The council’s Creek hosts remained in the background for most of the 1845 gathering, but at its close, Tuckabatchemicco, the Upper Creek host of the event, offered a summary and a set of suggestions. He urged everyone to follow the example of the Osages and “bring in all the stolen horses” to the next general council. “Hereafter,” he added, “quit stealing horses from one another.” Tuckabatchemicco also noted that he would give the absent Cherokees “a talk” urging them to stop the “straggling men” in their country from stealing and committing murder. (This was a reference to the tribe’s ongoing civil war.) Once the Indians succeeded in policing themselves, the Creek leader promised, the United States would have no reason to station troops in the territory. At that point, he suggested, this intertribal council could act as a general government: “When we shall all get at peace again with the different tribes, the troops may be recalled or dispensed with.” Tuckabatchemicco and other leaders believed that a stable intertribal council could potentially evolve into a comprehensive system of governance for the entire Indian Territory.21
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DESPITE HIS INVOLVEMENT with intertribal issues, Cherokee tribal politics remained William Potter Ross’s principal preoccupation in the years before the Civil War. He represented the Tahlequah district in the national council government from 1849 to 1859, and in that position (as well as when he served as a member of tribal delegations to Washington in 1847, 1849, 1850, and 1855) the editor-activist lobbied for expanded federal funding for tribal schools and greater power for tribal institutions. In Washington he doggedly followed the process by which congressional committees debated the appropriation of funds promised to compensate the Cherokees for their losses during the removal process. “That Congress will much longer fail to make the appropriations . . . we cannot believe,” he and another delegate wrote his uncle in 1850.22 Still, action did not come until 1852 when $1.5 million was distributed to tribal members.23 During the 1850s William Potter Ross also served as an officer of the Cherokee Temperance Society and the Cherokee Seminaries. He lived alongside other prosperous tribal leaders at Park Hill, a rich agricultural area near Tahlequah, and was an active figure in the social life of the Cherokees’ planter elite.
Throughout his early career, Ross remained ambivalent about the institution of slavery. Like other members of the Cherokee leadership, he did not oppose operating agricultural plantations with slave labor. At the same time, he parted ways with his family’s political rivals—the remnants of the Ridge/Boudinot group that had signed the hated 1835 removal treaty—who became outspoken defenders of slavery. These slaveowners challenged him in the 1855 district election, charging he was too sympathetic to northern abolitionists, but support from Chief Ross saved him from defeat.24 Not surprisingly, then, Ross responded to the approaching prospect of secession and war by urging his fellow Cherokees to remain neutral in the dispute. Early in 1861, when federal forces abandoned nearby Fort Smith and its new southern commander demanded the Cherokees declare their loyalty to the South, William Potter Ross was among those who urged his uncle to “do nothing . . . keep quiet and comply with our treaties.”25
John Ross held the Confederates and their sympathizers within his own tribe at bay for several weeks, but continued pressures from his rivals and the rapid retreat of federal troops soon forced him to negotiate an alliance with the South. Significantly, the treaty that the chief and his executive committee, which included William Potter Ross, negotiated with Albert Pike, the Confederate representative, read like a list of the issues the tribe had failed to resolve with U.S. officials over the previous two decades. The Cherokees would send a delegate to the Confederate Congress, the southern government promised to pay all outstanding claims related to the Cherokees’ forced removal from Georgia, tribal officials would have the right to extradite and prosecute criminals who had fled to neighboring states after committing crimes in their territories, and—in a direct repudiation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in U.S. v. Rogers fifteen years earlier—the Cherokee tribe was guaranteed the right to determine its own membership. Ironically (and incredibly) the treasonous Confederates, committed to the defense of racial slavery and white supremacy, were willing to recognize Indian tribes as autonomous political entities.26
As they signed their treaty with the Confederacy, Ross and his advisers issued a Declaration by the People of the Cherokee Nation, spelling out the reasons for the new alliance. In the document they explained that by casting their lot with the South, the tribe was exercising its “inalienable right of self defense” as well as its rights as “a free people, independent of the Northern States of America. . . .”27 Their declaration neatly encapsulated the position that John and William Potter Ross had repeatedly defended over the past two decades. The pair had long rejected the American belief, posed during the removal crisis and by Justice Taney in U.S. v. Rogers, that tribes were nothing more than communities of backward and racially inferior people. They argued that their dramatic decision to ally with the South affirmed both their autonomy and their identity as a progressive national entity. Ross’s declaration thus made it clear that the Cherokees’ new partnership was as much a product of the past as a statement about the violent conflict that was about to erupt around them. Its terms affirmed how deeply the political culture that had first been articulated during the removal era had taken root in the alien territory that was now their home.
