In addition to their military contributions, many Choctaws had encouraged the work of missionaries and embraced new businesses and new ways of life. Initially, the most accommodating were the descendants of traders like McDonald’s father who had first entered the Choctaw country in the eighteenth century. The first of these traders, Nathaniel Folsom, John Pitchlynn (Peter Pitchlynn’s father), Louis LeFlore, Louis Durant, and Turner Brashears, quickly married into Indian families. Their wives’ relatives helped them acquire supplies of deerskins and enjoy in return steady access to manufactured goods and luxury items they could use themselves or distribute among their relatives. In the process, they also produced new generations of mixed-heritage children like McDonald, whom the matrilineal Choctaws considered natural-born members of the tribe. Over time, these traders and their families took on a wide range of roles, and by the nineteenth century, one historian estimated, they constituted 10 percent of the tribe’s population. John Pitchlynn served as the Choctaws’ official interpreter at treaty gatherings from Hopewell onward, while Turner Brashears, an agent of the Florida-based British firm Panton and Leslie, opened a tavern on the Natchez Trace. Louis Durant is credited with introducing cattle ranching into Mississippi. Louis LeFlore operated west of the Pearl River, trading with Choctaws who crossed the Mississippi at Nogales (later Vicksburg) to hunt on the west side of the river.26
In the first decades of the nineteenth century these bicultural Choctaw trading families became increasingly involved in plantation agriculture and cattle ranching. They purchased African slaves, expanded their farming operations, and began operating ferries and taverns. Tribal land was owned communally, but wealthy individuals established their rights to agricultural acreage by clearing it and using it for cotton, cattle, and other crops, thereby accommodating themselves both to the advent of commercial agriculture and to the region’s rigid social hierarchy. By 1830 Louis LeFlore’s son Greenwood lived on a Yazoo River plantation with thirty-two slaves. Nathaniel Folsom’s son David owned ten slaves, while among the tribe’s woman slaveowners was Turner Brashears’s daughter, Delila. Despite maintaining their tribal government and enforcing the borders to their homeland established at Hopewell, the Choctaws had come to accept dramatic changes in their culture: African American slavery, cattle ranching, square cabins, and enclosed farms and plantations devoted to cotton and other commercial crops.27
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DESPITE THE CHOCTAWS’ deep involvement in the region’s economic growth, the tribe could not avoid the gaze of political leaders who viewed their presence as an obstacle to the region’s development. The tribe confronted this reality in the spring of 1819, when the U.S. Indian agent John McKee notified their leaders that General Andrew Jackson had inquired “whether or not [the Choctaws] are disposed to treat” with the United States for the sale of the Mississippi lands and removal to a new territory west of the river. Jackson would conduct the treaty negotiations under a mandate from President James Monroe. The Tennessee war hero directed McKee to read his message to the chiefs “by way of preparing them for the cession.” The general warned the agent that this proposed transaction would be the Choctaws’ single opportunity to make a deal. “Now is the time and the only time the Government will have it in its power to make [the Choctaws] happy, by holding the land west of the Mississippi for them,” he declared. “And this can only be done by their consent to an exchange, in whole or in part.”28
The Choctaw leadership met later that summer and rejected Jackson’s invitation. The tribe had long used the woods of modern Arkansas as a hunting ground, crossing regularly at Nogales and drawing on the territory’s inventory of deerskins to supply their needs. Some, like Pushmataha, had also traveled farther west, visiting tribes as far away as the Spanish settlements on the Rio Grande.29 As familiar as they were with the lands across the river, the Choctaw leaders had no interest in leaving Mississippi. “We wish to remain here,” Pushmataha, Jackson’s former comrade-in-arms, told the agent. He did not consider the Choctaws who hunted and lived across the Mississippi members of his nation. “[T]hey are considered as strangers; they have no houses or places of residence; they are like wolves. I am well acquainted with the country contemplated for us,” the chief told the American commissioners. “I have often had my feet sorely bruised there by the roughness of its surface.” As for selling land in Mississippi, the chief was firm: “we have none to spare.”30
