The Spanish used enslaved Africans as workers to develop their agriculture and settlements. They also used them in defence of the colonies. Originally the Crown relied on private initiative and resources to protect colonial shipping and settlements. In some cases, colonists hired out their slaves or donated them for this purpose; in other cases, the Crown bought the slaves. Building forts and defence works relied on slave labor, but most were privately owned.
As far as the scale and numbers involved in this slave trade, the slave populations were extremely low on Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1760s. It was only after the British took Havana, Cuba, in 1762 that, the British imported more than 10,000 slaves to Havana, a number that would have taken 20 years to import on other islands.
Cuba became the hub of a lucrative trade in people as property
The British used Cuba as a base to supply the Caribbean and the lower Thirteen Colonies. This change is almost directly related to the opening of Spanish slave trade to other powers in the 18th century. Spain and Great Britain made a contract in 1713 by which the British would provide the slaves, whilst the Spanish outlawed its own slave trade of Africans.
The Spanish colonies were late to exploit slave labor in the production of sugarcane, particularly on Cuba. The Spanish colonies in the Caribbean were among the last to abolish slavery. While the British colonies abolished slavery completely by 1834, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886.
On the mainland of Central and South America, Spain ended African slavery in the eighteenth century. Peru was one of the countries that revived the institution of slavery for some decades after declaring independence from Spain early in the 19th century.
Whilst the young Sir Walter Raleigh was growing up, and perhaps while he was listening to stories of the Spanish main, the high demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century was to lead to the supply of this human "commodity" by the notable Elizabethan seafarer, Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth. He is widely acknowledged to be "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade". In 1554–1555, Hawkins formed a slave trading syndicate of wealthy merchants in London. He sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese slave ship and sold the 300 slaves from it in Santo Domingo.
Sir John Hawkins ship the Carrack Jesus Of Lubeck
During a second voyage in 1564, sailing with his second cousin, Francis Drake, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers. A third voyage involved both buying slaves directly in Africa and capturing a Portuguese ship with its cargo; upon reaching the Caribbean, Hawkins sold all the slaves. On his return, he published a book entitled An Alliance to Raid for Slaves. It is estimated that Hawkins transported 1,500 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic during his four voyages of the 1560s, before stopping in 1568 after a battle with the Spanish in which he lost five of his seven ships.
The English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade only resumed in the 1640s after the country acquired the American colony of Virginia, the colony named for Queen Elizabeth and established by colonists that financed by Raleigh, even though he never actually set foot on the North American continent. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth had granted Raleigh a royal charter authorising him to explore, colonise and rule any;
"remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian People"In return, the Queen would receive one-fifth of all the gold and silver that might be mined there.
During the eighteenth century Cuba provided the British slave traders with a base ffom which to supply captive slaves from Africa to the wider Caribbean and the lower Thirteen British Colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America.
Slavery in Britain's Thirteen Colonies, the colonial area which later became the United States (1600–1776) developed from complex factors, and several theories have been proposed to explain the development of the institution of slavery and of the slave trade in these colonies.
Slavery correlated with Europe's American colonies' need for labour, especially for the labour-intensive plantation economies of the sugar colonies in the Caribbean, operated by Great Britain, France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic.
Most slaves who were brought or kidnapped to the Thirteen British colonies — the Eastern seaboard of what later became the United States — were imported from the Caribbean, not directly from Africa. They had come to the Caribbean islands as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. Indigenous people were also enslaved in the North American colonies, but on a smaller scale, and Indian slavery largely ended in the late eighteenth century though the enslavement of Indigenous people did continue to occur in the Southern states until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In the English colonies, slave status for Africans became hereditary in the mid-17th century with the passage of colonial laws that defined children born in the colonies as taking the status of the mother, under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for;
"that which is brought forth follows the belly (womb)"This was a legal doctrine concerning the slave or free status of children born in the English royal colonies. Incorporated into legislation in the British American colonies and later in the United States, partus held that the social status of a child followed that of his or her mother. Thus, any child born to an enslaved woman was born into slavery, regardless of the ancestry or citizenship of the father. This principle was widely adopted into the laws regarding slavery in the colonies and the following United States, eliminating financial responsibility of fathers for children born into slavery.
Prior to the adoption of the doctrine in the English colonies in 1662, beginning in Virginia, English common law had held that among English subjects, a child's status was inherited from its father, based on the concept that a married couple were a unit headed by the father. The community could require the father to acknowledge illegitimate children and provide some support for them, and arrange for apprenticeships so the children were assured of learning a means of self-support. Courts wanted the fathers to take responsibility so the community did not have to support the children.
In 1658 Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African descent to bring a freedom suit in the Virginia colony, seeking recognition as a free woman of color, rather than being classified as a Negro (African) and slave. Her natural father was an Englishman and a member of the House of Burgesses. He had acknowledged her, had her baptized as a Christian in the Church of England, and arranged for her guardianship under an indenture before his death. Her guardian returned to England and sold the indenture to another man, who held Key beyond its term.
When he died, the estate classified Key and her child (also the son of an English subject) as Negro slaves. Aided by a young English lawyer working as an indentured servant on the plantation, Key sued for her freedom and that of her infant son. She won her case.
The partus doctrine was based in the economic needs of a colony with perpetual labour shortages. Conditions were difficult, mortality was high, and the government was having difficulty attracting sufficient numbers of indentured servants.
The change also legitimized the sexual use of slave women by white planters, their sons, overseers and other white men. Resulting illegitimate mixed-race children were "confined" to slave quarters unless fathers took specific legal actions on their behalf. The new law in 1662 meant that white fathers were no longer required to legally acknowledge, support, or emancipate their illegitimate children by slave women. Men could sell their children or put them to work.
Until the early 18th century, enslaved Africans were difficult to acquire in the colonies that became the United States, as most were sold to the West Indies, where the large plantations and high mortality rates required continued importation of slaves. One of the first major centers of African slavery in the English North American colonies occurred with the founding of Charles Town and the Province of Carolina in 1670. The colony was founded mainly by planters from the overpopulated British sugar island of Barbados, who brought relatively large numbers of African slaves from that island to establish new plantations.
For several decades it was difficult for planters north of the Caribbean to acquire African slaves. To meet agricultural labour needs, colonists practiced Indian slavery for some time. The Carolinians transformed the Indian slave trade during the late 17th and early 18th centuries by treating such slaves as a trade commodity to be exported, mainly to the West Indies.
Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, between 24,000 and 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported from South Carolina—much more than the number of Africans imported to the colonies of the future United States during the same period (Gallay, Alan. (2002) The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670–1717. Yale University Press: New York. ISBN 0-300-10193-7, pg. 299).
The first treaty between two Cherokee towns with English traders of Carolina took place in 1684, and established a steady trade in deerskins and Indian slaves.
The Cherokee leaders who signed were: the Raven (Corani or Kalanu); Sinnawa the Hawk (Tawodi); Nellawgitchi (possibly Mankiller); Gorhaleke; Owasta; – all from Toxawa; and Canacaught (the Great Conqueror); Gohoma; and Caunasaita of Keowa. In 1690 the first trader established himself among the Cherokee people, and took a native wife. He was Cornelius Doughtery, an Irishman from Virginia. Although contact was limited initially to white traders, important changes began to occur within the Cherokee society as a result. Leadership shifted from priest to warrior, and warriors became hunters for profit.
In 1690, the secretary of the colony, James Moore, ventured into the Cherokee country looking for gold. Some Cherokee chiefs visited Charleston in 1693 demanding firearms for their wars against neighboring tribes.
The first Africans to be brought to British North America landed in Virginia in 1619. They arrived on a Dutch ship that had captured them from the Spanish. These approximately 20 individuals appear to have been treated as indentured servants, and a significant number of enslaved Africans earned freedom by fulfilling a work contract or for converting to Christianity. Some successful free people of colour, such as Anthony Johnson, in turn acquired slaves or indentured servants for workers. Historians such as Edmund Morgan say this evidence suggests that racial attitudes were much more flexible in 17th-century Virginia than they would later become. A 1625 census recorded 23 Africans in Virginia. In 1649 there were 300, and in 1690 there were 950. Over this period, legal distinctions between white indentured servants and "Negros" widened into lifelong slavery for Africans.
In the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, slaves, African and Native American, made up a smaller part of the New England economy, which was based on yeoman farming and trades, and a smaller fraction of the population, but they were present.
The Puritans codified slavery in 1641. The Massachusetts royal colony passed the Body of Liberties, which prohibited slavery in some instances, but did allow three legal bases of slavery. Slaves could be held if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery, were purchased from elsewhere, or if they were sentenced to slavery by the governing authority. The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves, as they were generally not English subjects. Colonists came to equate this term with Native Americans and Africans.
The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven enslaved blacks who worked as farmers, fur traders, and builders to New Amsterdam (present day New York City), capital of the nascent province of New Netherland. The Dutch colony expanded across the North River (Hudson River) to Bergen (in today's New Jersey). Later, slaves were also held privately by settlers in the area. Although enslaved, the Africans had a few basic rights and families were usually kept intact. They were admitted to the Dutch Reformed Church and married by its ministers, and their children could be baptized. Slaves could testify in court, sign legal documents, and bring civil actions against whites. Some were permitted to work after hours earning wages equal to those paid to white workers. When the colony fell to the English in the 1660s, the company freed all its slaves, which created an early nucleus of free Negros in the area.
The English continued to import slaves. Enslaved Africans performed a wide variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, mostly in the burgeoning port city and surrounding agricultural areas. In 1703 more than 42% of New York City's households held slaves, a percentage higher than in the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, and second only to Charleston in the South.
The French introduced legalized slavery into their colonies in New France both near the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. They also used slave labour on their island colonies in the Caribbean: Guadeloupe and especially Saint-Domingue. After the port of New Orleans was founded in 1718 with access to the Gulf Coast, French colonists imported more African slaves to the Illinois Country for use as agricultural or mining laborers. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves accounted for as many as a third of the limited population in that rural area.
Slavery was much more extensive in colonial Louisiana, where the French developed sugar cane plantations along the Mississippi river. Slavery was maintained during the French and Spanish periods of government.
The first people enslaved by the French were Native Americans, but they could easily escape into the countryside which they knew well.
Beginning in the early 18th century, the French imported Africans as labourers in their efforts to develop the colony. Mortality rates were high for both colonists and Africans, and new workers had to be imported.
Gradually
in the English colonies, slavery became known as a racial caste that
generally encompassed all people of African descent, even if mixed race.
From the 17th century, Virginia defined all children born to enslaved
mothers as born into slavery, regardless of their father's ancestry.
Similarly, Virginia denied that converting a slave to Christianity was
grounds for freedom. Even free people of colour or mixed-race, called
mulattoes, were restricted in their rights, especially as colonies
passed harsher laws after early slave revolts. During the centuries of
slavery in the British colonies, many slaves were of mixed-race
ancestry.Georgia, the last province in the British colonization of North America, introduces black slavery in 1751 even though early on in its foundation it had banned slavery in 1735, the only one of the thirteen colonies to have done so. However, black slavery was legalized by royal decree in 1751.
The colony of Georgia was established in 1732, and its founder James Oglethorpe ensured that slavery was prohibited in the colony. However, the 1735 law which prohibited slavery, only disallowed the enslavement of Africans and not Native Americans. One of the first of the Native American slaves in Georgia were those brought down with the Musgrove family of South Carolina. Historian Rodney Baine found that reports of purchases of Native American slaves continued in 1738, and that Indian slaves continued to work Georgia plantations in 1772.
In 1728, three years before conceiving the Georgia colony, Oglethorpe chaired a Parliamentary committee on prison reform. The committee documented horrendous abuses in three debtors' prisons. As a result of the committee's actions, many debtors were released from prison with no means of support. Oglethorpe viewed this as part of the larger problem of urbanisation, which was depleting the countryside of productive people and depositing them in cities, particularly London, where they often became impoverished or resorted to criminal activity. To address this problem, Oglethorpe and a group of associates, many of whom served on the prison committee, petitioned in 1730 to form the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America. The petition was finally approved in 1732, and the first ship, led by Oglethorpe, departed for the New World in November.
Oglethorpe and the Trustees formulated a contractual, multi-tiered plan for the settlement of Georgia. The plan envisioned a system of "agrarian equality", designed to support and perpetuate an economy based on family farming, and prevent social disintegration associated with unregulated urbanisation. Land ownership was limited to fifty acres, a grant that included a town lot, a garden plot near town, and a forty-five-acre farm. Self-supporting colonists were able to obtain larger grants, but such grants were structured in fifty-acre increments tied to the number of indentured servants supported by the grantee. Servants would receive a land grant of their own upon completing their term of service. No one was permitted to acquire additional land through purchase or inheritance.
Originally established by the Apothecaries' Company in 1673 for the cultivation and study of medicinal plants, the Garden's mission soon expanded to collect and study plants, shrubs, and trees from all over the world. The cotton seeds given to Oglethorpe (and his colony's success in growing cotton) were instrumental in establishing the cotton industry in the U.S. South.
Oglethorpe and the first colonists arrived at South Carolina on the ship Anne in late 1732, and settled near the present site of Savannah, Georgia on 1 February 1733. He negotiated with the Yamacraw tribe for land (Oglethorpe became great friends with Chief Tomochichi, who was the chief of the Creek Indian village of Yamacraw), and built a series of defensive forts, most notably Fort Frederica, of which substantial remains can still be visited. He then returned to England and arranged to have slavery banned in Georgia after being emotionally moved by an intercepted letter from Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a slave in Maryland.
Georgia was a key contested area, lying in between the English Carolinas and Spanish Florida. It was Oglethorpe's idea that British debtors should be released from prison and sent to Georgia. Although it is often repeated that this would theoretically rid Britain of its so-called undesirable elements, in fact it was Britain's "worthy poor" whom Oglethorpe wanted in Georgia. Ultimately, few debtors ended up in Georgia. The colonists included many Scots whose pioneering skills greatly assisted the colony, and many of Georgia's new settlers consisted of poor English tradesmen and artisans and religious refugees from Switzerland, France and Germany, as well as a number of Jewish refugees. There were also 150 Salzburger Protestants who had been expelled by edict from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in present-day Austria (see Religious conflict in Salzburg), and established the settlement of Ebenezer near Savannah. The colony's charter provided for acceptance of all religions except Roman Catholicism. The ban on Roman Catholic settlers was based on the colony's proximity to the hostile settlements in Spanish Florida.
As far back as 1687 Spain offered fugitive slaves a place of safety. Slaves from British colonies were granted freedom in return for conversion to Catholicism and four years of military service.
In 1738, the Spanish governor of Florida, Manuel de Montiano, had Fort Mose built and established as a free black settlement.
As early as 1687, the Spanish government had begun to offer asylum to slaves from British colonies. In 1693, the Spanish Crown officially proclaimed that runaways would find freedom in Florida, in return for converting to Catholicism and a term for men of four years' military service to the Crown.
