The delegates closed their response with an outline of what they considered their last offer. They demanded the abolition of Article Four of the 1820 treaty, a provision that defined the Choctaws as no more than temporary residents of Mississippi; the immediate payment of the $6,000 annuity promised in 1820; the appropriation of a lump-sum payment for education; and educational annuities for twenty years that would bring them $450,000 for their western lands. (The proposed educational funds would be divided between “mechanical institutions” and colleges.) The delegates acknowledged that their price was beyond what the government had been prepared to pay, but “it is not more than what we think to be their just value.” Besides, they added, “we wish our children educated.” The delegates were clearly laying the groundwork for the long-term welfare of the tribe. Striking a conciliatory pose, but no doubt aware of the tenacious twenty-three year-old lawyer sitting beside them at the bargaining table, the chiefs ended by assuring their adversaries that they wanted the “rising generation” to “tread in those paths which have conducted your people . . . to their present summit of wealth and greatness.”46
After conferring again with Monroe, Calhoun reported that the government could not meet the tribe’s price. McKenney again pleaded privately with McDonald, urging him to persuade his colleagues to relent as a favor to their government “friends.” The delegation held firm, and the commissioner’s “little Indian,” the eager student who had once copied letters in his outer office, appeared to stand with them, united in support of securing the tribe’s Mississippi homeland and winning fair compensation for the territory taken from them by the Arkansas squatters. During the ensuing weeks, as McKenney urged the delegates to reconsider and the group discussed a number of smaller issues (including McDonald’s desire to be compensated for the theft of slaves from his mother’s Mississippi farm), Pushmataha, the tribe’s eloquent spokesman, developed a virulent infection. He died on December 24. It is impossible to know the details of the Choctaws’ deliberations after Pushmataha’s death, but it seems evident that McDonald’s knowledge of Washington, together with his ready pen, promoted him to a central role.
The delegation continued to drive a hard bargain. They refused a late-December offer from the government but agreed to reconsider if the administration would increase its price. After several more exchanges stretching into late January, the two sides agreed on $216,000 for the Arkansas lands. They signed a new treaty in Calhoun’s office on January 22. The bulk of the federal payment would go toward education, and as proposed first by the Choctaws in November, Article Four of the 1820 treaty was altered to ensure that any change in the status of the tribe’s remaining Mississippi landholdings would require the Indians’ approval.47
The Choctaws could take great satisfaction from their tenacity and hard work. They had accomplished their principal mission of protecting their Mississippi homeland and of extracting the highest possible price for the Arkansas territory that had been forced on them five years earlier. They had also succeeded in winning a revision of the language of the 1820 treaty, a clear refutation of Jackson’s bullying tactics at Doak’s Stand, and in directing most of the tribe’s new income to education. Moreover, the negotiations had been conducted in an unprecedented fashion. For the first time, written offers had been exchanged and revised and the delegates had worked systematically through an extended list of outstanding disputes, from the wording of Article Four of the 1820 treaty to compensation for military service performed by tribal members during the War of 1812.48
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AS THE CHOCTAW TEAM prepared to leave Washington, however, their pride in their achievement was mitigated by the realization that the predicament of Indian tribes in the American Southeast had, if anything, grown more dangerous. The 1824 presidential election had occurred just before the delegation arrived in the capital, and though Andrew Jackson had not prevailed in a contest where no one won a majority in the electoral college, he had proved himself to be the most popular candidate. The subsequent deal struck between Jackson’s enemy Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives that put the New Englander in the White House outraged Old Hickory’s followers. The general began working almost immediately on his 1828 campaign. Sensing the westerner’s political influence, both President-elect Adams and his vice president, John C. Calhoun, made it clear that while they rejected Jackson’s bellicose rhetoric, they supported Indian removal.
