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“We must plant corn and raise cattle, and we desire you to assist us…in former times we bought of the traders goods cheap; we could clothe our women and children, but now game is scarce and goods dear, we cannot live comfortably. We desire the United States to regulate this matter…”

--Little Turkey, 1791-1792

“The Indians say they don’t understand their Father, the President. A few years ago he sent them a plough and a hoe—said it was not good for his red children to hunt—they must cultivate the earth. Now he tells them there is good hunting at the Arkansas: if they go there he will give them rifles.”

--Anonymous Cherokee, 1816

“Men must have corrupted nature a little, because they weren’t born wolves, yet they’ve become wolves.”

--Voltaire

At the dawn of the 19th century, as they settled down onto lands accorded them by treaty

with the United States, the Cherokee peoples of Georgia and the Carolinas began a massive

program of cultural assimilation. They formed a legislative assembly, wrote a Constitution,

formed a court system, created a police force, adopted Southern slaveholding agricultural

practices and both allowed and encouraged missionary educational facilities. Thirty years later,

after an unprecedented cultural transformation praised throughout the western world, the

Cherokee were forced off their lands to property west of the Mississippi. This paradox presents a

number of interesting historical puzzles. First, why did the Cherokee acculturate Western ways?

How, exactly, did the Cherokee manage to acculturate Western ways so quickly, and were these

complete assimilations or modified ones? Secondly, after being so praised for their acculturation,

why were they expelled from their native lands? How and why did the Trail of Tears happen?

The answers to these questions provide some startling insights into both the Cherokee Nation and

the United States in both the early 19th century and the present.

Before I begin I should make clear my own bias in this report. I find the removal of the

Cherokee an atrocious and morally inexcusable act on the part of my own government. I do not

believe that modern attitudes toward Native Americans in either the government or the populace

have improved greatly. However, the purpose of this report is not to write a condemnation of US

policy toward Native Americans, nor to paint the Cherokee in an overly sentimental or idealized

light in order to use them as a foil against Western civilization. Rather, I will attempt to bring

together a number of divergent studies of different aspects of this paradoxical period into a

straightforward and readable context. In doing so the overall picture of the hows and whys of this

unprecedented acculturation become clearer, and the answers to the questions I’ve proposed

above become more comprehensible.

Roots

After years of sporadic warfare with the United States, the Cherokee settled down to

peace with the Treaty of Holston in 1791. Warfare with rebel groups of the Cherokee, such as the

Chickamaugans, would continue for another ten years before being finally suppressed by the US

Army. At the turn of the century full peace was obtained, and the Cherokee had legal title to their

lands. This tranquility would not last long.

In 1802 the Jefferson Administration made a pact with the Georgia state government.

This became known as the Georgia Compact. It entailed the sale of Georgia’s western lands to

the United States for $1,250,000. More importantly, it stated that the US would forfeit her treaty

rights with Native American tribes in Georgia. Georgia would gain legal title to Cherokee lands

as soon as they could buy them from the Cherokee Nation through peaceful treaty terms.

It has been generally ascertained among historians that the Cherokee assimilated Western

Culture as a defense against western encroachment. In the words of one scholar of Cherokee

historian

“in a supreme effort to forestall the removal of their people from ancestral homelands to the state of Georgia by the Compact of 1802, progressive Cherokee leaders, many of whom were mixed bloods, undertook an ambitious and aggressive program that would further Cherokee education and religion: replace Cherokee culture with that of the educated and Christianized white man; and—of utmost importance—convert the Cherokee’s tribal government…into a republic substantially patterned after that of the United States.”[1]

Many of the Cherokee proponents of assimilation were mixed bloods who had received

education in missionary schools. These included statesmen such as John ridge, Major Ridge, the

Ridge (no relation), and writer, editor and deputy Elias Boudinot. These men, early benefactors

of acculturation, turned their attention to the interest of the nation at large and served as leaders in

the Cherokee program of strategic acculturation. They were motivated by a desire to save their

people, their land, and their nation.

