After the deaths of the primary signatories of the Treaty of New Echota, the story of that treaty revolves around the man who most steadfastly resisted it. Year after year John Ross wrote page after page—to the secretary of war, Congress, successive presidents, and various individuals—on Cherokee rights, Cherokee history, Cherokee treaties, and Cherokee political status. He pushed the government to honor or even improve the terms of the treaty at the same time as he continued to deny the validity of the treaty. Sometimes he was in Washington six months a year. At first the government refused to recognize him, and continued to deal with Treaty Party delegates. In April 1840, General Arbuckle informed a delegation of Old Settler and Emigrant Cherokees at Fort Gibson that, despairing of the Cherokees being able to settle their differences themselves, the United States insisted that the Old Settlers hold one-third of the offices in the new Cherokee government, and Secretary of War Poinsett ordered that John Ross and William Coodey be removed from office. The Cherokee Council immediately denounced such measures as an assault on the Cherokee Nation’s rights of elective government and “destructive to the principles of a republican Government.”146
But the 1840 elections brought a Whig administration to power, and President Harrison (soon replaced by John Tyler) and the new secretary of war, John Bell, gave Ross a much warmer reception. Again invoking the written assurances that Jefferson had given the Cherokees forty years before, Ross reminded Bell that the Cherokee Nation sought “nothing more than the performance of such promises as this parchment embodies, and as have been so often reiterated, not only before, but since; and in the solemn form of treaties.”147 For a while Ross was hopeful that his efforts to renegotiate the New Echota treaty might bear fruit, but by the time he wrote his annual message to the Cherokee Nation in November 1842 it was clear that no renegotiation was likely.148
Meanwhile the violence emanating from the treaty continued and escalated. In 1840 Archilla Smith, who had signed the treaty, stabbed John McIntosh to death in an argument. He was arrested and put on trial in Cherokee court in Tahlequah. Stand Watie defended him but Smith was found guilty. Watie drew up a petition for pardon, Ross denied it, and Smith was hanged.149 In May 1842, according to the Treaty Party, an armed group “set out upon the unhallowed purpose of murdering the aged widow of fallen Major Ridge.”150 That same month Stand Watie encountered James Foreman, one of the men accused of assassinating the treaty signers, in a grocery store. There was an altercation, and Watie threw his drink into Foreman’s face. As Foreman reached to pick up a board, Watie stabbed him with his bowie knife and then fired his pistol at him but missed. Foreman died shortly afterward. Watie stood trial in the state of Arkansas the next year but was acquitted on grounds of self-defense.151 Meanwhile, Watie gained a wife and lost his father: in September 1842, he married Sarah Caroline Bell (they had three sons: Saladin Ridge, Comiskey, and Solon Watica, and two daughters, Ninnie Josephine and Charlotte Jacqueline); his father died later that year.152
In 1843, Isaac Bushyhead was murdered and David Vann seriously wounded, by George and Jacob West and others. Elijah Hicks was also attacked. The sons of James Starr, who had been condemned to death with Boudinot and the Ridges, murdered a Cherokee family and burned their home.153 John Rollin Ridge, away at school in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, wrote his uncle, Stand Watie, telling him he would always be pleased to hear of the deaths of those who had murdered his relatives.154 Eighteen forty-five brought another round of killings. On November 2, a party of pro-removal Cherokees including Thomas, Ellis, and Washington Star, Ellis Rider, and Ellis West, murdered two Cherokees “and mangled their bodies in the most horrible manner.” Someone burned the home of Ross’s daughter, Jane, and attempted to kill her husband, Return J. Meigs (a grandson of the Indian agent of the same name). A week later, a mob killed James Starr and Ellis Starr; five days after that Stand Watie’s brother Thomas was tomahawked, shot, and stabbed to death.155 Watie gathered guns and men and vowed to avenge his brother. Robberies, murders, and revenge killings spread fear through Cherokee country, and alarmed whites in Arkansas urged the government to take action.