TREATIES DEFINE A NATION
The Civil War shattered the bonds that held Cherokee society together just as it destroyed national unity in the United States. In 1861, while William Potter Ross and others of his generation and class dutifully enlisted in the Confederate army, many loyal members of the tribe fled north to Kansas, where they settled until 1862, when Union forces began their return to Indian Territory. These “loyal” Cherokees quickly took control of Tahlequah, captured Chief Ross, and sent him east to negotiate a new agreement with the Union. But as often happened on the periphery of the Civil War’s main battlegrounds, the American forces soon retreated again from the isolated Cherokee homeland, and Confederate sympathizers, led by Ross’s old adversaries in the treaty party, organized a provisional, pro-Confederate tribal government and began taking revenge on the chief’s supporters, whom they now labeled “traitors.” The tide turned yet again in 1863, when U.S. forces captured Fort Smith and reestablished themselves at Fort Gibson. Determined to live out the war as a neutral civilian, William Potter Ross returned home.
The Union presence in the area remained slight, however, enabling southern sympathizers to burn Ross’s store during a raid on Fort Gibson and to wreak havoc elsewhere in the nation. In 1863 and 1864 the surrounding countryside was a battleground where opposing guerrilla units attacked one another amid a backdrop of Confederate retreat and Union indifference. In this polarized environment, William Potter Ross joined the pro-Union Cherokee Home Guards as an act of self- defense. Writing to his uncle in Washington in January 1864, he noted that “the contrast between the past and the present [is] too overwhelming to be borne in silence. Then we were more than twenty thousand strong, with a government and laws of our own. . . . [N]ow all [is] changed.” After describing the poverty and destruction around Fort Gibson, Ross concluded that the Cherokees now had “the forms but not the substance of freemen. . . .”28 A year later, as Lee prepared to surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, the situation had not improved. “Everything has been changed by the destroying hand of war,” William Potter Ross wrote his son, “We have not a horse, cow or hog left that I know of. . . .”29
In the aftermath of such wholesale destruction, John Ross was convinced that a new treaty with the United States was the only way the Cherokee tribal government could reclaim its authority over a suffering and divided populace. Only federal power could establish a structure that would both reconcile the factions within the tribe and protect its borders against settler onslaughts from Kansas and Arkansas. The Cherokee chief and other Indian Te
rritory leaders made this argument at Fort Smith, Arkansas, in September 1865, when they met with President Andrew Johnson’s skeptical commissioner of Indian affairs, Dennis N. Cooley, at a large intertribal peace conference. The commissioner and his colleagues (who included General Grant’s Seneca aide-de-camp, General Ely S. Parker) expected to dictate their terms to the defeated Indians. They rejected Ross’s protestations of loyalty (happily embarrassing him by publishing his extensive correspondence with the former Confederate government) and demanded that the tribe sell part of its tribal estates in preparation for the creation of a new territorial government that would bring white homesteaders to live alongside the tribes.
