Jackson, though not known to read a great many books, was the quintessential newspaper consumer. In the 1820s he subscribed to as many as seventeen papers at a time, and did not like to throw them away. He might go through them later, seeking clippings he wanted to pass to a friend or use to smite an enemy. The papers piled up so high that his household began having them bound—huge volumes, each with a year to a year and a half’s worth of issues and as oversize as the broadsheet papers it contained. The information in those volumes could be instruments of power. And Jackson the collector of newspapers was also a collector of newsmen. Once he became president, Jackson would draw newspaper editors into his circle of intimate advisors—especially Francis Blair and Amos Kendall, who came to his side even though they were from Henry Clay’s Kentucky.
Since newspapers were linked to the interests of specific parties or politicians, it made sense that marginalized groups sought their own outlets. Freedom’s Journal, widely considered the first black-owned and operated newspaper, started in New York in 1827. To start their own paper in 1828, the Cherokees overcame numerous obstacles. There was no printing press in the Cherokee Nation, no experienced printer, and no such thing as Cherokee metal type. Fortunately the missionary in town, Samuel Worcester, was able to write to his base in New England for help in obtaining the necessary equipment. The Cherokees found a veteran printer in Tennessee, who took the job though he had trouble distinguishing the Cherokee symbols and tended to leave that part of the job to his assistant. From February onward the lone editor came and went from the shop, handing the printers editorials and the latest news.
Murder.
We are informed of a murder being committed in the neighborhood of Sumach. The name of the person killed is William Fallen, and of the murderer Bear’s Paw. We have not heard of the circumstances.
Later issues of the paper accused local authorities of leaving the suspect “unmolested.” Possibly stung by this unprecedented media attention, authorities finally put Bear’s Paw on trial. He was acquitted.
A subscription to the Phoenix cost $3.50 a year, with a discount if paid in advance. “Subscribers who can only read the Cherokee language” received a greater discount—a signal that those literate in English were likely more prosperous than others. The newspaper reported that the Cherokee Nation was, as a whole, accumulating wealth. One article said that the eastern Cherokees, with a population conservatively estimated at thirteen thousand, owned sixty-two shops, fifty gristmills and sawmills, and 7,683 horses, not to mention $200,000 worth of fencing that penned in 22,531 black cattle and 46,700 hogs. In English and in Cherokee, the Phoenix published the full text of the constitution (“We, the representatives of the people of the CHEROKEE NATION …”) as well as letters debating its meaning and texts of other laws. Readers on April 24 were informed that any person who “shall lay violent hands” on a woman, “forcibly attempting to ravish her chastity contrary to her consent,” would receive fifty lashes and have an ear cut off. Other laws published in the paper revealed how well the Cherokees had learned the ways of the surrounding white population. “Resolved by the National Committee and Council, That intermarriages between Negro slaves and Indians, or whites, shall not be lawful … any male Indian or white man, marrying a negro woman slave, he or they, shall be punished with thirty-nine stripes on the bare back.”
The Phoenix also did something notable for a newspaper in the Deep South: it included criticism of slavery. One article reprinted the narrative of a writer who’d visited West Africa, from which many slaves had come. “I stood on Cape Montserado,” the writer said. “Scenes of horror—of relentless cruelty” had taken place “along the whole border of this afflicted, this injured land.” Surely “the Omnipotent” would end “the exile, sufferings, and degradation of the Africans,” and allow them to be repatriated, as the American Colonization Society was beginning to do. This article edged up to or beyond the limits of permissible southern discourse. Authorities were increasingly anxious to suppress anything that might inspire a slave revolt. Even the Cherokees’ own slaveholding elites might not have approved.
There seemed to be no particular reason to print the article on slavery except that it interested the editor, Elias Boudinot, one of the most fascinating characters in New Echota. When his paper started publication, he was around twenty-six—round-faced, clean-cut, and sometimes eloquent. He was not an experienced newsman, and his four-page newspaper had an initial circulation of just two hundred. Yet the structure of the nineteenth-century media gave the Phoenix an outsize influence. Over the years, Boudinot arranged to receive copies of about a hundred other papers by exchange, meaning that he was also mailing copies of the Phoenix to a hundred other newspapers. Editors read it. They said it “may very properly be regarded as something new,” as the Charleston Mercury advised South Carolina readers, an assessment reprinted by the United States Telegraph in Washington. Many papers reprinted Phoenix articles, including religious journals that were the era’s most widely read publications. Other papers replied to Phoenix editorials. In modern terms, it was as if a blog or social media feed caught the mainstream media’s attention, causing its articles to go viral.
And so it was noteworthy when copies of that 1827 correspondence between John Ross and the federal commissioners made their way to the Phoenix printshop. On May 28, 1828, Boudinot gave over a substantial portion of the newspaper to publishing the letters. Though offered with little commentary, they read like an exposé. The commissioners came across as designing and arrogant, insisting on paying the “expenses” of native leaders they wanted to influence, and seemingly baffled by Indians who did not follow instructions. Ross seemed smooth and in control, insisting upon nothing more than the ordinary process of the law. The letters ended with the whole Cherokee government, under the new constitution, saying Cherokees “would never dispose of one foot more of land again.” It was perfect Cherokee propaganda, distributed to newspaper after newspaper. Boudinot’s services were worth what little the Cherokees were able to pay.