Monroe’s insistence that the tribe meet with Jackson despite the leaders’ unwillingness to discuss either removal or land sales reflected a shifting balance of power both in Washington, D.C., and along the Gulf. Acting on the president’s instructions, Jackson traveled south from his home in Nashville for a face-to-face meeting with the Choctaw chiefs.31 The tribe was to be represented by three men who had considerable experience with the Americans: Pushmataha, from the Six Towns District (Okla-hunnali); Mushulatubbe, from the center of the state (Haiyip Atukla); and Puckshenubbe, from the western division along the Mississippi River (Okla-Falaya).32 When they gathered at a forest clearing called Doak’s Stand in October 1820, Jackson was blunt. Ignoring the tribe’s prosperous farms, expanding plantations, and burgeoning cattle ranches, he announced: “You have more land than you can cultivate. . . . It is useless to yourselves.” Continuing in the paternalistic manner that was becoming characteristic of government officials, he added that “the President expects no difficulty with his Choctaw children.” Jackson offered a choice. Those who wished to travel west “can live in abundance, and acquire riches and independence.” Those who chose to remain would be “protected by our laws. . . . As all parties are accommodated,” he concluded “and the interest and happiness of all consulted, there cannot be any honest opposition made to the friendly proposals of your father the President.” Refusing the government’s proposal, he warned, would mean that the president “can no longer look upon you as friends and brothers, and as deserving his fatherly protection. . . . If you suffer any injury,” he concluded darkly, “none but yourselves will be to blame.”33
This was not a negotiation, and it was certainly not an occasion for celebrating the diplomatic kinship established a generation earlier at Hopewell or the military partnership that had been so effective in New Orleans five years earlier. The Choctaws, particularly leaders like Pushmataha and Mushulatubbe, who had worn American uniforms at the battle of New Orleans in 1815, must have listened to their former commander in shock. Their community was being presented with an ultimatum from the most powerful military leader of his age, delivered with the warning that the only alternative to immediate removal was to dissolve their tribal government and remain in Mississippi. Those who remained in the East would become state citizens, subject to local laws (which, among other things, barred Indians from testifying in court) and beyond the protection of federal officials. References to past diplomatic alliances or a brotherhood born of war were completely absent from Jackson’s presentation. He demanded obedience. Sensing this dramatic shift in tone, Puckshenubbe calmly requested that all future statements be recorded. He also asked “that his half-breeds, who could read and write, might be permitted to perform this duty, to see that there were no mistakes and that everything was well done.”34
The Choctaw chiefs and their advisers retreated to consider their reply. After a week they remained united in opposition. Jackson responded angrily, delivering a second blistering address before the council. He argued that the Treaty of Hopewell had granted Congress the “right to manage the affairs of this nation” and declared that if the chiefs refused his demands, the government would simply recognize whichever Choctaws assembled in the West as their government. This meeting “will be the last time a talk will ever be delivered by your father the President to his Choctaw children on this side of the Mississippi,” he added. “You are advised to beware. . . . Your father the President will not be trifled with and put at defiance. . . . A heavy cloud may burst upon you and you may be without friends to counsel
or protect you. . . . Your existence as a nation is in your hands,” he told the chiefs. “Should you reject [the treaty] it will be a source of great regret, as it may be a measure fatal to your nation.”35
The Choctaw leaders met again the following day, but they could not agree on a united course of action. Puckshenubbe, the group’s senior leader, abruptly left the council grounds and announced that he would have no further contact with the Americans. The following day Jackson met with those who remained—“about forty or fifty headmen and warriors”—and made a deal. The tribe exchanged more than five million acres in Mississippi for a tract in western Arkansas and modern Oklahoma that the United States claimed contained thirteen million acres. The agreement also stipulated that the proceeds from the sale of some thirty-four thousand acres of ceded land would be used to support schools for Choctaw youth and a “light-horse” tribal police force to maintain order in their Mississippi homeland. Jackson’s report on the treaty sessions also noted that he made “donations” ranging from five hundred to twenty-five dollars to twenty-three leaders in order to complete the transaction.36
For the Choctaws, the drama at Doak’s Stand came not only from the experience of being browbeaten and bribed by their former military commander. More terrifying even than his threatening posture was Andrew Jackson’s grasp of an aggressive rhetoric, which resonated with fellow westerners and was to fuel his presidential campaign. For those who accepted his premise, Old Hickory’s logic was ironclad: Indians were backward hunters; they did not develop their land. Native tribes were therefore anachronistic vestiges of the past and should not exist within the boundaries of progressive American settlements.