The civil war in Cherokee country was accompanied by a war of words in delegations by all three parties to Washington and memorials to Congress, and fees to Washington lawyers, all of which fueled “the flame of discord in the Cherokee nation.”156 The Old Settler party complained to Congress that the Treaty of New Echota ignored the prior treaty rights of the western Cherokees, sending the eastern Cherokees to live on their lands without asking their consent or paying compensation. Whereas the Treaty Party had moved west and settled under laws of the existing Cherokee community in Arkansas, Ross and his followers thought of themselves “not as ordinary emigrants, but as a nation moving, carrying with them sovereignty, a constitution, laws, usages, and all the officers of an organized community…. They determined, by bloodshed and revolution, at once to overthrow the established government, and take all power over our territory and our people into their own hands.” The relationship of the three Cherokee parties to the Treaty of New Echota presented “a spectacle”: “The treaty party, who were recognized east as competent to cede away a territory and extinguish a nation, are not considered west worthy to be protected when living, or avenged when dead.” Ross and his chiefs, “who were not recognized east as clothed with authority to prevent the execution of the treaty,” were now recognized as the Cherokee Nation and received all its benefits, even though they rejected the treaty. And the western Cherokees, who were not party to the treaty, were left to “protest against its assumptions and its consequences.”157
Indian agents Stambaugh and Kendall were outraged at the turn of events in the ten years since New Echota. “Look now at the condition of those whom the United States had encouraged to make a treaty with them, and had a hundred times promised to protect,” they wrote the secretary of war. “Their first men were murdered, and all the rest of them outlawed, for no other offence than signing that treaty!” Not one of the assassins had been brought to justice. The government had abandoned the Treaty Party “to the tender mercies of John Ross” who, “with scarcely enough Cherokee blood in his veins to mark him as of Indian descent,” had deluded the majority of the Cherokees into thinking “that he is true to the aboriginal race, while his full-blooded rivals are traitors to their country and their kindred.” Ross was truly “an extraordinary man.” He had resisted removal to the last, causing untold suffering, and then had gotten himself put in charge of the removal arrangements. “Thus strengthened for mischief, upon his arrival on the Arkansas, he destroyed his rivals, overturned the existing government, established his power through blood and usurpation; and in all this he has been tolerated by the United States.” Ruled by avarice, they contended, Ross “comes to Washington every year, spending in luxury and pleasure the funds of the nation, under pretence of settling their difficulties; but never makes a proposition which tends to their settlement.”158 Ross meanwhile, in the summer of 1844 courted, largely by correspondence, and married a new wife, a Quaker named Mary Stapler.159
A change of administration changed the situation in Washington again. The new government was not likely to renegotiate the Treaty of New Echota. Ross and Watie were both in Washington in the spring of 1846, Ross still pushing for a new treaty, but in Cherokee country the violence continued. A letter to Watie from John Rollin Ridge, then studying law in Fayetteville, Arkansas, contained a telling line: “No very important transactions have happened since your departure, except the killing of five or six Indians of the Ross party.” A few days later, he wrote again, asking his uncle to get him a bowie knife.160 Ross portrayed Watie and his “lawless band of armed men” as a threat to the Cherokee government and the safety of Cherokee people and asked President James Polk to order them dispersed.161 Doubting that the different Cherokee parties could ever again live together in peace, Polk in April 1846 proposed dividing the Cherokee Nation among the various factions.162 The House Committee on Indian Affairs su
pported the president’s recommendation and a bill was introduced seeking legislation to divide the Cherokee Nation. The bill did not pass but it pressured the groups to make peace. Ross read the president’s message “with equal grief and astonishment.”163 He had fought for years against the Treaty of New Echota and for the sovereignty and unity of the Cherokee Nation; now he had no choice but to compromise or see the nation permanently divided. By the terms of a treaty, signed on August 6, 1846, Ross agreed to accept and work with the Treaty of New Echota. He also agreed to include the Old Settlers and members of the Treaty Party in the per capita distribution of the land sale. In return the Old Settlers relinquished their claim to be sole owners of the new homeland and in effect yielded government of the nation to the National Party. The treaty stipulated that there should be a general amnesty for all crimes committed by the rival groups during the previous seven years. Ross and Stand Watie shook hands when they signed the treaty. The Senate ratified it the next day.164