• • •
Boudinot lived with his wife and family a short walk from the newspaper office in New Echota. They occupied a wood-frame house with a “piazza,” or columned porch, and a garden. The house included the era’s closest approximation of running water, a well with a windlass built into the porch. Such a house suited Boudinot’s status as a member of the Cherokee elite. He was a nephew of powerful Major Ridge, though not especially affluent. His wife, Harriett, struggled to maintain the growing household on the editor’s salary of $400 a year. “Our water is so sweet & pure that I have almost substituted it for coffee & Tea,” she wrote once, though a careful reading of the letter indicates she was really cutting back on coffee and tea because she couldn’t afford it. It cost a lot, she noted, and Elias drank it constantly, as he worked days and nights, sometimes on the newspaper and sometimes translating religious texts for the missionary Samuel Worcester. Occasionally the strain on Elias showed up in the pages of his paper:
The Editor of this paper regrets that, owing to indisposition, he is not able to render his present number as interesting as he would wish.
In another issue Boudinot expressed regret that the previous week’s newspapers had all been delivered sodden after the mail carrier fell from his horse into a stream. And then there were days Boudinot apologized on page 2 for an error on page 1, having discovered the error only after the printer had run off the first page and the ink had dried. He was having trouble with the printer, a preoccupied and suspicious man. A Methodist, he disliked the Congregationalist missionary Samuel Worcester, and accused him of undue influence over Boudinot and the paper. Boudinot fired the printer and found a new one.
Whatever his struggles, the young editor was well positioned to translate Cherokees to the surrounding white world. He had seen some of it. When organizing the Phoenix, the editor-to-be supplemented the Cherokee government subsidy with a fund-raising tour, developing a speech he delivered in eastern cities. (�
�What is an Indian?” he asked a crowd in Philadelphia. “Is he not formed of the same materials as yourself?”) He had in fact been traveling since his teenage years, and during his travels had acquired both a white man’s name and a white wife.
He’d been called Buck Watie at birth, but like many Cherokees he changed his name as he grew older. In 1818, when Buck was sixteen, his family sent him to attend school in the North, and on the way he met an old man from New Jersey named Elias Boudinot, who’d been a leader of the Continental Congress during the Revolution. The old revolutionary was sympathetic to Indians, and had written a book investigating whether native peoples were “the descendants of Jacob and the long lost tribes of Israel”—the same theory that had long fascinated Indian sympathizers such as the eighteenth-century trader James Adair. There is no proof that Buck really believed he was an Israelite, but he was impressed enough to enroll in school a short time later using Boudinot’s name.
The institution where he enrolled was the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. It was a forerunner of the Fulbright scholarships and other American programs that would attract later generations of foreign students to study at American universities. The Foreign Mission School taught “Latin, Greek, Rhetoric, Navigation, Surveying, Astronomy and Theology” to young people from “heathen lands” as far away as Malaysia and Hawaii. Some came from “heathen lands” closer to home. The record of “public exercises” during school exams in 1820 included a “declamation in English” by “Elias Boudinot, Cherokee,” and a “Dialogue” among Cherokee students on the possibility of “the removal of the tribe to the West.” Naturally, a good part of Boudinot’s education was simply walking around Cornwall and experiencing New England. Just as naturally, he met a girl. In 1825, after leaving the school because of illness, he wrote letters proposing marriage to the young woman, Harriett Gold.
Harriett Gold’s family went through agony. It was “rash presumption & disobedience,” a relative told her, “going among the heathen” for a “selfish” reason like marriage. She was burned in effigy by a crowd in the town commons, where Harriett’s own brother lit the fire. The community was especially outraged because Boudinot was the second Indian student who had proposed to a woman from Cornwall; the first, a few years before, was John Ridge, the son of Major Ridge. The fury was revealing. The practice of interracial marriage between whites and Indians was more than two hundred years old—missionaries estimated that one-fourth of the entire Cherokee Nation had at least some white ancestry from interracial marriages that could be traced back six generations. Cherokees accepted these marriages to outsiders, which suited a society in which people were expected to marry outside their clan or nation, and white society also seemed to accept these marriages when they involved white men far out on the frontier. An Indian man’s marriage to the youngest daughter of a white family in Cornwall was considered entirely different. The fury after Boudinot’s proposal was so great that the Foreign Mission School soon closed.
Harriett married Elias anyway. By the time Elias went to work on the Cherokee Phoenix, good sense had prevailed among her family. Her parents even visited the young couple in New Echota. Elias Boudinot seems to have embraced his new family, though in letters to his in-laws he did not avoid reminding them who he was. He told Harriett’s relatives that one of their children had “real Indian black eyes,” and closed the letter:
I remain your Indian
Brother,
Elias Boudinot.
