent its letter back home, confounding General Scott.) The final deal was less generous, though Ross got some of what he wanted. Thirteen million dollars was more than the government would pay, but the amount could be increased to more than $6 million. More important, money would be paid to the Cherokee government instead of being spread among individuals. Van Buren rejected the extra two years for emigration, but Ross would be allowed to organize the emigration at government expense, taking it out of the hands of the army and gaining control over the conditions under which the journey was made.

Ross had achieved all he could. He had made the transaction with the United States somewhat less unfair. He had preserved his people as a people. Now he would lead them to a new country. Poinsett had done what no other U.S. official seemed able to do: reach an agreement with John Ross. The secretary of war could feel relieved at gaining a partial reprieve for the conscience of his nation. However much they may have been coerced, the Cherokees would at last go on their own; the history of the United States need not forever be stained by the specter of soldiers rousting thousands of unarmed civilians from their homes at bayonet point. Poinsett wrote a letter to General Scott confirming the sudden change in plans, and dropped his letter in the mail for its two-week transit to the Cherokee Nation.

The date on his letter was May 23.

“
No communication has reached me from Washington,” wrote General Scott on May 22. He had his orders, and had received no others; he would proceed. On his own authority, he might have put off the
emigration until the news from Washington was clarified, but Scott believed the security situation demanded action. He constantly worried that if the Cherokees did not leave quickly enough, white settlers would attack them.

Scott departed his headquarters, leaving instructions for any mail to be forwarded. On the twenty-third he arrived at New Echota, intending to keep an eye on the Georgians. On the twenty-fifth he watched as two new regiments of Georgia infantry were organized; these foot soldiers would require less maintenance and be easier to control than the horsemen. The reinforcements were still en route to their stations when the roundups began on May 26, 1838.

The soldiers cleared out one farm at a time, one valley at a time. Approaching a house, the troops would surround it so that no one would escape, then order out the occupants with no more than they could carry. One Cherokee house contained Rebecca Neugin, who was about three years old at the time, one of nine children of a Cherokee family. Decades later she gave the family story of how they were led into captivity. “
When the soldier came to our house my father wanted to fight,” she said,

but my mother told him that the soldiers would kill him if he did and we surrendered without a fight. They drove us out of our house to join other prisoners in a stockade. After they took us away, my mother begged them to let her go back and get some bedding. So they let her go back and she brought what bedding and cooking utensils she could carry and had to leave behind all of our household possessions.

On May 30 a Cherokee student wrote a letter to a friend in the North; her letter was published in newspapers, its author described only as a “young Cherokee girl.” She was staying at a missionary school near Red Clay, Tennessee. She heard drums beating “
as we were going from school to dinner,” and briefly feared the school was to be invaded, but the soldiers were leaving the mission alone for the moment. “Two
hundred or more” men marched past “with their bright gems glittering in the sunshine and beating their drums,
and playing fiddles and fifes, which seemed to the people who were very sad, as if they meant to mock at them
.”
Many people “expected speedy extermination. . . . The whites just take the Indians without waiting or warning.
They then lock up the doors every where, and leave all their things to be valued according to their own notions
.
” One day she saw “a considerable number” of Cherokees passing. “They had run away from the soldiers. They had nothing with them but the clothes they wore on their backs. . . . The crop looks very flourishing indeed, and the wheat has begun to head, and our garden looks very nice; but every body seems very much plagued, and there has been a considerable number of deaths in the neighborhood.”

Though some Cherokees fled, there was no organized resistance. On May 29 a white engineer was encamped “in a pretty section of the country” near New Echota, where his crew was surveying a future road: “
Many of our friends are troubling themselves about our danger from the Indians. We never think of the subject . . . the Cherokees are a peaceable, inoffensive people.” General Scott believed the troops also were peaceable, although there was no way to minimize the shocking moment when the soldiers came over a fence or through a door. Long afterward, an ethnographer who lived among the Cherokees listened to some of their stories: “
Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play.” Sometimes civilians followed the detachments of soldiers, waiting to plunder the homes left vacant, or even digging up graves, “
to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead.”

