Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  The Ridges and Boudinots saw themselves as patriots, giving up land so that the people might survive but “a man who will forsake his country … in time of adversity,” declared Ross in August 1833, “is no more than a traitor and should be viewed—and shunned as such.”49 That month General R. G. Dunlap of Tennessee who had, he said, “conversed freely” with both John Ridge and John Ross, wrote to Jackson, “I do sincerely believe that the ultimate views of both these men are the same in regard to the final destiny of their nation,” but each was “catching at everything to weaken the other, and gain or keep the ascendancy, for the furtherance of their ends.”50

  Governor Wilson Lumpkin of Georgia, hardly a disinterested observer, weighed in on the side of Ridge. Convinced that removal was the only way to protect his state’s sovereign right to govern its own territory, Lumpkin dismissed the opponents of removal as “a few of the interested half-breeds” and self-serving white politicians, and he impugned Ross as a descendant of Scots Tories who had fought on the wrong side in the Revolution. Ross was well educated and gentlemanly in his manners but compared with John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, he was “a mere pygmy.” Ridge, said Lumpkin, was “one of nature’s great men, who looks beyond the present moment and seeks the good of his people with an eye to their posterity … and, therefore, hazards life and everything dear to him as a man, to effect a great public object of deep and lasting interest to his native race, the Cherokees.”51 Ross on the other hand governed the Cherokees “in the most absolute manner” and had deluded them into believing there was an alternative to removal. There was not. Georgia was determined to enforce its laws “throughout what is still called the Cherokee Country. If reason and considerations of interest should fail to sustain the execution of our laws, other and stronger measures must and will be resorted to,” Lumpkin warned. “It is extreme folly and wholly fallacious for the Cherokees to entertain the shadow of a hope that the Federal Government will ever attempt, in the slightest degree, to overturn the laws of Georgia in regard to the soil or population within the chartered limits of the State.”52

  As Georgia intensified efforts to undermine the political and economic bases of Cherokee society, Ross and the Cherokee delegation found themselves competing with the Ridge faction for attention in Washington. Sitting in Brown’s Hotel, where many Indian delegations to the capital stayed in these years, Ross and his delegation wrote letters to President Jackson, reminding him of their political rights “which have been recognized and established by the laws and treaties of the United States.”53 In May 1834, fifty Cherokees from the Coosawatie district sent Lewis Cass a protest against the delegation of Major Ridge, Boudinot, Andrew Ross, and James Starr, denying that Ridge and Boudinot had any authority.54 In June, Ross’s brother Andrew agreed to a humiliating removal treaty in Washington, ceding all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for an annuity of $25,000 for twenty-four years.55 John Ross responded by offering to sell most of the Cherokees’ Georgia land in return for a dozen years of federal protection while the Cherokees “amalgamated” into American society, with a view to becoming US citizens. Boudinot and the Ridges totally rejected Ross’s proposal, the Senate rejected Andrew Ross’s treaty as lacking official Cherokee sanction, and Secretary of War Lewis Cass rejected anything “short of an entire removal.”56 At a council held at Red Clay in August 1834, Cherokee Tom Foreman denounced Major Ridge and charges were brought against the Ridges and David Vann. John Ridge stood up to defend his father’s conduct but there were murmurs of “Let’s kill them.”57 At the annual council in October, Ross and the others who controlled the proceedings declined to prosecute the impeachment charge against the Ridges and Vann but neither would they withdraw it. The Ridges and Vann rode off before the council adjourned, and they convened their own council at Running Water near Boudinot’s home at the end of November.58

