The Choctaw delegation was led by Taboca, a prominent warrior who represented a major town near the headwaters of the Pearl River. Taboca was viewed by his Choctaw kinsmen as a fanimingo (squirrel chief ), a designated representative of the community charged with protecting its interests in encounters with outsiders.8 His presence at the South Carolina treaty ground was a measure of his tribe’s stability and his own diplomatic sophistication. When he met the American commissioners, Taboca could boast two decades of experience representing Choctaw interests at international gatherings. Over the previous generation French, Spanish, and British officials had recorded his presence in Mobile, St. Augustine, Savannah, and Charleston. Following the Hopewell conference he and his wife were to travel to Philadelphia and New York to meet with American leaders, including Secretary of War Henry Knox and Benjamin Franklin. Eight years later he led fifteen hundred Choctaws in a council where the Spanish governor of West Florida crowned him “King of the Choctaws” in an elaborate ceremony.9
Despite their high office, the Choctaw delegation arrived at Hopewell wearing only deer- and bearskins. In the tradition of frontier diplomacy, they expected the Americans would welcome them as kinsmen and supply them with clothing and food. Despite initial grumbling from the U.S. representatives, the delegates were soon wearing U.S. Army coats and sharing the Americans’ supplies. The ensuing days were marked by additional detours into diplomatic ritual. Treaty sessions began with invocations of the power of the sun, a power the Choctaws associated both with creation and with the all-seeing eye of the Great Spirit. Like most Indian groups, the Choctaws imagined their communities as extended families. Foreigners could neither be trusted to keep their promises nor relied upon to be generous in times of hardship unless they could somehow be transformed into family members. The conference was therefore punctuated by numerous references to the importance of the family bonds that linked the Americans to their Native neighbors.
The Americans and Choctaws signed the Hopewell treaty on January 3, 1786. On that occasion the Americans appeared in their dress uniforms while Taboca and his fellow delegates performed an eagle tail dance before the entire assembly. Covered with white clay, the Choctaws sang and waved eagle tails back and forth over their heads before approaching their counterparts and dancing before them. The Choctaws also carried white poles topped with white deerskins as symbols of peace and presented the U.S. officials with a white calumet. Taboca then kindled a sacred fire in the center of the treaty ground and made a special point of gathering up a few of its coals to take home with him as a record of the event. According to an American observer, Taboca brought the council to a close by touching the breasts of the government’s commissioners with an eagle tail. He explained: “[T]hese feathers of the eagle tail we always hold when we make peace.”10
The Hopewell treaty established peace between the Choctaws and the United States and announced the federal government’s recognition of the tribe’s control over its Mississippi homeland. According to the language of the agreement, American citizens were not welcome to settle in Choctaw territory. At the same time, the document noted that the Choctaws would give their allegiance to “no other sovereign” and would accept Congress’s right to regulate their trade and “manage” their affairs. That last statement had little meaning when British traders still operated in the area, and Choctaw diplomats were negotiating similar agreements with the Spanish authorities in St. Augustine and New Orleans.11
The style and substance of the Hopewell treaty had counterparts in other parts of North America where American officials sought to establish peaceful relations with tribes on their inland borders. These treaties ended hostilities between the two groups and specified the boundaries between them. U.S. commissioners signed these agreements because they were aware of both their country’s financial and military weakness and the steady threat posed to the young government by the British and Spanish troops stationed in a vast arc stretching from Niagara to Detroit, Green Bay, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pensacola. American officials were also concerned about the volatile atmosphere being created by western settlers who were constantly testing the limits of federal authority by trespassing on tribal land. Agreements separating settlers from powerful Native communities promised to bring peace to the border region while preempting military intervention from Britain or Spain.