In the face of Jackson’s rise, President Monroe seemed to retreat. In a January 1825 report to Congress, delivered just as the Choctaw negotiations were concluding, the departing chief executive recommended the appointment of new commissioners to “visit and explain to the several tribes the objects of the government,” and he urged negotiations that would lead to “conveying to each tribe a good title to an adequate portion of land to which it may consent to remove.” The bill Monroe proposed was no less coercive than the Removal Act Jackson rammed through Congress five years later. The Choctaws were also aware that the Creeks in neighboring Alabama were deeply divided over the Treaty of Indian Springs, signed a few weeks after the Choctaw agreement, which called for the group to leave Alabama for the West.49 In mid-February 1825, perhaps with an eye to this uncertain landscape, the Choctaw delegation, led by McDonald, crafted an open letter to Congress.50
James McDonald was only one of seven signers of the Choctaw declaration, but its legal language and simple phrasing make it clear that he was its author. Thomas McKenney agreed and reprinted the document in his memoirs as evidence of the young man’s intellect. The statement was a plea for sympathy and support, but it also articulated clearly and publicly ideas that were a central element in all subsequent Native American political activists’ arguments. In their memorial, the Choctaws acknowledged first that the United States was expanding while their tribe was becoming weak. They admitted as well that this trajectory suggested that the “interposing hand” of God was telling them that “the time must come” when they would be “made to become like white men.” But at the same time, the delegates wrote, the tribe’s progress in education and Christianity “give us the consoling assurance that we are not doomed to extinction.” They would become like white men, but they would not cease being Indians. Defined by their culture and history, the Choctaws would not disappear into the “civilized” population as so many American leaders assumed. The Choctaws pointed out that the “one great reason” for the Americans’ success “has been the general diffusion of literature and the arts of civilized life among them.” “Civilized” Americans should protect the Choctaws, not destroy them. McDonald explained: “You have institutions to promote and disseminate the knowledge of every branch of science; you have a government, and you have laws, all founded upon those principles of liberty and equality which have ever been dear to us. . . . The theory of your government is justice and good faith to all men. You will not submit to injury from one party because it is powerful, nor will you oppress another because it is weak. Impressed with that persuasion, we are confident that our rights will be preserved.”51
The Choctaw memorial argued that the American state and the tribe shared a common set of political values: “those principles of liberty and equality which have ever been dear to us.” As a consequence, the American government and American laws—the visible embodiments of the young nation’s commitment to “liberty and equality”—should protect the tribe from greedy settlers and the politicians who pandered to them. The delegates argued that the nation’s deepest political commitments would inspire its leaders to recognize the Choctaws’ “rights.”
The Choctaw statement created little notice. Its words were modest and, perhaps, naive. McDonald emphasized the values the two groups shared, confessing that if his white neighbors lived up to those values, he and his tribe would be willing to entrust their future to the “liberality of the South.” Yet his central assertions—that Indians would not become extinct and that “law” and “righ
ts,” rather than race, should govern relations between tribes and the United States—marked a fundamental shift in political consciousness. The leaders of one of the most populous tribes in eastern North America, even as they acknowledged that their military power was slipping away, were staking their future not on force or ceremonial diplomacy but on the proposition that American “civilization” itself could underwrite their future. For the first time a political thinker had defined a space for Indians—and Indian tribes—within the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state.
“A BITTER AND ENDLESS PERSECUTION”
In April 1826, only fourteen months after publishing his remarkable memorial, the Choctaws’ young lawyer slipped into a dark mood. James McDonald wrote his patron Thomas McKenney that his “exertions in behalf of the Choctaws at the last treaty . . . were persevering and zealous” but that they represented “the only incident within the last two or three years of my life to which I can look back with anything like unmingled satisfaction.” He confessed that events over the past year had caused him to “regret that I ever accompanied the delegation to Washington.”52
Across the United States there was an emerging consensus that Indian removal was inevitable. This was the cause of the dispiriting atmosphere McDonald noted. For the next five years he and his counterparts among the Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws in the South, as well as the Potawatomis, Shawnees, Sauks, Miamis, and others in the North, heard from friend and foe alike that the demands of white settlers could not be quieted and that regardless of past promises, federal authorities were unlikely to uphold the Indians’ “rights” to their treaty-protected homelands. McDonald was not the only Native writer to devise a defense of tribal rights, but he was certainly among the first and most eloquent. His unique training and intense, face-to-face engagement with adversaries in both Mississippi and Washington, D.C., produced a series of remarkably perceptive observations about the mounting crisis. His thinking reflected both the anguish of his time and the issues Indian leaders were to face in the decades to come.
