The American Future (44 page)

There were days when the agent thought his commission impossible to fulfill and wondered why, in his sixties, he had accepted so thankless an office. But then Return Jonathan Meigs had never been one to shrink from a challenge. Portrait engravings of the colonel show a tough old turkeycock of a man, beady-eyed and bony. So when his old comrade from the Quebec campaign of heroic and disastrous memory, Henry Dearborn, now President Jefferson's secretary of war, had inquired if Meigs might go to Tennessee to be United States agent among the Cherokee, he had not hesitated. Everyone seemed to go to Tennessee sooner or later. Besides, his son, Return Jonathan Jr., could now be left safely in a place of authority and eminence in Ohio, with the brightest prospects in the world, needing no paternal eye for his further advancement. Meigs had heard fine things of the Smoky Mountains, of the high country of north Georgia, and the old adventuring passion that had sent him in 1788 into the wildest regions of western Ohio had not yet died in his old body. It had been on the Ohio frontier that he had seen the Indians in full fury, but when the time came to speak with them about the return of captives, he found they were men like himself; men whose cast of mind he believed he understood. Could the Cherokee be much different?

But those Indians in the Ohio country had been braves and warriors. Now, as he understood his appointment, he was being asked to do something quite different, something about which Return Jonathan, from the beginning, had decidedly mixed feelings. The policy of the government toward the Cherokee, as it was to the other tribes of the Southeast, was to uphold them as proprietors of their land, and protect those rights against white frontiersmen who sought to dispossess them by simply squatting and daring the law to come and evict them. Neither Washington nor his secretary of war, General Henry Knox, imagined the Indians could be protected forever. But neither did they wish to have endless wars on the frontier. So the policy was to be one of social rather than military pacification. The Cherokee
(and for that matter the Creek, Chickasaw, and the Choctaw) were to be turned into true Americans, which meant farmers. In any case, their old hunting grounds had been invaded by whites and depleted of game; and (so it was said) their communal gardens never yielded enough crops to see them through from year to year. Bartram's Cherokee Eden had been a fantasy. But if the Indians could somehow be persuaded to adopt a civilized life, the tomahawk replaced by the plow, each family with its own, the women supplementing food crops with cotton (for the Cherokee were slave owners), they could card and spin, and no longer be a threat. To the tidy, economical American mind, hunting grounds were a shocking waste of good land that could be made productive. Since there were at most 16,000 Cherokee claiming to occupy millions of acres, the abandonment of the old life would liberate a great portion of the land for sale and tillage. Perhaps the Cherokee could be induced to part with it in exchange for the settlement of the exorbitant debts they seemed to run up to white traders.

In one of the many meetings he had with Indian chiefs in Washington, Thomas Jefferson put the policy most clearly and generously, so Meigs thought: “Let me entreat you, on the lands now given to you, to begin to give every man a farm; let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies let it belong to his wife and children after him. Nothing is so easy as to learn to cultivate the earth; all your women understand it and to make it easier we are always ready to teach you how to make plows, hoes, and necessary utensils. If the men will take the labor of the earth from the women, they will learn to spin and weave and clothe their families…When once you have property you will want laws and magistrates to protect your property and person…you will find our laws are good for this purpose…you will unite yourselves with us, join with us in our great councils and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent.”

The idea may have been noble, and it would inspire an entire generation of Cherokees to take the Jeffersonian dream seriously. But the president was playing a double game. In 1802 he let it be known to the state of Georgia that one day Cherokee rights would be retro-ceded to it. But his own officers, especially Colonel Meigs, believed
his grander intentions. The first federal agent to the tribe, Leonard Shaw, had been sympathetic to the fusion of Indian and American and had married a full-blood Cherokee, instantly earning the suspicious hatred of the frontiersmen. Return Jonathan came to know the Cherokee well enough to understand that there could never be any question of their easy mass conversion to horse-and-plow farming; that hunting was ingrained in their culture; that it gave them food and clothing, and that attached to the division of labor between the sexes was an entire cultural calendar. Their religion, their dances, their food and tobacco were all unthinkable without this union of opposites: forest and garden.

