Monuments to Absence

Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

Andrew Denson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469630847
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

1 Removal and the Cherokee Nation

The Cherokee homeland lies in the southern Appalachian highlands, with its center in the Great Smoky Mountains. At the time of European contact, Cherokees lived in what is today western North Carolina, the northwestern corner of South Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and a portion of northern Georgia. In the eighteenth century, Cherokees expanded further into Georgia and into northeastern Alabama. They also claimed a much broader expanse of territory in present-day Kentucky and Virginia, where they hunted and gathered wild plants and other resources. With its varied terrain and temperate climate, this country was an immensely rich place, with fertile lands for agriculture and some of the greatest biodiversity in North America.1 It was a good place for human beings.

Cherokees were farmers, cultivating corn in the valleys made by the rivers and streams that drained the highlands. They lived in permanent settlements, or towns, of several hundred people each. At the center of a Cherokee town stood a polygonal council house, sometimes built upon an earthen mound, which served as both a meeting place and a religious structure. Cherokees viewed some of their settlements as “mother towns,” especially significant places that helped to define the surrounding regions. The most important of these was Kituwah (or Kituwha), on the Tuckaseegee River in present-day western North Carolina. Today, Cherokees still identify Kituwah as the first Cherokee town, the place where their people learned the proper way of living in this world. At Kituwah, Cherokees entered into the sacred relationship between their people and the land that established this country as their home.2

When Europeans began arriving in the Americas, Cherokees first experienced limited encounters with the Spanish before establishing more sustained relations with British colonists operating out of South Carolina and Virginia. In the eighteenth century Cherokees traded deerskins and war captives to the British in return for guns, metal knives and tools, textiles, and other European goods. Cherokees also became British military allies, drawn into the struggles among rival European empires. In the Seven Years’ War Cherokees fought on the side of the British until attacks by Anglo-American frontier settlers led some Cherokees to break with the alliance and war upon their former partners. The British responded by invading the Cherokee country, razing more than a dozen towns and burning Cherokee farms and food stores.3

Tuckaseegee River valley, looking toward the site of Kituwah. Photo by author.

When the American Revolution began, Cherokee leaders tried to keep their people neutral. By this time, however, Anglo-American settlers were focusing increasing pressure upon the tribe to cede land. Some Cherokees viewed the Revolution as an opportunity to regain lost territory, aided by the British and their other Native American allies. In the spring of 1776, Cherokee warriors attacked frontier settlements, hoping to drive the intruders from their borders. Colonists responded by invading the Cherokee country, with columns of militia from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia all converging upon the Cherokee homeland. The invaders again burned towns and destroyed Cherokee farms, setting much of the population to flight. Cherokees suffered terribly from hunger and disease in the winter that followed. At this point, most Cherokees abandoned the war, but a segment of the tribe fought on, establishing new villages in the vicinity of present-day Chattanooga. Their resistance led colonial militia to mount additional invasions of the Cherokee country, bringing further destruction. Some continued to fight even after the war between the United States and Great Britain ended. The last of the Cherokees made peace with the United States only in 1794, more than a decade after Britain conceded defeat and recognized American independence.4

In the Peace of Paris, Great Britain acknowledged U.S. possession of all territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, south of Canada and north of Florida. Most of this land, of course, belonged to Indian nations, the Cherokees among them. One of the great questions of early American politics, then, was how the United States could make these expansive claims a reality. Removal was not the first response to this Indian Question, but it became the definitive answer.