The new Federal Constitution approved in 1787 stated that Congress would have the power to “regulate commerce . . . with the Indians” but said nothing about formal diplomacy or treaties. Nevertheless, soon after George Washington took office as the first president of the newly reorganized national government, he proposed that the Senate ratify previously negotiated agreements with western tribes in the same way that it would approve treaties with foreign powers. The president’s secretary of war, Henry Knox, declared that the Indians “possess the right of the soil. It cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by right of conquest in case of a just war. To dispossess them on any other principle would be a gross violation of the fundamental laws of nature. . . .”12
The most dramatic example of Washington’s commitment to formal diplomacy was his decision in the summer of 1790 to invite Alexander McGillivray to the American capital of New York. Secretary of War Knox had urged the Creek leader to come north and instructed his subordinates to spare no expense in making arrangements for the delegation that arrived wearing feather plumes in their silk turbans, silver earrings, and gleaming gorgets of Spanish silver. The Americans hoped the treaty would set a fixed border between the Creeks and their Georgia neighbors and woo the tribe away from its alliance with the Spanish. The Americans punctuated their practical concerns with repeated pledges of friendship and peaceful intent. At the treaty signing, government officials showered their guests with strings of beads and ceremonial tobacco, and the Creeks responded with a “song of peace.”13
Five years later a dozen Great Lakes tribes that had fought for more than a decade to stop the American invasion of their homeland met with General Anthony Wayne at Greenville in northern Ohio. They hoped to establish a permanent border with the United States and to set out the ground rules for future relations. The treaty they negotiated was approved by the “sachems, chiefs and warriors of the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatimes, Miamis, Eel-river, Weas, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias” and was designed to “put an end to a destructive war, to settle all controversies, and to restore harmony and a friendly intercourse between the said United States, and the Indian tribes.” The Native representatives at Greenville accepted white settlers in southern and central Ohio in exchange for the United States’ pledge to “relinquish their claims to all other Indian lands northward of the river Ohio, eastward of the Mississippi, and westward and southward of the Great Lakes and the waters uniting them. . . .” As had been true at the councils at Hopewell and in New York, the diplomats at Greenville sought to establish peace and stability with the methods they had inherited from the colonial era. Those methods would soon prove inadequate.14
COMING OF AGE IN A SHIFTING LANDSCAPE
James McDonald was born into a world made secure by the Hopewell treaty, but he grew up in a world where American settlers and their political champions threatened the “mutual confidence” that had been celebrated at the South Carolina treaty ground. The first evidence of this threat appeared just as the new national constitution was being framed in Philadelphia. In 1787 Georgia’s leaders refused to follow Virginia’s and North Carolina’s example and surrender the state’s claim to the western territory described in its colonial charter. (The crown had granted Georgia’s original proprietors the right to settle as far west as the Mississippi.) The issue lingered as a source of tension between state and federal officials until 1802, when Thomas Jefferson framed a compromise under which the state would give up its western claims in exchange for a federal pledge to extinguish all tribal land titles in its remaining territory. This unpre
cedented Georgia Compact had no immediate impact—state officials were content to allow the Indians to remain within their state in their relatively isolated villages—but underscored the federal government’s commitment to the removal of all tribes from Georgia and, by implication, other areas in the Southeast where white settlers coveted tribal homelands.
Vocal opposition to Indian landholding in Mississippi began in 1803, after Napoleon had suddenly decided to sell the entire territory to the Americans. The French emperor’s decision immediately transformed the Choctaw homeland from a distant border area to an inland province that boasted hundreds of miles of frontage on a river that was destined to become the nation’s central highway.15 Secure borders and the lure of plantation agriculture triggered a surge of settlement. The American population in the region doubled between 1810 and 1820 and then doubled again by 1830. New towns clustered along the east bank of the Mississippi as well as on the lower reaches of the Tombigbee River, two hundred miles to the east.