Not all motivation for assimilation was quite so high minded. Game in and around the

Cherokee lands had been decimated over the last century due to the burgeoning trade with whites

that was the nexus of the Cherokee economy. Without game and trade, it was clear that the

Cherokee economy would have to diversify. As Elias Boudinot stated in 1825,

“the rise of [my] people in their movement towards civilization, may be traced back as far as the relinquishment of their towns; when game became incompetent to their support, by reason of the surrounding white population. They then betook themselves to the woods, commenced the opening of small clearings, and the raising of stock…the nation is highly improving, rapidly improving in all those particulars which must finally constitute the inhabitants an industrious and intelligent people.”[2]

The Cherokee at the turn of the century were not an ignorant, unintelligent, or culturally

static people. In light of the changes that Elias Boudinot described, however, the Cherokee were

a people steeped in traditional cultural practice. They were a Seven Clan matrilineal society.

They had a gender division of labor; the women farmed; the men hunted and made warfare.

Women ran the family. There was no formal centralized political system, and no major “chief.”

Most political issues were solved by council meetings with close surrounding villages. An

informal national tribal council was employed at certain times of year and in times of current or

looming warfare. The Seven Clans went out of their way to be internally peaceful. With other

tribes they practiced Mourning Wars and blood revenge. They practiced kinship/adoption

practices. They lived primarily in houses in small villages built alongside rivers. They were

highly decorative; the women wore skirts and the men wore breeches, piercings, and tattoos. The

Cherokee language was linguistically similar to the language of the Iroquois and the Tuscarora.

When adopting white ways, the Cherokee often did so on terms that amalgamated

Western ways with the Cherokee ones detailed briefly above. These assimilations were not

always the dramatic reforms that they initially appeared to whites, but rather dynamic

modifications of previous indigenous institutions.

I. A Solitary Tree. Assimilation.

The program of strategic assimilation adopted by the Cherokee can be separated into four

domains: missionary education, government, agriculture/slaveholding, and language. These

domains were not formal and frequently overlap, as the discussion below illustrates, but for the

sake of simplicity I’ve condensed them into these arenas.

It should be noted that these reforms were by not universally accepted. Dissent, although

sometimes widespread, was commonly centered among the more removed factions of the Nation

in the Georgian Mountains. In 1808, after the passage of the first Cherokee Constitution, some

disenchanted Cherokee headed west under the headmen Bold Hunter and Fox. They called

themselves the “Old Settlers,” or the “Cherokees West,” and they settled in Arkansas, west of the

Mississippi, where they continued to live in a traditionalist fashion as a kind of foil to the Eastern

Cherokee.

Intertwining Branches. Agriculture and Slaveholding

In 1796 President Washington appointed Benjamin Hawkins the Principal Temporary

Agent for the Southern Indians. The same year Hawkins wrote Washington that the Cherokee

“said they would follow the advice of their great father George Washington, they would plant cotton and be prepared for spinning as soon as they could make it, and they hoped they might get some wheels and carts as soon as they should be ready for them, they promised also to take care of their pigs and cattle…That they were willing to labour if they could be directed how to profit by it.”[3]

One of the duties of Hawkins’ job was the construction of model plantation farms on

Native American lands. The model farm on the Cherokee reservation employed slave labor.

Washington had long been advising the Cherokee to follow white ways, keep livestock, grow

corn, cotton and flax. Hawkins introduced Western methods of cotton agriculture and cloth

production. By the first years of the 19th century, western agriculture and slaveholding had been

introduced in earnest on Cherokee lands.

