by Sarah Vowell
Unlike Washington, New Echota is cool and quiet and green. Site manager David Gomez shows us around the grounds. Amy and I are unprepared for the loveliness of the place, for its calm lushness, its fragrance. Everywhere, honeysuckle is in bloom. I tell him I like it here.
“It’s nice,” he agrees. “It’s peaceful and the atmosphere is right for what was going on and the story that we tell here. It’s a story that’s sad in a lot of ways, but there were a lot of great things happening with the Cherokee Nation.”
The Cherokee, along with the other Southeastern tribes who suffered removal to Oklahoma—the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Choctaw, the Seminole—are one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes. It was in 1822 that the Cherokee hero Sequoyah developed an alphabet, inventing the sole written language of any North American tribe. Only six years later, Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot founded the Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual, English-Cherokee newspaper published at New Echota. Many Cherokee, especially the large population of mixed-bloods, practiced Christianity. And, because many of these lived as “civilized” Southern gentlemen of the early nineteenth century, they owned prospering plantations, which meant they owned black slaves. More than any other Native American tribe, the Cherokees adopted the religious, cultural, and political ideals of the United States. Partly as a means of self-preservation. By becoming more like the Americans, they hoped to coexist with this new nation that was growing up around them, but they weren’t allowed to. Georgia settlers wanted their land. And their gold, which was discovered near New Echota in 1829.
Gomez says, “They were really progressing so fast at this time period. The printing operation was going with their newspaper here. Things were moving so fast for them for a short while here that it looked very promising, but because of the gold and the big demand for land, their fate had really been already sealed for them in earlier years.”
The tribe allowed Christian missionaries to live and work among them, and to teach their children English. The most beloved of these was the Presbyterian Samuel Worcester, who built a two-story house at New Echota, which functioned as a post office, school, and rooming house. It still stands, and David Gomez walks us through, warning us of the steep steps: “You wouldn’t want to have a broken leg on the rest of your trail.”
The state of Georgia, which of all the Southern states treated the Cherokee with the most hostility, passed a number of alarming laws in the 1820s and ’30s undermining the sovereignty of the Nation. One of these laws required white settlers within the boundaries of the Nation to obtain a permit from the state of Georgia. Samuel Worcester refused to apply for such a permit, arguing that he had the permission of the Cherokee to live on their lands and that should suffice. Georgia arrested Worcester and imprisoned him for four years. Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, and the case, Worcester v. Georgia, became a great victory for the tribe. The Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokee Nation was just that—a sovereign nation within the borders of the U.S., and therefore beholden only to the federal government, i.e., not under the jurisdiction of Georgia state laws.
“And the Cherokee Nation was elated,” Gomez points out. “They thought, ‘All right, the highest court in the land of the United States—this government that we’re trying to copy—they ruled in our favor. This is going to be good.’ Of course, Andrew Jackson, who was pro-removal from the early years—he campaigned on that issue—decided he wasn’t going to back the Supreme Court ruling.”
On hearing of the ruling, the president is said to have replied, “John Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Think about that, what that means: a breakdown of the balance of power in such boasting, dictatorial terms. Jackson is violating his own oath of office, to uphold the Constitution. In the twentieth century, when people bandy about the idea of impeachment for presidents who fib about extramarital dalliances, it’s worth remembering what a truly impeachable offense looks like. Didn’t happen of course. I refer you to the face on the twenty-dollar bill.
The state of Georgia was thrilled when Jackson thumbed his nose at the Court, and immediately dispatched teams to survey the Cherokee lands for a land lottery. Soon white settlers arrived here. According to Gomez, “They showed up two years later in 1834, with the land lottery deed and with Georgia soldiers saying, ‘I’ve got this land from the lottery. Get off of it.’ ”
Another small constitutional violation that was part of the land grab: Georgia seized the Cherokee printing press, so they couldn’t publicize their cause and win political support in states up north.
No one annoyed Jackson like Principal Chief John Ross. Ross was a Jeffersonian figure in almost every sense. A founding father of the Cherokee Nation in its modern, legal form, it was Ross who cribbed from Jefferson in writing the Cherokee constitution. Like Jefferson, he preached liberty while owning slaves. An educated gentleman planter, Ross was only one-eighth Cherokee—just one-eighth, even I’m more Cherokee than that—but he was their chief from 1827 to 1866. Toward the end of his life he corresponded with Abraham Lincoln; in his early years, he was such a believer in the inherent justice of the American system that he lobbied relentlessly in Washington, D.C., believing that once Congress and the president understood that the Constitution applied to this virtuous, sibling republic, they would treat the tribe fairly, as equals.
Once the state of Georgia began evicting the Cherokee, and John Ross among them, Ross wrote, “Treated like dogs, we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants, and strangers in our own country.”
The tribe was divided about what to do: stay and fight or demand cash for the land and head west. No one exploited this split more than Andrew Jackson.