In the immediate aftermath of his Washington sojourn, McDonald focused most of his attention on securing the subsidies for education that government officials had promised in the new treaty. The young lawyer was concerned not only that federal funds be used efficiently but also that white southerners recognize the Choctaws’ potential for “civilization.” “Every intelligent man with whom I have conversed is in favor of having a National Academy established in the nation,” he wrote McKenney in 1826. “Some school of a superior order, and upon a plan something different from the missionary schools, is very much wanted in the nation.” The lawyer envisioned an institution that was both “national” and “superior” and would therefore prepare young people to lead the development of the Choctaw nation. “I am sure,” he wrote, “that money thus applied would give more satisfaction and produce better results than if disposed of in any other manner.” McDonald opposed funneling educational appropriations through missionary organizations or the Adams administration’s political allies. He was critical of the Choctaw Academy, opened with federal dollars at the Kentucky home of Richard Johnson, the tribal agent’s brother-in-law, preferring a tribally run school that would prepare bilingual leaders who could interact with outsiders in a variety of arenas.53
It was at that time McDonald decided to return to Ohio to complete his legal studies. “I wish to apply myself closely to it for several months,” he wrote from the North in early 1827. His goal was “to qualify myself for the practice.”54 He also urged his young friend Peter Pitchlynn, the son of the tribe’s principal interpreter and a nephew of the district chief Mushulatubbe, to take advantage of the new government school. “Cheer up, look forward to brighter prospects, study hard and go back [home] with me in the fall,” he wrote in 1827. “We shall rub through our difficulties and come off with flying colors in the end.”55 Other educated tribal members shared this optimistic view. George Harkins, an ambitious young politician from the western district (another nephew of a district leader), encouraged the homesick Pitchlynn, writing that “our country stands in need of smart men and therefore I hope and trust that you will improve your time in such a manner that it will fit and qualify you to tell our poor countrymen their rights. . . . I hope the time is not very far ahead,” Harkins added, “when our nation will become one of the most enlightened nations upon the face of the earth.”56
A number of McDonald’s Native American contemporaries hoped to prepare the next generation of educated leaders who would be able to defend their tribes’ place within the United States. Cherokee leaders in nearby Georgia had allowed Moravian and Presbyterian missionaries to settle in their homeland in the first decade of the nineteenth century principally because they wished to promote English literacy that could be deployed in politics and business; they had little interest in the Christian Gospel.57 The Cherokees also sent a small number of young people—like McDonald, often the children of prominent mixed-heritage families—to distant boarding schools to prepare them for leadership. Several tribes in the North followed a similar pattern. For example, Black Hoof’s Shawnees, a band in Wapakoneta, Ohio, who had rejected Tecumseh’s call to fight with the British in the War of 1812, sent several young people away to be educated at the same time as they welcomed Quakers into their communities to improve their farming and stock raising practices.58 In 1825 the Office of Indian Affairs reported that federal subsidies were going to thirty-eight schools (most east of the Mississippi) that together were educating more than one thousand Native young people from Pleasant Point, Maine, to Florissant, Missouri.59
As he worried over the organization of tribal schools, McDonald also expressed concern about the effectiveness of the Choctaw government. Proud of the 1824 delegation’s performance in Washington, McDonald believed his tribe needed this type of efficient and unified leadership to sustain itself in an increasingly hostile political climate. He explained in an 1825 letter to McKenney that the Choctaws had historically functioned as three separate entities. In the eighteenth century the three districts had been united by language, clan, and cultural traditions and had formed a permanent alliance in order to deal effectively with outside powers. “Each district is politically independent of the other,” the lawyer wrote. “They are bound together by no other than . . . kindred and common origin.” This heritage caused the Choctaws “to be in a very unsettled condition.” McDonald acknowledged that it was “painful as well as delicate” to address this topic, but it was unavoidable. The Choctaws needed a united leadership.60
