The interbellum constitu.., p.36
The Interbellum Constitution, page 36
Since childhood, Ross (known as “Tsan Usdi,” or “Little John”) had lived literally at the crossroads of Cherokee and white culture. His father was Daniel Ross, who had emigrated as a boy from Sutherlandshire, Scotland. His mother, Mollie McDonald Ross, was the daughter of a Highlander from Inverness and the granddaughter of a Cherokee woman named Ghigooie.68 John Ross grew up with his parents and eight siblings as “backwoods aristocrats” in a Cherokee town near present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee, attending Cherokee festivals, and receiving private lessons in English from a tutor before being sent to board at an academy that offered an Anglo-American curriculum.69
Ross inherited a trading empire and substantial property, including slaves, from his father. Combined with his rigorous formal education, Ross’s business connections made him particularly adept at moving between Euro-American and Cherokee society. The 1824 trip to Washington was not his first mission to the capital. He had traveled there in 1816 to press the Nation’s claims, and his fluency in English had made him an important participant in meetings with the Madison administration. With the exception of Major Ridge, who spoke only Cherokee, each of the members of the 1824 delegation had some competence in both Cherokee and English—although, in Ross’s case, the Cherokee was only rudimentary. When he later became principal chief, Ross routinely addressed his fellow citizens in English, with an interpreter standing by to convey his words in Cherokee.
When the Cherokee delegation arrived in Washington in early January 1824, they took rooms at Tennison’s Hotel at Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks east of the White House.70 They then launched their diplomatic efforts, meeting with President Monroe, Secretary of State Adams, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, as well as with other Cabinet officials and members of Congress. Along with the official sessions, the members of the delegation attended a whirl of social events, including parties and balls at the White House and at the homes of Adams and Calhoun, among others. At these gatherings, the Cherokee representatives sought to continue arguing their case, to engage in informal suasion, and also to demonstrate, by their very presence, that their Nation had achieved the degree of civilization that the United States seemed bent on demanding from them as a condition of protecting their lands against the increasingly heated demands of Georgia. The Cherokee representatives regarded themselves as diplomats acting on behalf of a distinct nation. Consequently, all affairs with the sister nation of the United States were to be settled through the accepted medium of the law of nations: treaties. Yet their American counterparts required perpetual convincing.
Between January and June 1824, conversations concerning the burgeoning conflict between Georgia and the Cherokees filled the halls of Congress, the chambers of the War Department, and the dining room of the White House. In the evenings, they spilled over into the salons and levees of Washington City’s leading hostesses, many of whom were the wives of Cabinet members. The debates unfolded across the capital’s variety of elite spaces. Representatives of the Cherokee Nation made certain that they were present—and, crucially, both seen and heard—in each of these theaters of power.
Washingtonians were struck by the delegation’s conviviality and social acumen—and by how radically their appearances diverged from the image of the untutored son of the forest that many white Americans had evidently expected. Secretary of State Adams noted the following observations in his diary:
The manners and deportment of these men have in no respect differed from those of well-bred country gentlemen. They have frequented all the societies, where they have been invited at evening parties, attended several drawing-rooms, and most of Mrs. Adams’s Tuesday evenings. They dress like ourselves, except that Hicks, a young and very handsome man, wore habitually a purfled scarf. He and Ross are half-breeds, and Ross is the writer of the delegation. They have sustained a written controversy against the Georgia delegation with great advantage.71
Adams’s repetition of the word “delegation” to refer to both the Cherokees and the Georgians is notable here. The secretary of state, a scion of one of America’s founding families who had spent years mixing with the diplomatic corps of Russia, the Netherlands, and Prussia, was clearly impressed by the seriousness and urbanity of the Cherokee representatives. “They write their own State papers,” he observed in his diary, “and reason as logically as most white diplomatists.”72
The Cherokees were not the only ambassadors from the Southwest who were pressing their case in Washington in early 1824. The capital was a battleground for two delegations that had traveled north to claim the lands northwest of the Chattahoochee River. While Ross, Ridge, Hicks, and Lowrey were chivying along their agenda with Secretary of War Calhoun and others, Georgia’s congressional representatives were pressuring the Monroe administration to deny the Cherokees’ demands and to inform them that removal was their sole option.
In meetings with the Cherokee delegation, Calhoun urged the envoys to convince their government to cede the Nation’s lands to the United States in exchange for a sum of money and unspecified lands west of the Mississippi River. The only alternatives, Calhoun argued, were for the Cherokees to “remain … exposed to the discontent of Georgia and the pressure of her citizens” or to convert tribal ownership of land into individual holdings—and, in so doing, to dismantle the Nation from within.73
In a series of written responses, the Cherokees—with Ross almost certainly wielding the pen—reiterated their central points: “[T]he Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America.” Therefore, “the limits of their territory are defined by the treaties which they have made with the Government of the United States.” Moreover, Ross and his fellow delegates cast Georgia’s claims as pretensions to power in a domain that was not only outside the state’s jurisdiction, but within the jurisdiction of a different polity. The Cherokees, Ross wrote, “cannot recognize the sovereignty of any State within the limits of their territory.”74 The state of Georgia simply could not extend its reach into the Cherokee Nation. To allow it to do so would be to permit a state to interfere with the superior power of a nation. The Cherokees were here seizing the imperium in imperio concept for themselves. It was not the Cherokee Nation that was the nonconforming polity; it was Georgia, improperly asserting sovereignty from within the “limits of” Cherokee “territory.”