Civilizing Indians

Removal was the early nineteenth-century campaign to compel eastern Indian tribes to exchange their lands for territory west of the Mississippi River. After years of piecemeal treaties and land sales, removal advocates sought to open the entire East to non-Indian settlement as rapidly as possible, while eliminating the presence of independent Indian nations within the borders of established states. The idea of Indian removal evolved as an alternative to the approach to Indian affairs first formulated by President George Washington and his secretary of war, Henry Knox, in the early 1790s. Knox and Washington understood that the United States, still recovering from the Revolution, could not fully dominate its Indian neighbors, but they also knew that Americans demanded westward expansion and the opening of new lands. They tried to devise a system that would allow the United States to grow without provoking war along its western borders. The federal government, they decided, would approach Indian tribes as distinct nations, dealing with them through treaties negotiated by the Executive and ratified by the Senate. The United States would purchase lands from Indian people to facilitate westward settlement, rather than expand through war and conquest. At the same time, the United States would encourage Native people to become “civilized,” transforming their economies and cultures in emulation of white America. The federal government invited missionary organizations to set up schools and churches in Indian communities, and treaties during this period often included promises by the United States to provide Native Americans with agricultural tools and other materials that would promote economic change. As Indians became civilized, Knox and his supporters believed, they would be willing to sell territory to the United States, since they would no longer need large tracts of hunting land. They also anticipated that frontier trade would leave many Indian communities in debt, forcing them to sell land and alter their economic practices. When fully civilized, Indians would assimilate into American society. Piece by piece, and preferably without conquest, the territory won by the United States in the Revolution would become available to settlers. Historian Robert Berkhofer, with some irony, characterizes this policy as “expansion with honor.”5

In retrospect, this approach to Indian affairs seems far more benign than forced removal. Certainly, many Cherokees thought it so.6 It is important to emphasize, however, that “expansion with honor” shared removal’s ultimate objective: Indian disappearance and the replacement of indigenous peoples with settler communities. Knox and Washington recognized Indian tribes as distinct nations, but they also anticipated that those nations would soon vanish, their lands absorbed by the United States. Indeed, Indian nations had to vanish for the American republic to prosper and realize its territorial claims. Ideally, Native Americans would disappear through the civilization process, gradually fading into the American populace. If Indians did not assimilate, however, they would likely face destruction. They would find themselves in conflict with their white neighbors, and eventually the more numerous and civilized Americans would overwhelm the tribes. This line of reasoning was more than simply an example of Euro-American ethnocentrism. It represented a core element of American nationhood. The United States required the property of Indian peoples. It could offer its citizens freedom and opportunity only to the extent that it took possession of indigenous territories. This “logic of elimination,” to use Patrick Wolfe’s phrase, informed all early American Indian policy, Washington’s approach no less than Andrew Jackson’s.7

Cherokee interaction with the United States adhered to Knox’s plans. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Cherokees signed treaties selling large tracts of land to accommodate American expansion. Federal authorities agreed to protect the remaining Cherokee territory from encroachment by American citizens, while Cherokees promised to maintain political relations only with the United States. Under the civilization policy, the federal government provided Cherokees with tools and livestock, and Christian missionaries began to request permission to work in the Cherokee country. While most Cherokees rejected the idea that they had to remake themselves in the image of Euro-Americans, many adopted specific practices of the newcomers. Cherokee men used plows to prepare fields for planting, and Cherokee families raised horses, cattle, and hogs. Cherokee women, who had always made clothing, learned to weave and spin thread. Very few Cherokees converted to Christianity during this period, but many hoped their children might benefit from learning English and other new skills at the mission schools. These changes represented relatively minor adjustments, but they reassured the missionaries and federal agents that the civilization campaign was working as intended. Some Cherokees, meanwhile, embraced a more thorough transformation. Taking white southern planters as their model, they pursued market agriculture on a substantial scale, assembling large tracts of land and acquiring African American slaves. They opened stores and taverns or operated river ferries, taking advantage of increased traffic through the Cherokee territory. By the 1820s, a small but influential economic elite coalesced in the Cherokee country, and many of the Cherokees’ leaders during the removal struggle belonged to this class, men such as John Ridge, his father Major Ridge, and John Ross. Elite families often included white men married to Cherokee women. Under the tribe’s matrilineal kinship system, the children born to these marriages were Cherokees, but they tended to be conversant in both Euro-American and Cherokee ways. Their bicultural background helped them take advantage of economic opportunities offered by the close proximity of the United States, while making them useful as tribal representatives in Cherokee dealings with the federal government. This elite secured for the Cherokees a public reputation as a “civilized tribe,” an image tribal leaders later used to defend their people against removal.8

