Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (28 page)

Ridge and the others negotiated a treaty under excellent terms, so long as they were not viewed too closely. The treaty called for the Cherokees to be paid the unprecedented sum of “
five millions of dollars.” There was to be a school fund, investments in “safe and most productive public stocks,” and much more. Only a careful reading showed how these benefits were minimized. The money for the school fund and the investments were to be
subtracted from
the “five millions of dollars.” The
compensation for houses and fences and other improvements on the land were
also
to be subtracted from the “five millions of dollars,” meaning that in reality, the Cherokees would receive much less than $5 million for the acreage itself. Debts the Cherokees supposedly owed would be deducted from any payments they received. The United States would pay for the support of Cherokees who were near starvation after the upheaval of recent years, but this money would be taken out of their future annuity payments—meaning the Cherokees were being relieved from their years of pain and suffering not with federal funds but with their own money. Whatever was left of the “five millions” would be divided equally among individual Cherokees, a democratic touch that would probably benefit many poor families, though it would also scatter
the legacy of the land sale and keep the Cherokee government cash-poor. Dividing a federal payment among individuals was precisely the idea that 95 percent of Cherokee voters had rejected the previous summer.

There could be no submitting such a treaty to the Cherokee legislature, which would reject it. But on December 29, at the home of Elias Boudinot, Major Ridge signed the Treaty of New Echota. So did Boudinot and a number of other prominent men, including John Ross’s brother Andrew. Reverend Schermerhorn and Major Currey signed it too, and Currey rushed it to Washington. He arrived in mid-January to find that John Ross had begun his own negotiations with Jackson’s administration, but as soon as the administration learned of the Treaty of New Echota, it broke off talks with Ross. It had no more use for him. The game was over. Jackson sent the treaty for ratification by the Senate, which after bitter debate held a vote in the spring of 1836. A two-thirds majority was required. Henry Clay’s anti-Jackson forces had the votes to block the treaty, if they were united. They were not. The treaty prevailed by a single vote. The majority ruled.

S
oon after the Senate ratified the Treaty of New Echota, President Jackson sent the army to the Cherokee Nation. More precisely, he sent a single army general, John E. Wool. There weren’t troops available to send along with Wool, since much of the army was tied down by the Seminole war in Florida, and some of the rest was battling an Indian insurgency as the Creeks were driven out of Alabama. Brigadier General Wool was instructed to proceed to East Tennessee, recruit a thousand volunteers, and plant them in Cherokee country. Wool’s recruits marched from the Tennessee River down to New Echota, repairing roads and handing out rations to people left hungry by the Georgians’ depredations—trying to win hearts and minds while also showing their strength.

General Wool was a veteran of the War of 1812, in his early fifties, with the last of his
hair elaborately combed forward to obscure his baldness; yet he was nearer the beginning of his career than the end of it. He would serve with distinction for decades after his duty in the Cherokee Nation, leading troops in combat in Mexico and even serving, in his late seventies, in the Civil War. First, however, he would spend a year in Cherokee country as the conduit between Jackson and
John Ross—outmaneuvered by one, rebuked by the other, and increasingly doubtful of the course each pursued.

Senate ratification had started a clock ticking. The treaty allowed two years from ratification for all Cherokees to be gone—two years exactly after May 23, 1836. Wool was to make sure nothing slowed preparations for the migration.
In the early days he met with Major Ridge and other members of the treaty faction, who convinced him that the only real obstacle to removal was John Ross. Wool was so certain of this that his troops briefly
arrested the principal chief and several other leaders on the morning of August 3, 1836, Ross’s second detention in less than a year. Like the Georgians, Wool had to let Ross go. Later, when Wool had seen more of the Cherokee country for himself, he began to sense the true nature of his mission. “
The War Department does not understand these people, and no man can understand them until he goes among them,” Wool declared in a letter to the War Department.

For three weeks after my arrival at Athens
[Tennessee]
, from the daily reports made to me, I was induced to believe that a large proportion of the nation was prepared to submit to the treaty and remove west at the proper time; a few days at the mouth of Valley river convinced me I was mistaken. A few white men and some few half-breeds only could be found to advocate a submission to the treaty. This is not fiction but truth.