  There were two Cherokee delegations in Washington but the Ridge delegation had the inside track with the administration. Ross and his fellow delegates wrote Cass an impassioned letter in the middle of January 1835: “The property, the peace, and the existence of the Cherokee people, are in jeopardy,” they said, “and nothing but the timely interposition of the General Government can save them.” They asked that the president extend his “protecting arm … to arrest this unconstitutional and fatal course of Georgia.” They sent similar appeals to Congress and the president. They were asking the fox to guard the henhouse: Georgians were not about to be stopped and Jackson had no intention of trying to stop them.59 Perhaps in desperation by this point, Ross made Cass another offer—to sell the eastern Cherokees’ lands for $20 million, hoping to move his people to Texas and buy and build a new homeland in territory claimed by Mexico.60 But the government knew it could get a better deal. The Ridge delegation in January 1835 submitted a memorial to Congress from those Cherokees who were willing to migrate. Indian nations could not survive east of the Mississippi, they said, because the United States “has refused to fulfill its faith pledged to us in the treaties.” The Cherokees were at a crisis in their history and faced the choice between remaining “in a state of vassalage to the States” and migrating to the West. Although many within the Treaty Party had already “amalgamated,” they now apparently found the prospect of “amalgamation with our oppressors,” as suggested by Ross, “too horrid for a serious contemplation.” The only way to preserve the nation and its sovereignty was to transplant it.61 The Ridge delegates were under no illusions but they were ready and willing to negotiate a removal treaty.

  Jackson appointed John F. Schermerhorn to make the treaty. An evangelical minister in the Dutch Reformed Church from New York, Schermerhorn had traveled among the western Indians as a missionary and was convinced that removing Indians beyond the Mississippi and away from whites was a “benevolent enterprise,” essential to their survival and their “moral and religious improvement.”62 He corresponded with Jackson and Cass, conveying his views on Indian removal and informing them of his availability for the new position of Indian commissioner in the West. With the ABCFM and many other church groups opposed to removal, Jackson was eager to enlist clergymen on his side and appointed Schermerhorn as commissioner in October 1832. Schermerhorn left Schenectady, New York, with his wife and eight children and headed for Fort Gibson on the Arkansas River, in what is now Oklahoma.63 He quickly built a track record negotiating removal treaties. He negotiated treaties with the Senecas and Shawnees of Lewistown in Ohio in December 1832, with the western Cherokees and Creeks at Fort Gibson in February 1833, with the Seminoles in March, and with the Quapaws in May.64 In June he urged Potawatomis in Indiana to move west; in August he joined the treaty commissioners negotiating a removal treaty with the Seneca in upstate New York. Called away to assist at the Treaty of Chicago with the Potawatomis in September, he sent a talk to the Six Nations council at Onondaga, portraying himself as a friend to the Iroquois and urging them to remove.65

  Schermerhorn arrived in Chicago to find that George Porter, the governor of Michigan Territory and superintendent of Indian affairs, and the other treaty commissioners had made little headway in getting the Indians to give up their lands west of Lake Michigan and agree to removal. The Potawatomis had been bombarded with treaties in recent years and “had utterly refused for several days to sell any of their lands.” The day after he arrived, by his own account, Schermerhorn held a private interview with two of the principal chiefs conducting negotiations: Sauganash, better known as Billy Caldwell, was the son of an Irish officer and a Potawatomi woman; Chechebinquey, also called Alexander Robinson, was son of a Scottish trader and an Ottawa woman. Both chiefs frequently mediated and interpreted at treaty councils. Schermerhorn met with them during an adjournment of several days in the negotiations. The journal of the treaty proceedings does not record what transpired at the meeting, but by the time the journal picked up again the commissioners had the treaty ready for the Potawatomis to sign. Caldwell and Robinson each received $10,000, although Governor Porter denied it was a
bribe. The treaty stipulated “four hundred dollars a year to be paid to Billy Caldwell, and three hundred dollars a year, to be paid to Alexander Robinson, for life, in addition to the annuities already granted to them.” Charges of bribery and fraud held up the treaty’s ratification, and before the Senate finally gave its approval it reduced the amounts paid to Caldwell and Robinson, which were “so large as to induce a well-founded presumption that they have, by some means, acquired an influence over the Indians which they have been disposed to use to an unreasonable extent for their individual benefit.”66