In effect, Spain created a maroon settlement in Florida as a front-line defence against English attacks from the north. Spain also intended to destabilize the plantation economy of the British colonies by creating a free black community to attract slaves seeking escape and refuge from British slavery. Maroons were Africans and their descendants in the Americas who formed settlements away from New World chattel slavery. Some had escaped from plantations, but others had always been free, like those born among them in freedom. They often mixed with indigenous peoples, thus creating distinctive creole cultures.
In 1738, Governor Montiano ordered construction of the Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose military fort about 2 miles (3.2 km) north of St. Augustine. Slaves who had escaped from the British colonies were directed there. They were recognized as free, and men who passed inspection were taken into the Spanish militia and placed into service. The military leader at the fort, who also served as the de facto leader of the maroon community, was Francisco Menéndez, a Mandinga African born in the Gambia region along the Gambia River.
He had been captured by slave traders and shipped to the colony of Carolina, from where, he, like many other black slaves, escaped and sought refuge in Spanish Florida. He was appointed captain of the slave militia at St. Augustine in 1726 by Governor Antonio de Benavides, and reappointed to this position by each successive governor of the province. His status as a leader was solidified with the Spanish authorities when he helped defend the city from an English attack led by Colonel John Palmer in 1728 and distinguished himself by his bravery.
The Stono Rebellion
Word of the settlement reached the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia to the north, attracting escaping slaves. Charlestown was approximately 200 miles north of the Florida border. The attraction of Fort Mose is believed to have helped inspire the Stono Rebellion in September 1739. This was led by slaves who were "fresh from Africa".
They were bound for Spanish Florida. This was due to a Spanish effort to destabilize British rule, where they (the Spanish) had promised freedom and land at St. Augustine to slaves who escaped from the British colonies.
Jemmy and his group recruited nearly 60 other slaves and killed some whites before being intercepted and defeated by South Carolina militia near the Edisto River. A group of slaves escaped and traveled another 30 miles (50 km) before battling a week later with the militia. Most of the captured slaves were executed; the surviving few were sold to markets in the West Indies.
In response to the rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted slave assembly, education, and movement. It also enacted a 10-year moratorium against importing African slaves, because they were considered more rebellious, and established penalties against slaveholders' harsh treatment of slaves. It required legislative approval for each act of manumission, which slaveholders had previously been able to arrange privately. This sharply reduced the rate of manumissions in the state.
During the Stono revolt, several dozen Africans believed to be from the Kingdom of Kongo tried unsuccessfully to reach Spanish Florida. Some did make it, where they rapidly adjusted to life there, as they were already baptized Catholics (Kongo was a Catholic nation) and spoke Portuguese.
Following the murder of some inhabitants at the fort by British Indian allies, Montiano ordered it abandoned and its inhabitants resettled in St. Augustine. In 1740, British forces led by James Oglethorpe of Georgia attacked and captured the fort in the Siege of Fort Mose. During the ensuing conflict, a Floridian force consisting of Spanish troops, Indian auxiliaries, and free black militia counterattacked Oglethorpe's troops and defeated them decisively, destroying the fort in the process. Oglethorpe was eventually forced to withdraw his forces to Georgia. Because the fort was destroyed, its inhabitants stayed in St. Augustine.
Owing to the colony's primary role as a military buffer between English and Spanish-held territories, the original model for the colonisation of Georgia excluded the use of slave labour, fearing that runaway slaves could internally weaken the colony and assist the enemy at St. Augustine, Florida. But, instead of slaves defecting southwards to the Spanish, runaways from the Carolinas found refuge in Georgia, thus irritating its northern neighbour. The banning of slavery also reduced the work force, and this was felt to be a constraint on Georgia's early economic growth. Many settlers thus began to oppose Oglethorpe, regarding him as a misguided and "perpetual dictator". Many new settlers soon set their eyes on South Carolina as a less restrictive and, they hoped, a more profitable place to settle. In 1743, after Oglethorpe had left the colony, the ban on slavery was lifted. Various forces united including the English who always urged it and as a result large numbers of slaves were soon imported.
One of these "forces" was the oratory and rhetorical persuasive power of George Whitefield, an English Anglican cleric who was one of the founders of Methodism and the evangelical movement.
In 1739, he returned from Savannah in Georgia to England to raise funds to establish the Bethesda Orphanage, the oldest extant charity in North America.
Whitefield's endeavor to build an orphanage in Georgia was central to his preaching. The orphanage and preaching comprised the "two-fold task" that occupied the rest of his life. On 25 March 1740, construction began. Whitefield wanted the orphanage to be a place of strong Gospel influence, with a wholesome atmosphere and strong discipline.
Having raised the money by his preaching, Whitefield "insisted on sole control of the orphanage." He refused to give the Trustees a financial accounting.
The Trustees also objected to Whitefield's using "a wrong Method" to control the children, who "are often kept praying and crying all the Night".
On returning to North America in 1740, he preached a series of revivals that came to be known as the Great Awakening of 1740. In 1740 he engaged Moravian Brethren from Georgia to build an orphanage for Negro children on land he had bought in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. Following a theological disagreement, he dismissed them but was unable to complete the building, which the Moravians subsequently bought and completed.
He preached nearly every day for months to large crowds of sometimes several thousand people as he traveled throughout the colonies, especially New England. His journey on horseback from New York City to Charleston was the longest then undertaken in North America by a white man.
Like his contemporary and acquaintance, Jonathan Edwards, Whitefield preached staunchly Calvinist theology that was in line with the "moderate Calvinism" of the Thirty-nine Articles. While explicitly affirming God's sole agency in salvation, Whitefield freely offered the Gospel, saying at the end of his sermons:
"Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ."The defence of slavery was common among 18th-century Protestants, especially missionaries who used the institution to emphasize God's providence. Whitefield was at first conflicted about slaves.
It appears that Whitefield believed that African slaves were "human", but he also believed that they were "subordinate Creatures".It was a source of irritation to many colonists in Georgia that slavery had been outlawed in the establishment of the Georgia colony in 1735. In 1747, Whitefield attributed the financial woes of his Bethesda Orphanage to Georgia's prohibition of slavery. He argued that;
"the constitution of that colony [Georgia] is very bad, and it is impossible for the inhabitants to subsist without the use of slaves."Between 1748 and 1750, Whitefield campaigned for slavery's legalisation. He said that the colony would not be prosperous unless farmers had slave labour. Whitefield wanted slavery legalized not only for the prosperity of the colony, but also for the financial viability of the Bethesda Orphanage.
"Had Negroes been allowed", he said, "I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans without expending above half the sum that has been laid out."Whitefield's push for the legalization of slavery "cannot be explained solely on the basics of economics." It was also that "the spectre of massive slave revolts pursued him."
Slavery was legalized in 1751. Whitefield saw the "legalization of slavery as part personal victory and part divine will." Whitefield now argued a scriptural justification for slavery. He increased his number of slaves, using his preaching to raise money to purchase them.
Whitefield became "perhaps the most energetic, and conspicuous, evangelical defender and practitioner of slavery." By propagating such "a theological defense for slavery" Whitefield "participated in a tragic chapter of the nation's experience."Stephen J. Stein, "George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence" (Church History Vol. 42, No. 2, Jun., 1973), p. 256.
Throughout this period native American slavery was legally sanctioned. Native Americans living in the American Southeast of North America were enslaved through warfare and purchased by English and French colonists throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as held captive through Spanish-organized forced labour regimes in Florida.
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States included slavery by Native Americans as well as slavery of Native Americans by colonists in North America, and within the borders of the present-day United States. Tribal territories of indigenous peoples and nations and the slave trade ranged over wide areas of the North American continent. Some Native indigenous tribal peoples held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization, whilst other indigenous people were captured and sold by other indigenous tribal groups and sold into slavery to Europeans. A small number of tribes, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adopted the practice of holding slaves as chattel property and held increasing numbers of African-American slaves.
Pre-contact forms of slavery were generally distinct from the form of chattel slavery developed by Europeans in North America during the colonial period. European influence greatly changed slavery used by Native Americans. As they raided other tribes to capture slaves for sales to Europeans, they fell into destructive wars among themselves, and against Europeans.
When Europeans arrived as colonists in North America, indigenous peoples significantly changed their practice of slavery. Firstly, they began selling war captives to Europeans rather than integrating them into their own societies as they had done before. Secondly, as the demand for labour in the West Indies grew with the cultivation of sugar cane, Europeans enslaved indigenous peoples for the Thirteen Colonies, whilst others were exported to the "sugar islands."
The British settlers, especially those in the southern colonies, purchased or captured indigenous people to use as forced labour in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. Accurate records of the numbers enslaved do not exist. Scholars estimate tens of thousands of "Native Americans" may have been enslaved by the Europeans, being sold by "Native Americans" themselves or European traders and colonists.
Slaves became a caste of people who were deemed to be "foreign" to the English colonists. The Virginia General Assembly defined some terms of slavery in 1705:
All servants imported and brought into the Country ... who were not Christians in their native Country ... shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion ... shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resists his master ... correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction ... the master shall be free of all punishment ... as if such accident never happened.The slave trade of Native Americans lasted only until around 1730. It gave rise to a series of devastating wars among the tribes, including the Yamasee War.
— Virginia General Assembly declaration, 1705
The Yamasee or Yemassee War (1715–1717) was a conflict between British settlers of colonial South Carolina and various Native American tribes, including the Yamasee, Muscogee, Cherokee, Catawba, Apalachee, Apalachicola, Yuchi, Savannah River Shawnee, Congaree, Waxhaw, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Cheraw, and others. Some of the Native American Indian groups played a minor role while others launched attacks throughout South Carolina in an attempt to destroy the colony.
Native Americans killed hundreds of colonists and destroyed many settlements. Traders "in the field" were killed throughout what is now southeastern United States. Abandoning settled frontiers, people fled to Charles Town, where starvation set in as supplies ran low. The survival of the South Carolina colony was in question during 1715.
The tide turned in early 1716 when the Cherokee sided with the colonists against the Creek, their traditional enemy. The last of South Carolina's major Native American foes withdrew from the conflict in 1717, bringing a fragile peace to the colony.
The Yamasee War was one of the most disruptive and transformational conflicts of colonial America. It was one of the American Indians' most serious challenges to European dominance. For over a year the colony faced the possibility of annihilation. About 7% of South Carolina's white citizenry was killed, making the war a competitor for the title of bloodiest war in American history in terms of percentage of population killed. The geopolitical situation for British, Spanish, and French colonies, as well as the Indian groups of the southeast, was radically altered. The war marks the end of the early colonial era of the American South. The Yamasee War and its aftermath contributed to the emergence of new Indian confederated nations, such as the Muscogee Creek and Catawba.
The origin of the war was complex. Reasons for fighting differed among the many Indian groups who participated. Commitment differed as well. Factors included land encroachment by Europeans, the trading system, trader abuses, the Indian slave trade, the depletion of deer, increasing Indian debts in contrast to increasing wealth among some colonists, the spread of rice plantation agriculture, French power in Louisiana offering an alternative to British trade, long-established Indian links to Spanish Florida, the vying for power among Indian groups, as well as an increasingly large-scale and robust intertribal communication network, and recent experiences in military collaboration among previously distant tribes.
The Indian Wars of the early 18th century, combined with the increasing importation of African slaves, effectively ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Colonists found that Native American slaves could easily escape, as they knew the country. The wars cost the lives of numerous colonial slave traders and disrupted their early societies. The remaining Native American groups banded together to face the Europeans from a position of strength. Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection.
The European colonists of the new world were "Men of Blood", as defined in Las Casas reading of a passage in the book Ecclesiasticus in 1514:
"If one sacrifices from what has been wrongfully obtained, the offering is blemished; the gifts of the lawless are not acceptable. ... Like one who kills a son before his father's eyes is the man who offers sacrifice from the property of the poor. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood." 34:18–22
So, too, were the Cherokee, one amongst the so-called Five Civilized Tribes.
The Five "Civilized" Tribes were indigenous peoples of the Americas who lived in the Southeastern United States. Most were descendants of what is now called the Mississippian culture, an agrarian culture that grew crops of corn and beans, with hereditary religious and political elites. The Mississippian Culture flourished in what is now the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from 800 to 1500. Before European contact these tribes were generally matrilineal societies. Agriculture was the primary economic pursuit. The bulk of the tribes lived in towns (some covering hundreds of acres and populated with thousands of people). These communities regulated their space with planned streets, subdivided into residential and public areas. Their system of government was hereditary. Chiefdoms were of varying size and complexity, with high levels of military organization
The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole. These are the first five tribes that European settlers generally considered to be "civilized". Examples of colonial attributes adopted by these five tribes include Christianity, centralized governments, literacy, market participation, written constitutions, intermarriage with white Americans, and plantation slavery practices.
The term "civilized" has historically been used to distinguish the Five Tribes from other Native American groups that were formerly often referred to as "wild" or "savage". Texts written by non-indigenous scholars and writers have used words like "savage" and "wild" to identify Indian groups that retained their traditional cultural practices after European contact. As a consequence of evolving attitudes toward ethnocentric word usage and more rigorous ethnographical standards, the term "Five Civilized Tribes" is rarely used in contemporary academic publications.
Why Are U.S. Borders Straight Lines?
The ever-shifting curve of shoreline and river is no match for the infinite, idealized straight line.
The word "civilized" was used by whites to refer to the Five Tribes, who, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, actively integrated Anglo-American customs into their own cultures. Sociologists, anthropologists, and interdisciplinary scholars alike are interested in how and why these native peoples assimilated certain features of the alien culture of the white settlers who were encroaching on their lands. The historian Steve Brandon asserts that this "adaptation and incorporation of aspects of white culture" was a tactic employed by the Five Nations peoples to resist removal from their lands. While the term "Five Civilized Tribes" has been institutionalized in federal government policy to the point that the US Congress passed laws using the name, the Five Nations themselves have been less accepting of it in formal matters, and some members have declared that grouping the different peoples under this label is effectively another form of colonization and control by white society. Other modern scholars have suggested that the very concept of "civilization" was internalized by individuals who belonged to the Five Nations, but because much of Native North American history has been communicated by oral tradition, little scholarly research has been done to substantiate this.
The first known Cherokee contact with Europeans was in late May 1540, when a Spanish expedition led by Hernando de Soto passed through Cherokee country near present-day Embreeville, Tennessee, which the Spaniards referred to as Guasili. De Soto's expedition visited many of the Georgia and Tennessee villages later identified as Cherokee, but recorded them as then ruled by the Coosa chiefdom, while a Chalaque nation was recorded as living around the Keowee River where North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia meet.
Diseases brought by the Spaniards and their animals decimated the Cherokee and other Eastern tribes.
In 1673, two Englishmen, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur were sent to Overhill Cherokee county in 1673 by fur-trader Abraham Wood from Fort Henry (modern Petersburg, Virginia). Wood hoped to forge a direct trading connection with the Cherokee to bypass the Occaneechi Indians, who were serving as middlemen on the Trading Path.