But Meigs also knew that the Cherokee world had already been badly hurt by history. Choosing the British in the Revolutionary War had forced punitive land cessions out of them so that only about a third of the territory they thought of as ancestrally tribal was actually now theirs. Pressure from white settlers was relentless and supported by the Georgia politicians who wanted their votes. The whites, often ex-Patriot militiamen who had fought against the Indians, could not have been further from the high-minded paternalism of Washington, Knox, Jefferson, and Meigs himself, whom the Cherokee honored with the name of White Path. The settlers thought the Indians heathen savages who needed to be cleared out of the way or exterminated so that decent white Christian people, who understood what a hoe was, could make a go of it and make the wilderness bloom. So if for some incomprehensible reason the federal government was tender to the Indians, they would do their best to give the red men good reason to leave, making them understand there could be no cozy living together in Georgia and Tennessee.

So even as Meigs labored to persuade those among the Cherokee themselves (generally the older chiefs and the younger braves) who were skeptical of the good faith of the government, that the White Father meant what he said, the sorry record of casual theft, knife attacks, and murders, with American culprits going scot-free, undermined his best efforts. In 1812, after a series of eight murders of Cherokee for which no one was brought to justice, a furious Meigs wrote that “the Indians are condemned and executed on the testimony of any white citizen of common character and understanding, when at the same time a white man can kill an Indian in the presence of a
hundred Indians and the testimony of these hundred Indians means nothing and the man will be acquitted.”

To add insult to injury, the federal government, distressed by the impossibility of offering true justice to Cherokee victims, offered cash instead. Secretary Dearborn thought $200–300 for each murdered man or women would be about right. Knowing how abhorrent this was, Meigs decided to offer it anyway as the only form of reparation the Cherokee would get. Initially the chiefs were horrified, but there were so many cases of suffering, that after 1803 they accepted some payment while keeping, as William McLoughlin writes in his extraordinary work
Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic
, a different account in their own books of the lives owed to them. A deadly pattern established itself. The frontier settlers stole land and attacked Cherokee and could not be held to account. The Cherokee retaliated by stealing horses, which gave the settlers further reason to treat them as red outlaws.

The inability of the United States government to deliver on its promises stirred up a faction among the Cherokee who saw no reason why they should meekly discard their traditional way of life. They also suspected (correctly) that at least part of the motive for turning them into model farmers was so that millions of acres of their land could be ceded and sold. To be satisfied with cotton and corn and be surrounded by a world of hostile, brutal whites who wished them to be gone was to die the death by a thousand cuts. The colonel, when he was honest with himself (as he often was), knew they had a point and believed, incorrectly, that the Cherokee heart could never be in sedentary agriculture. But he was conscientious in doing what he could to realize Jefferson's dream of Indian Progress. He distributed farming tools, mattocks, and plows, as well as carding machines and spinning wheels for the cotton, which he noted, somewhat to his surprise, the Cherokee women had already made a success of cultivating. He also believed that the true salvation of the Indians would be in education (a Meigs dynasty trait, this) and encouraged the cession of land in return for sums of money that were applied to the creation of schools and the payment of teachers.

Caught between lawless white encroachment on the one hand, and hard-line Indian resistance on the other, Meigs believed he had no alternative but to cultivate chiefs who were inclined to sell and settle.
The most prominent was Doublehead, and the colonel knew well that he had adopted the new way as a means of enriching himself as much as his village. But was not that, after all, the American way? When Meigs and Doublehead together embarked on a campaign for the sale of old hunting grounds, the consequence was predictable. After a ballplay in August 1807, Doublehead was killed by a group of young chiefs incensed at his betrayal of their homeland.

Meigs ought to have seen this coming. He had himself written to Dearborn that “they have long resolved not to part with any more land. There is not a man in the nation who dares advocate it.” And yet the pressure for land was unrelenting. Iron ore deposits long known about but unexploited became yet another reason for dispossession. The first decades of the nineteenth century were a time of heroic road building in the United States. To connect the interior with the coast, the federal government as well as the states wanted a route that linked Nashville and Chattanooga with Augusta and the eastern seaboard, a line that went straight through Cherokee territory.