The feuds and vendettas subsided and the Cherokees directed their energies to rebuilding their nation. As principal chief, Ross worked assiduously “to squeeze every possible cent” owed to the Cherokees by the Treaty of New Echota. After 1846, the nation’s annual operating expenses were met essentially from the income of a trust fund of $500,800 established under the treaty. The $35,000 to $45,000 the fund generated each year was insufficient to pay for government buildings, salaries, police, courts, delegations to Washington, the tribal newspaper, and the nation’s schools. Ross argued that the government had no right to deduct the costs of removal from the $5 million it paid for the Cherokee homeland; that Cherokees who had resisted removal and the treaty of New Echota should be fully compensated for the losses they suffered; that the government still owed the nation some of the expenses incurred in carrying out removal, and that it should pay the Cherokees interest at 5 percent on all unpaid sums. For Ross, securing these additional monies was vital to rebuilding the Cherokee Nation. But the War Department resisted his demands and when the federal accounting office tallied up all the amounts subtracted for the costs of removal, compensation for spoliations, and remunerations for lost improvements, it determined that of the original $5 million only $627, 603.95 remained for per capita payments. Ross fought on, despite the fact that the government’s attention was focused on the War with Mexico, and lawyers’ bills further depleted the Cherokees’ finances. Finally, in 1852, the government agreed that removal costs should not be deducted from the $5 million paid for the Cherokees’ land, that almost $1 million was owed the Cherokees for removal expenses, and that 5 percent interest should be added to these sums when they were paid. When the per capita payments were finally made to the members of the Ross and Treaty parties, each Cherokee received $92.79. Years later, after Ross was dead, Congress reconsidered the issues he had raised and decided that the government owed the Cherokees an additional $961,368.165
Slowly, the Cherokee economy began to recover. Stand Watie developed a law practice and merchandise business. But the Treaty of 1846 did not heal the deep divisions between the Ross and Ridge parties.166 Some members of the Watie-Boudinot family went to California during the gold rush, including John Rollin Ridge. In 1849, in a dispute over a horse, John Rollin shot and killed a Ross sympathizer named David Knell. John Rollin’s mother and family wanted him to “leave the nation forever, and have nothing more to do with it.” He fled across the Missouri border and made his way to California the next year, leaving his wife and daughter to follow. From California, he wrote to Stand Watie: “There is a deep-seated principle of revenge in me which will never be satisfied until it reaches its object.” But he also wrote other things. He became a journalist, poet, and author. (His fictionalized story, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit [1854] was the first novel by a Native American, the first written in California, and the basis of later Zorro stories.) He never returned to Cherokee country.167
The old removal-era divisions flared again with the outbreak of the Civil War.168 The Confederacy sent General Albert Pike, its commissioner of Indian affairs, to negotiate treaties of alliance with the tribes in Indian Territory. Ross favored neutrality. The month after Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter, he issued a proclamation to the Cherokee people “reminding them of the obligations arising under their Treaties with the United States and urging them to the faithful observance of said Treaties, by the maintenance of Peace and friendship towards the People of all the States.” He then wrote to Albert Pike respectfully declining the invitation to enter into a treaty with the Confederate States of America.169 Stand Watie, on the other hand, raised a regiment for the Confederacy. His second son, fifteen-year-old Saladin, joined the Confederate army to serve alongside him.
Ross and the Cherokee Nation soon changed their tune. So long as there was hope that the differences could be resolved, he explained, neutrality was the proper course for the Cherokee people. But the withdrawal of federal troops from frontier posts and early Confederate victories indicated that the Union would not survive, leaving the Cherokees with no choice: “Our Geographical position and domestic institutions [i.e., slavery] allied us to the South.” In October, the Cherokee Nation made a treaty with Pike. The Confederacy assumed all the treaty obligations due the Cherokees from the United States and the Cherokee changed their political relations “from the United to the Confederate States.”170 The Cherokees raised a second mounted regiment, commanded by John Drew.