A captain in the First Artillery Regiment, L. B. Webster, ranged out in June to round up eight hundred Cherokees in far western North Carolina. Escorting them toward one of the main emigration camps near Calhoun, Tennessee, Webster’s company picked up about a
hundred additional Cherokees on the way. The Cherokees greatly outnumbered his troops but made no move to resist. “
I experienced no difficulty in getting them along,” he wrote home to his wife, “other than what arose from fatigue, and . . . the roads over the mountains, which are the worst I ever saw. We were eight days making the journey (80 miles) and it was pitiful to behold the women & children, who suffered exceedingly—as they were all obliged to walk, with the exception of the sick.”

There were varied descriptions of the detention camps in which the Cherokees were held. People who did not have to live in them remembered them more fondly than people who did. Long afterward General Scott recalled the camp where Captain Webster brought his prisoners as “
happily chosen,” a “well shaded” area that was twelve miles by four and bounded by a river—a place where sullen, protesting Cherokees at first refused even the food they were offered, but finally accepted generous sustenance. Scott was at least correct when he suggested that the Cherokees were spread over a considerable distance. A doctor who treated them did not describe them as penned in like cattle, but instead “
scattered and dispersed” in “family camps” that fell within a “general encampment.” Yet in a letter written at the time of his military operations, General Scott confessed that the Cherokees suffered from the loss of their cooking utensils, clothes, and other goods “
consequent upon the hurry of capture and removal.” Evan Jones, a missionary who lived among the Cherokees, described them as “prisoners” who had instantly been hurled from “comfortable circumstances” into “abject poverty.” Captain Webster, the Tennessee volunteer, was overcome with feelings of foreboding as his company guarded the prisoners. He wrote a letter to his wife to say there were “seven or eight thousand” Cherokees in various camps around his company, “and
they are the most quiet people you ever saw.” The only consistent sound was that of preachers, white and Cherokee, who went among prisoners and soldiers alike trying to save souls. Captain Webster was not consoled. “Among these sublime mountains and in the dark forests with the thunder often
sounding in the distance,” the talk of God only made him wonder what would “fall upon my guilty head as one of the instruments of oppression.”

So efficient was General Scott’s operation that thousands of Cherokees had been rounded up into the emigration camps before he finally received the letter from Secretary of War Poinsett in Washington making it clear that none of this had really been necessary, and that John Ross would arrive soon to take charge of a voluntary emigration.

 • • • 

In two follow-up letters, Poinsett advised the general of his concern that “sickness may result from the Indians being collected in great numbers at the depots.” The longer the Cherokees stayed at their collection points, the greater the risk of disease. Perhaps, Poinsett suggested, it would be better to “consult the dictates of humanity as well as prudence,” and gather the Cherokees only a short time before their actual journey west. It was sage advice, had it arrived in time for Scott to follow it. The camps were death traps. If there were “seven or eight thousand” Cherokees spread around Calhoun, Tennessee, that was in 1838 the equivalent of a bustling large town. Any settlement of that size would have grown over the course of years, allowing development of a corresponding infrastructure to deliver food, shelter, basic sanitation, and clean water. The Cherokee camps had been populated in weeks. Neither the sites nor the people were prepared.

But the people were already in the camps, and General Scott had concluded that there could be no going back. The Georgia land lottery winners believed that they had possession of their plots of land as of May 24. To send large numbers of Cherokees home, or even to stop collecting them from the countryside, would expose them to murderous encounters with the new owners of their houses and fields. In Alabama many Cherokee properties had already been taken over by white squatters, “
and the
squatters,”
Scott said, “are as likely to annoy, to dispossess, and make war upon the Indians, as if each squatter and occupant were
the hereditary owner of the ground, and the poor Indians the intruders or invaders.” If sending home the Cherokees was not an option, neither was sending them forward. Two parties of emigrants were shipped westward in early June, but it was becoming impossible to move large parties in the height of summer. Severe drought had struck. Even great streams like the Tennessee were not navigable in places, and the land route would be desperately short of drinking water. Scott decided to put off the migration until the fall. “
Not only the comfort, but the safety of the Indians . . . has forced this decision upon me.”