A gloomy fatalism began to make its way into Return Jonathan's canny old head. He had just buried his second wife, Grace, and with every day of trouble that passed he had second thoughts about the eventual fate of the Cherokee. If sedentary agriculture was not going to work, either through white aggression or Indian reaction, what would? Around 1808–9, he began to entertain an idea that Jefferson himself had raised five years earlier, that of an “exchange” of land; hundreds of thousands of acres of territory west of the Mississippi in return for abandonment of their present territory. Put another way, this was a policy of “removal,” for the moment voluntary. Jefferson rationalized what he was proposing in terms of treating the Indians
more
like white pioneers rather than less. Why would they
not
want to remove west, where they would be rid of white marauders and squatters and where game was surely plentiful, if they insisted on keeping to their older way of life? For those who wished to farm, the money paid for their land in the East could be enough to buy western acres. They would be native homesteaders. Why would they not jump at such an opportunity? The answer of course was that this plan represented the abandonment of Jefferson's fine promise that Indians would share American destiny and abundance and the two races march forward together as one farming people. Besides, as the
president who clung through thick and thin to his Virginia hillside knew perfectly well, land was more than territorial inventory. Land was a place impregnated with poetic or even mystical qualities, and the specific place that the Cherokee called home were those hills draped in wild azalea that had so elated William Bartram. Home was the strawberry fields. In this sense the Cherokee were not, by Tocqueville's standards, true Americans at all. Moving was not an opportunity; it was a calamity. Besides, the Cherokee knew nothing of what lay beyond the Mississippi except that some white men called it “the Great American Desert.”

And yet, for all their forebodings, a few hundred of the Cherokee who felt most under pressure or who put faith in White Path's reassurances did indeed make the journey west to Arkansas. Many of the chiefs who opted for transplantation did so armed with the reassurance, given by Meigs, that they would “take their land with them”—that an acre of Georgia or Tennessee would entitle them to precisely the same allotment in their new home. By far the greater part of the Cherokee opted to stay and pinned their faith in the security of their land title promised by successive treaties. Encouraged by Meigs, they joined, for once, the right side in an American war, making up a volunteer force in 1812–14 that served under Andrew Jackson, Indian fighter and land speculator. Their neighbors, the Creeks, made the wrong choice, siding with the British, and were duly punished. But to their horror, part of the land cessions imposed on the Creeks included a cool two-million-plus acres belonging to the Cherokee, America's ally! President Madison had actually decorated Cherokee warriors for bravery in the war but had been unable to stop Jackson's white militia from a spree of killing and destruction of Cherokee farms and livestock on their way back from the battle. For the militia it seemed like sport. Warriors returned home to sacked villages, the rotting carcasses of hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses, houses in charred ruins. The idea, of course, was to use the opportunity of wartime to terrorize the Cherokee into vacating their lands as soon as possible. Aghast, Meigs computed the damages for losses suffered by the Cherokee at the hands of the demobilized marauders at nearly $21,000, a huge sum by the standards of the day, so enormous that it made Andrew Jackson chuckle at the idea that anyone would actually believe the word of an Indian, much less pay out damages.

For a few months, Meigs thought he had prevailed on their behalf in Washington. Damages were authorized, and the 2 million acres that the colonel had proved indisputably belonged to the Cherokee were returned to them. But this only brought the wrath of the frontier, led by Jackson, down on the head of President Madison. His message to Meigs was: make them cough up some of it if they don't want to lose it all. Meigs tried but in vain. And now, for all that the Cherokee had suffered by way of violations of the treaties of earlier administrations, the colonel was beginning to think that their presumption of being treated as a sovereign nation was deluded if not doomed. He detected something unprecedentedly brutal in Jackson, and he was right. Years of famine in 1816 and 1817 only persuaded the colonel that his pessimism was justified. Perhaps the Cherokee would indeed be better off somewhere else. At Hiwassee, where Meigs was based, he heard Jackson spell out to the Cherokee chiefs their alternatives: removal to Arkansas, the government providing a gun and a blanket, or staying and abiding by the laws of Georgia or Tennessee. They must understand they did not have ancestral “territory”; they would get 640 acres each. The chiefs replied “we wish to remain on our land and hold it fast. We appeal to our father the president to do us justice.” They wanted neither to go nor to be American citizens. They had supposed they already had a nation and that Presidents Washington and Jefferson had thought so too. If they were forced to go west, they would be reduced to a “savage way of life,” and had not Washington and Jefferson wanted them to “remain on our lands and follow the pursuits of agriculture and civilisation”? Jackson told them their third way was no longer an option and they must choose between the two he offered. If they refused, they would be considered “unfriendly.” Intimidated by the sinister threat, half—but only half—of the sixty-seven chiefs signed.