But even these dark exhortations from the secretary of war were not enough to satisfy the Georgians, who were clearly irked at the cordial reception that the Cherokee delegates were receiving in the capital. At one point, Georgia officials objected to the fact that a communiqué from the federal government to the Cherokee representatives began with the salutation “Gentlemen.” Adams appeared to give credence to the complaint by characterizing the word choice as “an inadvertency of a clerk, overlooked by Calhoun in signing the paper.”75 Presumably the Georgians, ever punctilious in matters of social and racial hierarchy, would have preferred the communication to begin “Sirs.” So inflamed did the Georgians become at what they perceived as a lack of will on the part of the administration that they issued a belligerent letter to the president, the intemperateness of which appears to have stunned President Monroe, who immediately convened the Cabinet to share in his indignation.
Consider the scene: a meeting of the president and his Cabinet, in the second-floor room of the White House known then as the president’s office (and today as the Lincoln Bedroom). The sixty-five-year-old president, clad in no-longer-modish knee breeches, visibly aggrieved by the Georgians’ stance, declared the letter “an insult.” An “insult” was no idle label in this period, given the alacrity with which politicians were prepared to settle affairs of honor on the dueling ground.76 Adams, who was present at the meeting, noted, “The President said he had never received such a paper.” (Note the use of the word “paper”—did the pugnacious item not even qualify as a letter?) Adams’s account suggests that Monroe handed the letter around the table so that the members of his (betrousered) Cabinet could view Georgia’s enormity with their own eyes. In “terms of the most acrimonious reproach against the Government of the United States,” Adams recounted in that day’s diary entry, the letter charged the administration “almost in terms with fraud and hypocrisy” and “broadly insinuate[d] that the obstinacy of the Cherokees [was] instigated by the Secretary of War himself.”77
Peering at the letter as it was passed around, the thus-maligned secretary of war opined as to the identity of the writer based on forensic evaluation. “Calhoun remarked that it was in the handwriting of [Georgia congressman Thomas W.] Cobb, but it was signed by the two Senators, [John] Elliott and [Nicholas] Ware, and by all the members of the House from the State,” except one who was evidently not in Washington at the time. Ever a stickler, Calhoun then “dwelt upon its incorrectness with regard to the facts.” Adams, for his part, challenged the Georgians’ interpretation of the language of the Compact of 1802, which they had invoked as the gravamen of their complaint. The secretary of state “observed that it was a peremptory demand to do by force, and upon most unreasonable terms, that which had been stipulated only to be done peaceably, and upon reasonable terms.”78
Everyone at the table appears to have agreed that Georgia was in the wrong. Adams referred to “this raging fever for Indian lands,” and Calhoun observed that Georgia’s “immoral and corrupt” system of granting land by lottery was to blame, insofar as it “instigat[ed] insatiable cupidity for lands.”79 The sense of the room was that Georgia’s bellicosity not only toward the Cherokee Nation, but now against the federal government, was a troubling development. “I suspected this bursting forth of Georgia upon the Government of the United States was ominous of other events,” Adams brooded to his diary.80
The meeting continued for more than five hours while Monroe, Calhoun, Adams, and Secretary of the Navy Samuel Southard batted around potential responses to Georgia. When the assembled company adjourned sometime after three o’clock in the afternoon, they had not agreed on a course of action. Monroe continued to mull his options for more than two weeks.
Finally, after several more discussions in the Cabinet—some with the participation of Attorney General William Wirt and Treasury Secretary William Crawford, a Georgian who in this case took pains to distance himself from his compatriots who had authored the letter—Monroe settled on a plan. He would not forward Georgia’s letter to Congress, declining to dignify it with such attention. Instead, the president proposed to send two documents to the Capitol. First, he would transmit a report from Calhoun outlining the actions the federal government had taken in pursuance of the Compact of 1802, which made a brief allusion to the letter from the Georgia delegation. Second, Monroe would send a message reiterating that the Cherokees could not be removed by force, but then stating that since they continued to refuse to cede any additional land despite “all that has been done by the Government of the Union in fulfillment of the compact,” there was in fact no further recourse other than using force because of “the absolute necessity that the Indians should remove west of the Mississippi.” Finally, Monroe planned to end the message by stating that “nothing further could be done by the Executive.” Thanks to this pregnant statement by the president, Adams observed, “there were direct intimations that something should be done by Congress.”81
Upon hearing Monroe’s proposed message, Adams and other members of the Cabinet objected. Far from rebuffing Georgia’s insolence, as Monroe had initially intended, they argued that such a message would suggest that there was merit to the state’s claims and prompt its leaders to seek redress in Congress. How had a rebuke from the president to Georgia suddenly become an invitation to that recalcitrant state to begin “peremptorily claiming something further, and immediately, from Congress”? Monroe said he would “consider of it further.”82
The next day, the president sent a reworked version of the carefully worded message to Congress. In it, he stated that “the Indian title was not affected in the slightest circumstance” by the Compact of 1802, and that, despite Georgia’s intensifying demands, there was “no obligation on the United States to remove the Indians by force.” Indeed, Monroe noted, any effort to remove Native nations by force would be “unjust.” Yet the tribes whose lands lay within Georgia ought to be made to understand that removal was in their best interest: “Surrounded as they are, and pressed as they will be, on every side by the white population, it will be difficult if not impossible for them, with their kind of government, to sustain order among them.” Still, the goal, at least nominally, was voluntary removal. “[A]ll these evils may be avoided,” Monroe wrote, “if these tribes will consent to remove beyond the limits of our present States and Territories.” The president concluded by submitting the issue to Congress “under a high sense of its importance and of the propriety of an early decision on it.”83 Monroe sent his message to Congress on March 30, 1824. Congress responded by approving a new round of talks between federal commissioners and Cherokee officials, in the hope of arriving at a final land cession through treaty.