Slaveholding as practiced by the Cherokee had deep historical roots. Traditional

indigenous forms of bondage involved captive/adoption practices that had been in place for

centuries. Early interaction with traders in the 18th century saw a “rapid development of foreign

manufactured goods,” which in turn made “slaves very desirable possessions.”[4] Consequently,

intertribal warfare escalated, and the capture and sale of potential slaves came to be viewed as a

highly profitable industry. In this way traders had a massive influence upon changing Cherokee

views toward bondage practices. “As a southern Indian tribe, the Cherokees had extensive

contact with a white slaveholding society which set the standard by which the Cherokee measured

their progress toward ‘civilization.’ Consequently, the Cherokees in their flight from ‘savagery’

established a system of plantation slavery.”[5] With the dawn of the 19th century and the American

“policy of pacification and civilization, the slave’s role changed from product to producer.”[6]

Slaveholding as we know it was implemented at the same time that Western agriculture

was initiated. A concurrent development to these implementations was the creation of a wealthy

mixed-blood slaveholding elite. These men typically had some childhood education at the

missionary schools and had some white ancestry. “Only 17 percent of the people living in the

Cherokee Nation in 1835 had any white ancestors, but 78 percent of the members of the families

owning slaves claimed some proportion of white blood.”[7] Slaveholders comprised 8 percent of

the Cherokee Nation. Of this 8 percent, “39 percent could read English while only 13 percent

were proficient at reading Cherokee.”[8] Literacy, wealth and mixed blood lines gave these

slaveholders the economic upper hand. They owned most of the slaves. “Slaves owned by

fullbloods numbered only 4 percent of the total slave population.”[9] Slaveholding plantations

were small by the standards of the day—only several ever exceeded 50 slaves.

The Cherokees followed whites in creating legislation that prohibited slaves from owning

property, forbid inter-racial marriages between blacks and Indians or whites, denied slaves the

right of ownership, and forbid the practice of freeing slaves for the purpose of marriage. The

1828 Constitution formally excluded blacks from participating in government. “No person who

is of negro or mulatto parentage…shall be eligible to hold any office or trust under this

government.”[10]

There were, however, significant differences between white slaveholding and Cherokee

slaveholding. The Cherokee did not create laws that punished slaves for rebellion or

insubordination. Punishments for slave insubordination or insurrection were reserved for

masters. Disciplinary matters were left in the hands of individuals, in accordance with previous

attitudes toward one’s captives. Although the Cherokee frowned on marriage with blacks, census

records from the 1830s show that a small percentage of the Cherokee Nation was of mixed Indian

and African ancestry. Cherokees and slaves went to social events, such as dances and church,

together. Slaves were allowed to attend the missionary schools. “Not only did Cherokee masters

grant their slaves considerable freedom to participate in social, religious, and educational

activities, but they probably treated their slaves much better, on the average, than did their white

counterparts.”[11] One former slave, Henry Bibb, went so far as to once state, “If I must be a slave,

I had by far, rather be a slave to an Indian, than to a white man.”[12] The Cherokee adopted

slaveholding practices within their own parameters. They allowed their slaves many of the same

rights and privileges accorded to adopted captives during the pre-assimilation era.

It would not be fair, however, to paint Cherokee slaveholding as a kinder and benevolent

alternative to white slaveholding. It is, after all, still slavery. Assumptions of racial superiority

were adopted from whites. Punishments for slave insubordination, while generally mild, could be

severe. One slaveholder, James Varn, after being attacked and robbed by his slaves, responded

with particular fervor. He burned one of his attacked alive and shot another.

Young Branches. Missionary Education

In 1799 Cherokee leaders, such as Little Turkey, began to praise the benefits of white

education. In 1801 a school was established by a Moravian missionary to educate Cherokee

children in reading, writing, and arithmetic. This school was the first to teach Western education

in the Cherokee Nation. The founder of the school was the ideologically driven Reverend

Blackburn, the leading proponent of the movement to educate the Cherokee on the American side

of the question. In 1803 Blackburn presented a wide-reaching education program to the October

Council of the Cherokee. He was granted permission to undergo its implementation. He believed

that Cherokee children were “the key to the problem of civilizing the tribe.”[13] President Jefferson

allotted funds for this purpose. The motivations of the Moravians had subversive elements. “One

of the primary concerns of the Moravians was instilling a work ethic into what they considered to

be a lazy culture.”[14] Missionaries were intent on making Indian men farmers and Indian women

submissive housewives.

Cherokee children acquired western education with a remarkable ease and rapidity. In a