A “large majority” of the Cherokee Nation not only opposed the treaty but did not believe it would ever be enforced. “What course,” Wool asked his superiors, “under such circumstances, would you pursue?” Wool foresaw disaster. Cherokees would make no preparations to move. They would also remain “the prey of the white men” who were inventing “debts” that the Cherokees supposedly owed. When the deadline arrived, chaos or war would ensue.

Wool met the Cherokees’ principal chief, and did not find him
helpful. Ross informed the general that he planned to hold a mass meeting in September 1836 to discuss the treaty with his people. He asked if Wool had the authority to prevent a meeting; Wool, not wanting to repeat his initial heavy-handed tactics, said that he did not.

I advised
[Ross]
, however, to be careful . . . any discussion
[of opposing the treaty]
would find no favor with the President, who was determined to have the treaty executed. He merely replied that he thought the President would be convinced that he had been in error, and that he would finally yield, and be willing to do justice to the Cherokees. I answered . . . that the President I knew was determined to have the treaty executed.

The meeting must be used only to explain the treaty and to plan for obedience to it. Ross nodded mildly and went away without having made any promises.

On the appointed day Ross arrived at Red Clay, Tennessee, where his government had held its meetings for several years. It was a clearing in the woods, in a wide green valley, with an abundant source of cool water from a limestone spring. Contemporary visitors were charmed by the sight of Cherokee mass meetings there. When large crowds gathered, the woods and clearings around the council house became a temporary city, with “
huts for the accommodation of strangers,” and a kind of main street lined with “huts, booths and stores.” Around these structures and through the woods flowed “
an unceasing current of . . . men, women, youths, and children, moving about in every direction, and in the greatest order; and all, except the younger ones, preserving a grave and thoughtful demeanor.”
People might linger for days, waiting on the meeting to begin, their many cooking fires visible throughout the neatly cleared woods as they ate corn and freshly killed beef. When the time came for government business,
horns would echo through the woods. People congregated around the council house, a roof mounted on poles,
open except for a railing on all sides so that thousands outside could listen.

General Wool, whose troops camped near the meeting ground, estimated before the meeting started that
the crowd already numbered three thousand. Eventually
attendance grew to between four and five thousand; yet Wool found them “
peaceful,” operating with “order and decorum.” Once the meeting came to order, the Cherokees calculated the approximate number of voters who were attending, “
upwards of twenty-one hundred male adults.” This was out of a total
Cherokee population of about 16,500, of whom about half were male, and 3,992 were males over the age of eighteen. “Upwards of twenty-one hundred” male adults, if the count was accurate, would be a clear majority of the entire voting population, who had come over terrible roads during a time of severe economic deprivation. This great crowd fell silent as their principal chief stood up to speak in the council house.

A description survives of Ross around that time. Forty-seven years old, he was still trim. His once-dark hair was now “
streaked with gray,” remembered this observer, and “his complexion was a little florid. He had a dark, brown, brilliant eye.” Something about his charisma succeeded in crossing the language barrier; at assemblies like this he spoke in English and was
translated sentence by sentence into Cherokee, his words repeated far out into the crowd. He was addressing the sort of meeting at which Cherokees for centuries had been called forth to hear or to ratify the decisions of their leaders. But it was also a meeting in the emerging democratic tradition, the kind of gathering at which politicians raised their voices to be heard across the crowd, knowing that within that crowd lay the power to decide. This Cherokee meeting was a massive endorsement of Ross.
On the last day of the session, Cherokee leaders endorsed a letter declaring that the treaty was “
a fraud upon the government of the United States and an act of oppression on the Cherokee people.” Ross was one of thirty-three leaders who signed the letter, a roll call of resistance. Here were men of the elite who had stayed
with Ross, like George Lowrey, the assistant principal chief.
Here were men who went by their English names like James Spears, and by their Cherokee names like Choo-noo-luh-hno-kee. Here, as on the list of casualties at Horseshoe Bend, were names that fit the attributes or personalities of the bearers: Bean Stick, the Bark, Bushyhead, Money Crier. It was even signed by White Path, the traditionalist who had once led a quiet revolt against Ross and the modernists; now they were on the same side.

