McDonald’s faith in the benefits of state citizenship may have been a factor in his decision to remain in Mississippi, but that faith was quickly disappointed. In the immediate aftermath of the treaty signing, the Choctaw agent who had been assigned to register tribal members for land allotments in Mississippi refused to act, claiming that all the applications were the work of unscrupulous whites. At the same time, white settlers who refused to wait until the new treaty was formally ratified by the Senate poured into the tribal homeland. The fragile hope that the treaty might allow the growth of a new multiracial community that included Indian landowners, cattlemen, and even lawyers like McDonald disappeared amid a riot of speculation and lawlessness.
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JAMES MCDONALD’S VISION of overlapping tribal and state citizenship remained controversial among Native activists for decades to come. Nevertheless, he may well have been the first to argue that membership in the American state could be an effective means of defending the rights of Native people. He also appeared willing to test the new state statute by putting himself forward as a candidate for public office. On March 28, 1831, just weeks after the ratification of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, McDonald wrote that he was considering becoming a candidate for the state legislature. While he worried that his opposition to President Jackson would hurt his standing with white constituents, he announced that “If my friends wish me to run I will run.”85 McDonald imagined a community that would support his vision of the future and endorse him as a person who was both an Indian and a state citizen. A few days later he wrote the Choctaw agent, reporting his intention to run for the Mississippi legislature and his desire to “make a location as soon as possible” on the land granted him in the tribe’s removal treaty.86
McDonald’s March 30 letter is the last document we have in his hand. He died, apparently by suicide, six months later, in September 1831. His tragic death underscored the vast distance that separated the young lawyer’s tentative and hopeful vision of the Indians’ future from the racist and exploitive reality that quickly engulfed postremoval Mississippi.87 It is not difficult to imagine the despair a person of McDonald’s genius would have felt as he watched his hopes for education, tribal government, and state citizenship evaporate before the forces of dispossession and white supremacy. The young attorney must have understood that he would never serve in the Mississippi legislature or represent his tribe again in negotiations with the United States. There were many rumors surrounding his death—a marriage suit was rejected by a white woman, an alcohol-induced depression—but whatever the truth, McDonald no doubt understood that the vague and mild protections he had helped write into the Dancing Rabbit Creek treaty would be treated with contempt by state and federal officials. The government would soon forget its past promises to his tribe.
During his brief career James McDonald sketched the initial outlines of a secular and self-conscious American Indian political culture that would eventually take root within the boundaries of the United States. His words and ideas suggested an entirely new way for Native communities to imagine themselves in the North American landscape. “By this accident,” a friend wrote following the young lawyer’s death, “talents and genius . . . are lost forever to the world which cannot easily supply the void.” Henry Vose, the young Natchez journalist who wrote those lines, went on to declare his admiration for McDonald’s “transcendent abilities” and to question the rumor that his friend had indeed taken his own life: “his aspirations were far too noble and his patriotism too fervent to deliberately abandon the stage of human action.”88
Vose expressed his admiration for McDonald in a letter to their mutual friend Peter Pitchlynn, then preparing to move with the rest of his tribe across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. An admirer of both of these young Choctaw leaders, Vose could not help adding his estimation of what might have been possible had McDonald lived:
Poor McDonald! Could you and he have marched arm in arm in the efforts you are making to establish an undying fame, doubtless your task would be more cheering. But you have now all to do; for I fear you have none near, warm, ardent and enthusiastic as yourself, to promote the welfare of your nation. What a proud era it would be if the Choctaws would, one and all, devote themselves to the arts and sciences! . . . Why may they not become the manufacturers of the South and the carriers for the remote West? Unity is everything; without it, the proudest nations must fall, as Assyria, Babylon, Judea and others, to rise no more.89
EXPLORER AND SYMBOL
It is difficult to evaluate James McDonald’s career as the first American Indian lawyer. While he managed one of the first and most effective negotiating sessions between an Indian tribe and its government adversaries in 1824 and wrote eloquently on behalf of elected tribal governments and programs of Indian education in the ensuing years, he did little to slow the forces that expelled his tribe from its Mississippi homeland. Thanks in part to McDonald, the Choctaws arrived in the West with the sense, expressed in Henry Vose’s letter, that stable tribal leadership could be a powerful weapon against federal authority and that education in law, politics, and the English language would be critical to the community’s survival. But the extension of citizenship to Choctaws in Mississippi triggered tremendous fraud that mocked young McDonald’s idealistic hope that the privileges associated with citizenship could produce the “vindication” of their rights.