The Cherokee delegates understood the need to direct their campaign at Congress as well as the president. A fortnight after Monroe’s message, the Cherokee representatives appeared in person at the Capitol to bring a memorial before Congress. The American people, they hoped, would intercede, and Georgia would be isolated as a rogue state.84
Major Ridge, for his part, characterized Georgia’s letter to the administration as a gambit aimed at satisfying the Georgia audience. Some months later, he commented through an interpreter, “It is a very hot talk—I suppose it was intended for the people at home.”85 For Ridge, those people at home likely included members of Native nations as well as white Georgians. The former were meant to be intimidated into ceding their lands, while the latter would be bolstered by their state’s aggressive insistence on the broadest possible version of sovereignty.
On one level, the Cherokee Nation’s Washington campaign of 1824 yielded disappointing results. The detested Agent McMinn remained, and the situation with Georgia remained both tense and unresolved. The delegates had secured one victory, however: payment of the long-overdue annuity of one thousand dollars per year, plus interest, that was owed to the Nation under the Treaty of Tellico of 1804. The delegates’ citation of this obligation initially took Calhoun by surprise. But they had prudently brought their own copy of the signed and sealed treaty to Washington. When they laid it before Calhoun, a clerk had to be sent to retrieve the War Department’s own “long lost” copy.86
In a larger sense, by making this latest official visit to the seat of American government and its spaces of informal politicking, the Cherokee representatives had compelled the elite of the federal government to engage with them as diplomats and see them as emissaries from a society that bore all the requisite markers of nineteenth-century civilization.
What Ross, Ridge, Hicks, and Lowrey could not know, however, was that it was this very civilization that sparked such resentment and covetousness in the citizens of Georgia, solidifying the state’s determination to exile the Nation beyond its boundaries. After the same Cabinet meeting that caused Adams to marvel at the skill displayed in the Cherokees’ state papers, he recorded a comment from Calhoun that later revealed itself as prescient: “Mr. Calhoun thinks that the great difficulty arises from the progress of the Cherokees in civilization.”87
Politics, 1826–28: Cherokee Nation
Elias Boudinot, who wrote of his hopes for his children’s education in the North, had himself gone to New England for learning. Born around 1804 in the Cherokee village of Oothcaloga in northwestern Georgia, and known during childhood as “Gallegina” (“” in Cherokee) or “Buck,” he was the eldest of nine children of Oo-watie (also known as “David Uwatie” or “David Watie”) and Susanna Reese.88 Oo-watie was the younger brother of Major Ridge; Susannah Reese was the daughter of a Cherokee mother and a white trader.89 Both Oo-watie and Ridge believed that their children should obtain Anglo-American-style educations. As historian Theda Perdue notes, the fact that the children of these families adopted “Watie” and “Ridge” as surnames (except, of course, for Boudinot) suggests “a move away from matrilineality” and other aspects of traditional Cherokee culture.90
At around the age of six, Buck was sent to a Moravian mission school twenty miles north of his parents’ home, where he, his cousins John and Nancy Ridge, and several other Cherokee children were taught—in English—reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and Christian doctrine, as well as the “arts of civilization.”91 Buck quickly distinguished himself as one of the most promising students. In 1817, when he was about thirteen years old, he was invited to attend the secondary school run by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Cornwall, Connecticut.
The aim of the Foreign Mission School, as it became known, was to draw promising young men from non-Christian populations around the world in order to convert and educate them, and then to send them back to their homelands as missionaries. While traveling to New England in the company of the board’s officers, Buck was introduced to the prominent New Jersey statesman Elias Stockton Boudinot, who had served in the Continental Congress, become president of the American Bible Society, and was a strong supporter of the education and Christianization of Indian youths. By all accounts, the septuagenarian philanthropist and the young Cherokee scholar struck up an immediate rapport, such that Buck took the elder man’s name and was thenceforth known as “Elias Boudinot.”92