Chief Ross and his supporters rejected each of these demands. They pointed out that despite their early alliance with the Confederacy, the tribe’s constitutional leaders had returned early to the Union fold. (One of John Ross’s sons had died wearing the uniform of the United States.) They also noted that the failure of U.S. forces to protect the loyal Cherokees after 1862 had prompted prosouthern groups in the tribe to unleash years of violence and bloodshed against them. The only reasonable response to the destruction now evident throughout the Cherokee Nation, Ross argued, was enhanced federal protection in the form of a new treaty and the rapid reconstitution of the Cherokee national authority.30
William Potter Ross underscored this connection between federal power and tribal authority a few years later, when he told a congressional committee that the “essence” of his tribe’s relationship with the American government was embodied in the “pledges made to the Indians if they would but agree to a removal—pledges of protection from war, trespass, and intrusion from every quarter; pledges of self-government, pledges of ownership of their lands . . . These pledges exist today, and are as binding now upon all the departments of government and upon the people of the United States as they were when they were made.”31 This position became the Cherokees’ mantra during their sessions with Commissioner Cooley. They refused to concede that Chief Ross had been a rebel, they rejected their prosouthern rivals’ claim to a portion of the tribal homeland (Stand Watie and his followers wanted to create a separate Cherokee government of their own), and they insisted that a new treaty should be negotiated not in Arkansas but in Washington, D.C., a place they now knew well and where they could mobilize sympathetic white allies. Despite the Cherokees’ weakened state and their leader’s rapidly failing health, the Ross group’s united intransigence persuaded Cooley to accept their demands and to suspend negotiations until all parties could reassemble in the nation’s capital.
The Cherokee leadership’s skillful evasion of Commissioner Cooley reminded William Potter Ross of another key element of the tribe’s diplomatic strategy. While insisting that federal authorities enforce the “pledges” they had made in the past, the Cherokee leader also reminded his own followers that tribal unity was essential to their continued recognition by the United States. In a speech delivered to the Cherokee tribal council shortly after fighting ended in 1865, the younger Ross explained that he did not advocate reconciliation with his Cherokee adversaries for sentimental reasons. “Strife,” he declared, “is fatal . . . it is the lever of ambition and cupidity and will be used for overturning our most precious rights. It has multiplied our difficulties in the past, increased the afflictions of the present and will present the greatest dangers in the future.”32 He urged the Cherokee public to embrace the tribe’s institutions and elected leaders as a practical way of combating the divisions that undermined their standing before Congress and federal bureaucrats. He repeated this argument a year later in his first speech as Chief Ross’s successor: “Our only hope,” he told the tribal council in 1866, “is that unity of feeling and action that we have of interest and destiny.” He pointed out the link between this unity and the “privileges” of tribal citizenship as he closed: “We are a community of men . . . as free as almost any on the continent. These are high and valuable privileges. Let us not despise or neglect them. . . .”33
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TOO OFTEN HISTORIANS and other observers have been seduced by the nineteenth-century habit of dismissing tribal leaders like John and William P. Ross as “mixed-blood” Indians who cared for little beyond protecting their own privileges.34 While technically correct—Ross and his peers were skilled political operatives who were proud of their cultural sophistication and tactical skills—this characterization runs the risk of replicating Andrew Jackson’s and Roger Taney’s racist view of Indians who, if sophisticated, must no longer be Native Americans. This view also obscures the differences between tribal advocates like William Potter Ross and their adversaries in the United States. Defining those differences, while assuring the Americans of their loyalty and “civilization,” was the central challenge Cherokee leaders faced in the immediate postwar era. Throughout these years Ross insisted that strong treaties and a forceful national government offered a practical and equitable alternative to violence and chaos.
