The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears

Morning tears from Cherokee Indian Art

I just finished reading The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. It is compact account of the removal of the Cherokees from their homes in the southern Appalachians to Oklahoma, aimed at students and general readers. Written by two college professors, it is annotated, provides a list of selected readings, and a useful index, as well as a map of the various routes of the trail of tears.

President Washington and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, instituted a policy of "civilization" of Indians living in what was then the United States with a view towards their assimilation into white culture. The Cherokees were one of the most successful tribes in assimilating European technologies and customs with their own, creating what appears to have been an effective amalgam of the two. Many accepted Christianity. One of their leaders, Sequoia, developed a syllabary with which the language could be written; by the 1830s not only were the Cherokees publishing in their own language and English, but literacy was higher among them than among their white neighbors. They picked up European crops and farming techniques. They had a written constitution for the Cherokee Nation and elected officials to run their government and negotiate treaties. Unfortunately, some of the more affluent also employed slaves and white sharecroppers on their plantations.

Cherokees fought on the side of the English in colonial times and later on the side of the United States, notably with Andrew Jackson against the Creeks. They entered into a large number of treaties, first with the English and later with the United States.

Unfortunately for the tribe, their land was accessible to avaricious white settlers. Even more unfortunate, the first gold strike in the United States was on their land. The whites in the south (convenient to their economic interests) came to believe that the civilization polity of the founding fathers was a failure, and that the Indians including the Cherokees, could not be assimilated. Many, but not all, came to favor "removal" from the lands east of the Mississippi to the new lands opened by the Louisiana Purchase. The removal faction gained control of the government with the election of President Jackson. (Many in the north were more favorable to the Indians, but I suppose most of the Indians had already left the northern states,)

Georgia's government led the charge on the Cherokee lands within that state. A series of laws denied sovereignty to the Cherokee nation, negated the treaties, withheld citizenship from the Cherokees, denied the rights of individual Cherokees to testify in court, and began to raffle off their land to white settlers. When the Supreme Court struck down the Georgian law, President Jackson refused to implement the Court's order.

A rump group of Cherokees, probably with the best of intentions, negotiated a treaty with the Jackson administration for removal. It was ratified by the Senate in spite of a petition signed by the great majority of the Cherokees. The Cherokee negotiators were later executed on the orders of the Cherokee national government.

Some Cherokees had emigrated as early as the 18th century, more (seeing the writing on the wall) early in the 19th century, and more still of the party supporting the removal treaty. However, most Cherokees refused to do so. Under orders from the President, General Winfield Scott arrested them by the thousands, imprisoned them in concentration camps, and began their transportation west. Only small remnants escaped removal, notably the ancestors of the members of the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina.

Thousands died on the "trail of tears". Their trip was not only marked by the natural difficulties and dangers of the trail, but by cupidity of whites and mismanagement by the government, not to mention failure of the government to meet the terms agreed upon for the removal. The trials continued for the early years of stay in Oklahoma, as subsequent administrations in Washington implemented policies largely disadvantaging the Cherokees.

Because the Cherokee publications were widely shared in the United States, and because they were seen as one of the five "civilized" tribes, their trials were relatively well known. However, 60 tribes suffered removal, and all apparently shared similar sad histories.

The treatment of Indians is a second "original sin" of the United States together with slavery. The antebellum injustices were followed by the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, and discrimination in the 20th century. Purdue and Green have provided a useful explanation of the U.S. government policies around the removal and their impact on a single tribe.

A Final Thought

Underlying the conflict was the fact that two cultures clashed. The Cherokees, like other North American tribes, combined some agriculture with hunting and gathering; their technology supported a relatively sparse population and led to one kind of landscape. The white settlers depended on more intensive agriculture, substituted livestock for hunting their source of meat, cut down forests both for the forest products and to clear the land for crops; their technology led to a more dense population and quite a different kind of landscape.

In some sense, there was a justification for changing the landscape in order to support the larger population. Certainly we can sympathize with the thousands, later millions of immigrants streaming to the United States seeking opportunities to better their own lives and those of their children.

There is also justification for the Cherokees seeking to maintain those aspects of their culture that they most valued, to continue to live in the land in which they had lived for centuries, and indeed to see the treaties that they had negotiated and ratified in good faith to be honored by the United States.

In fact the Cherokees and other Indian nations did sell territory to white settlers and cede blocks of land to the United States via treaties. Indeed, not only did the Cherokees adopt some white culture, but whites also adopted some Indian culture. In both cases, however, people were struggling for mere survival; perhaps had there been more slack in their economies, better conduct would have surfaced. On the other hand, many in power were taking advantage of the situation for pecuniary or political gain. Ultimately the cultural divide proved too broad a breach to be overcome in the racist atmosphere of the time.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides