Hold on to the Land: 1792-1892

The town of Cowee western North Carolina had been ravaged by disease and trampled by invading armies as the revolutionary era ended, but it remained in the hands of its Cherokee founders. A Shawnee Indian who had once been held prisoner there continued to admire the town after his release. One day, having returned to the area on a hunting trip, he spotted several Cherokees on a nearby hill and hailed them to ask, “Do you still own Cowee?”

“Yes, we own it yet,” came back the reply.

“Well, it’s the best town of the Cherokee,” the Shawnee hunter shouted across the valley. “It’s a good country; hold on to it.”

In the 19th century the Cherokees and their neighbors would attempt, against formidable odds, to do just that. Though their population had been drastically reduced in the 300 years since Columbus, the Cherokees and other Southern Indians of the 1790s still inhabited a landscape which more closely resembled the terrain of the 1490s than that of the 1990s. The great virgin forests remained uncut except for small, scattered clearings; the swift rivers ran free, blocked only by fish weirs and beaver dams. Though George Washington and other investors were forcing slaves to dig an enormous canal that would drain Virginia’s Dismal Swamp and open it to development, their scheme did not succeed, and most swamps remained untouched for generations.

But much was about to change. Soon the last Eastern buffalo would be killed and millions of passenger pigeons would be slaughtered — driven to extinction, along with the colorful Carolina parakeet. And soon, millions of tons of rich topsoil from small farms and large plantations would be washed off the Southern countryside forever. With its rolling hills, rapid rivers, and high seasonal rainfall, the region was especially vulnerable to erosion, as the plowed fields of row-crop agriculture replaced natural groundcover. When huge warring armies foraged across the South in the 1860s, they only intensified the ecological disaster fostered by King Cotton.

The spread of intensive cotton farming depended on more than Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The rising demand for cotton in the mechanized textile industries of England and New England played a crucial role. So did the willingness, on the part of those who had recently framed and ratified the U.S. Constitution, to retain and expand slavery. But raising cotton depleted the soil, and Southern planters could not capitalize on the captive labor force and growing international demand without more acreage. And in the 1790s, the largest and best portion of the South remained in the hands of its original occupants.

End of the Middle Ground

For more than a century, the major Southern Indian nations had engaged successfully in diplomatic, economic, and cultural dialogue with Old World newcomers — occupying what Alabama-born scholar Joel Martin of Franklin and Marshall University calls a dangerous but viable “middle ground.” In their reciprocal relations with Europeans and Africans, Indians had been hosts and visitors, allies and teachers, husbands and wives. They had shared foods, beliefs, words, remedies, tools, and beds in a tense but workable cross-cultural exchange.

In the half century after the creation of the United States, however, the exchange broke down. “Instead of engaging in mutual accommodation, white American settlers and planters determined to subordinate Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Muskogees, and other peoples of the Southern interior and to take and develop their lands,” Professor Martin points out. “With the aid of complicit Indian individuals, they destroyed the Southern middle ground and established a new order characterized by political domination, economic dependency, and cultural imperialism.”

The agents of the new order arrived in many guises. Some, such as William Panton of Pensacola, Florida, were aggressive merchants who led Indians into enormous trading debts and then turned a quick profit by arranging debt-for-land swaps with the U. S. government. Others, such as Reverend Samuel Worcester of Boston, preached a blend of Protestant Christianity and grammar school education. Still others, such as federal agent Benjamin Hawkins, were government employees who pressured Southern nations to accept the “civilizing” influence of private property, foreign dress, written legal codes, and European farming practices.

Many Indians resisted these new ways. In 1811 the Shawnee leader Tecumseh traveled through the South, attempting to build a pan-Indian alliance to oppose U.S. encroachments in the West. Tecumseh condemned drinking and white customs, urging warriors to shun cotton textiles and return to wearing leather clothes.

“Accursed be the race that has seized on our country,” he told a council of leaders at Tukabatchi Town in Alabama. “Our fathers from their tombs reproach us as slaves and cowards.... Their tears drop from the wailing skies. Let the white race perish. They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.”

But when Tecumseh asked that “warriors of the Southern tribes unite with the warriors of the Lakes,” only the Red Stick (or Red Club) faction of the Creek nation followed his call. Taking advantage of American hostilities with the British in the War of 1812, the Red Sticks struck against frontier settlements, killing more than 500 people in their attack on Fort Mims north of Mobile, Alabama. General Andrew Jackson marched south with an army reinforced by Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw warriors. In March 1814 his force surrounded the Red Sticks on the Tallapoosa River, northeast of Montgomery. Over 800 Creeks died in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The U.S. emerged victorious from its war with Great Britain, and Jackson went on to win the Battle of New Orleans, with aid from his Indian allies. But far from being rewarded for their loyalty, those who had sided with Jackson found their position in the South more precarious than ever. And those who had opposed him paid an even higher price. At the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, the general blamed all the Creeks for the uprising of the Red Sticks, and as reparations the government claimed 22 million acres of Creek land in Georgia and Alabama.