James McDonald was a Native explorer who searched American legal and political institutions for a means by which their democratic promise could be used to protect tribal communities. As he observed the processes of negotiation and political engagement, McDonald identified the tools tribes might employ to contend with the machinery of United States expansion: literacy, compromise, and new alliances with powerful non-Indians. The lessons he and the Choctaws learned in Mississippi in the 1820s were absorbed by other leaders of removed tribes. Each group applied these lessons in different ways. Some focused on education, others on political tactics and alliances, still others on economic innovation. Each of their innovations rested on the propositions James McDonald had written into the Choctaw memorial to Congress in February 1825. He had wrestled with these ideas as he speculated about the benefits of state citizenship for Mississippi Indians in the years that followed. Indians were a permanent presence within the boundaries of the United States, McDonald declared; they therefore could claim that American law and government should protect their rights, both as individuals and as tribal communities. He imagined that Native people could not be erased from the nation and he proposed that they therefore should participate in the nation’s future.
Despite his early death, James McDonald symbolized the proposition that Native futures could be secured by the laws and institutions of the American state. His words and actions advanced the remarkable proposition that Indian tribes might reclaim some portion of their original homeland by invoking the laws and values of their dispossessors. McDonald’s untimely disappearance from the historical stage underscored the futility of this vision in the cruel age of Andrew Jackson, but the persistence of his ideas in the “Indian Territory” that Jackson and his allies created west of Fort Smith suggests that Henry Vose was correct when he imagined that new tribal leaders like Peter Pitchlynn would not surrender. James McDonald offered an alternative to death or surrender. Produced by engagement rather than rejection and characterized by a search for vulnerabilities in the Americans’ rhetoric, the young lawyer’s ideas challenged the United States’ claim to the continent as well as to sole ownership of the ideals of democracy, freedom, and justice. McDonald’s “transcendent abilities” first identified this alternative pathway; his successors would explore and develop it.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MOUNTAINTOP PRINCIPALITY OF SAN MARINO
William Potter Ross, Cherokee
Nearly fifty years after James McDonald urged Congress to protect Indian rights, another Native activist from the Southeast
voiced a similar appeal. In the dusty railroad town of Vinita, Indian Territory, near modern Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Cherokee chief William Potter Ross addressed a crowd of supporters. Like McDonald, Ross was a member of an elite group of Indians who had been educated by whites in an institution far from his tribal homeland. But unlike the Choctaw lawyer, Ross had spent his entire career in tribal politics. Born in the East, he had come west when his tribe was expelled from Georgia and in the ensuing decades had held a variety of offices. He had battled with political enemies within the tribe and traveled widely to lobby U.S. officials and others on behalf of the Cherokee Nation. In 1866, when his famous uncle Chief John Ross passed from the scene, the tribe turned to William Potter to take his place. It seemed a proper reward for his years of faithful service.
In 1874, in that dusty railroad town, the Cherokee chief spoke to his supporters of a place in Europe where “justice” had been won by political action. A decade earlier and an ocean away, the tiny mountaintop principality of San Marino had peacefully resisted incorporation into the new Italian nation-state forming around it. Ross noted that this “little republic” had resolved its differences with the central authorities in Rome by negotiating a series of mutually beneficial treaties and trade agreements. The Sammarinese had acted, the Cherokee chief insisted, to honor “the centuries which have chronicled the freedom of [their] ancestors.” They were not motivated by ignorance, but by “as pure a glow of patriotism and delight as ever animated the brow of ancient or modern citizen.”1
In his speech Ross portrayed San Marino as a vigilant, protective eagle, perched high in its mountain eyrie and noted by comparison that “[no] Indian nation on this continent has shown a more conspicuous bearing in the history of America than the Cherokee.” He reminded his audience that the Italian principality and their tribe shared common mountain origins. “The mountaineers of America have been overpowered but not destroyed,” he declared. “Their defenses of their own rights and those common to all inhabitants of the [Indian] territory has been constant, unflagging and successful thus far despite the powerful influences arrayed against them.” Just as an understanding national government in Rome had demonstrated its wisdom by guaranteeing San Marino’s national survival, he argued, so the “protecting arm of the federal government” would be vital to the Cherokees and their neighbors in Indian Territory. The United States should imitate Italy by underwriting the tribes’ institutions and defending their borders against the “heterogeneous” onslaught of unruly settlers. Ross warned that by failing to uphold the independence of the Cherokees and other Indian Territory tribes, American officials would be guilty of promoting “a revolution” on the western frontier that would surely trigger “wrong, fraud, deception, vice, immorality, insult, retaliation, blood, [and] extermination.”2
While it is not particularly surprising that a well-educated member of the Cherokee elite would be so conversant with world events in 1874, it is significant that Chief Ross called on his audience to take a lesson from the practical world of European politics. A generation after the removal crises of the 1830s, Ross was still preoccupied with the issues arising from the enforcement of Cherokee treaty rights and the defense of tribal autonomy. Since arriving in Indian Territory thirty years earlier, he had written extensively and spoken frequently about the distinctive place Native nations could have within the United States. Not only was Ross aware of the process of national consolidation then taking place in Italy and other parts of Europe, but he had also observed the behavior of neighboring tribes and had witnessed the recent struggle of southern states to escape the authority of the federal government. Ross’s assertion that there was space within America for an Indian San Marino was rooted in the search for ways to integrate small communities into modern nations, which was taking place both inside and outside the United States.
From Ross’s perspective, it made perfect sense to view Indian Territory as another San Marino. Formed in the wake of the removal era, the area that eventually entered the Union as Oklahoma in 1907 had been established as a new homeland for relocated Indian tribes. Despite the fact that it was not administered by a presidentially appointed governor, as were other federal territories, the land often described as lying “west of Fort Smith” was now a common “home” for thousands of Indians. Some had traveled there voluntarily in the early years of the century, but most of the members of the large southeastern tribes—Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—arrived the 1830s. A second wave of settlement came after 1854, when the creation of the Kansas Territory triggered the relocation of several additional eastern and midwestern tribes (some moving for a second time). West of the resettled tribes were indigenous groups that lived primarily as hunters. Most prominent among these were the Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Comanches, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. After the Civil War additional groups were resettled in the territory from as far away as California and Oregon. By the time of Chief Ross’s speech in Vinita, Indian Territory contained nearly sixty thousand Native people living on dozens of reservations. While the cultures of these groups were wildly diverse, they shared a common desire to live autonomously within the United States.
William Potter Ross understood that common ambition. Recognizing that the ceremonial diplomacy of the eighteenth century was now an artifact of the past and that military resistance to American expansion was futile, Ross relied on practical political language to make his case. He rejected the conventional American assumption that Native communities were hopelessly backward, proposing instead that Indian social and economic progress would produce stability and lay the foundation for peaceful relations between Native groups and whites. After the Civil War, as a reunited American nation celebrated its industrial strength and continental power, William Potter Ross proclaimed his support for both “progress” and Indian nationhood. He believed the “pure glow of patriotism” could shine as brightly in his Indian Territory homeland as it had in San Marino.
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BORN NEAR MODERN Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the summer of 1820, William Potter Ross belonged to an extended mixed-race family of traders, farmers, and political leaders. William’s father, John Golden Ross, a trader, was born in Scotland. His mother, Eliza Ross, who shared the same last name as her husband but was not related to him, was the daughter of a storekeeper. Eliza’s brother, John Ross, was the Cherokees’ first principal chief.3 Like many other children of elite families among southeastern tribes, William Potter was educated at boarding schools. He compiled a stellar academic record at a Presbyterian mission school in Will’s Valley, Alabama, and at Greenville Academy in Tennessee, before being sent in 1837 to Hamil’s Preparatory School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. A year later he entered Princeton University, from which he was graduated in 1842. Ross was still in school in the East when the removal crisis reached its climax and his uncle became a national symbol of Indian resistance. He retraced his family’s grueling journey west on the Trail of Tears the summer following his college graduation. Unlike his relatives who suffered and died on their way west, William Potter Ross made the journey safely by carriage.4
Despite his relatively comfortable journey, the young Cherokee scholar was soon plunged into the trauma and violence that accompanied arrival in Indian Territory. As a teacher in a rural school in the fall of 1842 he witnessed the tribe’s efforts to make a living from its new lands. He also watched as his elders tried to reorganize their divided tribal government. He was not directly involved in the assassinations of Major Ridge and other leaders of the minority party who had agreed to sign the removal Treaty of New Echota, nor was he a target of the retaliatory violence organized by Ridge’s relatives during the ensuing decade; but this civil conflict swirled around him and left a deep impression. After a year in the classroom, Ross moved to the Cherokee capital, Tahlequah. Through his uncle’s patronage he secured a position as clerk of the national senate, and in 1844 the legislature appointed him editor of the tribe’s national newspape
r, The Cherokee Advocate.
Ross and his brother Daniel soon opened a sawmill and mercantile business in the commercial center that grew up around the U.S. Army base at nearby Fort Gibson. Through his political activity and business success, William Potter also became one of his uncle’s most trusted advisers. When the Civil War began, Ross followed other members of the Cherokee planter class, many of them slaveowners like James McDonald and Peter Pitchlynn, into the Confederate cause. After the rebels’ defeat at the battle of Pea Ridge in 1862, Ross was captured by advancing U.S. troops. When offered a parole the following year, Ross returned to his Fort Gibson wholesale business and temporarily abandoned tribal politics. He later joined the pro-Union Cherokee Home Guards, but avoided any further fighting. Instead, he urged his fellow Cherokees to avoid violence and refrain from participating in the raiding and revenge that destroyed many farms and plantations in the closing days of the war. He was remembered—appropriately for someone who wore both the gray and the blue uniform during the Civil War—as a man who “would rather have his people united than to see them fight each other.”5 At the conflict’s end he served on the tribal delegation that negotiated a new peace treaty with the United States.
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