Jackson’s stance at Doak’s Stand revealed the harsh new realities James McDonald and others of his generation would soon confront. Writing at the conclusion of his meeting with the Choctaws, Old Hickory predicted confidently (and without evidence) that “at least two-thirds of the nation here will remove to the country ceded to them” and “the remainder . . . will then be prepared to have the laws of the United States extended over them.” He added ominously, “[W]e shall no longer witness the farce and absurdity of holding treaties with the Indians residing within our territorial limits.”37 Native leaders would soon meet others like the future president, men who would smoothly turn their backs on former allies and demand that tribal leaders choose between a “civilized” life as individual subjects or the “savage” life of tribes. The new generation of frontier politicians could imagine no place where Indian tribes might continue within the settled boundaries of their states.
Before Doak’s Stand the Choctaws could rely on leaders like Taboca or Pushmataha to establish and sustain their diplomatic relationship with the United States. After Doak’s Stand, Indians like the Choctaw chiefs were now cast by Jackson and his settler supporters as backward aliens, rather than partners in diplomacy. In this new environment the Choctaws would be best served by leaders who could confront the Americans’ logic and challenge their authoritarian proposals. It was time to replace the diplomats with lawyers. It was time for a Choctaw like James McDonald.
THE INDIAN LAWYER
Andrew Jackson’s prediction that people interested in learning to farm would soon move to the Choctaws’ new Arkansas lands proved only half correct. Eager farmers soon arrived, but they were whites, not Indians. Niles Weekly Register reported in March 1821 that American squatters were invading the tribe’s newly acquired western territory. Without prompting and with no evident sense of irony, several congressmen now called for the tribe’s removal from Arkansas, the territory that General Jackson had promised would be their new homeland, but that they had yet to occupy.38
As the 1824 presidential election drew near, pressure mounted on American officials to resolve this Arkansas dispute as well as similar disputes in other southeastern states. Georgia continued to call for the removal of the Cherokees, while in Alabama officials focused their attention on the Creeks. Presidential candidate Jackson encouraged these pro-removal forces, but he was hardly alone. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (also a presidential hopeful) issued a long report in the spring of 1824 that warned removal had been avoided thus far only because of the “humanity, kindness and justice” of federal authorities. The time was fast approaching, he warned, when the tribes would have no choice but to depart.39 Even the retiring president, the Virginian James Monroe, sympathized with the removal advocates. Referring to Georgia, he wrote in early 1824 that he had long been “anxious . . . to meet the wishes of the state.” Monroe cautioned against the use of force, but his sentiments largely echoed Jackson’s. Referring to the southern tribes, he declared that “surrounded as they are . . . on every side by the white population, it will be difficult if not impossible for them with their kind of government to sustain order among them.” The choice, Monroe argued, was simple: “wretched” chaos or removal.40
James McDonald returned to Mississippi in 1823, just as the presidential campaign was taking shape and the confrontation between “civilizing” tribes and southern states was coming into focus. That year the Choctaws sought redress on three matters: the status of their Arkansas lands (now occupied largely by whites), the government’s failure to provide the funds for education promised in the 1820 treaty, and Mississippi’s unrelenting demand for their removal. Calhoun had invited tribal leaders to a treaty council in 1822, but they rejected any further meetings with lower-level diplomats. They wanted to see the president. As the tribal leaders later wrote, “We had often met with commissioners [but] . . . they had uniformly stated . . . that their powers were limited. We, therefore . . . wished to visit the President of the United States (the fountainhead of power) and have a full understanding with him on all the points of difference between our white brothers and ourselves.”41 Calhoun approved bringing tribal leaders to Washington in 1823, but the project was delayed several times, and the Choctaw leaders did not arrive in the capital until October 1824. The delegation included all three “medal chiefs,” including Pushmataha and Puckshenubbe, the man who had left the treaty grounds in 1820 rather than give in to Andrew Jackson’s demands. In addition, the tribe sent along four recently elected district delegates to the tribal council and two interpreter-clerks who were the sons of white traders and Choctaw women: David Folsom and James McDonald.42