A map of the most inhabited part of Virginia containing the whole province of Maryland with part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. Joshua Fry, Peter Jefferson 1755
The two colonial Virginians probably did make contact with the Cherokees. Wood called them Rickohockens in his book on the expedition. The map accompanying the book, showed the Rickohockens occupying all of present-day southwestern Virginia, southeastern Kentucky, northwestern North Carolina and the northeastern tip of Tennessee.
The character and events of the early trading contact period have been pieced together by historians' examination of records of colonial laws and lawsuits involving traders. The trade was mainly deerskins, raw material for the booming European leather industry, in exchange for European technology "trade goods", such as iron and steel tools (kettles, knives, etc.), firearms, gunpowder, and ammunition. Although colonial governments early prohibited selling alcohol to Indians, traders commonly used rum, and later whiskey, as common items of trade.
In 1705, traders complained that their business had been lost and replaced by Indian slave trade instigated by Governor James Moore of South Carolina. Moore had commissioned people to "set upon, assault, kill, destroy, and take captive as many Indians as possible". When the captives were sold, traders split profits with the Governor.
During the early historic era, Europeans wrote of several Cherokee town groups, usually using the terms Lower, Middle, and Overhill towns to designate the towns, from the Piedmont across the Allegheny Mountains. The Lower Towns were situated on the headwater streams of the Savannah River, mainly in present-day western South Carolina and northeastern Georgia. Keowee was one of the chief towns, as was Tugaloo.
The Middle Towns were located in present western North Carolina, on the headwater streams of the Tennessee River, such as the upper Little Tennessee River, upper Hiwassee River, and upper French Broad River. Among several chief towns were Nikwasi and Joara, first recorded in the late 16th century during Spanish settlement there with the establishment of Fort San Juan.
TANASI - TENNESSEE
There were two more groups of towns often listed as part of the three: the Out Towns, whose chief town was Kituwa on the Tuckaseegee River, considered the mother town of all Cherokee; and the Valley Towns, whose chief town was Tomotley on the Valley River (not the same as the Tomotley on the Little Tennessee River). The former shared the dialect of the Middle Towns and the latter that of the Overhill (later Upper) Towns.
Of the southeastern Indian confederacies of the late 17th and early 18th centuries (Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, etc.), the Cherokee were one of the most populous and powerful. They were relatively isolated by their hilly and mountainous homeland. A small-scale trading system was established with Virginia in the late 17th century. In the 1690s, the Cherokee had founded a much stronger and important trade relationship with the colony of South Carolina, based in Charles Town. By the 18th century, this overshadowed the Virginia relationship.
From 1710 to 1715 the Cherokee and Chickasaw allied with the British, and fought the Shawnee, who were allied with the French, and forced the Shawnee to move northward. The Cherokee fought with the Yamasee, Catawba, and British in late 1712 and early 1713 against the Tuscarora in the Second Tuscarora War. In the early 18th century, there were two groups of the Tuscarora in North Carolina: a Northern group led by Chief Tom Blount (pronounced Blunt) and a Southern group led by Chief Hancock. Chief Blount occupied the area around what is present-day Bertie County on the Roanoke River; Chief Hancock was closer to New Bern, North Carolina, occupying the area south of the Pamplico River (now the Pamlico River).
Chief Blount became close friends with the influential Blount family of the Bertie region. But Chief Hancock and his people suffered raids and kidnappings by slave traders, who sold the Tuscarora into slavery. Both groups were adversely affected by the introduction of European diseases, to which they had no immunity and suffered high fatalities. They were also resentful of colonial encroachment on their lands.
Chief Hancock decided they needed to attack the settlers in an effort to drive them out of the area. Tom Blount did not become involved in the war at this point. The English offered Chief Blount control of the entire Tuscarora tribe if he assisted the settlers in defeating Chief Hancock. Chief Blount captured Chief Hancock, and the settlers executed him in 1712.
In 1713 the Southern Tuscarora lost their Fort Neoheroka, located in Greene County. About 950 people were killed or captured and sold into slavery in the Caribbean or New England by Colonel Moore and his South Carolina troops.
His forces were made up of 33 white men and more than 900 Native American allies, mostly Yamasee and Cherokee, historic competitors to the Tuscarora. At this point, the majority of the surviving Southern Tuscarora began migrating to New York to escape the settlers in North Carolina.
The Tuscarora War marked the beginning of a British-Cherokee relationship that, despite breaking down on occasion, remained strong for much of the 18th century.
With the growth of the deerskin trade, the Cherokee were considered valuable trading partners, since deer-skins from the cooler country of their mountain hunting-grounds were of a better quality than those supplied by the lowland tribes who were neighbors of the English colonists.
In January 1716, Cherokee murdered a delegation of Muscogee Creek leaders at the town of Tugaloo, marking their entry into the Yamasee War. It ended in 1717 with peace treaties between the colony of South Carolina and the Creek. Hostility and sporadic raids between the Cherokee and Creek continued for decades.
In 1721, the Cherokee ceded lands in South Carolina. In 1730, at Nikwasi, a former Mississippian culture site, a Scots adventurer, Sir Alexander Cuming, crowned Moytoy of Tellico as "Emperor" of the Cherokee. Moytoy agreed to recognize King George II of Great Britain as the Cherokee protector.
In 1735 the Cherokee were estimated to have sixty-four towns and villages, and 6,000 fighting men. In 1738 and 1739 smallpox epidemics broke out among the Cherokee, who had no natural immunity to the new infectious disease. Nearly half their population died within a year. Hundreds of other Cherokee committed suicide due to their losses and disfigurement from the disease.
The French and Indian War and the related European theatre of conflict known as the Seven Years' War laid many of the foundations for the conflict between the Cherokee and the American settlers on the frontier. The action of the French and Indian War in North America included the Anglo-Cherokee War, lasting 1758–1761.
British forces under general James Grant destroyed a number of major Cherokee towns, which were never reoccupied. Kituwa was abandoned, and its former residents migrated west; they took up residence at Mialoquo, called Great Island Town, on the Little Tennessee River among the Overhill Cherokee. At the end of this conflict, the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Long-Island-on-the-Holston with the Colony of Virginia (1761) and the Treaty of Charlestown with the Province of South Carolina (1762). Conocotocko (Standing Turkey), the First Beloved Man during the conflict, was replaced by Attakullakulla, who was pro-British.
Acculturation and assimilation as a survival strategy
"One of the most notable forms of acculturation is imperialism, the most common progenitor of direct cultural change."The British Empire was about to be challenged by American Revolutionary forces, and the Cherokee strategy tended towards continuing their alliances with the British. At least the British King George III recognised the political fact of treaties that respected the existence of the so-called Indian Reserve. It was colonial territorial expansion of the colonists from Virginia and the Carolinas that presented the most significant threat to the Cherokee lands, way of life and culture.
The Cherokee lands between the Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers were remote enough from white settlers to remain independent after the Cherokee–American wars, also known as the Chickamauga Wars, were a series of back-and-forth raids, campaigns, ambushes, minor skirmishes, and several full-scale frontier battles in the Old Southwest from 1776 to 1795 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were times of little or no action, at times spanning several months.
For the Cherokee in the eighteenth century, economically and ecologically, the decline of the deerskin trade was significant. In the early 18th century, after King William's War, the beaver fur trade declined dramatically while the deerskin trade boomed.
By 1750, deer were becoming harder to find in Cherokee territory. So large was the scale of the trade that in time deer became nearly extinct in the southeast. It also radically altered the social make-up of the Cherokee because the men were increasingly absent from towns for long periods while hunting for deer. At the same time, Cherokee society was undergoing a growing dependence on European trade goods. All of these events contributed to growing tensions and conflict between the Indian tribes themselves, as well as with the Europeans.
The deerskin trade was no longer feasible on the Cherokee's greatly reduced lands. Over the next several decades, the people of the fledgling Cherokee Nation began to build a new society, defining themselves as territorial entities, whilst adopting many ideas and practices that originated in the post-colonial Southern United States.
In the years prior to the American Revolution, the British had attempted to end hostilities and confrontations with Indian tribes along the frontier by implementing a variety of measures to thwart settler encroachment on Indian lands. The Proclamation of 1763, the most notable of these measures, forbade settlement west of a line that sliced through the backcountry of Britain’s Atlantic colonies. The British had sought to mark newly established boundaries between Indians and colonists to end boundary disputes. The boundaries negotiated by various tribes were meant to stand, at least in Indian eyes, as one Creek chief noted, like;
“a stone wall never to be broke.”
By the early 1800s, tribes increasingly came to define themselves as territorial entities with permanent boundaries and the sovereign right to live independently and protect their borders. Although pushed relentlessly by American agents to cede more and more territory, they viewed their territorial boundaries as inviolate: Indian country was for Indian peoples.
Series: American Indians and the War of 1812By the time that the Treaty of Hopewell had been signed with the Confederation Congress of the United States of America on 28 November 1785, the Cherokee had made land concessions and border agreements on 20 occasions with the British and American colonists, and once with New Spain, at the Treaty of Pensacola, 30 May 1784, in an alliance and commerce between New Spain and the Cherokee and Muscogee. See Cherokee Treaties.
Breaking rugged boundaries: American expansion onto Indian lands
By Kathryn Braund, Auburn University
The first Treaty of Hopewell was signed between the U.S. representative Benjamin Hawkins and the Cherokee Indians. The treaty laid out a western boundary for American settlement.
The treaty gave rise to the sardonic Cherokee phrase of "Talking Leaves", since they claimed that when the treaties no longer suited the Americans, they would blow away like talking leaves.
By 1827, as part of this process of self determination, the Cherokee Nation drafted a Constitution that reflected the model that the United States had adopted, with executive, legislative and judicial branches and a system of checks and balances. This was, perhaps, the culminating moment in this process of Cherokee resistence to the underlying "imperialist" imperative, an imperative that would drive the territorial expansion of the United States westward across those boundaries, and in contradiction of agreements by treaty. The process, in the end, failed, regardless of the thorough, and revolutionary efforts the Cherokee had made during these three decades to become "civilized".
"Talking Leaves" and the protection of the Cherokee by the United States?
Little Turkey was elected First Beloved Man by the general council of the Cherokee upon the re-establishment of the council's seat at Ustanali on the Conasauga River in 1788. The United States acknowledged his rival, Hanging Maw of Coyatee, as the Cherokee leading headman, but the larger part of the Cherokee themselves, including the Chickamauga Cherokee (or Lower Cherokee) who followed Dragging Canoe, recognized Little Turkey as leader. Following the end of the Cherokee–American wars (1794) and the subsequent organization that year of a national government, his title became Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation—a title he held until his death in 1801.
The treaty that had ended the Cherokee-American wars was negotiated (and signed on November 8, 1794) at the Tellico Blockhouse an early American outpost located along the Little Tennessee River in Vonore, Monroe County, Tennessee. During this period, the blockhouse was the site of official liaisons between the United States government and the Cherokee. Cherokee chiefs Hanging Maw (representing the Upper Cherokee) and Colonel John Watt (representing the Lower Cherokee, or "Chickamauga") met with Governor William Blount to negotiate an end to the violence. All sides agreed to recognize boundaries set forth in previous treaties.
Completed in 1794, the blockhouse operated until 1807 with the purpose of keeping the peace between nearby Overhill Cherokee towns and early Euro-American settlers in the area in the wake of the Cherokee–American wars.
The Tellico Blockhouse became the site where several treaties were negotiated in which the Cherokee were induced to cede large portions of land in Tennessee and Georgia.
- The First Treaty of Tellico, also known as the Treaty with the Cherokee, negotiated in 1797 and signed on October 2, 1798, aimed to resolve differences brought about by the attempts of the U.S. Congress to force illegal settlers ("squatters") from Cherokee lands. In exchange for ceding land to the settlers, the Cherokee received various financial incentives and a guarantee of the right of the Cherokee Nation to "exist forever."The U.S. negotiators, acting on instructions from Governor John Sevier, included James Robertson, Lachlan McIntosh, Thomas Butler, and James White.
- The Second Treaty of Tellico, signed on October 24, 1804, brought the Wafford settlements in northern Georgia under U.S. dominion. The Cherokee received various financial incentives. Colonel Return J. Meigs negotiated the treaty for the United States.
- The Third Treaty of Tellico, signed on October 25, 1805, and the Fourth Treaty of Tellico, signed two days later on October 27, brought the land between the Cumberland River and Duck River (i.e., most of the Cumberland Plateau) under U.S. dominion. The goal of the U.S. was to connect East Tennessee with Nashville. Both treaties were negotiated for the United States by Colonel Return J. Meigs. Two of the Cherokee negotiators, Doublehead and Tollunteeskee, were later criticized for including "secret articles" that allowed for personal incentives.
Perhaps it was this previous agreement and treaty that established the terms of relations between the United States and the Cherokee, and, most significantly, established that the Cherokee tribes were to fall under the protection of the United States, with the United States managing all future foreign affairs for all the loosely affiliated Cherokee tribes.
The terms of this treaty, were, in the end, to become the means to exercising forms of "protection" of the Cherokee tribes that were to result in a state policy of the United States of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide".
George Washington sought to 'civilize' Southeastern American Indians, through programs overseen by the Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins. He encouraged the Cherokee to abandon their communal land-tenure and settle on individual farmsteads, which was facilitated by the destruction of many American Indian towns during the American Revolutionary War. The deerskin trade brought white-tailed deer to the brink of extinction, and as pigs and cattle were introduced, they became the principal sources of meat.
Culture Wars
The government supplied the tribes with spinning wheels and cotton-seed, and men were taught to fence and plow the land, in contrast to their traditional division in which crop cultivation was woman's labor. Americans instructed the women in weaving. Eventually Hawkins helped them set up smithys, gristmills and cotton plantations.
In 1806 a Federal Road from Savannah, Georgia to Knoxville, Tennessee was built through Cherokee land. Chief James Vann opened a tavern, inn and ferry across the Chattahoochee and built a cotton-plantation on a spur of the road from Athens, Georgia to Nashville. His son 'Rich Joe' Vann developed the plantation to 800 acres (3.2 km2), cultivated by 150 slaves. He exported cotton to England, and owned a steamboat on the Tennessee River.
The Cherokee allied with the U.S. against the nativist and pro-British Red Stick faction of the Upper Creek in the Creek War during the War of 1812. Cherokee warriors led by Major Ridge played a major role in General Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Major Ridge moved his family to Rome, Georgia, where he built a substantial house, developed a large plantation and ran a ferry on the Oostanaula River. Although he never learned English, he sent his son and nephews to New England to be educated in mission schools. His interpreter and protégé Chief John Ross, the descendant of several generations of Cherokee women and Scots fur-traders, built a plantation and operated a trading firm and a ferry at Ross' Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee). During this period, divisions arose between the acculturated elite and the great majority of Cherokee, who clung to traditional ways of life.
Around 1809 Sequoyah began developing a written form of the Cherokee language. He spoke no English, but his experiences as a silversmith dealing regularly with white settlers, and as a warrior at Horseshoe Bend, convinced him the Cherokee needed to develop writing.