The Cherokees gave their letter to General Wool, with its declaration that they relied on the “
good faith” and “magnanimity” of “the President and the Congress.” Wool forwarded the letter to the president in Washington. The president read it and sent it right back to Wool in New Echota. He declared the letter was “disrespectful” to the president and the Senate. A War Department functionary instructed Wool to “
immediately return it” to the signers, and tell them the treaty would be enforced “without modification.” Not only that,

you will deliver a copy of this communication to Mr. Ross, and will thereafter cease to hold any communication with him, either orally or in writing, in regard to the treaty.

The president also criticized his general for allowing the mass meeting to continue after it became clear it was being used to strengthen opposition to the treaty.

Wool continued to regard Ross as a dangerous obstructionist, but he was also contemplating the potential horror of prodding an entire nation to move at gunpoint: “
The people are opposed to the treaty, and are unwilling to leave this country for the Arkansas. The amount of force [required] in this country will entirely depend on the course which John Ross and his party will pursue.” Wool repeatedly voiced sympathy for ordinary Cherokees, and even protested a plan for some law-abiding Creeks in Cherokee territory to be “
dragged like so many beasts to the emigration camp.” The administration began to seem unnerved by the
general’s reports; whose side was the army on? Secretary of War Cass wrote the general with a warning about disloyalty. “
If any officer of the army should countenance resistance or opposition to the treaty, you will arrest him.” Wool never did “countenance resistance”—
he thought Cherokees should move west for their own good—but continued warning of the risk of disaster. He predicted that when the May 1838 deadline arrived, it would be hard to avoid “
the shedding of human blood. . . . It is sufficient to say that the rights of this people have been too often disregarded, too often trampled upon, too often violated without a cause or justification, with impunity, not to have sunk deep into their hearts.”

It is remarkable, given such statements, that General Wool lasted in his assignment as long as he did. He was an effective organizer, hard to replace when the greater part of the army was bogged down fighting Indians elsewhere. But he increasingly came into conflict with the white men who surrounded the Cherokees.
Alabamans were upset when he interfered with white men selling alcohol in Cherokee country; North Carolinians said he insulted their sovereignty. When a white man in Alabama seized a Cherokee’s property “improvement,” meaning cleared fields or buildings, General Wool took it back.
State authorities complained to Washington, and General Wool was instructed to relinquish command to a subordinate officer as of July 1, 1837.
Supposedly he was recalled from command at his “own request,” although General Wool spoiled this fiction by writing that he was not actually requesting a recall at the time. Returning to the capital, he entered a lengthy defense of his conduct, in which he sounded a bit like John Marshall, insisting that the Cherokee treaties trumped the power of the states. A military court of inquiry, composed of sympathetic officers, cleared Wool of any wrongdoing. He had been ordered to enforce a fictional treaty. It had not been easy to square his orders with reality, but he had followed them.

B
y then Andrew Jackson had left Washington for the final time.
He had staggered to the end of his second term in miserable health—correspondence from his final year includes a note from a functionary saying that the president could not even be shown a letter because of his “severe illness.” In his farewell message on March 4, 1837, the president declared that “
advanced age and a broken frame warn me to retire from public life.” But he had triumphed over all. The national debt had been retired. The power of the Bank of the United States was broken, and the bank itself would soon be liquidated. Not only that, the Indians were gone, or so Jackson said in his message. Indian removal, his first major legislative proposal, was the first concrete achievement he listed in his farewell letter: “The States which had so long been retarded in their improvement by the Indian tribes residing in the midst of them are at length relieved from the evil.” Now, he told his fellow citizens, “if you are true to yourselves nothing can impede your march to the highest point of national prosperity.”