  Having taken care of the Potawatomi resistance, Schermerhorn departed to do the same with the Miamis in October. But he met his match in the person of the old Miami head chief Jean-Baptiste Richardville, a successful merchant, consummate politician, and savvy negotiator. Schermerhorn was authorized to offer the Miamis up to 50 cents an acre; Richardville scoffed at the offer and the treaty failed. “It was a public treaty,” Schermerhorn explained significantly, “and not a private negotiation as I recommended.” (The next year Richardville offered to sell some Miami land for $5 per acre and he subsequently accepted removal treaties.)67 As commissioner in the West, Schermerhorn in 1834 dealt with resettling the Shawnees and Senecas of Lewiston and with claims stemming from a treaty with the western Cherokees in 1828. As he urged eastern Cherokees to relocate with promises of peace and prosperity he was well aware that western Cherokees felt aggrieved to be inundated by emigrants who had not shared the hardships they had suffered when they had moved west.68

  Such was the man and such were the methods Andrew Jackson called upon to secure a removal treaty with the Cherokees. Cherokees nicknamed Schermerhorn the Devil’s Horn. In February 1835 Cass instructed Schermerhorn to meet with the Ridge delegation and draw up a preliminary treaty, which the delegates would sign and then take home for ratification by the Cherokees. Schermerhorn and Ridge reached a tentative agreement and in March they wrote a secret treaty that offered the Cherokees $5 million “for the cession of their entire claims east of the Mississippi river.” Jackson issued a proclamation to the Cherokees admonishing them to think of their future and their children; their condition was deteriorating rapidly, things were only going to get worse, and they must delude themselves no longer. If only they had listened to Jackson years ago, they could now be enjoying peace and prosperity in the West.69

  John Ridge left Washington in March, telling Cass that the Cherokees who had once been unanimously opposed to a treaty were now ready to accept it; only Ross and his followers stood in the way. “Sir,” he wrote, invoking his full-blood identity, “I am an Indian, and understand the character of my countrymen. The common Indians are not to blame, and have only been misled by the avaricious half-breeds of the Ross party.”70 Ridge, who had called Andrew Jackson a chicken snake in 1832, had apparently had a significant change of heart: he named his new son Andrew Jackson Ridge.71 Federal emigration agent Benjamin Franklin Currey believed that Ross exercised “a secret & powerful influence over the destinies of his people” and warned the chief that the president would hold him and his council responsible if anything happened to the members of the treaty party.72 There was little protection for Ross. He returned to his home at Coosa to find it occupied by people who had “won it” in the lottery. He resettled his family across the Tennessee border at Red Clay.73

  Schermerhorn followed Ridge back home and, together with Currey, they began selling the treaty to the Cherokees. In the words of the author, poet, and playwright John Howard Payne (best known for writing the song “Home Sweet Home”), “The President sends a Treaty with a letter to explain it. He then sends Mr. Schermerhorn to re-explain the explained Treaty. The end of it is, the Treaty is so much explained that it is explained away.” Payne arrived in Cherokee country later in the year and the National Council invited him to write a history of the Cherokees in the hope it would help educate the public about the Cherokee cause. Payne and Schermerhorn had attended the same school. (Schermerhorn was an upperclassman when Payne entered Union College in Schenectady; Schermerhorn graduated; Payne dropped out after two or three years when his father went bankrupt, and began an acting career.) But they were diametrically opposed on the Cherokee issue.74