In 1821, he introduced Cherokee syllabary, the first written syllabic form of an American Indian language outside of Central America. Initially his innovation was opposed by both Cherokee traditionalists and white missionaries, who sought to encourage the use of English. When Sequoyah taught children to read and write with the syllabary, he reached the adults. By the 1820s, the Cherokee had a higher rate of literacy than the whites around them in Georgia.
Cherokee National Council building,
New Echota
In 1819, the Cherokee began holding council meetings at New Town, at the headwaters of the Oostanaula (near present-day Calhoun, Georgia). In November 1825, New Town became the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and was renamed New Echota, after the Overhill Cherokee principal town of Chota. Sequoyah's syllabary was adopted. They had developed a police force, a judicial system, and a National Committee.
The Cherokee, as the trans-cultural interpreters of a European Enlightenment, decided that, in 1827, they would draft a Constitution with executive, legislative and judicial branches and a system of checks and balances. The two-tiered legislature was led by Major Ridge and his son John Ridge.
Convinced the tribe's survival required English-speaking leaders who could negotiate with the U.S., the legislature appointed John Ross as Principal Chief. A printing press was established at New Echota by the Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester and Major Ridge's nephew Elias Boudinot, who had taken the name of his white benefactor, a leader of the Continental Congress and New Jersey Congressman. They translated the Bible into Cherokee syllabary. Boudinot published the first edition of the bilingual 'Cherokee Phoenix,' the first American Indian newspaper, in February 1828.
Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian is a 1964 concept album, the twentieth album released by singer Johnny Cash on Columbia Records. It is one of several Americana records by Cash. This one focuses on the history of Native Americans in the United States and their problems. Cash believed that his ancestry included Cherokee, which partly inspired his work on this recording. He later learned that his ancestry was limited to the British Isles: English, Scots, Scots-Irish and Irish. The songs in this album address the harsh and unfair treatment of the indigenous peoples of North America by Europeans in the United States.
Q. What did the future hold for the Cherokee following acculturation?
A. Ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee!
Thomas Jefferson is an icon of individual liberty, democracy, and republicanism, hailed as the author of the Declaration of Independence, an architect of the American Revolution, President of the United States and a renaissance man who promoted science and scholarship. This same Thomas Jefferson also believed Native American peoples to be a noble race who were "in body and mind equal to the whiteman" and were endowed with an innate moral sense and a Indians setting marked capacity for reason. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson defended American Indian culture and marveled at how the tribes of Virginia "never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government" due to their "moral sense of right and wrong".
Jefferson was also a man of extreme contradictions. Jefferson consistently spoke out against the immorality of slavery and worked gradually to end the practice of slavery while he owned over 600 African-American slaves throughout his adult life and freed only seven.
Jefferson's hope, as interpreted by Francis Paul Prucha, was for the Native Americans to intermix with European Americans and to become one people. To achieve that end, Jefferson would, as President, offer U.S. citizenship to some Indian nations, and propose offering credit to them to facilitate their trade—with the expectation that they would be unable to honour their debts and thereby allow the United States to acquire their land.
Whilst Jefferson never removed any Native Americans, in private letters, this same Jefferson did suggest various ideas for removing tribes from enclaves in the East to their own new lands in lands west of the Mississippi. Before and during his presidency, Jefferson discussed the need for respect, brotherhood, and trade with the Native Americans, and he initially believed that causing them to adopt European-style agriculture and modes of living would allow them to quickly "progress" from "savagery" to "civilization". Beginning in 1803, Jefferson's private letters show increasing support for the idea of the removal of the "Indians". Jefferson maintained that "Indians" had land "to spare" and, he thought, would willingly exchange it for guaranteed supplies of food and equipment.
In cases where Native tribes resisted assimilation, Jefferson believed that to avoid war and probable extermination they should be forcefully relocated and sent west. As Jefferson put it in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt in 1813:
You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of our present war, we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.He told his Secretary of War, General Henry Dearborn (who was the primary government official responsible for Indian affairs): "if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi."
Jefferson's first promotions of Indian Removal were between 1776 and 1779, when he recommended forcing the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to be driven out of their ancestral homelands to lands west of the Mississippi River. Indian removal, said Jefferson, was the only way to ensure the survival of Native American peoples. His first such act as president, was to make a deal with the state of Georgia that if Georgia were to release its legal claims to discovery in lands to the west, then the U.S. military would help forcefully expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. At the time, the Cherokee had a treaty with the United States government which guaranteed them the right to their lands, which was violated in Jefferson's deal with Georgia.
How "civilized" do indigenous people need to become to be free from the prospect of removal from their own lands?
Jefferson initially promoted an American policy that encouraged Native Americans to become assimilated, or "civilized". As President, Jefferson made sustained efforts to win the friendship and cooperation of many Native American tribes, repeatedly articulating his desire for a united nation of both whites and Indians, as in a letter to the Seneca spiritual leader, Handsome Lake, dated November 3, 1802:
Go on then, brother, in the great reformation you have undertaken.... In all your enterprises for the good of your people, you may count with confidence on the aid and protection of the United States, and on the sincerity and zeal with which I am myself animated in the furthering of this humane work. You are our brethren of the same land; we wish your prosperity as brethren should do. Farewell.When a delegation from the Upper Towns of the Cherokee Nation lobbied Jefferson for the full and equal citizenship George Washington had promised to Indians living in American territory, his response indicated that he was willing to accommodate citizenship for those Indian nations that sought it.[33] In his Eighth Annual Message to Congress on November 8, 1808, he presented to the nation a vision of white and Indian unity:
With our Indian neighbors the public peace has been steadily maintained.... And, generally, from a conviction that we consider them as part of ourselves, and cherish with sincerity their rights and interests, the attachment of the Indian tribes is gaining strength daily... and will amply requite us for the justice and friendship practiced towards them.... [O]ne of the two great divisions of the Cherokee nation have now under consideration to solicit the citizenship of the United States, and to be identified with us in laws and government, in such progressive manner as we shall think best.As some of Jefferson's other writings illustrate, however, he was ambivalent about Indian assimilation, even going so far as to use the words "exterminate" and "extirpate" regarding tribes that resisted American expansion and were willing to fight to defend their lands. Jefferson's intention was to change Indian lifestyles from hunter-gatherering to farming, largely through "the decrease of game rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient".[36] He expected that the switch to agriculture would make them dependent on white Americans for trade goods and therefore more likely to give up their land in exchange, or else be removed to lands west of the Mississippi. In a private 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:
Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.Elsewhere in the same letter, Jefferson spoke of protecting the Indians from injustices perpetrated by whites:
Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians, to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them, by everything just and liberal which we can do for them within... reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people.By the terms of the treaty of February 27, 1819, the U.S. government would again offer citizenship to the Cherokees who lived east of the Mississippi River, along with 640 acres of land per family. Native American land was sometimes purchased, either via a treaty or under duress. The idea of land exchange, that is, that Native Americans would give up their land east of the Mississippi in exchange for a similar amount of territory west of the river, was first proposed by Jefferson in 1803 and had first been incorporated in treaties in 1817, years after the Jefferson presidency.
Under President James Monroe, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun devised the first plans for Indian removal. By late 1824, Monroe approved Calhoun's plans and in a special message to the Senate on January 27, 1825, requested the creation of the Arkansaw Territory and Indian Territory. The Indians east of the Mississippi were to voluntarily exchange their lands for lands west of the river. The Senate accepted Monroe's request and asked Calhoun to draft a bill, which was killed in the House of Representatives by the Georgia delegation.
President John Quincy Adams assumed the Calhoun–Monroe policy and was determined to remove the Indians by non-forceful means, but Georgia refused to submit to Adams' request, forcing Adams to make a treaty with the Cherokees granting Georgia the Cherokee lands.
When on July 26, 1827, the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution which declared they were an independent nation with jurisdiction over their own lands, the state of Georgia contended that it would not countenance a sovereign state within its own territory, and proceeded to assert its authority over Cherokee territory.
Such a contention was only plausible if a political, historical and ethical amnesia was allowed to prevail. The Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole tribes) were living as autonomous nations in what would be later called the American Deep South. The process of cultural transformation, as proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox, was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.
American settlers had been pressuring the federal government to remove Indians from the Southeast; many settlers were encroaching on Indian lands, while others wanted more land made available to European ('Caucasian'/'white') settlers.
When Andrew Jackson became president as the candidate of the newly organized Democratic Party, he agreed that the Indians should be forced to exchange their eastern lands for western lands and relocate to them, and enforced Indian removal policy vigorously. Jackson's effort was vehemently opposed by some, including U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett of Tennessee. Crockett was the only member of the Tennessee delegation to vote against 1830 Indian Removal Act. Cherokee chief John Ross sent him a letter on January 13, 1831 expressing his thanks for Crockett's vote. His vote was not popular with his own district, and he was defeated in the 1831 election by William Fitzgerald.
"I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure.... I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgement."
David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett (1834)
Despite the opposition in Congress President Andrew Jackson was able to gain Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to extinguish Indian title to lands in the Southeast.
Such a policy was only feasible as a result of the Louisiana Purchase of French territories west of the Mississippi in 1803, a situation prompted by France's failure to put down the revolt in Saint-Domingue of African slaves, the "Black Jocobins", coupled with the prospect of renewed warfare with the United Kingdom. It was these circumstances that prompted Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States to fund his military.
The acceptance of this bargain was to set the United States on an imperialist trajectory, one that established and institutionalised what has more recently been discussed as internal colonialism. Internal colonialism describes and analyses the uneven effects of economic development on a regional basis, otherwise known as "uneven development" as a result of the exploitation of minority groups within a wider society and leading to political and economic inequalities between regions within a state. This is held to be similar to the relationship between metropole and colony, in colonialism proper. The phenomenon creates a distinct separation of the dominant core from the periphery in an empire. Robert Blauner is regarded as the developer of the Internal Colonialism Theory. The "Blauner Hypothesis" states that minority groups created by colonization, because it is forced on them, experience a greater degree of racism and discrimination than those created by voluntary immigration.
Americans had originally only sought to purchase the port city of New Orleans and its adjacent coastal lands. The Louisiana Purchase was accomplished during the Presidential term of Thomas Jefferson, but not before significant Federalist Party opposition; they argued that it was unconstitutional to acquire any territory. Jefferson agreed that the U.S. Constitution did not contain explicit provisions for acquiring territory, but he asserted that his constitutional power to negotiate treaties was sufficient.
The Trail of Tears
The statutory argument for Indian sovereignty persisted until the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), that (e.g.) the Cherokee were not a sovereign and independent nation, and therefore not entitled to a hearing before the court. However, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the court re-established limited internal sovereignty under the sole jurisdiction of the federal government, in a ruling that both opposed the subsequent forced relocation and set the basis for modern U.S. case law.
While the latter ruling was defied by Jackson, the actions of the Jackson administration were not isolated because state and federal officials had violated treaties without consequence, often attributed to military exigency, as the members of individual Indian nations were not automatically United States citizens and were rarely given standing in any U.S. court.
Jackson's involvement in what became known as the Trail of Tears cannot be ignored. In a speech regarding Indian removal, Jackson said, "It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions; will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." According to Jackson, the move would be nothing but beneficial for all parties. His point of view garnered support from many Americans, many of whom would benefit economically from the removal.
This was compounded by the fact that while citizenship tests existed for Indians living in newly annexed areas before and after forced relocation, individual U.S. states did not recognize tribal land claims, only individual title under State law, and distinguished between the rights of white and non-white citizens, who often had limited standing in court; and Indian removal was carried out under U.S. military jurisdiction, often by state militias. As a result, individual Indians who could prove U.S. citizenship were nevertheless displaced from newly annexed areas. The military actions and subsequent treaties enacted by Jackson's and Martin Van Buren's administrations pursuant to the 1830 law, are widely considered to have directly caused the expulsion or death of a substantial part of the Indian population then living in the southeastern United States.
On September 27, 1830, the Choctaw signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and by concession, became the first Native American tribe to be removed. The agreement represented one of the largest transfers of land that was signed between the U.S. Government and Native Americans without being instigated by warfare. By the treaty, the Choctaw signed away their remaining traditional homelands, opening them up for European-American settlement in Mississippi Territory. When the Choctaw reached Little Rock, a Choctaw chief referred to the trek as a;
"trail of tears and death".
The Choctaws were the first to sign a removal treaty presented by the federal government. President Andrew Jackson wanted strong negotiations with the Choctaws in Mississippi, and the Choctaws seemed much more cooperative than Andrew Jackson had imagined. When commissioners and Choctaws came to negotiation agreements it was said the United States would bear the expense of moving their homes and that they had to be removed within two and a half years of the signed treaty.
In 1832 a young 22-year-old Harkins wrote the Farewell Letter to the American People.
The Choctaw nation occupied large portions of what are now the U.S. states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. After a series of treaties starting in 1801, the Choctaw nation was reduced to 11,000,000 acres (45,000 km2). The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek ceded the remaining country to the United States and was ratified in early 1831.
The removals were only agreed to after a provision in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek allowed some Choctaw to remain. The chief of the Choctaw tribe, George W. Harkins, wrote to the citizens of the United States before the removals were to commence:
It is with considerable diffidence that I attempt to address the American people, knowing and feeling sensibly my incompetency; and believing that your highly and well improved minds would not be well entertained by the address of a Choctaw. But having determined to emigrate west of the Mississippi river this fall, I have thought proper in bidding you farewell to make a few remarks expressive of my views, and the feelings that actuate me on the subject of our removal.... We as Choctaws rather chose to suffer and be free, than live under the degrading influence of laws, which our voice could not be heard in their formation.— George W. Harkins, George W. Harkins to the American People
United States Secretary of War Lewis Cass appointed George Gaines to manage the removals. Gaines decided to remove Choctaws in three phases starting in 1831 and ending in 1833. The first was to begin on November 1, 1831 with groups meeting at Memphis and Vicksburg. A harsh winter would batter the emigrants with flash floods, sleet, and snow. Initially the Choctaws were to be transported by wagon but floods halted them. With food running out, the residents of Vicksburg and Memphis were concerned. Five steamboats (the Walter Scott, the Brandywine, the Reindeer, the Talma, and the Cleopatra) would ferry Choctaws to their river-based destinations.
The Memphis group traveled up the Arkansas for about 60 miles (100 km) to Arkansas Post. There the temperature stayed below freezing for almost a week with the rivers clogged with ice, so there could be no travel for weeks. Food rationing consisted of a handful of boiled corn, one turnip, and two cups of heated water per day. Forty government wagons were sent to Arkansas Post to transport them to Little Rock. When they reached Little Rock, a Choctaw chief referred to their trek as a "trail of tears and death". The Vicksburg group was led by an incompetent guide and was lost in the Lake Providence swamps.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher, witnessed the Choctaw removals while in Memphis, Tennessee in 1831:
In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung. The Indians were tranquil, but sombre and taciturn. There was one who could speak English and of whom I asked why the Chactas were leaving their country. "To be free," he answered, could never get any other reason out of him. We ... watch the expulsion ... of one of the most celebrated and ancient American peoples.Nearly 17,000 Choctaws made the move to what would be called Indian Territory and then later Oklahoma. There are conservative estimates of 2,500 and possibly more, who had died along the trail of tears.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Nearly 15,000 Choctaws (together with their 1000 or so slaves) made the move to what would be called Indian Territory and then later Oklahoma. The population transfer occurred in three migrations during the 1831-33 period including the devastating winter blizzard of 1830-31 and the cholera epidemic of 1832. About 2,500 died along the trail of tears.