Like his letters, the pages he composed for the Cherokee Phoenix sometimes called attention to the interactions of the white and Indian worlds.
AN IMITATION INDIAN—A person made his appearance in the city [of Boston] Thursday last, dressed in the costume of an Indian, and calling himself “Gen. William Ross,” which is engraved on an apparently silver breast plate. He says his father is Daniel Ross, who is Chief of the Cherokee Indians, and that he is an authorized agent of the nation.
The Phoenix also spread information about the elections of actual Cherokee leaders, informing candidates that they must pay a fee in order to place “electioneering” letters and articles in the paper: Boudinot was charging for political advertising. But there were gaps in the political coverage, considering that 1828 was an election year to choose a president of the United States. One of the most savage campaigns in American history received little mention in the Phoenix until December 3:
Presidential Election.
The long contest is over, and we shall soon ascertain, who is to be the next President of the United States. From returns of the election received thus far, it is highly probable that Gen. Andrew Jackson will be Chief Magistrate of the Union.
It was an understandable oversight that the Phoenix covered the election so little. The campaign turned more on the personal qualities of the candidates than their contrasting views of Indian policy. And the Phoenix had more immediate issues to cover, like Georgia’s latest efforts to gain control of Cherokee land. But if the Phoenix did not focus on the next president of the United States, the next presidential administration paid attention to the Phoenix. After Jackson took office, he received a letter from his attorney general, who happened to be a Georgian, outlining two strategic moves that would be sure to undermine the Cherokees’ ability to resist removal. The first was to take away their sources of money. The second was to take away their printing press.
Eighteen
This Is a Straight and Good Talk
Jackson’s inauguration in March 1829 is remembered less for what he said than for what was done. After his speech at the East Portico of the Capitol (it was a “serene and mild” day, witnesses reported, with such “an immense concourse of spectators” at the base of the Capitol steps that most could not get close enough to hear the words of their white-haired leader) the new president was mobbed. Margaret Bayard Smith, that perceptive denizen of the capital, was in the crowd: “The barrier that had separated the people from him was broken down and they rushed up the steps all eager to shake hands with him. It was with difficulty that he made his way through the Capitol and down the hill to the gateway that opens on the avenue. Here for a moment he was stopped. The living mass was impenetrable.” Someone handed the new president the reins to a horse, a passage was opened through the crowd, and then “carriages, wagons and carts” pursued the rider to the Executive Mansion, the building that is today called the White House, along with “country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white.”
Though the ceremonial rooms could accommodate hundreds of people, the house was so stuffed with well-wishers that china was smashed, people climbed through windows to escape with their lives, and the new president was nearly crushed against a wall. He had to be wedged out of the house by a squad of men who formed around him. The near riot scandalized capital society but did Jackson no harm. In the long term the story of the irrepressible crowds would enshrine his inauguration as a triumph of the common man, and for the short term the general made a tactical retreat. He did not spend the first night of his presidency in the Executive Mansion. He slept at the new and luxurious National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The National’s proprietor was John Gadsby, whose prior hotel had served as Jackson’s campaign headquarters in the winter of 1824–25. Back then Gadsby’s was where Jackson met Lafayette at the stairs, and where Rachel worried about his health shortly before his defeat. Now the city was filled with celebrations of his victory, but at Gadsby’s he was alone. Rachel was dead. She had fallen ill in December, and the shadow of this tragedy enveloped his triumph. While still at the Hermitage in January, he declined to attend an event in his honor, informing his would-be hosts in Kentucky that “the present season is sacred to sorrow.” Days later he was compelled to answer a letter that had been written to Rachel shortly before her death. “It pleased God to take her from this world,” Jackson informed Rachel’s friend, “depriv[ing] me of my stay and solace whilst in it.” His friends worrie
d about him. Louisiana congressman Edward Livingston wrote from New Orleans to express confidence that Jackson would be able to focus on the presidency, though the phrasing of Livingston’s letter suggested doubts. He urged Jackson to “abandon your just grief” in order to perform his duty.
Just before starting from Nashville to Washington, Jackson sent a sad letter to John Coffee: “I have this day got my dear Mrs. J Tomb, compleated, and am notified that the Steam Boat will be up tomorrow for me… . Whether I am ever to return or not, is for time to reveal,” he said. “My mind is so disturbed … that I can scarcely write, in short my dear friend my heart is nearly broke.” Yet the same letter showed that Jackson was wrapping up his western affairs and preparing for a new season. He gave Coffee detailed instructions to pay off and collect debts for him, $100 here and $130 there. Having sent these instructions, Jackson hurried on to other business, hiring an overseer to run the Hermitage and drawing up an inventory of ninety-five slaves. Then he gathered his family (his nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson would serve as his private secretary, and Donelson’s wife, Emily, would become the official hostess of the Executive Mansion) and went to the waiting steamboat—downriver to the Ohio, upriver to Pittsburgh, and overland to Washington. Now, as he rested at Gadsby’s after the inauguration, his mind was turning to the challenges ahead.
Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab Page 17