As these economic and social changes took place, Cherokees also altered their political practices. Traditionally, Cherokee political life was a local affair. Cherokee towns were autonomous, with local communities making decisions through consensus. Some political centralization took place during the eighteenth century, as Cherokees conducted trade and diplomacy with Europeans, but power remained widely diffused. In the early nineteenth century, Cherokees departed from this pattern and began building stronger national institutions. They adopted written laws and created a national police, known as Light Horse Guards, to enforce them. They established an executive committee to represent the Cherokee Nation on a day-to-day basis, while organizing a system of districts to select representatives to the Cherokee National Council. Later, in 1827, they drafted a Cherokee Constitution, which established a central government for the tribe modeled on that of the United States, with a chief executive, legislature, and court system. Tribal leaders even designated a national capital, New Echota, as the seat of this new central government. Two motives lay behind this transformation. First, the tribal elite hoped that a national government would help them defend their economic interests. When Cherokees began drafting written laws, many of the early statutes sought to protect individual property and regulate the new economic activities adopted by Cherokee planters. In addition, a strong central government promised to help Cherokees preserve their homeland and contend with American demands for new land cessions. The 1827 Constitution specified that Cherokee land would be held in common and that only the National Council could cede territory. The United States, in other words, could purchase Cherokee lands only with the consent of the Nation as a whole.9

One other development from this period is worth mentioning here. In the 1820s, as Cherokee leaders worked to create a national government, a previously obscure man named Sequoyah completed a system for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah’s syllabary contained eighty-five symbols representing different sounds in spoken Cherokee. By most accounts, native speakers of the Cherokee language could learn the system with relative ease, and its use quickly spread, particularly after it received the endorsement of tribal leaders. In 1828, the Cherokee Nation, aided by missionaries, established a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, with material printed in both the syllabary and English. John Ridge’s cousin Elias Boudinot became its first editor. During the struggle over removal, Cherokee literacy became a potent symbol of Indian civilization, and the Phoenix helped to rally opposition to the policy. Sequoyah, meanwhile, gained considerable fame as a Native American genius, a man who proved the capabilities of Indian people.10 A century later, Sequoyah and the syllabary would also become common features of the public memory of the Trail of Tears.

From Civilization to Removal

For supporters of the Indian civilization campaign, Cherokees provided ample evidence of the success of Washington’s policies. By the early 1820s, however, American political leaders were turning away from “expansion with honor” in favor of the wholesale expulsion of Indian tribes from the East. Several developments explain this change. First, American demand for new territory proved far greater than the eastern tribes’ willingness to part with their property. Knox and Washington’s approach imagined a gradual, orderly expansion, but the reality was closer to a gold rush. This pressure was particularly intense in the South, where the rise of the cotton kingdom promised wealth and status to any white settler who could secure agricultural land and the slaves to work it. In the midst of an agricultural boom, the continued presence of Indian homelands in the East seemed a criminal denial of opportunity to American citizens. Meanwhile, public faith in Indian civilization faded, as Americans increasingly subscribed to more rigid and hierarchical conceptions of race. In the emerging racial thought of the antebellum era, Indians’ cultural difference from Europeans reflected an inherent inferiority, a deficiency no amount of education could ameliorate. If this were the case, Native people could never progress to a level at which they would be ready to enter American society. From this perspective, removal seemed a far more reasonable approach to Indian affairs than continued efforts at civilization. The federal government could simply move Native Americans out of the way of the expanding white republic. Finally, by the early 1820s, the United States possessed greater power to coerce Indian people than during the federal period, making a policy as sweeping as removal more feasible. “Expansion with honor” reflected Knox and Washington’s awareness that the large Indian nations of the East still posed a significant military challenge to the United States. After the War of 1812, Native military power was much reduced, and American political leaders could talk of simply imposing their will upon weakened Indian nations. The removal policy, then, emerged from a potent combination of land hunger, white supremacy, and growing imperial power.11

The removal campaign received widespread support from white political leaders in the South, but, in the Cherokee case, the government of the state of Georgia forced the issue. In part, this fact simply reflected the size and value of the Cherokee territory claimed by the state, but, in addition, Georgia’s leaders believed that the federal government bore a special obligation to eliminate Indian landholding. In 1802...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Removal and the Cherokee Nation
• 2. The Tourists: Basking in Cherokee History in Southern Appalachia
• 3. The Centennial: Chattanooga Marks the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the Trail of Tears
• 4. The Capital: Remembering Cherokee Removal in Civil Rights–Era Georgia
• 5. The Drama: Performing Cherokee Removal in the Termination Era
• 6. The Remembered Community: Public Memory and the Reemergence of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma
• 7. The National Trail
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index