Approximately 5,000–6,000 Choctaws remained in Mississippi in 1831 after the initial removal efforts. For the next ten years they were objects of increasing legal conflict, harassment, and intimidation. The Choctaws described their situation in 1849, "we have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died."
Racism was rampant. Joseph B. Cobb, who moved to Mississippi from Georgia, described Choctaws as having "no nobility or virtue at all, and in some respect he found blacks, especially native Africans, more interesting and admirable, the red man's superior in every way. The Choctaw and Chickasaw, the tribes he knew best, were beneath contempt, that is, even worse than black slaves." The removals continued well into the early 20th century. In 1903, three hundred Mississippi Choctaws were persuaded to move to the Nation in Oklahoma.
The Creek dissolution
The early historic Muscogee were descendants of the mound builders of the Mississippian culture along the Tennessee River in modern Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. They may have been related to the Tama of central Georgia. Oral traditions passed down by the ancestors of the Creeks have alleged that their nation migrated eastward from places West of the Mississippi River, eventually settling on the east bank of the Ocmulgee River. It was here that they waged war with other bands of Native American Indians, as the Savannas, Ogeeches, Wapoos, Santees, Yamafees, Utinas, Icofans, Paticans and others, until at length they had extirpated them.
Contact with the Spanish conquistadors
At the time the Spanish made their first forays inland from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, many political centers of the Mississippians were already in decline, or abandoned. The region is best described as a collection of moderately sized native chiefdoms (such as the Coosa chiefdom on the Coosa River) interspersed with completely autonomous villages and tribal groups. The late Mississippian culture is what the earliest Spanish explorers encountered, beginning on April 2, 1513, with Juan Ponce de León's Florida landing and the 1526 Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón expedition in South Carolina.
The Spanish "discovery" of Florida was instigated following rumours of undiscovered islands to the northwest of Christopher Columbus' Hispaniola had reached Spain by 1511, and King Ferdinand was interested in forestalling further exploration and discovery by Columbus. In an effort to reward Ponce de León for his services, Ferdinand urged him to seek these new lands outside the authority of Colón. Ponce de León readily agreed to a new venture, and in February 1512 a royal contract was dispatched outlining his rights and authorities to search for "the Islands of Benimy". The three ships in Ponce de León's small fleet were the Santiago, the San Cristobal and the Santa Maria de la Consolacion. Anton de Alaminos was their chief pilot. He was already an experienced sailor, and would become one of the most respected pilots in the region. After leaving Puerto Rico, they sailed northwest along the great chain of Bahama Islands, known then as the Lucayos. On March 27, Easter Sunday, they sighted an island that was unfamiliar to the sailors on the expedition. Because many Spanish seamen were acquainted with the Bahamas, which had been depopulated by slaving ventures, some scholars believe that this "island" was actually Florida, as it was thought to be an island for several years after its formal discovery. Other scholars have speculated that this island was one of the northern Bahama islands, perhaps Great Abaco.
For the next several days the fleet crossed open water until April 2, 1513, when they sighted land which Ponce de León believed was another island. He named it La Florida in recognition of the verdant landscape and because it was the Easter season, which the Spaniards called Pascua Florida (Festival of Flowers).
According to a popular legend, Ponce de León discovered Florida while searching for the Fountain of Youth. Though stories of vitality-restoring waters were known on both sides of the Atlantic long before Ponce de León, the story of his searching for them was not attached to him until after his death. In his Historia general y natural de las Indias of 1535, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés wrote that Ponce de León was looking for the waters of Bimini to cure his aging. A similar account appears in Francisco López de Gómara's Historia general de las Indias of 1551.
Then in 1575, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a shipwreck survivor who had lived with the Native Americans of Florida for 17 years, published his memoir in which he locates the waters in Florida, and says that Ponce de León was supposed to have looked for them there. Though Fontaneda doubted that Ponce de León had really gone to Florida looking for the waters, the account was included in the Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas of 1615. Most historians hold that the search for gold and the expansion of the Spanish Empire were far more imperative than any potential search for such a fountain.
There is a possibility that the Fountain of Youth was an allegory for the Bahamian love vine, which locals brew today as an aphrodisiac. Ponce de León could have been seeking it as a potential entrepreneurial venture. Woodrow Wilson believed Indian servants brewing a "brown tea" in Puerto Rico may have inspired Ponce de León's search for the Fountain of Youth. Arne Molander has speculated that the adventurous conquistador mistook the natives' "vid" (vine) for "vida" (life) – transforming their "fountain vine" into an imagined "fountain of life".
Before contact with European explorers, conquerors and colonists, the Muscogees did not have the concept of private property; everything was shared. Similarly, they did not have a structured government; decisions were made by consensus. Both of these forms of social structure gradually broke down and disappeared, partly because the Musgogees found the items the Europeans had to sell, such as muskets, or alcohol highly desirable, and they acquired and used the money exchanged with Europeans in the trade of deer hides. The communal form of governement disappeared partly because the Spanish pressed them to say whom they could negotiate with; government by consensus was unknown in Europe at that time.
When the Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto arrived in 1540, and as the de Soto expedition's brutalities became known to the indigenous peoples, they took action to defend their territory. De Soto's expedition introduced new infectious diseases carried by the Europeans, causing catastrophic epidemics with high rates of fatality among the indigenous peoples. These losses were exacerbated by the Indian slave trade that flourished in the Southeast during the 17th and 18th centuries. As the survivors and descendants regrouped, the Muscogee or Creek Confederacy arose, which was a loose alliance of Muskogee-speaking peoples.
Contact with colonists
In 1736, Spanish and British officials established a neutral zone from the Altamaha to the St. Johns River in present-day Florida, guaranteeing Native hunting grounds for the deerskin trade and protecting Spanish Florida from further British encroachment.
Around 1750 a group of Ochese moved to the neutral zone, after clashing with the Muskogee-speaking towns of the Chattahoochee, where they had fled after the Yamasee War. Led by Chief Secoffee (Cowkeeper), they became the centre of a new tribal confederacy, the Seminole, which grew to include earlier refugees from the Yamasee War, remnants of the 'mission Indians,' and escaped African slaves. A large population of Muscogee people moved into Florida between roughly 1767 and 1821 and these people intermarried with local tribes to become the Seminole people, thereby establishing a separate identity from the Creek Confederacy. Muscogee people in these waves of migration into Florida were fleeing conflict and encroachment by European settlers.
Their name comes from the Spanish word cimarrones, which originally referred to a domestic animal that had reverted to the wild. Cimarrones was used by the Spanish and Portuguese to refer to fugitive slaves—"maroon" emerges linguistically from this root as well—and American Indians who fled European invaders. In the Hitchiti language, which lacked an 'r' sound, it became simanoli, and eventually Seminole.
The Muscogee were regarded as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes" by the colonists, because they were said to have integrated numerous cultural and technological practices of their more recent European American neighbors. In fact, Muscogee confederated town networks were already based on an (at minimum) 900-year-old history of complex and well-organized farming and town layouts. The Muscogee were, in fact, the first Native Americans officially considered by the early United States government to be "civilized" under George Washington's so-called "civilization plan".
In 1796, Washington appointed Benjamin Hawkins as General Superintendent of Indian Affairs dealing with all tribes south of the Ohio River. He personally assumed the role of principal agent to the Muscogee. He moved to the area that is now Crawford County in Georgia. He began to teach agricultural practices to the tribe, starting a farm at his home on the Flint River. In time, he brought in slaves and workers, cleared several hundred acres, and established mills and a trading post as well as his farm. For years, Hawkins met with chiefs on his porch to discuss matters. He was responsible for the longest period of peace between the settlers and the tribe, overseeing 19 years of peace.
The Great Temple Mound (right) and the Lesser Mound (left) at Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park
In 1805, the Lower Creeks ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee to Georgia, with the exception of the sacred burial mounds of the Ocmulgee Old Fields. They allowed a Federal Road linking New Orleans to Washington, D.C. to be built through their territory. A number of Muscogee chiefs acquired slaves and created cotton plantations, grist mills and businesses along the Federal Road. In 1806, Fort Benjamin Hawkins was built on a hill overlooking the Ocmulgee Old Fields, to protect expanding settlements and serve as a reminder of U.S. rule.
Hawkins was disheartened and shocked by the outbreak of the Creek War, which destroyed his life work of improving the Muscogee quality of life. Hawkins saw much of his work toward building a peace destroyed in 1812. A faction of Muscogee joined the Pan-American Indian movement of Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh, rejecting accommodation with white settlers and adaptation of European-American culture. Although Hawkins personally was never attacked, he was forced to watch an internal civil war among the Muscogee develop into a war with the United States.
The Great Comet of 1811 or 1812?
The Great Comet of 1811, is a comet that was visible to the naked eye for around 260 days, a record it held until the appearance of Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997. In October 1811, at its brightest, it displayed an apparent magnitude of 0, with an easily visible coma.
The comet was discovered March 25, 1811 by Honoré Flaugergues After being obscured for several days by moonlight, it was also found by Jean-Louis Pons on April 11, while Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach was able to confirm Flaugergues' discovery the same night.
The first provisional orbit was computed in June by Johann Karl Burckhardt. Based on these calculations, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers made a prediction that the comet would go on to become extremely bright later that year.
From May to August, the comet's position made it difficult to spot because of its low altitude and the evening twilight. Both Flaugergues and Olbers were able to recover it in Leo Minor during August, Olbers noting a small but distinct tail, consisting of two rays forming a parabola, when viewing through a comet seeker.
By September, in Ursa Major, it was becoming a conspicuous object in the evening sky as it approached perihelion: William Herschel noted that a tail 25° long had developed by October 6. By January 1812, the comet's brightness had faded.
The comet was popularly thought to have portended Napoleon's invasion of Russia, even being referred to as "Napoleon's Comet", and also the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.
At the midpoint of War and Peace, Tolstoy describes the character of Pierre observing this "enormous and brilliant comet [...] which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world".
It appears at the end of Book Eight (in my Kropoktin translation). Pierre has just confessed his love to Natasha. Here’s the passage:
“Where now?” asked the driver.
“Where?” repeated Pierre to himself. “Where can I go now? To the club, or to make some calls?”
All men, at this moment, seemed to him so contemptible, so mean, in comparison with the feeling of emotion and love that overmastered him–in comparison with that softened glance of gratitude which she had given him just now through her tears.
“Home,” said Pierre, throwing back his bearskin cloak over his broad, joyfully throbbing chest, though the mercury marked ten degrees of frost.
It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, half-lighted streets, above the black roofs of the houses, stretched the dark, starry heavens. Only as Pierre gazed at the heavens above, he ceased to feel the humiliating pettiness of everything earthly in comparison with the height to which his soul aspired. As he drove out of Argat Square, the mighty expanse of the dark, starry sky spread out before his eyes. Almost in the zenith of this sky–above the Pretchistensky Boulevard–convoyed and surrounded on every side by stars, but distinguished from all the rest by its nearness to the earth, and by its white light, and by its long, curling tail, stood the tremendous brilliant comet of 1812–the very comet that men thought presaged all manner of woes and the end of the world.
But in Pierre, this brilliant luminary, with its long train of light, awoke no terror. On the contrary, rapturously, his eyes wet with tears, he contemplated this glorious star which seemed to him to have come flying with inconceivable swiftness through measureless space, straight toward the earth, there to strike like an enormous arrow, and remain in that one predestined spot upon the dark sky; and, pausing, raise aloft with monstrous force its curling tail, flashing and sparkling with white light, amid the countless other twinkling stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star was the complete reply to all that was in his soul as it blossomed into new life, filled with tenderness and love.
The information panel in the Tate Display Caption says:
John Varley – an artist, astrologer and close friend of Blake – reported in his Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1882) that Blake once had a spiritual vision of a ghost of a flea and that ‘This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect.’
While drawing the spirit it told the artist that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of men who were ‘by nature bloodthirsty to excess’. In the painting it holds a cup for blood-drinking and stares eagerly towards it. Blake’s amalgamation of man and beast suggests a human character marred by animalistic traits.
A spectre of the "Men of Blood"?As the comet appeared in March 1811, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, whose name meant "shooting star", travelled to Tuckabatchee, where he told the Muscogee that the comet signaled his coming. McKenney reported that Tecumseh would prove that the Great Spirit had sent him by giving the Muscogee a sign. Shortly after Tecumseh left the Southeast, the sign arrived as promised in the form of an earthquake.
On December 16, 1811, the New Madrid earthquake shook the Muscogee lands and the Midwest. While the interpretation of this event varied from tribe to tribe, one consensus was universally accepted: the powerful earthquake had to have meant something. The earthquake and its aftershocks helped the Tecumseh resistance movement by convincing, not only the Muscogee, but other Native American tribes as well, that the Shawnee must be supported.
The Indians were filled with great terror ... the trees and wigwams shook exceedingly; the ice which skirted the margin of the Arkansas river was broken into pieces; and most of the Indians thought that the Great Spirit, angry with the human race, was about to destroy the world.— Roger L. Nichols, The American Indian
The Muscogee who joined Tecumseh's confederation were known as the Red Sticks. Stories of the origin of the Red Stick name varies, but one is that they were named for the Muscogee tradition of carrying a bundle of sticks that mark the days until an event occurs. Sticks painted red symbolize war.
Tecumseh was among the most celebrated Native American leaders in history and was known as a strong and eloquent orator who promoted tribal unity. He was also ambitious, willing to take risks, and make significant sacrifices to repel the Americans from Native American lands in the Old Northwest Territory. In 1808, with his brother Tenskwatawa ("The Prophet"), Tecumseh founded the Native American village the European Americans called Prophetstown, north of present-day Lafayette, Indiana. Prophetstown grew into a large, multi-tribal community and a central point in Tecumseh's political and military alliance.
In his early years Tenskwatawa was given the name Lalawithika ("He Makes a Loud Noise", "The Noise Maker", or "The Rattle"), of the Red Stick Creek Indians. He denounced the Euro-American settlers, calling them offspring of the Evil Spirit, and led a purification movement that promoted unity among Native Americans, rejected acculturation to the settler way of life, including alcohol, and encouraged his followers to pursue traditional ways.
Tecumseh was not ready to confront the United States directly. His primary adversaries were initially the Native American leaders who had signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne.
