The Cherokee Removal

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 8, 2014

Did you know that the man who was chief of the Cherokee during the Trail of Tears was a Harvard graduate? Did you know there were missionaries living in Georgia amongst the Cherokee who vigorously protested their removal? Did you know what natural resource was at the root of the removal? This week we learn about justice and politics in the nineteenth century.

The early 1800’s were when Beethoven was writing music, when Napoleon was being triumphant, when the telegraph was being used for communication over distances. In the early 1800’s, the Cherokee were living in a swath of land that went from north Georgia through Tennessee and western South Carolina and western North Carolina, with hunting lands in Kentucky. 100,000 sq miles.

The Cherokee were divided about how to best survive the encroachment of white settlers. Some wanted to continue to live in a more traditional way, with the traditional form of government they’d had for hundreds of years. This group signed a treaty with the US giving up title to the lands they held in the southeast in exchange for lands they chose in Arkansas and Oklahoma. They called themselves the Old Settlers, and established a traditional life with traditional governance in the west. They are known also as the Ketoowah tribe of the Cherokee.

Most of the rest of the Cherokee in the east wanted to survive by becoming as European as possible. Their houses looked like the white settler’s houses. They wore more European style dress. Some were country folks and others were more sophisticated and progressive. Some were in business, some in farming, some lawyers, doctors and ministers. Most converted to Christianity. Their Principle chief, John Ross, who was part Scottish and part Cherokee, was a graduate of Harvard, and he drew up a constitution for the tribe and made the governance more like that of the US. It was actually more like the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, which Thomas Jefferson had modeled the US Constitution. Many families were of mixed blood, as the Irish (who were not seen by the settlers as quite “white,” even though that term didn’t really exist at the time) intermarried with the Cherokee, as did the Scots-Irish. Many Cherokee were wealthy, and some owned large plantations in Georgia. Native tribes had enslaved one another for centuries, so the idea of owning enslaved Africans was comfortable. The labor of these enslaved men and women added to the wealth of many Cherokee families, who are said to have had around 25 slaves each. A Cherokee named George Gist, also called Sequoyah, developed a way to write the language that was also fairly simple to print. Between 1809 and 1820, most Cherokee learned to read and write, and their newspaper, “The Phoenix” was established.

There had been talk of removal since the beginning of the 1800’s. The communal way in which the tribe held land didn’t match with the way the Europeans saw land ownership. Then gold was discovered in the hills of North Georgia, and outsiders moved in in droves, trampling Cherokee land, trespassing, resenting the Cherokee sovereignty over the creeks and hills where the gold was. Pressure for removal increased.

Missionaries who lived amongst the Cherokee were expected by the state of GA to be on the side of voluntary removal, or at the very least hold a neutral attitude. Some of the missionaries agreed to that, but not the Methodist missionary Samuel Worcester. He noisily protested that “establishment of the jurisdiction of the State of Georgia over the Cherokee people against their will would be an immense and irreparable injury.” The publisher of The Phoenix took up the anti-removal cause, and the case went to court. Was the Cherokee nation a sovereign nation, or was it like a ward of the State of Georgia? A case on this matter had gone to the Supreme Court two years earlier, but the court declined to hear the case, saying in that instance that the Cherokee nation was not a separate nation, so it couldn’t sue Georgia. Worcester’s lawsuit went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled for Cherokee sovereignty. President Andrew Jackson said he would not enforce that ruling, so it was ignored. The debate within the Cherokee tribe was whether they should remove themselves voluntarily to Indian Territory, or should they hold out to see if there would be a reprieve. A small group of Cherokee met with US officials and signed a treaty at New Echota agreeing to exchange their land for tools, money, equipment, land, livestock and other valuables in Indian Territory. Chief Ross and his people and their lawyers objected that these folks did not have the power to sign any treaty. In fact, the Cherokee governing council had passed a law a few years earlier that said no one could sign away Cherokee land upon pain of death.

Georgia passed laws that no missionaries could live amongst the Cherokee without special permits, none of which were given. When Worcester refused to leave, he and one other missionary were sent to prison. Others in opposition to the removal were Senators Daniel Webster (a Unitarian) and Henry Clay. The signers of the New Echota Treaty left to join the other Cherokee who had settled in Indian Territory. The rest continued to fight removal in the courts, the newspapers, by sending delegations to Washington to speak with President Jackson.

In May of 1838, the terror began. Soldiers came to every village and rousted the Cherokee, rich and poor, sophisticated, educated, farmers, landowners, doctors, business people, mothers with young children, grandmothers from their homes at bayonet point. They were walked, just with the clothes on their backs, to stockades, internment camps. 16,000 Cherokee, 1500 enslaved Africans, penned up that summer. Many died of dysentery. Soldiers took about 4,000 in steamships down the drought-stricken rivers. The slaves had to work at clearing obstacles from the path of the boats. So many people deserted along the way, so many died, that the government signed a contract with Chief Ross to arrange for the transport of the rest of the tribe when the weather got cooler. With government money he hired wagons, and organized the people into cohorts, each with a doctor, some grave diggers, and a seaso was madened leader. The weather quickly grew freakishly cold, and the thousand-mile journey killed the old and the very young. The people slept on the ground or in the wagons without a warming fire, still in the clothes they’d left home in. There wasn’t enough food. People along the route would come out of their homes and stand while the people trudged by, weeping and begging the soldiers not to keep them marching this way. No one was allowed to stop during the day to bury the dead, so they had to be carried until night fall, when the sounds of shovels in the dirt and wailing would haunt people’s dreams.

Even though John Ross and his wife Quatie were on a steamship having a more comfortable trip, she died of pneumonia near Little Rock and is buried there. Our own forbear, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a letter to the President when word reached MA of the removal.

“We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, -a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.”

When the Cherokee got to Indian Territory, there were the Ketoowah tribe, living traditionally, matrilinealy, where the clan mothers chose the chiefs, and there were the hated group who had signed the treaty at New Echota. The leaders of that group were soon assassinated, as the penalty for what they had done was death.

About a thousand Cherokee stayed in the Southeast. They had melted into the hills, living on squirrels and acorns, or they had passed for white. A few hundred were living on the private land of a farmer in NC who had been adopted into the tribe as a boy, and if you were living on private land you didn’t have to be removed. This is now called the Eastern Band of the Cherokees, and the Cherokee in OK are called the Western Band. The divisions amongst the groups still gives rise to tensions. Appalachian culture, with its tradition of feuding, is rooted in Cherokee culture, so the feuds persist and it’s easy to step on toes. The Cherokee were not the only people who had to walk the Trail of Tears. Choctaw, Muskogee/Creek and Seminole were also stripped of their land and shoved out to Indian Territory. Then, when the European settlers wanted that land, the reservations were set up. Greed always pushes for more. We have to stand up to it, first in our own hearts, then out in the world.

Whenever I tell you stories from history, one of my purposes is to remind you that things are always as complicated in the past as they are in the present. Injustice has a similar shape wherever it moves. The laws are ignored. Differences are demonized. Horrors are minimized, dismissed. The oppressed turn on one another. infighting and self-hatred does the job of the oppressor for them. The people who do the very worst things are just following orders. Good people speak up. Sometimes we succeed in making a change. Imagine how different our US would be had we been able to envision a future including the First Nations people as neighbors and friends.

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