But the Union forces returned in 1862. Watie remained steadfast in his allegiance to the Confederacy but Drew’s regiment defected to the Union side after the North’s victory at the three-day battle of Pea Ridge in March. “Now the Cherokee schism was wider,” notes the historian Laurence Hauptman in his study of Native Americans in the Civil War, “between blue and gray as well as Indian and Indian.” In the summer, Union forces marched on Tahlequah and captured Ross. He was paroled after making a proclamation of loyalty to the United States, and he spent the rest of the war in Washington and Philadelphia trying to mend fences with the United States. In his absence the Cherokee National Council elected Watie principal chief of the Cherokee Nation (South). Watie’s forces not only conducted hit-and-run raids against Union troops and supply lines but also raided within the Cherokee Nation, plundering and sometimes killing Ross followers.171 In 1863 the Ross party abrogated the alliance with the Confederacy, declared their allegiance to the United States, and abolished slavery. Ross cited the Treaty of New Echota to justify the brief Confederate alliance. By the sixth article the United States had agreed to “protect the Cherokee Nation from domestic strife and foreign enemies.” Ross had resisted earlier intrusions on the basis of this provision as an infringement on Cherokee sovereignty; now he cited the United States’ failure to provide the promised protection in 1861 as leaving the Cherokees “utterly powerless” in the face of the rebel invasion and with no choice but to make a Confederate treaty.172
In effect there were now two Cherokee nations: the Northern Cherokees led by Ross and the Southern Cherokees led by Watie. Watie burned John Ross’s home at Park Hill during the war. Three of Ross’s sons served in the war, and James died in a prison camp in 1864. Ross’s wife, Mary, died of lung congestion in Philadelphia in July 1865.173 Watie’s nephew Elias Cornelius Boudinot was sent as a delegate to the Confederate Congress, in accordance with the Cherokee-Confederate treaty. The war years took a toll on Watie’s family. Watie’s wife, Sarah, took refuge in Texas. Their third son, Comiskey, died in the spring of 1863. Two months later, Sarah heard that Saladin had killed a prisoner. She wrote Watie that she found herself “almost dead sometimes thinking about it. I am afraid that Saladin will never value human life as he ought.” Sarah suffered from poor health and depression. She had lived with the internal Cherokee conflicts so long that she said she would like to live “a short time in peace just to see how it would be.” Watie was appointed commander of the Confederate Indian Cavalry Brigade in 1864; in June 1865, he wa
s the last Confederate general to surrender.174
The Civil War in Cherokee country, and the resurgent civil war within the Cherokee Nation, was disastrous. Population fell from twenty-one thousand to fifteen thousand; thousands of Cherokees were refugees; one-third of married women were widows and one-quarter of Cherokee children were orphans; and Cherokees lost three hundred thousand head of cattle in raids by Union and Confederate forces.175 Then, at the Treaty of Fort Smith in September 1865, the United States imposed terms on the Cherokees. The Cherokee delegation to the multitribal council was made up of two factions: one representing Ross’s Northern group, the other Watie’s Southern followers. The five US commissioners (who included the Seneca General Ely S. Parker, who served as General Grant’s military secretary during the war, and Major General W. S. Harney, who would figure prominently in negotiations at Medicine Lodge two years later) treated the Cherokee delegations as one. Cherokees had supported the Confederacy; consequently, the Cherokee Nation had forfeited all treaty rights with the United States. In the summer of 1866, the Northern and Southern Cherokees each sent a delegation to Washington to negotiate a final peace treaty, each hoping to be recognized as the legitimate Cherokee nation. John Rollin Ridge traveled to Washington to join Stand and Saladin Watie and Elias C. Boudinot as a member of a Southern Cherokee delegation. Finding that the United States recognized Ross and the Northern Cherokees, Watie and the Southern Cherokees sought to have Cherokee country divided into two nations but lost their bid. A new treaty was drawn up between the Cherokees and the United States, declaring null and void the Cherokee treaty with the Confederacy, prohibiting slavery, and establishing railroad rights of way through Cherokee country. In addition, the United States asserted the right to settle other Indians in the Cherokee Nation and took possession of Cherokee lands in Kansas and the Cherokee Strip. The Senate ratified the treaty on August 11, 1866.
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