The Treaty of Fort Wayne, sometimes called the Ten O'clock Line Treaty or the Twelve Mile Line Treaty, is an 1809 treaty that obtained 3,000,000 acres (approximately 12,000 km²) of American Indian land for the white settlers of Illinois and Indiana.
The tribes involved were the Delaware and others. The negotiations excluded the Shawnee who were minor inhabitants of the area and had been asked to leave the area previously by Miami War Chief Little Turtle. Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison negotiated the treaty with the tribes. The treaty led to a war with the United States begun by Shawnee leader Tecumseh and other dissenting tribesmen in what came to be called "Tecumseh's War".
Tecumseh, an impressive orator, began to travel widely, urging warriors to abandon the accommodationist chiefs and to join his resistance movement. He insisted that the Fort Wayne treaty was illegal and asked Harrison to nullify it. Tecumseh also warned that the European Americans should not attempt to settle on the ceded lands and claimed that;
"the only way to stop this evil [loss of land] is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided".Tecumseh met with William Henry Harrison in 1810 and in 1811 to demand that the U.S. government rescind its land cession treaties with the Shawnee and other tribes. Harrison refused.
In mid-August 1810, Tecumseh led 400 armed warriors from Prophetstown to confront Harrison at Grouseland, the territorial governor's home at Vincennes. The warriors' appearance startled the townspeople and the gathering quickly became hostile after Harrison rejected Tecumseh's demands. Harrison argued that individual tribes could have relations with the U.S. government and claimed that the tribes of the area did not welcome Tecumseh's interference. Tecumseh's response to Harrison's remarks included his impassioned rebuttal:
Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children? How can we have confidence in the white people?Tecumseh's confederation fought the United States during Tecumseh's War, but he was unsuccessful in getting the U.S. government to rescind the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809) and other land-cession treaties, and so, in 1811, he travelled south to recruit more allies, and it was in this enetrprise he persuaded a section of the Muscogee Creeks, the so-called Red Sticks, to join in this resistence to the dispossession of the lands of indigenous people, and the enrichment of those interests prepared to engage in military violence to secure the accumulation of a vast property, and at the expense of the native populations.
Tecumseh's confederation fought the United States during Tecumseh's War, but he was unsuccessful in getting the U.S. government to rescind the Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809) and other land-cession treaties. In 1811, as he traveled south to recruit more allies.
It was at this time that Tecumseh exhorted the Muscogee Creek to join him in this existential war of liberation and resistence. Influenced by Tenskwatawa's interpretations of the 1811 comet and the New Madrid earthquakes, the Upper Towns of the Muscogee, supported by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, actively resisted European-American encroachment. Internal divisions with the Lower Towns led to the Red Stick War (Creek War, 1813–1814). Begun as a civil war within Muscogee factions, it enmeshed the Northern Creek Bands in the War of 1812 against the United States while the Southern Creeks remained US allies. General Andrew Jackson then seized the opportunity to use the rebellion as an excuse to make war against all Muscogee people once the northern Creek rebellion had been put down with the aid of the Southern Creeks. The result was a weakening of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy and the forced cession of Muscogee lands to the US.
In August 1814, the Red Sticks surrendered to Jackson at Wetumpka (near the present city of Montgomery, Alabama). On August 9, 1814, the Muscogee nation was forced to sign the Treaty of Fort Jackson. It ended the war and required the tribe to cede some 20 million acres (81,000 km2) of land— more than half of their ancestral territorial holdings— to the United States. Even those who had fought alongside Jackson were compelled to cede land, since Jackson held them responsible for allowing the Red Sticks to revolt. The state of Alabama was created largely from the Red Sticks' domain and was admitted to the United States in 1819.
WHEREAS an unprovoked, inhuman, and sanguinary war, waged by the hostile Creeks against the United States, hath been repelled, prosecuted and determined, successfully, on the part of the said States, in conformity with principles of national justice and honorable warfare-- And whereas consideration is due to the rectitude of proceeding dictated by instructions relating to the re-establishment of peace: Be it remembered, that prior to the conquest of that part of the Creek nation hostile to the United States, numberless aggressions had been committed against the peace, the property, and the lives of citizens of the United States ...Many Muscogee refused to surrender and escaped to Florida. They allied with other remnant tribes, becoming the Seminole. Muscogee were later involved on both sides of the Seminole Wars in Florida.
— Treaty of Fort Jackson, 1814
The Red Stick refugees who arrived in Florida after the Creek War tripled the Seminole population, and strengthened the tribe's Muscogee characteristics. In 1814, British forces landed in West Florida and began arming the Seminoles. The British had built a strong fort on the Apalachicola River at Prospect Bluff, and in 1815, after the end of the War of 1812, offered it, with all its ordnance (muskets, cannons, powder, shot, cannonballs) to the locals: Seminoles and maroons (escaped slaves).
"the deadliest cannon shot in American history"
Negro Fort had been built by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812, on the Apalachicola River, in a remote part of Spanish Florida. It is part of the Prospect Bluff Historic Sites, in the Apalachicola National Forest, Franklin County, Florida.
The fort was called Negro Fort only after the British left in 1815; its later residents were primarily black people, free or fugitive slaves, together with some Choctaws. There were a significant number of maroons already in the area before the fort was built and beginning in 1804 there was for several years a trading post. These people, having worked on plantations, knew how to plant and care for crops, and also to care for domesticated animals, mostly cattle.
When withdrawing in 1815, the local British commander, Edward Nicolls, deliberately left the fully armed fort in the hands of this group, and paid off the Colonial Marines and their Creek allies, most of whom resided there and took part in the defense of the fort. As Nicolls hoped, the fort became a center of resistance near the Southern border of the United States. The site was militarily significant, although without artillery training, the black people, tribal warriors, and ex-Marines were ultimately unable to defend themselves.
However, this remains the largest and most famous instance before the American Civil War in which armed former or fugitive slaves fought whites who sought to return them to slavery. The fort was destroyed in 1816 at the command of General Andrew Jackson. After notifying the Spanish governor, who had very limited resources, and who said he had no orders to take action, U.S. General Andrew Jackson quickly destroyed the Fort, in a famous and picturesque, though tragic, incident in 1816 that has been called "the deadliest cannon shot in American history". The attackers used heated shot against the powder magazine and ignited it, blowing up the fort and killing many people, immediately. Almost every source states all but about 60 of the 334 occupants of the Fort were instantly killed, and others died of their wounds shortly after, including many women and children. A more recent scholar says the number killed was "probably no more than forty", the remainder having fled before the attack. The explosion was heard more than 100 miles (160 km) away in Pensacola. Just afterward, the U.S. troops and the Creeks charged and captured the surviving defenders. Only three escaped injury; two of the three, an Indian and a Negro, were executed at Jackson's orders. General Gaines later reported that:
The explosion was awful and the scene horrible beyond description. You cannot conceive, nor I describe the horrors of the scene. In an instant lifeless bodies were stretched upon the plain, buried in sand or rubbish, or suspended from the tops of the surrounding pines. Here lay an innocent babe, there a helpless mother; on the one side a sturdy warrior, on the other a bleeding squaw. Piles of bodies, large heaps of sand, broken glass, accoutrements, etc., covered the site of the fort... Our first care, on arriving at the scene of the destruction, was to rescue and relieve the unfortunate beings who survived the explosion.Garçon, the black commander, and the Choctaw chief, among the few who survived, were handed over to the Creeks, who shot Garçon and scalped the chief. African-American survivors were returned to slavery. There were no white casualties from the explosion.
The Creek salvaged 2,500 muskets, 50 carbines, 400 pistols, and 500 swords from the ruins of the fort, increasing their power in the region. The Seminole, who had fought alongside the blacks, were conversely weakened by the loss of their allies. The Creek participation in the attack increased tension between the two tribes. Seminole anger at the U.S. for the fort's destruction contributed to the breakout of the First Seminole War a year later. However, the area continued to attract escaped slaves until the construction of Fort Gadsden in 1818.
The Seminole continued to welcome fugitive black slaves and raid American settlers, leading the U.S. to declare war in 1817. The following year, General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida with an army that included more than 1,000 Lower Creek warriors; they destroyed Seminole towns and captured Pensacola. Jackson's victory forced Spain to sign the Adams–OnÃs Treaty in 1819, ceding Florida to the U.S. In 1823, a delegation of Seminole chiefs met with the new U.S. governor of Florida, expressing their opposition to proposals that would reunite them with the Upper and Lower Creek, partly because the latter tribes intended to enslave the Black Seminoles. Instead, the Seminoles agreed to move onto a reservation in inland central Florida.
Another broken treaty promise!
In August 1814, peace discussions began in the neutral city of Ghent. The British opened with their demands, chief of which was the creation of an Indian barrier state in the American Northwest Territory. It was understood the British would sponsor this Indian state. The British strategy for decades had been to create a buffer state to block American expansion. The Americans refused to consider a buffer state and the proposal was dropped.
However, it was agreed in Article IX of the Treaty of Ghent that there be provisions to restore to Natives;
"...all possessions, rights and privileges which they may have enjoyed, or been entitled to in 1811 . . "Unfortunately, these provisions were unenforceable. In any case, the British soon lost interest in the idea of creating an Indian buffer state and stopped supporting or encouraging tribes in American territory.
After the War of 1812, some Muscogee leaders such as William McIntosh signed treaties that ceded more land to Georgia. The 1814 signing of the Treaty of Fort Jackson signaled the end for the Creek Nation and for all Indians in the South.
Friendly Creek leaders, like Selocta and Big Warrior, addressed Andrew Jackson and reminded him that they keep the peace. Nevertheless, Jackson retorted that they did not "cut Tecumseh's throat" when they had the chance, so they must now cede Creek lands. Jackson also ignored Article IX of the Treaty of Ghent that restored sovereignty to Indians and their nations
The situation is set out in Robert Remini's "The Creek War: Victory". Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Empire, 1767–1821. Vol. 1. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jackson opened this first peace session by faintly acknowledging the help of the friendly Creeks. That done, he turned to the Red Sticks and admonished them for listening to evil counsel. For their crime, he said, the entire Creek Nation must pay. He demanded the equivalent of all expenses incurred by the United States in prosecuting the war, which by his calculation came to 23,000,000 acres (93,000 km2) of land.— Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson
Eventually, the Creek Confederacy enacted a law that made further land cessions a capital offense. Nevertheless, on February 12, 1825, McIntosh and other chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, which gave up most of the remaining Creek lands in Georgia. After the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty, McIntosh was assassinated on April 30, 1825, by Creeks led by Menawa.
The Creek National Council, led by Opothle Yohola, protested to the United States that the Treaty of Indian Springs was fraudulent. President John Quincy Adams was sympathetic, and eventually the treaty was nullified in a new agreement, the Treaty of Washington (1826). The historian R. Douglas Hurt wrote: "The Creeks had accomplished what no Indian nation had ever done or would do again — achieve the annulment of a ratified treaty." (Hurt, R. Douglas (2002). The Indian Frontier, 1763–1846 (Histories of the American Frontier). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. p. 148.)
However, Governor Troup of Georgia ignored the new treaty and began to forcibly remove the Indians under the terms of the earlier treaty. At first, President Adams attempted to intervene with federal troops, but Troup called out the militia, and Adams, fearful of a civil war, conceded. As he explained to his intimates, "The Indians are not worth going to war over."
Although the Creeks had been forced from Georgia, with many Lower Creeks moving to the Indian Territory, there were still about 20,000 Upper Creeks living in Alabama. However, the state moved to abolish tribal governments and extend state laws over the Creeks. Opothle Yohola appealed to the administration of President Andrew Jackson for protection from Alabama; when none was forthcoming, the Treaty of Cusseta was signed on March 24, 1832, which divided up Creek lands into individual allotments. Creeks could either sell their allotments and receive funds to remove to the west, or stay in Alabama and submit to state laws. The Creeks were never given a fair chance to comply with the terms of the treaty, however. Rampant illegal settlement of their lands by Americans continued unabated with federal and state authorities unable or unwilling to do much to halt it.
Further, as recently detailed by historian Billy Winn in his thorough chronicle of the events leading to removal, a variety of fraudulent schemes designed to cheat the Creeks out of their allotments, many of them organized by speculators operating out of Columbus, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama, were perpetrated after the signing of the Treaty of Cusseta. A portion of the beleaguered Creeks, many desperately poor and feeling abused and oppressed by their American neighbors, struck back by carrying out occasional raids on area farms and committing other isolated acts of violence.
Escalating tensions erupted into open war with the United States following the destruction of the village of Roanoke, Georgia, located along the Chattahoochee River on the boundary between Creek and American territory, in May 1836. During the so-called "Creek War of 1836" Secretary of War Lewis Cass dispatched General Winfield Scott to end the violence by forcibly removing the Creeks to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.
During the Creek War of 1836, in Alabama, Opothleyahola, a Creek chief was commissioned as a Colonel by the U.S. government, led 1,500 of his warriors against the rebellious Lower Creek tribe who had allied themselves with the Seminole in fighting the white occupation
With the Indian Removal Act of 1830 this forcible removal continued into 1835 and after as in 1836 over 15,000 Creeks were driven from their land for the last time. 3,500 of those 15,000 Creeks did not survive the trip to Oklahoma where they eventually settled.
Seminole resistence
The Seminole peoples in their lands of the Florida territory ended up resisting the Indian Removal and going to war with United States. The U.S. acquired Florida from Spain via the Adams–OnÃs Treaty and took possession in 1821. In 1832 the Seminoles were called to a meeting at Payne's Landing on the Ocklawaha River. The treaty negotiated called for the Seminoles to move west, if the land were found to be suitable. They were to be settled on the Creek reservation and become part of the Creek tribe, who considered them deserters; some of the Seminoles had been derived from Creek bands but also from other tribes.
Those among the tribe who once were members of Creek bands did not wish to move west to where they were certain that they would meet death for leaving the main band of Creek Indians. The delegation of seven chiefs who were to inspect the new reservation did not leave Florida until October 1832.
After touring the area for several months and conferring with the Creeks who had already settled there, the seven chiefs signed a statement on March 28, 1833 that the new land was acceptable. Upon their return to Florida, however, most of the chiefs renounced the statement, claiming that they had not signed it, or that they had been forced to sign it, and in any case, that they did not have the power to decide for all the tribes and bands that resided on the reservation. The villages in the area of the Apalachicola River were more easily persuaded, however, and went west in 1834.
On December 28, 1835 a group of 180 Seminoles, along with about 50 African escaped slaves given sanctuary by the Seminole, ambushed a U.S. Army company marching from Fort Brooke in Tampa to Fort King in Ocala, killing all but three of the 110 army troops. This came to be known as the Dade Massacre.
As the realization that the Seminoles would resist relocation sank in, Florida began preparing for war. The St. Augustine Militia asked the War Department for the loan of 500 muskets. Five hundred volunteers were mobilized under Brig. Gen. Richard K. Call. Indian war parties raided farms and settlements, and families fled to forts, large towns, or out of the territory altogether. A war party led by Osceola captured a Florida militia supply train, killing eight of its guards and wounding six others. Most of the goods taken were recovered by the militia in another fight a few days later.