The American immigrants were soon calling for the creation of two territorial governments in the area. Congress had first organized Mississippi Territory in 1798 as a hundred-mile-wide swath of unsurveyed land hugging the east bank of the great river and then in 1803, had expanded its borders so that it stretched south from Tennessee to the Gulf. Finally, in 1817, the region took its modern shape when the Tombigbee settlements became the Alabama Territory, Mississippi’s eastern neighbor.
Events on America’s northwestern frontier echoed those along the Gulf. Secure borders, a surging settler population, and aggressive local leaders encouraged the rapid organization of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into territories and states during Jefferson’s presidency. (Ohio became a state in 1803; Indiana in 1816; Illinois in 1818.) Jefferson championed both traditional Indian diplomacy and westward expansion. He understood the value of traditional diplomacy, but he also understood the rising power of western politicians and was far more likely to accommodate them.
In 1808 Jefferson supported a major purchase of Choctaw land. He noted that while it was “desirable that the United States should obtain from the native population the entire left (east) bank of the Mississippi,” federal authorities were also determined “to obliterate from the Indian mind an impression . . . that we are constantly forming designs on their lands.” The Choctaws’ current debt of more than forty-six thousand dollars, he explained, provided a solution to this dilemma. Owing to “the pressure of their own convenience,” Jefferson reported, the Choctaws themselves had initiated this sale of five million acres of their land. He wrote that he welcomed this “consolidation of the Mississippi Territory,” and the Senate quickly ratified the agreement.16 No longer playing the role of ally and kinsman, the president had become a facilitator of tribal debt relief and consolidated settlement in the former Choctaw homeland. Despite this purchase, however, the Choctaw borders established at Hopewell remained largely intact. When James McDonald left Mississippi for Baltimore in 1813, the Choctaws’ homeland seemed secure. Choctaw farms lay scattered along the major river systems where tribal members raised both subsistence and cash crops. At the same time, prosperous trading families like McDonald’s expanded their operations, investing in both large-scale agriculture and cattle ranching.
Unlike Joseph Brant and Alexander McGillivray, who were also sent away from their Native homelands to be educated, James McDonald traveled to an entirely new region when he left Mississippi in 1813. He spent a few years at a Quaker school in Baltimore, Maryland, before moving to Washington, D.C. Thomas L. McKenney, a Maryland merchant who served as the superintendent of the Office of Indian Trade from 1816 to 1822, and who later became the nation’s first commissioner of Indian affairs, described the nature of McDonald’s education in his memoirs. McKenney recalled that early in his tenure, Philip E. Thomas, a friend who was the secretary of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends, brought McDonald into his office in hopes of finding the young man a government post. Recalling their first encounter, McKenney wrote, “I soon discovered that there were qualities of both heart and head in this youth of rare excellence, and that nature had bestowed on him not only personal lineaments of uncommon beauty, but a manner and action altogether captivating.”17
McDonald arrived in Washington in the spring of 1818, just as McKenney was attempting to persuade Congress to establish a “civilization” fund for Indians. The superintendent struck a Jeffersonian pose, arguing that federal subsidies for schools and model farms would hasten the tribes’ assimilation into the American mainstream. Some of his critics did not believe Indians could be educated at all, while others argued that the proposal was simply a scheme for distributing federal dollars to the administration’s missionary supporters. McDonald, articulate and “civilized,” could appear as a human advertisement for what would be produced by the new program, the perfect rejoinder to McKenney’s critics. The War Department provided the superintendent with $330 annually for housing and feeding the young man and also provided a subsidy for a new suit of clothes. McDonald was soon hard at work in McKenney’s office. In a few days the superintendent could scribble across a letter: “copied in haste by our little Indian.”18
McKenney’s lobbying (and perhaps McDonald’s presence) paid off. In January 1819 Congress approved an annual appropriation of ten thousand dollars for “the civilization of the tribes adjoining the frontier settlements.” McKenney’s office was responsible for distributing the funds. The superintendent issued guidelines to missionary organizations stipulating that grants go to only those committed to putting up one-third of the cost of new schools and to offering instruction in the “mechanical and domestic arts.” In addition, recipients of federal funds were required to “impress on the minds of the Indians the friendly and benevolent views of the government toward them and the advantage of . . . yielding to the policy of the government, and co-operating with it. . . .”19 Jefferson’s idea of compromise, in which Indians would “yield” to American expansion, was now being translated into legislation and government policy. As McKenney’s superior, John C. Calhoun, wrote confidently a few months later about the tribal leaders who sometimes protested his actions, “our opinion, and not theirs, ought to prevail in measures intended for their civilization and happiness.”20 Sitting at his desk at the Indian Office, James McDonald appeared to be living proof of the wisdom of this viewpoint.