Despite frequent references to “white brothers” and bonds of friendship, the 1824 negotiations in Washington, D.C., were unlike any previous diplomatic encounter in Choctaw history. The somber tone of the meetings may have been set by the accidental death of eighty-five-year-old Puckshenubbe on the journey to Washington, but it was also clear from their first exchanges with government officials that the delegates were determined to keep the focus on a small set of issues. They had no interest in socializing or lobbying. “We have been here a fortnight,” McDonald wrote his friend Peter Pitchlynn on November 6, “and yet we have transacted no business.”43 Initially, McDonald played a minor role in drafting communications between the two sides and sending reports back home, but as the conversations intensified, his command of English and his skill at framing issues in clear legal terms became indispensable.
Once formal talks began, the Choctaw delegation quickly seized the initiative. They rejected any discussion of further land sales in Mississippi. In a note in McDonald’s handwriting sent to Calhoun during their first week in the city, the Choctaws expressed their “friendly disposition” toward the United States but insisted that the “wishes of our countrymen” precluded any additional sales of the tribe’s eastern lands. The discussion then shifted to Arkansas, where the Choctaws insisted on receiving a good price from the white squatters who had invaded their territory. As the two sides negotiated price and method of compensation, Calhoun reminded Pushmataha that four years earlier he and the other chiefs had disparaged the quality of the Arkansas land. The chief replied crisply that he was simply “imitating the white man”: in 1820 he had been buying land; now he was selli
ng it.44
U.S. officials also proposed a variety of payment schemes involving different lump sums and annual payments. McDonald’s former patron Thomas McKenney (now the commissioner of Indian affairs) communicated separately with the young lawyer, pleading with him to help the government close the deal. The Choctaws maintained that they deserved to be fully compensated for what they were giving up, and they insisted that gifts of trade goods, a part of the 1820 treaty, would no longer be acceptable. They wanted cash for their national treasury. As the weeks wore on, the Choctaws pressed Calhoun and Monroe to make their best offer. Finally, on November 20, after several exchanges, they set their terms for the remainder of their stay. “Unless the Government can bring itself to the conclusion to make a more liberal offer,” the delegates wrote, “the negotiation must come to an immediate close and the delegation [must] return to their homes.”45
When Calhoun’s answer arrived two days later, the Choctaw leaders composed a withering reply. While continuing to express affection for the South Carolina leader—the letter called him “our friend and brother”—the delegates pronounced the government’s offer “altogether inadequate.” They pointed out that the five-million-acre tract they were discussing was not as “remote,” as the government claimed, but easily accessible to New Orleans by the Arkansas and Red rivers. The sale of only one-third the total would generate two million dollars for the government. “Is it not just and right,” they asked, “that we should receive in annuity, a reasonable portion of that sum?” They expressed sympathy for the squatters who had made improvements to their homesteads, but they pointed out that those settlers were trespassers, acting “contrary to the laws of Congress. . . . The labor has not been ours,” the delegates conceded, “but who can say that the property is not?”
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