The union under Jackson had been preserved, and was on the verge of expanding. For much of his life Jackson had believed the Mexican state of Texas should belong to the United States, and by the time
he left office it nearly did. In early 1836 Texas revolutionaries were slaughtered at the Alamo, among them that wayward former member of Jackson’s army, David Crockett, but afterward Jackson’s protégé Sam Houston rescued the cause of Texas independence. Houston, the talented if erratic hero of Horseshoe Bend, had arrived in Texas after a shooting-star political career in Tennessee. He led a small army to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto, and his infant Republic of Texas promptly asked to be annexed by the union.
Jackson declined. The time was not yet right. But Jackson could confidently leave such matters to his successor, since Jackson had chosen the successor: Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president and the winner of the 1836 election. His victory underlined the strength of the political party Jackson had founded, the first party in American history with sufficient organization and popular identity to last for generations.

Leaving Van Buren in charge in Washington, Jackson took the roads and rivers homeward, stopping now and then to rest or to greet cheering crowds. The people loved him; even his enemies applauded his service. Jackson was said to be so overcome with sentimental emotions that he
expressed regret over his estrangement from Henry Clay. He cried when a crowd greeted his carriage in Tennessee. Reaching Nashville, he once again walked the grounds of the Hermitage, when he was well enough to walk. From a rear porch the old man, now seventy, could oversee enslaved workers tending the fields near the mansion. Guests approaching the Hermitage saw the white-columned front porch between two rows of trees in the yard, and walked into a high foyer wallpapered with an Italianate scene of balconies and trees. Next they would be shown into a sitting room to meet the sticklike, white-haired master of the house, whose mood was returning to normal. His sentimental feelings toward his political enemies soon passed. He read his many regular newspapers and raged at the news, scrawling notes in a shaky hand to politicians, cabinet members, even Van Buren himself. He remained a political force of nature, a volcano at the Hermitage, occasionally erupting.

The downsides of Jackson’s brand of presidential leadership would all be left to Van Buren. The new president had been in office just two months when a financial panic struck New York. The causes were complex, but seemed to grow in part out of Jackson’s dislike of banks. Distrusting paper money, which in that era was issued by banks, Jackson in 1836 had declared that buyers of federal land must pay for their real estate only in gold or silver. Instantly he undermined public confidence in paper currency and created a shortage of gold, which contributed to a credit crisis. In responding to the crisis, Van Buren was hamstrung by Jackson’s small-government philosophy: the government had neither the duty nor the authority to help those in need. A catastrophic depression stained Van Buren’s entire presidency. Then there were the Indians. Only in Jackson’s farewell address were they all removed. The truth could be found in another document from that year, the first annual report to Congress by President Van Buren’s secretary of war, who was forced to offer
explanations and excuses for the soaring expense and frustration of the Seminole campaign.

The war in Florida continued as Jackson left office, though his 8,249-word farewell letter did not mention it. It was as inconclusive as counterinsurgency campaigns usually were. Osceola and other leaders carefully planned their attacks and slipped away. A succession of army commanders tried different ways to trap them.

Van Buren must have thought that he would begin his administration by putting the sad and brutal conflict to an end. Soon after he took office, several Seminole leaders agreed to negotiations with the army and signed a truce, which included an agreement to give up their land and move west. However, the agreement called for them to go west with the escaped slaves who lived among them and fought on their side. White Floridians were outraged, feeling that
if they could not recapture slaves, they would rather continue the war. Osceola did not accept the deal either. Fighters under Osceola and another leader descended on Tampa Bay in mid-1837 and
turned out hundreds of Seminoles being held in a detention camp awaiting transportation to the West.

In October the army commander, General Thomas Jesup, hit upon a way to strike back. The general agreed to send officers to meet Osceola for peace talks. Osceola, with a group of followers, arrived under a white flag—and then, by prearrangement,
250 soldiers surrounded him and took him prisoner. Memorable in his outfit of blue and red, Osceola was paraded through celebrating crowds in St. Augustine, and shipped up the coast to a prison cell in Fort Moultrie, on Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. One of his last sights before being led into the fort may have been a man-made island in the harbor,
fifty thousand tons of granite and cut stone, the recently built foundation for Fort Sumter.