  In July Schermerhorn and Currey called a meeting of Cherokees at Running Water. Ross and his supporters at first urged people to stay away but then attended, along with some four thousand Cherokees. Schermerhorn mounted a platform and “began his speech of three hours and twenty minutes, counted anxiously by the watch,” noted Payne. Once the Cherokees removed to Indian Territory, said Schermerhorn, they could look forward “to the day when your several tribes of Indians shall there be organized into a territorial government, with the rights and privileges of American citizens; and that the time will yet come, when an Indian State will be added to our Federal Union: and which, though the last, will be the brightest star and fairest stripe upon the banner of our nation, and fill up the measure of our country’s glory.” But they should make no mistake and, he had told this to Ross, this was their last and only hope: “if you reject these propositions for a treaty, and come to no final agreement with the commissioners now appointed to treat with you, [the president] will enter into no further negotiation with you, during his administration.” If they rejected “the very liberal and generous offers” now being made they risked losing the sympathies of even their friends. There was no use trying to delay things any longer; time was running out: “You cannot mistake the policy of Georgia. She is determined to get rid of her Indian population, and she will soon legislate you out of the country, by granting your possessions to her own citizens, who claim the fee of your lands. And then where will you go?” Payne’s account of the council phrased the offer more bluntly than Schermerhorn’s report did: “‘Take this money,’ said the Reverend Commissioner, ‘for if you do not, the bordering States will forthwith turn the screw upon you tighter & tighter, till you are ground to powder.’” Agent Return J. Meigs, who attended the meeting, said the Cherokees listened with attention and interest as Schermerhorn explained the terms of the treaty and the Rev. Jesse Bushyhead faithfully interpreted them. Schermerhorn entreated Ross and Ridge to settle their differences and head a joint committee representing the Cherokees in the treaty discussions.75 But Schermerhorn told the commissioner of Indian affairs that he would have to deal with one or the other party. “I wish to see neither Ross nor Ridge injured,” he explained, “but if a treaty can be carried only by putting down one and exalting the other, I should not long hesitate to make my election.”76

  In August 1835, fearing Ross would use the printing press of the Cherokee Phoenix to publish antiremoval propaganda, Stand Watie secured the assistance of the Georgia Guard in confiscating it and restoring it to the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot faction.77 Governor Lumpkin considered it “a perfect farce” for the government “to pretend any longer to consider or treat these unfortunate remnants of a once mighty race as independent nations of people, capable of entering into treaty stipulations as such.” During his administration, the Cherokee part of Georgia had been transformed from a howling wilderness into a cultivated country settled by thousands of civilized people. “Having effected all this without a treaty, why should Georgia, upon selfish considerations, care about a treaty?” As far as Georgia was concerned, he declared, “I feel entirely indifferent whether the Cherokees ever enter into a treaty or not. I no longer look to the Federal Government, or its agents, to relieve Georgia from her Cherokee perplexity.” However, since a treaty was on the table, every effort should be made to overcome the opposition of the Ross faction and induce the Cherokees to take it. “Starvation and destruction await them if they wait much longer in their present abodes.”78

  John Ridge and Schermerhorn presented their treaty to the Cherokee Council at Red Clay in October. John Ross led the opposition. Cherokees were outraged, John Ridge’s life was threatened, and opposition was so overwhelming that he and Boudinot joined the majority in voting against it. But Scherme
rhorn refused Ross’s requests to return with him to Washington and told the elected chief of the Cherokees that he would not be received there. He circulated a printed notice, which Boudinot translated into Cherokee, urging the Cherokees to think it over and meet again at New Echota in December for further discussion. The notice also contained a warning that all who failed to show up would be considered to “give their assent and sanction to whatever is done at the council.”79

  Benjamin Currey warned of “the evil consequences likely to attend the departure of a delegation from the Eastern Cherokees for Washington at this juncture in time.” In November the Georgia Guard crossed the border into Tennessee, arrested Payne and Ross, and confiscated Payne’s papers. Payne and Ross were held for two weeks at the old Moravian mission at Springplace. Payne was accused of being an abolitionist and a French spy, and Ross of impeding the census that was being carried out in Cherokee country, but no official charges were brought. Immediately after his release, Ross hurried to Washington. Payne returned to New York but continued to work for the antiremoval cause, assisting the Ross delegation in Washington and helping to write petitions.80

  In his annual report, in November 1835, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Elbert Herring stated there had been no letup in efforts to induce the Cherokees to move west of the Mississippi “in conformity with the policy adopted by the Government in favor of the Indians.” He attributed “the disinclination of a large portion of the nation to emigrate, and avail themselves of the obvious benefit in the contemplated change” to “bad advisement, and the intolerant control of chiefs adverse to the measure.”81 Major Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and other members of the Treaty Party wrote to Andrew Jackson on December 1 “to express our entire confidence in your full determination to secure justice to the poor Indians.”82 In the absence of the principal chief and the majority opposition, and while a Cherokee delegation authorized to negotiate a treaty was away in Washington, Schermerhorn went ahead and made his treaty with the members of the minority Treaty Party.