The Cherokees’ political ambitions and tenacious tactics were on full display when the tribe’s representatives met again with Commissioner Cooley in the spring of 1866 to continue their negotiations.35 These delegates, including William Potter and his brother Daniel, met the American leaders in Washington, D.C., arriving just after representatives of Confederate loyalists, now called the Southern Party, finished their separate session with the U.S. government. The Southern Party Cherokees had quickly capitulated to all of the government’s demands: admission of former slaves to citizenship, generous land grants to railroads, the sale of a large tract of tribal land to the United States, and the formation of a federally supervised territory to oversee all the area tribes. In exchange, the United States had tentatively agreed to a division of the Cherokee government and the assignment of a portion of its homeland to Stand Watie and the rest of Chief Ross’s rivals. John Ross was very ill when he arrived in Washington—he conducted negotiations from a bed in his hotel room and died there four days after the finished treaty was ratified—but he understood that his delegation had no choice but to make significant concessions in order to persuade Cooley to set the southerners’ agreement aside. The John Ross group labored through June and July to produce a document that, when ratified on July 27, accomplished their major goal: it ignored the Southern Party’s demands and instead recognized Ross and his allies as the sole representatives of the Cherokee people. William Potter Ross later noted that even though many Cherokees considered the 1866 agreement “unjust, ungenerous and oppressive,” its ratification meant that the tribe’s “existence as a nation and the tenure by which they own and hold the lands reserved to them, [would] stand unimpaired.”36
Nevertheless, the price exacted for the Cherokee Nation’s “unimpaired” existence was steep. The tribe agreed to repeal all confiscation laws directed at Confederate Cherokees, to admit its former slaves to citizenship in the tribe, to grant two railroad rights-of-way through its territory, to create a territory-wide council of tribal representatives, and to convey to the United States all unoccupied tribal lands in Kansas and west of the ninety-sixth meridian (a prairie area commonly referred to as the Cherokee Outlet). At the same time, the tribe’s careful negotiation exacted significant concessions from the Americans: the promised rights-of-way to the railroads were only two hundred feet wide (the companies would receive no additional land grants, as was customary in the West), the new territorial council for Indian Territory could operate only with the permission of each tribe’s national government, and the Cherokee Outlet lands west of the ninety-sixth meridian would be purchased only to “settle friendly Indians” and thus would not be opened to non-Indian settlers, as had been proposed a year earlier at Fort Smith. Federal authorities also promised to pay back salaries and pensions to Cherokees who had served in the U.S. Army during the Civil War and to guarantee the tribe “the quiet and peaceable possession of their country” as well as “protection against domestic feuds . . . [and] interruptions and intrus
ion from all unauthorized citizens . . . who may attempt to settle on their lands or reside in their territory.” Considering where Ross and his allies had begun a year earlier, the 1866 treaty was a remarkable achievement.37
During the years immediately following its ratification, Cherokee leaders pressed to expand concessions they had won in the 1866 treaty. They quickly resolved the debilitating political divisions that had nearly dissolved the nation during the war. During the summer of 1867 a group of John Ross’s former supporters persuaded Stand Watie and his Southern Party to support Lewis Downing in that year’s election for principal chief. Downing had been “second chief” during the elder Ross’s last term but had been passed over as a successor in favor of the late chief’s college-educated nephew. (Downing’s inability to speak English was considered a liability at a time when the tribe required a forceful presence in Washington, D.C. In addition, as a matrilineal society the Cherokees were frequently inclined to favor sisters’ sons in matters of inheritance and succession.) Following his victory over Ross in the November election, Downing made a series of bipartisan appointments that ensured stability within the tribe and helped him win reelection in 1871. But when Downing died unexpectedly early in his second term, the tribe asked William Potter Ross to take his place as chief.
Within weeks of his selection as chief, Ross assembled a committee to negotiate an agreement with officials from the Union Pacific Railroad that would govern the rights-of-way stipulated in the 1866 treaty. Responding to a proposal submitted earlier to the tribe, the new chief invited company officials to Tahlequah to negotiate an agreement that in the twentieth century would be termed a joint venture. On October 31, 1866, tribal leaders and Union Pacific executives announced that the company would build a line from Kansas to Texas with a major station at Fort Gibson. In return the Union Pacific would accept tribal regulation of its rates within Cherokee territory, and the tribe would invest five hundred thousand dollars of the money it expected to receive for its Cherokee Outlet lands in company stock. The Cherokees were also guaranteed at least two seats on the company’s eleven-person board of directors.38 Because the 1866 treaty called for “congressional approval” for all future railroad construction, the tribe quickly moved to have the Union Pacific agreement ratified in Washington, D.C.
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