McDonald’s skill and hard work impressed his superiors. “No young man in the District writes more or with more apparent pleasure,” McKenney wrote at the time. Soon after the Civilization Fund was approved, the superintendent suggested educating the young man to prepare him for a profession. Dipping again into the War Department budget—perhaps into the new Civilization Fund itself—McKenney enrolled McDonald in a Georgetown academy run by Rev. James Carnahan. Again, the youth exceeded all expectations. “I soon discovered that McDonald was bent on distinguishing himself,” McKenney later wrote. “His book was his constant companion.” Carnahan agreed, noting that “he comes to school with his lessons all so well digested, and with more Latin, and Greek, and mathematics in one of them than the class . . . can get through in a week.”21
McKenney witnessed the young Choctaw’s academic triumphs for two years. As the Georgetown course reached its conclusion, the superintendent reported that he had raised McDonald’s case with Secretary of War Calhoun. “Make a lawyer of him,” Calhoun said. McKenney dutifully broached the subject with McDonald and eventually arranged for John McLean, an Ohio congressman who was returning to his home near Cincinnati to take a seat on the state’s supreme court, to bring the young man into his law office. The Office of Indian Trade again subsidized McDonald’s efforts, and again, the young Choctaw performed well. “Such was his capacity,” McKenney later wrote, “that in about one-half the time ordinarily occupied by the most talented young men of our race, he had gone the rounds of his studies, and was qualified for the bar.”22
Written twenty years after the
events he described, McKenney’s account of McDonald’s education was obviously colored by the tragic events surrounding the campaign to force the tribe out of Mississippi. The former Indian commissioner claimed, for example, that McDonald responded to the prospect of pursuing a professional education by “pressing his hand against his forehead” and declaring, “Oh sir, it will be all lost on me.” After a “deep sigh” McDonald was supposed to have added, “I am an Indian. . . . I am marked with a mark as deep and abiding as that which Cain bore. My race is degraded—trodden upon—despised.”23 The young man undoubtedly experienced moments of despair, but it is hard to imagine that someone who had exhibited such tenacity and talent for most of a decade would collapse into such a theatrical pose when offered an opportunity of this kind. His efforts on behalf of his tribe in the immediate aftermath of his legal education suggest that he was far more resilient and resourceful than McKenney knew.
In October 1823, McDonald reported to Secretary Calhoun that he had completed his legal training in Ohio but that he had been unable to secure a position with a local law firm. As a consequence, he wrote, “I now propose going to the state of Mississippi to visit my friends and relations.” He added that “should the prospect of success in my profession be encouraging . . . I shall settle there and commence the practice of law.”24 McDonald soon moved south, taking up residence in Jackson, the new capital of the six-year-old state. He was as likely to have been struck as much by the continuities he found in his old homeland as by the changes. After all, many of his Choctaw kinsmen had participated in and supported the American settlement effort. As allies of the United States the Choctaws continued to farm and trade and maintain friendly ties to the government. In recent years they had resisted the anti-American entreaties of Tecumseh (who had traveled south from Indiana to recruit allies), joined forces with the Americans to beat back a nationalist Creek rebellion, and, most dramatically, fought alongside Andrew Jackson in his famous victory over the British at New Orleans.25
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