Sugar plantations along the Atlantic coast south of St. Augustine were destroyed, with many of the slaves on the plantations joining the Seminoles.
Other warchiefs such as Halleck Tustenuggee, Jumper, and Black Seminoles Abraham and John Horse continued the Seminole resistance against the army. The war ended, after a full decade of fighting, in 1842. The U.S. government is estimated to have spent about $20,000,000 on the war, at the time an astronomical sum, and equal to $519,241,379 today. Many Indians were forcibly exiled to Creek lands west of the Mississippi; others retreated into the Everglades. In the end, the government gave up trying to subjugate the Seminole in their Everglades redoubts and left fewer than 500 Seminoles in peace. Other scholars state that at least several hundred Seminoles remained in the Everglades after the Seminole Wars.
As a result of the Seminole Wars, the surviving Seminole band of the Everglades claims to be the only federally recognized tribe which never relinquished sovereignty or signed a peace treaty with the United States.
Chickasaw monetary removal
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was a 17th century French explorer and fur trader in North America, best known for an early 1682 expedition in which he canoed the lower Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the entire Mississippi River basin for France.
In 1682 he departed Fort Frontenac with a group of Frenchmen and Indians and canoed down the Mississippi River. He named the Mississippi basin La Louisiane in honor of Louis XIV and claimed it for France. On April 9, 1682, at the mouth of the Mississippi River near modern Venice, Louisiana, he buried an engraved plate and a cross, claiming the territory for France.
Following the founding of the United States, the Chickasaw signed the Treaty of Hopewell in 1786. Article 11 of that treaty states:
"The hatchet shall be forever buried, and the peace given by the United States of America, and friendship re-established between the said States on the one part, and the Chickasaw nation on the other part, shall be universal, and the contracting parties shall use their utmost endeavors to maintain the peace given as aforesaid, and friendship re-established."Benjamin Hawkins attended this signing.
Treaty of 1818
In 1818, leaders of the Chickasaw signed a treaty ceding all claims to land north of the southern border of Tennessee. The Chickasaw were allowed to retain a four-square-mile reservation, but were required to lease the land to European immigrants.
The Colbert legacy
In the mid-18th century, an American born trader of Scots and Chickasaw ancestry by the name of James Logan Colbert settled in the Muscle Shoals area of Mississippi. He lived there for the next 40 years, where he married three high-ranking Chickasaw women in succession. Chickasaw chiefs and high-status women found such marriages of strategic benefit to the tribe, as it gave them advantages with traders over other groups. Colbert and his wives had numerous children, including seven sons: William, Jonathan, George, Levi, Samuel, Joseph, and Pittman (or James). Six survived to adulthood (Jonathan died young.)
The Chickasaw had a matrilineal system, in which children were considered born into the mother's clan; and they gained their status in the tribe from her family. Property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line, and the mother's eldest brother was the main male mentor of the children, especially of boys. Because of the status of their mothers, for nearly a century, the Colbert-Chickasaw sons and their descendants provided critical leadership during the tribe's greatest challenges. They had the advantage of growing up bilingual.
Of these six sons, William "Chooshemataha" Colbert served with General Andrew Jackson during the Creek Wars of 1813-14. He also had served during the Revolutionary wars and received a commission from President George Washington in 1786 along with his namesake grandfather. His brothers Levi ("Itawamba Mingo") and George Colbert ("Tootesmastube") also had military service in support of the United States.
In addition, the two each served as interpreters and negotiators for chiefs of the tribe during the period of removal. Levi Colbert served as principal chief, which may have been a designation by the Americans, who did not understand the decentralized nature of the chiefs' council, based on the tribe reaching broad consensus for major decisions.
An example is that more than 40 chiefs from the Chickasaw Council, representing clans and villages, signed a letter in November 1832 by Levi Colbert to President Andrew Jackson, complaining about treaty negotiations with his appointee General John Coffee.
After Levi's death in 1834, the Chickasaw people were forced upon the Trail of Tears. His brother, George Colbert, reluctantly succeeded him as chief and principal negotiator, because he was bilingual and bicultural. George "Tootesmastube" Colbert never reached the Chickasaw's "Oka Homa"; he died on Choctaw territory, Fort Towson, enroute.
Treaty of Pontotoc Creek and Removal (1832-1837)
In 1832 after the state of Mississippi declared its jurisdiction over the Chickasaw Indians, outlawing tribal self-governance, Chickasaw chiefs assembled at the national council house on October 20, 1832 and signed the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, ceding their remaining Mississippi territory to the U.S. and agreeing to find land and relocate west of the Mississippi River. Between 1832 and 1837, the Chickasaw would make further negotiations and arrangements for their removal.
Unlike other tribes who received land grants in exchange for ceding territory, the Chickasaw held out for financial compensation: they were to receive $3 million U.S. dollars from the United States for their lands east of the Mississippi River. In 1836 after a bitter five-year debate within the tribe, the Chickasaw had reached an agreement to purchase land in Indian Territory from the previously removed Choctaw. They paid the Choctaw $530,000 for the westernmost part of their land. The first group of Chickasaw moved in 1837. For nearly 30 years, the US did not pay the Chickasaw the $3 million it owed them for their historic territory in the Southeast.
The Chickasaw gathered at Memphis, Tennessee, on July 4, 1837, with all of their portable assets: belongings, livestock, and enslaved African Americans. Three thousand and one Chickasaw crossed the Mississippi River, following routes established by the Choctaw and Creek. During the journey, often called the Trail of Tears by all the Southeast tribes that had to make it, more than 500 Chickasaw died of dysentery and smallpox.
When the Chickasaw reached Indian Territory, the United States began to administer to them through the Choctaw Nation, and later merged them for administrative reasons. The Chickasaw wrote their own constitution in the 1850s, an effort contributed to by Holmes Colbert.
After several decades of mistrust between the two peoples, in the twentieth century, the Chickasaw re-established their independent government. They are federally recognized as the Chickasaw Nation. The government is headquartered in Ada, Oklahoma.
The Cherokee Removal
Georgia and the Cherokee Nation
The rapidly expanding population of the United States early in the 19th century created tensions with Native American tribes located within the borders of the various states. While state governments did not want independent Indian enclaves within state boundaries, Indian tribes did not want to relocate or to give up their distinct identities.
With the Compact of 1802, the state of Georgia relinquished to the national government its western land claims (which became the states of Alabama and Mississippi). In exchange, the national government promised to eventually conduct treaties to relocate those Indian tribes living within Georgia, thus giving Georgia control of all land within its borders.
However, the Cherokee, whose ancestral tribal lands overlapped the boundaries of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, declined to move. They established a capital in 1825 at New Echota (near present-day Calhoun, Georgia). Furthermore, led by principal Chief John Ross and Major Ridge, the speaker of the Cherokee National Council, the Cherokee adopted a written constitution on 26 July 1827, declaring the Cherokee Nation to be a sovereign and independent nation.
With this constitution, an election was held for Principal Chief. John Ross won the first election and became the leader and representative of the tribe. In 1828, the Cherokee government established a law that addressed the issue of removal. The law stated that anyone who signed an agreement with the United States that addressed the Cherokee land without consent of the Cherokee government would be considered treasonous and could be punishable by death.
The Cherokee land that was lost proved to be extremely valuable. Upon these lands were the alignments for the future rights-of-way for rail and road communications between the eastern Piedmont slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, the Ohio River in Kentucky and the Tennessee River Valley at Chattanooga. This location is still a strategic economic asset and is the basis for the tremendous success of Atlanta, Georgia, as a regional transportation and logistics center. Georgia's appropriation of these lands from the Cherokee kept the wealth out of the hands of the Cherokee Nation.
The Cherokee lands in Georgia were settled upon by the Cherokee for the simple reason that they were and still are the shortest and most easily traversed route between the only fresh water sourced settlement location at the southeastern tip of the Appalachian range (the Chattahoochee River), and the natural passes, ridges, and valleys which lead to the Tennessee River at what is today, Chattanooga. From Chattanooga there was and is the potential for a year-round water transport to St. Louis and the west (via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers), or to as far east as Pittsburgh, PA.
The Treaty of New Echota
With the landslide reelection of Andrew Jackson in 1832, some of the most strident Cherokee opponents of removal began to rethink their positions. Led by Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and nephews Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie, they became known as the "Ridge Party", or the "Treaty Party". The Ridge Party believed that it was in the best interest of the Cherokee to get favorable terms from the U.S. government, before white squatters, state governments, and violence made matters worse. John Ridge began unauthorized talks with the Jackson administration in the late 1820s. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the Cherokee removal, the state of Georgia began holding lotteries in order to divide up the Cherokee tribal lands among white Georgians.
However, Principal Chief John Ross and the majority of the Cherokee people remained adamantly opposed to removal. Political maneuvering began: Chief Ross canceled the tribal elections in 1832, the Council threatened to impeach the Ridges, and a prominent member of the Treaty Party (John Walker, Jr.) was murdered. The Ridges responded by eventually forming their own council, representing only a fraction of the Cherokee people. This split the Cherokee Nation into two factions: those following Ross, known as the National Party, and those of the Treaty Party, who elected William A. Hicks, who had briefly succeeded his brother Charles R. Hicks as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation to act as titular leader of the pro-Treaty faction, with former National Council clerk Alexander McCoy as his assistant.
John Ross states in his letter to congress;
"By the stipulations of this instrument, we are despoiled of our private possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped of every attribute of freedom and eligibility for legal self-defence. Our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family! We have neither land nor home, nor resting place that can be called our own. And this is effected by the provisions of a compact which assumes the venerated, the sacred appellation of treaty. We are overwhelmed! Our hearts are sickened, our utterance is paralyzed, when we reflect on the condition in which we are placed, by the audacious practices of unprincipled men, who have managed their stratagems with so much dexterity as to impose on the Government of the United States, in the face of our earnest, solemn, and reiterated protestations."In 1835, Jackson appointed Reverend John F. Schermerhorn as a treaty commissioner. The U.S. government proposed to pay the Cherokee Nation US$4.5 million (among other considerations) to remove themselves. These terms were rejected in October 1835 by the Cherokee Nation Council meeting at Red Clay. Chief Ross, attempting to bridge the gap between his administration and the Ridge Party, traveled to Washington with a party that included John Ridge and Stand Watie to open new negotiations, but they were turned away and told to deal with Schermerhorn.
Meanwhile, Schermerhorn organized a meeting with the pro-removal council members at New Echota, Georgia. Only five hundred Cherokee (out of thousands) responded to the summons, and, on December 30, 1835, twenty-one proponents of Cherokee removal (Major Ridge, Elias Boudinot, James Foster, Testaesky, Charles Moore, George Chambers, Tahyeske, Archilla Smith, Andrew Ross (younger brother of Chief John Ross), William Lassley, Caetehee, Tegaheske, Robert Rogers, John Gunter, John A. Bell, Charles Foreman, William Rogers, George W. Adair, James Starr, and Jesse Halfbreed), signed or left "X" marks on the Treaty of New Echota after those present voted unanimously for its approval. John Ridge and Stand Watie signed the treaty when it was brought to Washington. Chief Ross, as expected, refused.
This treaty gave up all the Cherokee land east of the Mississippi in return for five million dollars to be disbursed on a per capita basis, an additional half-million dollars for educational funds, title in perpetuity to an amount of land in Indian Territory equal to that given up, and full compensation for all property left in the East. There was also a clause in the treaty as signed allowing Cherokee who so desired to remain and become citizens of the states in which they resided on 160 acres (0.65 km2) of land, but that was later stricken out by President Jackson.
Despite the protests by the Cherokee National Council and principal Chief Ross that the document was a fraud, Congress ratified the treaty on May 23, 1836, by just one vote.
Removal process
The process of Cherokee removal took place in three stages. It began with the voluntary removal of those in favor of the treaty, who were willing to accept government support and move west on their own in the two years after the signing of the Treaty of New Echota in 1835. Most of the Cherokee, including Chief John Ross, were outraged and unwilling to move, and they reacted with opposition. They did not believe the government would take any action against them if they elected to stay. However, the U.S. army was sent in, and the forced removal stage began. The Cherokee were herded violently into internment camps, where they were kept for the summer of 1838. The actual transportation west was delayed by intense heat and drought, but in the fall, the Cherokee reluctantly agreed to transport themselves west under the supervision of Chief Ross in the reluctant removal stage.
Voluntary removal
The Treaty provided a two-year grace period for Cherokee to willingly emigrate to Indian Territory. However, President Andrew Jackson dispatched General John E. Wool to begin the process of rounding up all those who would accept government provisions and prepare them for removal. Upon arrival, the staunch opposition to the treaty was evident to General Wool as the provisions were rejected by nearly all that he came in contact with, and it seemed that no one would voluntarily remove themselves. Due to the staunch opposition, preparations did not begin for several months, which greatly frustrated General Wool, who reported that the Indians were "almost universally opposed to the treaty."
During this time, efforts were also being made by pro-removal advocates within the Cherokee to persuade the rest of the people to accept government subsistence and therefore give in to the inevitable. The treaty party called a meeting of the Cherokee on September 12, 1836 to do just that, but the meeting was canceled due to John Ross's subsequent call for another meeting that opposed the goals of the first in every way. Ross urged the people to continue to reject any government handout, stressing that the acceptance of any such gift also meant the acceptance of the treaty terms. Seeing that all efforts to sway their brethren were fruitless, a number of Cherokee (mostly members of the Ridge faction) ceased their delay and accepted government funds for subsistence and transportation. An approximate total of 10,000 Cherokee voluntarily removed themselves to the west, leaving around 1,000 of their brethren behind, who continued their opposition. Many travelled as individuals or families, but there were several organized groups.
Forced removal
Many white Americans were outraged by the dubious legality of the treaty and called on the government not to force the Cherokee to move. For example, on April 23, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter to Jackson's successor, President Martin Van Buren, urging him not to inflict;
"so vast an outrage upon the Cherokee Nation."Nevertheless, as the May 23, 1838, deadline for voluntary removal approached, President Van Buren assigned General Winfield Scott to head the forcible removal operation. He arrived at New Echota on May 17, 1838, in command of U.S. Army and state militia totalling about 7,000 soldiers. Scott discouraged mistreatment of the Native Americans, ordering his troops to "show every possible kindness to the Cherokee and to arrest any soldier who inflicted a wanton injury or insult on any Cherokee man, woman, or child."
They began rounding up Cherokee in Georgia on May 26, 1838; ten days later, operations began in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. Men, women, and children were removed at gunpoint from their homes over three weeks and gathered together in concentration camps, often with very few of their possessions.
About 1,000 Cherokee took refuge in the mountains to the east, and some who owned private property also escaped the evacuation. Private John G. Burnett later wrote "Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokee who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter."
This story is perhaps a garbled version of the episode when a Cherokee named Tsali or Charley and three others killed two soldiers in the North Carolina mountains during the round-up. The two Indians were subsequently tracked down and executed by Chief Euchella's band of Cherokee in exchange for a deal with the Army to avoid their own removal.