According to McDonald, the absence of a unified tribal position on removal exposed the Choctaws to one of the government’s oldest strategies: divide and conquer. Mushulatubbe, for example, who had interacted with federal authorities as a tribal spokesperson for decades, appeared receptive to pressure from pro-removal forces in Washington. Concerned for the well-being of his particular district and clan, the chief appeared not to share McDonald’s commitment to the good of the “nation” (itself a new term).61 In response, McDonald and other young men argued that an elected tribal council should replace the current system. The young lawyer joined forces with David Folsom, who had accompanied him to Washington in 1824, to unseat the older district chief. Arguing that the tribe needed leaders who could deal effectively and in English with powerful outsiders, Folsom deposed Mushulatubbe in the northeastern district in the spring of 1826. He followed up this victory with a campaign against Robert Cole, the traditional leader of the western district. Cole was soon replaced by his nephew, Greenwood LeFlore. For McDonald, what was even more important than this shift in leadership was the council’s decision in August 1826 to write a national constitution and erect a meetinghouse that would form the center of a unified community. Folsom, LeFlore, and Tapenahomah, the chief of the southern district, produced this document nearly a year before the neighboring Cherokees announced a similar charter on July 4, 1827.
The 1826 Choctaw constitution esta
blished a general council made up of the three district chiefs and six other representatives, and it stipulated that the group would meet at least twice each year. The council would legislate on matters as diverse as prohibition and witchcraft over the next three years. Two chiefs acting together could veto legislation approved by the general council, but that veto could be overridden and the majority’s will imposed on every district. The ideals of a centralized authority ruled by law rather than custom was now becoming part of tribal life.62
The Choctaws’ reforms were echoed elsewhere in the region and beyond. The Cherokees’ 1827 constitution was more elaborate than the Choctaws’. It established a three-part national government headed by a chief executive, a framework modeled roughly on the founding document of the United States. In 1828, the same year Andrew Jackson was elected to the presidency, John Ross became the head of the Cherokee Nation and his fellow leaders took their places in the tribe’s bicameral legislature and on the national supreme court. North of the Ohio River, tribes with long histories of decentralized leadership were less successful in the effort to create unified governments, in large part because federal authorities were quick to exploit their divisions to promote further land sales. (The infamous Black Hawk War in 1832, for example, in which one group of Sauks resisted removal from Illinois while another acquiesced, was a product of this government tactic.) Still, some tribes managed to create new systems of governance. Most notable of these were the Allegany and Cattaraugus Senecas, who replaced their hereditary chiefs with an elected council in 1848.63
The Choctaws soon had an opportunity to test their new political system. Just weeks before Old Hickory’s election in 1828 a mass meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, called on the state legislature to extend its “exclusive jurisdiction” over all territory within its boundaries and condemned the federal government’s “unconstitutional” protection of the local Creek tribe. The following month the Georgia legislature enacted similar legislation that declared all Cherokee laws null and void within the state. A month later Mississippi passed a parallel measure.64 By the time he took office in March, Jackson could present himself as the champion of this expanding trend. Southern politicians had grown bolder, and Indians faced increased prosecution. The new president declared that the federal government would not act to “sustain those people in their pretensions.” He assured his supporters that tribal governments operating within states “would not be countenanced.”65
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