The majority of the tribe wanted to stay put and supported Ross. But around a hundred men—including Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot and his brother Stand Watie; a hundred in a tribe of sixteen thousand—met at Boudinot’s house in New Echota in 1835 and signed a treaty with the U.S. government. They had no authority to do this. Called the Treaty of New Echota, it relinquished all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in the West. They figured, Georgia was already seizing Cherokee land; this might be the only way the Cherokee would get something for it.
John Ross, whom the Georgia militia arrested so that he could not protest, was stunned. He accused the treaty party of treason. The rest of the sixteen thousand Cherokee signed a petition calling the treaty invalid and illegal. Congress ratified the treaty by only one vote, despite impassioned pleas on behalf of the Cherokee by Congressmen Henry Clay and Davy Crockett. The tribe was given three years to remove themselves to the West.
We’re now standing at the site of Elias Boudinot’s house, where the infamous New Echota treaty was signed. Gomez says, “The spring of ’38 rolled around, and nobody was going anywhere. The state of Georgia and the federal government thought they were going to have some problems and you had about seven thousand troops come in to forcibly remove the Cherokees from their farms, from their houses, and initially rounded them up in stockades and moved them up into eastern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama to three immigration depots where they were moved out onto the Trail of Tears as everybody knows it. Technically this is the starting point for the Trail of Tears. For the individual Cherokees, it really started at their front door wherever they were rounded up from.”
Amy and I want to step on it, this patch of grass where the treaty was signed, but we hesitate. “It’s not a grave,” Gomez tells us. But that’s what it feels like. We tiptoe onto it, this profane ground. And then we tiptoe away.
As Amy and I travel the Trail of Tears I wonder if we should be embarrassed by certain discrepancies between our trail and theirs. We’re weak, we’re decadent, we’re Americans. Which means: road trip history buffs one minute, amnesiacs the next. We want to remember. Except when we want to forget.
We register at the Chattanooga Choo Choo. Yes, yes, the Chattanooga Choo Choo, track 29! It’s a hotel now, a gloriously hokey, beautifully restored H
oliday Inn, in which the lobby is the ornate dome of the old train station, and the rooms are turn-of-the-century rail cars parked out on the tracks. We’re in giggles the entire night for the simple reason that the phrase “choo choo” is completely addictive. We try to work it into every sentence: “What should we do for dinner? Stay here at the Choo Choo?” We end up going out for barbecue, saying, “This is good, but I can’t wait to get back to the Choo Choo.” We watch The X-Files in our train car, commenting, “Is it just me, or is this show even better in the Choo Choo?” I send email from my laptop just so I can write, “Greetings from the Chattanooga Choo Choo Exclamation Point.”
Sadly, we check out of the Choo Choo and drive across town to Ross’s Landing. It used to be where John Ross’s ferry service carried people across the Tennessee River. But in 1838, it was one of the starting points for the water route of the Trail of Tears.
And anchored there, at the river, like some ghost ship, in the very spot where Cherokees were herded into flatboats by the U.S. military, is a U.S. Coast Guard boat. I stand on the sand and read a weathered historical marker: “Established about 1816 by John Ross some 370 yards east of this point, it consisted of a ferry, warehouse and landing. Cherokee parties left for the West in 1838, the same year the growing community took the name Chattanooga.”
I’m sure there’s no connection at all between those two points. That sounds so nice. They “left for the West.” Bye-bye! Bon voyage!
Ross’s Landing also functions as Chattanooga’s tourist center. Up the hill from the river is the gigantic Tennessee Aquarium and an IMAX theater. The place is crawling with tourists—a crowd so generic and indistinguishable from one another they swirled around us as a single T-shirt.
One hundred and sixty years ago, thousands of Cherokees came through this site. In the summer of 1838, they were forced onto boats and faced heat exhaustion, and then later a drought that stranded them without water to drink. In the fall, they headed west by foot, eventually trudging barefoot through blizzards. Either way, they perished of starvation, dysentery, diarrhea, and fatigue. A quarter of the tribe was dead.
Here, in the shadow of the aquarium, the Trail of Tears is remembered by a series of quotations from disgruntled Native Americans, carved into a concrete plaza. One of the citations, from a Cherokee named Dragging Canoe, is from 1776: “The white men have almost surrounded us, leaving us only a little plot of land to stand upon. And it seems to be their intention to destroy us as a nation.”
Good call.
We’re moving diagonally across the sidewalk, and happily step on the words of Andrew Jackson, from 1820: “It is high time to do away with the farce of treatying with Indian tribes as separate nations.”
Amy looks up from the brochure she’s reading and says, “These cracks in the sidewalks, they are symbolic of broken promises.”
“Are you making that up?”