The Cherokee were then marched overland to departure points at Ross's Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee) and Gunter's Landing (Guntersville, Alabama) on the Tennessee River, and forced on to flatboats and the steamers "Smelter" and "Little Rock". Unfortunately, a drought brought low water levels on the rivers, requiring frequent unloading of vessels to evade river obstacles and shoals. The Army directed Removal was characterized by many deaths and desertions, and this part of the Cherokee Removal proved to be a fiasco and Gen. Scott ordered suspension of further removal efforts.
Internment camps
The deaths and desertions in the Army's boat detachments caused Gen Scott to suspend the Army's Removal efforts, and the remaining Cherokee were put into eleven internment camps, mostly located near Ross' Landing (now Chattanooga, TN) and at Red Clay, Bedwell Springs, Chatata, Mouse Creek, Rattlesnake Springs, Chestoee, and Calhoun (site of the former Cherokee Agency) located within Bradley County, TN and one camp (Fort Payne) in Alabama.
Cherokee remained in the camps during the summer of 1838 and were plagued by dysentery and other illnesses, which led to 353 deaths. A group of Cherokee petitioned General Scott for a delay until cooler weather made the journey less hazardous. This was granted; meanwhile Chief Ross, finally accepting defeat, managed to have the remainder of the removal turned over to the supervision of the Cherokee Council. Although there were some objections within the U.S. government because of the additional cost, General Scott awarded a contract for removing the remaining 11,000 Cherokee under the supervision of Principal Chief Ross, with expenses to be paid by the Army, which outraged President Jackson and surprised many.
Reluctant removal
Chief John Ross made sure to confirm and secure his position as leader of the removal process by conferring with other Cherokee leaders, who granted him full responsibility of this daunting task. He then wasted no time in forming a plan, in which he organized 12 wagon trains, each with about 1000 persons and conducted by veteran full-blood tribal leaders or educated mixed bloods. Each wagon train was assigned physicians, interpreters (to help the physicians), commissaries, managers, wagon masters, teamsters, and even grave diggers. Chief Ross also purchased the steamboat "Victoria" in which his own and tribal leaders' families could travel in some comfort. Lewis Ross, the Chief's brother, was the main contractor and furnished forage, rations, and clothing for the wagon trains. Although this arrangement was an improvement for all concerned, disease and exposure still took many lives. This is the part of the Removal usually identified as The "Trail of Tears."
These detachments were forced to trek through various trails, crossing through Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and even Missouri to the final destination of Oklahoma. One of the main routes began in Chattanooga, TN and took a northwestern route through eastern Kentucky and southern Illinois before bearing to the southwest near the center of Missouri. The entire trip was roughly 2,200 miles. The Cherokee endured freezing temperatures, snowstorms, and pneumonia. The harshness of the trail and the intense weather conditions claimed around 4,000 lives, although estimates vary.
- Daniel Colston, Conductor (first choice Hair Conrad became ill); Asst. Conductor Jefferson Nevins; 710 persons left Oct.5, 1838 from Agency camp and 654 people arrived at Woodall's place in Indian Territory on Jan. 4, 1839 (57 deaths, 9 births, 24 deserters).
- Elijah Hicks, Conductor; White Path (died near Hopkinsville, Kentucky) and William Arnold, Asst. Conductors; 809 persons left Oct.4, 1838 from Camp Ross on Gunstocker Creek and 744 people arrived Jan.4, 1839 at Mrs. Webber's place in Indian Territory.
- Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, Conductor; Roman Nose, Asst. Conductor; 864 left Oct. 16, 1838 from Chatata Creek camp and 898 arrived Feb. 27, 1839 at Fort Wayne, Ind. Ty. (38 deaths, 6 births, 151 deserters, 171 additions).
- Capt. John Benge, Conductor; George C. Lowrey, Jr. Asst. Conductor; 1,079 persons left Fort Payne camp, Alabama Oct. 1, 1838 and 1,132 arrived Jan.11, 1839 at Mrs. Webber's place, Indian Territory. (33 deaths, 3 births).
- Situake, Conductor; Rev. Evan Jones, Asst. Conductor; 1,205 persons left Oct. 19, 1838 from Savannah Creek camp and 1,033 arrived Feb. 2, 1839 (at Beatties' Prairie, Indian Territory. (71 deaths, 5 births).
- Capt. Old Fields, Conductor; Rev. Stephen Foreman, Asst. Conductor; 864 persons left Oct. 10, 1838 from Candy's Creek camp and 898 arrived Feb. 2, 1839 at Beatties' Prairie (57 deaths, 19 births, 10 deserters, 6 additions).
- Moses Daniel, Conductor; George Still, Sr. Asst. Conductor; 1,031 persons left from Agency camp on Oct.23, 1838 and 924 arrived March 2, 1839 at Mrs. Webber's (48 deaths, 6 births).
- Chuwaluka (a.k.a. Bark), Conductor; James D. Wofford (fired for drunkenness) and Thomas N. Clark, Jr. Asst. Conductors; 1,120 left Oct.27, 1838 from Mouse Creek camp and 970 arrived March 1, 1839 at Fort Wayne.
- Judge James Brown, Conductor; Lewis Hildebrand, Asst. Conductor; 745 left Oct. 31, 1838 from Ootewah Creek camp and 717 arrived March 3, 1839 at Park Hill.
- George Hicks, Conductor; Collins McDonald, Asst. Conductor; 1,031 left Nov. 4, 1838 from Mouse Creek camp and 1,039 arrived March 14, 1839 near Fort Wayne.
- Richard Taylor, Conductor; Walter Scott Adair, Asst. Conductor; 897 left Nov. 6, 1838 from Ooltewah Creek camp and 942 arrived March 24, 1839 at Woodall's place(55 deaths, 15 births). Missionary Rev. Daniel Butrick accompanied this detachment, and his daily journal has been published.
- Peter Hildebrand, Conductor; James Vann Hildebrand, Asst. Conductor; 1,449 left Nov. 8, 1838 Ocoe camp and 1,311 arrived March 25, 1839 near Woodall's place.
- "Victoria" Detachment – John Drew Conductor; John Golden Ross, Asst. Conductor; 219 left Nov. 5, 1838 Agency camp and 231 arrived March 18, 1839 Tahlequah.
There exist muster rolls for four (Benge, Chuwaluka, G. Hicks, and Hildebrand) of the 12 wagon trains and payrolls of officials for all 13 detachments among the personal papers of Principal Chief John Ross in the Gilcrease Institution in Tulsa, OK.
Deaths and numbers
This monument at the New Echota Historic Site honours Cherokees who died on the Trail of Tears.
The entrance to the Cherokee Removal Memorial Park near Blythe's Ferry, one of the trail's departure points
The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with the Daniel Colston wagon train, estimated 2,000 deaths in the Army removal and internment camps and perhaps another 2,000 on the trail; his total of 4,000 deaths remains the most cited figure, although he acknowledged these were estimates without having seen government or tribal records.
A scholarly demographic study in 1973 estimated 2,000 total deaths; another, in 1984, concluded that a total of 6,000 people died (Prucha, Great Father, p. 241 note 58; Ehle, Trail of Tears, pp. 390–92; Russel Thornton, "Demography of the Trail of Tears" in Anderson, Trail of Tears, pp. 75–93).
The 4000 figure or one quarter of the tribe was also used by the Smithsonian anthropologist, James Mooney. Since 16,000 Cherokee were enumerated on the 1835 Census, and about 12,000 emigrated in 1838, ergo 4000 needed accounting for. Note that some 1500 Cherokee remained in North Carolina, many more in South Carolina, and Georgia, so the higher fatality numbers are unlikely. In addition, nearly 400 Creek or Muskogee Indians who had avoided being removed earlier, fled into the Cherokee Nation and became part of the latter's Removal.
An accounting of the exact number of fatalities during the Removal is also related to discrepancies in expense accounts submitted by Chief John Ross after the Removal that the Army considered inflated and possibly fraudulent. Ross claimed rations for 1600 more Cherokee than were counted by an Army officer, Captain Page, at Ross' Landing as Cherokee groups left their homeland and another Army officer, Captain Stephenson, at Fort Gibson counted them as they arrived in Indian Territory. Ross' accounts are consistently higher numbers than that of the Army disbursing agents. The Van Buren administration refused to pay Ross, but the later Tyler administration eventually approved disbursing more than $500,000 to the Principal Chief in 1842.
In addition, some Cherokee travelled from east to west more than once. Many deserters from the Army's boat detachments in June 1838 later emigrated in the twelve Ross wagon trains. There were transfers between groups, and later join ups and desertions were not always recorded. Jesse Mayfield was a white man with a Cherokee family went twice (first voluntarily in B.B. Cannon's detachment in 1837 to Indian Territory; unhappy there, he returned to the Cherokee Nation; and in Oct. 1838 was Wagon Master for the Bushyhead Detachment). An Army disbursing agent discovered that a Cherokee named Justis Fields travelled with government funds three times under different aliases. A mixed-blood named James Bigby, Jr. travelled to Indian Territory five times (three as government interpreter for different detachments, as Commissary for the Colston detachment, and as an individual in 1840). In addition, a small but significant number of mixed-bloods and whites with Cherokee families petitioned to become citizens of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Tennessee and thus ceased to be considered Cherokee.
During the journey, it is said that the people would sing "Amazing Grace", using its inspiration to improve morale. The traditional Christian hymn had previously been translated into Cherokee by the missionary Samuel Worcester with Cherokee assistance. The song has since become a sort of anthem for the Cherokee people. Walela is a trio of singers, named for the Cherokee word for hummingbird. The group was founded in 1996 by sisters Rita Coolidge and Priscilla Coolidge, with Priscilla's daughter Laura Satterfield as the third member.
Music for The Native Americans is a 1994 album by Robbie Robertson, compiling music written by Robertson and other colleagues (billed as the Red Road Ensemble) for the television documentary film The Native Americans. Walela sing the Cherokee Morning Song.
Slavery - No escape!
The 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation, then located in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) west of the Mississippi River, was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur among the Cherokee.
Prior to European contact, the Cherokee had a practice of enslaving prisoners of war from other Indian tribes. In the late 18th century, some Cherokee set up European-American style plantations on their Cherokee Nation land, which occupied territory near parts of Georgia and Tennessee. They purchased African-American slaves to work this land.
In 1819, the Cherokee Nation passed slave codes that regulated slave trade; forbade intermarriage; enumerated punishment for runaway slaves; and prohibited slaves from owning private property. An 1820 law regulated trading with slaves, requiring that anyone who traded with a slave without the master's permission was bound to the legal owner for the property, or its value, if the traded property proved to be stolen. Another code declared that a fine of fifteen dollars was to be levied for masters who allowed slaves to buy or sell liquor.
The Cherokee adopted the practice of using enslaved African Americans on their plantations from European Americans. Most Cherokee held fewer slaves and labored with them at subsistence agriculture. Slaves worked primarily as agricultural labourers, cultivating both cotton for their master's profit and food for consumption. Some slaves were skilled labourers, such as seamstresses and blacksmiths. Like other slaveholders, affluent Cherokee used slaves as a portable labour force. They developed robust farms, salt mines, and trading posts created with slave labour.
The Cherokee took many of their slaves with them to the West on the Trail of Tears, in the Indian Removal of the 1820s and 1830s, when the federal government forcibly removed them from the Southeastern states. Joseph Vann was described as taking 200 slaves with him. Black slaves in each of the tribes performed much of the physical labor involved in the removal. For example, they loaded wagons, cleared the roads, and led the teams of livestock along the way.
By the time of removal in 1835, the Cherokee owned an estimated total of 1500 slaves of African ancestry (the most black slaves of any of the Five Civilized Tribes). Within five years of removal, 300 mixed-race Cherokee families, most descendants of European traders and Cherokee women for generations, made up an elite class in the Indian Territory. Most owned 25-50 slaves each. Some of their plantations had 600 to 1,000 acres; cultivating wheat, cotton, corn, hemp, and tobacco. Most of the men also had large cattle and horse herds.
The mass escape of 20 enslaved African Americans from the Cherokee territory began on November 15, 1842, and has been called "the most spectacular act of rebellion against slavery" among the Cherokee. Most of the 20 slaves were from the plantations of "Rich Joe" Vann and his father James; they gathered and raided local stores for weapons, ammunition, horses, and mules. Escaping from Webbers Falls without casualties, the slaves headed south for Mexico, where slavery had been prohibited since 1836. Along the way they picked up another 15 slaves escaping from Creek territory. Some Cherokee and Creek pursued the fugitives, but the slaves partially held them off. In one altercation, 14 slaves were either killed or captured, but the remaining 21 continued south. The Cherokee and Creek pursuers returned to their nations for reinforcements.
Along the way, the fugitives encountered two slave catchers, James Edwards, a white man, and Billy Wilson, a Lenape (Delaware Indian), who were returning to Choctaw territory with an escaped slave family of three adults and five children. The family had been headed west into Plains Indian territory. The fugitive party killed the bounty hunters to free the slave family. Together they continued South, slowed somewhat by traveling with five children.
On November 17, the Cherokee National Council in Tahlequah passed a resolution authorizing Cherokee Militia Captain John Drew to raise a company of 100 citizens to "pursue, arrest, and deliver the African Slaves to Fort Gibson." (The resolution also relieved the government of the Cherokee Nation of any liability if the slaves resisted arrest and had to be killed.) The commander at Fort Gibson loaned Drew 25 pounds of gunpowder for the militia.
The large force caught up with the slaves seven miles north of the Red River on November 28. The tired fugitives, weak from hunger, offered no resistance. They were forced to return to their owners in the Choctaw, Creek and Cherokee reservations. The Cherokee later executed five slaves for the murders of Edwards and Wilson. Vann put most of his surviving slaves to work on his steamboats, shoveling coal.
The slave revolt inspired future slave rebellions in the Indian Territory. By 1851, a total of nearly 300 blacks had tried to escape from Indian Territory. Most headed for Mexico or the area of the future Kansas Territory, where residents prohibited slavery.
After the revolt, the Cherokee often hired non-slave holding Indians to catch runaway slaves. In the past, some of these people had struggled to eat, while slave-owning families flourished in a market economy driven by slave labor. Some among these once poor Cherokee became wealthy by providing services to the 'rescue' company in catching fugitive slaves. When slave catching expeditions were mounted, such trackers were paid. They were also authorized to buy ammunition and supplies for the hunt, at the expense of the Nation (provided that the expedition was not "unnecessarily protracted and did not incur needless expenses").
By 1860, the Cherokee held an estimated 4,600 slaves, and depended on them as farm laborers and domestic servants. At the time of the Civil War, a total of more than 8,000 slaves were held in all of the Indian Territory, where they comprised 14 percent of the population.
America’s Other Original Sin
Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans—they enslaved them, and encouraged tribes to participate in the slave trade, on a scale historians are only beginning to fathom.
By Rebecca Onion
Jan. 18 2016