General Jesup went on to use this kind of treachery several more times to capture Seminoles. But his triumph turned to ashes for Van Buren’s administration. Osceola had been captured dishonorably, in what everyone understood to be a violation of the laws of war, and having been captured this way, he died at Fort Moultrie on the last day of January 1838. He had been suffering from malaria. The stories of his exploits, followed by the manner of his capture, turned him from a murderer into a martyr in the eyes of many whites. A popular painter, George Catlin, had visited Osceola in prison to make what became a famous portrait, the classic Indian hero with his feathered headdress and shells around his neck and a soulful look on his youthful face. Osceola was celebrated across the nation as neither a savage nor a terrorist but a defender of his homeland. In the years to follow, a later historian noted, there would be “
twenty towns, three counties, two townships, one borough, two lakes, two mountains, a state park, and a national forest bearing his name.” Some of these places were named not in later generations but shortly after the Seminole’s death. Osceola County, Michigan, received its name in 1843. Though the army captured Osceola and disease killed him, democracy kept his name alive.

This embarrassment for Van Buren and his administration was only beginning to unfold in the fall of 1837 when John Ross arrived in Washington. There was a brief hope that the new president might be more flexible toward the Cherokees than the old one, and might even
extend the 1838 deadline for Cherokee removal. This did not happen; Van Buren had been elected by roughly the same political coalition that had elected Jackson, and the southern wing of that coalition had the same interests. But there was a new secretary of war, Joel R. Poinsett, who was nothing if not creative; his previous assignments had included a term as the U.S. envoy to Mexico, where he had attempted audaciously to induce the Mexicans to sell Texas. Now Poinsett, overseeing the blood-soaked catastrophe that was federal Indian policy in 1837, discovered a peaceful if irritating Indian sitting in his office at the War Department. Poinsett proposed to put the Indian to use:
Would Ross be willing to appeal to the Seminoles to stop their senseless war?

Ross pondered this. He had been told that if he aided the government, it would be regarded as a service the government would repay. He also wanted the Seminole war to end;
stories of savages fighting in the Florida forests contributed to prejudice against all Indians. He agreed to write a letter, a “talk,” to Seminole leaders. Dipping his pen in ink in Washington, on October 18, 1837, Ross undertook to persuade Seminoles whom he did not know to make peace with a government he did not trust. This called for considerable art in letter-writing. If in 1834 Ross had subtly obscured his Indian roots in an effort to slip past the defenses of Andrew Jackson, in 1837 he put all his weight on those roots.

I am of the aboriginal race of redman of this great Island—and so are you.

“We are strangers,” Ross went on, “yet, the time was, when our ancestors once smoked the pipe of peace together—therefore, I ask you to listen to my talk.”
Ross did not go along with a War Department suggestion that he tell the Seminoles they must agree to removal as a condition of peace. He would not be used to that extent. Instead he tried to use the letter for his own purposes, suggesting that the Seminoles should try to negotiate a new and better treaty as the Cherokees wanted to do.

Perchance, you may have heard that the Cherokees are also in trouble about their own lands—this is true—but I have spoken to my people, and they have listened. . . . That, the laws & treaties for the security and protection of our rights were the only weapons with which we must defend
[our lands]
. That, if it has been our misfortune to suffer wrongs from the hands of our white brethren we should not despair of having justice still extended to us by the U. States.

Ross had been writing letters seeking justice for more than twenty years now, at least since his 1816 letter declaring Cherokees part of the “great family of the Republic of the U. States.” He may have believed in the ideals and the justice of the great republic even more than some of the men who governed it. His letter was sent onward in the hands of four Cherokees, who carried the paper to an army fort in Florida. This letter was used to lure within the fort’s walls a delegation of Seminoles,
including their leader Micanopy, who came under a white flag to hear it read, after which the army’s General Jesup had the visiting Seminoles arrested. They were sent off to prison at St. Augustine.

Distraught, the four Cherokees followed the prisoners until they found an opportunity to express their regret and to insist that they had nothing to do with the white man’s treachery.
The Seminoles believed them.