“No. It says right here, ‘Some of the pavement is cracked to symbolize the broken promises made to the Indians.’ ”
Most Americans have had this experience, most of us can name things our country has done that we find shameful, from the travesties everybody agrees were wrong—the Japanese internment camps or the late date of slavery’s abolition—to murkier, partisan arguments about legalized abortion or the Enola Gay. World history has been a bloody business from the get-go, but the nausea we’re suffering standing on the broken promises at Ross’s Landing is peculiar to a democracy. Because in a democracy, we’re all responsible for our government’s actions, because we’re responsible for electing the government. Even if we, the people, don’t do anything wrong, we put the wrongdoers in power.
Another piece of the sidewalk quotes a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren (who, playing George Bush to Jackson’s Ronald Reagan, enforced his predecessor’s removal policy) in 1838. “A crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude. A crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokee 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 the 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.”
The path ends with a quotation from an unknown survivor of the Trail of Tears who said, “Long time we travel on way to new land. People feel bad when they leave old nation. Womens cry and make sad wails. Children. And many men. And all look sad like when friends die. They say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards west. Many days pass and people die very much. We bury close by trail.”
That last passage, especially the part about “when friends die,” brings Amy and me to tears. And we just stand there, looking off toward the Tennessee, brokenhearted. Meanwhile, there are little kids literally walking over these words, playing on them, making noise, having fun. We sort of hate them for a second. I ask a teacher who’s with a group of fourth graders why she isn’t talking to them about Cherokee history. She says normally she would, but it’s the end of the school year, this trip is their reward for being good. It seems reasonable.
I ask Amy if she thinks these kids should share our sadness. She says, “I think it’s a sad story. It’s sort of like the Holocaust. You don’t have to be Jewish to think that’s definitely a sad part of history. And I think the Trail of Tears is America’s version of genocide. Really, it started right over there.”
Still, I can’t take my eyes off those children. I envy them. I want to join them. I wanted to come on this trip to get a feel for this trail that made us; standing at Ross’s Landing, it hits me how crazy that is—how crazy I was. Suddenly the only thing I get out of it is rage.
Why should we keep going?
I don’t know. I seriously don’t. I know it’s an interesting story and I’m supposed to be interested in my past, but what good comes of that? I’m feeling haunted, weighed down, in pain. This might have been a mistake. It isn’t a story where the more you know, the better you’ll feel. It’s the opposite. The more I learn, the worse I feel. This trip is forcing me to stand here next to a stupid aquarium and hate the country that I still love.
There are only so many hours a human being can stomach unfocused dread. I was tired and confused and depressed and I needed the kind of respite that can only come from focused resentment. In the Trail of Tears saga, if there’s one person you’re allowed to hate, it’s Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Indian removal policy. And since the trail passed through Nashville anyway, we stop at his plantation, the Hermitage. We get a private tour from Hermitage employee Carolyn Brackett. The house and museum are closed to the public when we arrive because of astonishing tornado damage. All the trees are down. Part of me wanted to destroy Andrew Jackson and everything representing him. Seeing all those hacked-up trees made me feel like Someone had beaten me to the punch.
Inside, there’s no display mentioning Indian removal because, remarkably, there is no display about Jackson’s presidency. Carolyn Brackett showed us around the house, a columned antebellum mansion that looks like a cross between Graceland and Tara. Unfortunately for my spite spree, I liked Carolyn Brackett a lot and I felt bad for her. She would point into the library and say Jackson subscribed to a lot of newspapers before his death, and I’d say, “Was one of them the Cherokee Phoenix?” Brackett wasn’t sure.
Brackett points into a room and says, “All of the rooms that have original wallpaper, all of the paper was conserved and had to be cleaned with an eraser the size of a pencil eraser. So that was quite an undertaking.” She points to a painting of Jackson that “was finished nine days before his death. I think he shows the wear and tear of his life in that portrait.”
He looks like he’s sticking his head out a car window.
Brackett agrees, “I guess he wasn’t worrying about his hair much by then.” Brackett
guides us past the flower garden planted by Jackson’s wife, Rachel, and into the family graveyard. There are a few piddly headstones and one Greco-Roman monstrosity with an obelisk rising from the center.
“He actually had this designed for Rachel and left room for other family members,” Brackett says as she leads us onto Jackson’s grave.
I pull a book out of my backpack, a book with the subtitle Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. Carolyn Brackett and Amy exchange a worried look.
I tell her that I’m standing here on Andrew Jackson’s grave and that as a person of partly Cherokee descent, I wouldn’t mind dancing on it. I read her a letter that Jackson wrote about the removal of the southeastern tribes. It says, “Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, but what do they more than our ancestors did nor than our children are doing? To better their condition in an unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the lands of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions.” And then it ends, “Can it be cruel in the Government, when, by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontent in his ancient home to purchase his lands, to give a new and extensive territory, to pay the expense of his removal, and support him a year in his new abode. How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?”