Some of the defeated Red Sticks moved to Florida, where they joined 4,000 Seminoles and their runaway-slave allies who continued to receive secret British aid. But in 1818, troubled by the alliance between blacks and Indians in Spanish-owned Florida, American politicians again unleashed Andrew Jackson. The general invaded Seminole land, claiming that his brutal attacks served to “chastise a savage foe” who had “combined with a lawless band of Negro brigands.” By 1821 the Spanish had ceded Florida to the United States, depriving the Seminoles of foreign support.

Taking up arms for or against the increasingly powerful U.S. government seemed a losing proposition, and many Native Americans looked instead towards white institutions — churches, schools, courts, and legislatures — as possible means for holding on to their country. “In former times we bought of the traders goods cheap; we could then clothe our women and children,” the Cherokee leader Bloody Fellow had explained to Secretary of War Henry Knox in 1792. “But now game is scarce and goods dear, we cannot live comfortably.... We must plant corn and raise cattle, and we desire you to assist us.... We rejoice in the prospect of our future welfare, under the protection of Congress.”

In exchange for federal protection, the Cherokees agreed to practice the ways of white Southerners. They acquired plows and livestock and accepted school teachers and missionaries. They drew up a Cherokee constitution, and a few even acquired African-American slaves, all in an effort to win continued acceptance and permanent rights in the changing South. In 1821, Sequoyah — a veteran of Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks, and the son of a Cherokee woman and a Virginia trader — devised an 86-symbol syllabary that allowed the words of the Cherokee language to be written. Immediately, according to one observer, this new tool began “spreading through the nation like fire among the leaves.” Hymns, prayers, laws, and sacred formulas were soon being written down and shared.

In an 1826 speech, Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot used his white education to invoke the phoenix of Egyptian mythology. “I can view my native country, rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth,” Boudinot told a Philadelphia audience. “If the General Government continues its protection and the American people assist them in their humble efforts, they will, they must, rise.”

Two years later, Boudinot founded a bilingual newspaper called the Phoenix in the Cherokee capital of New Echota. On the masthead a phoenix — looking rather like an American eagle — rose through fire, while a banner above proclaimed “Protection.” But that same year Andrew Jackson, drawing on his Tennessee roots and his reputation as an “Indian fighter,” carried the Southern vote to win the presidency. Those who advocated removing Indians to the West were gaining ground.

Removal, to the West

Ever since Thomas Jefferson had purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, small groups of Indians had been exchanging Southern land for property west of the Mississippi. But despite the increased violence and racism they encountered along the East Coast, most Indians resisted the idea of voluntary removal. They rejected the arguments of American courts that the British had earned title to the land by right of “discovery,” and that the Americans had inherited that title in the Revolution. After all, Indians were the original “possessors ...of the whole island,” a group of Creek headmen declared in 1824. “No title can be equal to ours.”

The following year, Secretary of War John Calhoun urged the government to limit Western settlement, much the way George III had issued his “Proclamation Line” prohibiting expansion beyond the Appalachian Divide in 1763. The new “Indian Line” would run due south from the headwaters of the Mississippi through Missouri and Arkansas. Indians would be encouraged to take up claims west of the line, where American settlement would be prohibited.

Eager to convert Indian lands into cotton fields, Southern states supported the “Indian Line.” When plans for the boundary remained stalled in 1828, Georgia tried to force the government’s hand. In six months, the state declared, all Indians in Georgia would become subject to state laws, regardless of any federal treaties. “The result,” writes scholar Alice Kehoe, “was cleavage of the voting populace and its representatives into a Southern bloc championing states rights, slavery, and Indian removal, and a Northern bloc favoring stronger federal government, emancipation of slaves, and the Indians’ right to their ancestral lands.”

The pressure for removal intensified in 1829, when a white prospector discovered gold on Cherokee lands in the mountains of north Georgia. The state legislature passed a law prohibiting Cherokees from mining gold on their own land, and Georgia courts refused to let Indians file charges when 3,000 gold seekers invaded their property, breaking fences and stealing livestock.

Angry at Northern missionaries, Georgia also required whites teaching among the Cherokees to obtain a permit and take an oath of allegiance to the state. The Georgia Guard arrested offenders, and local judges put them in jail. But several, including Samuel Worcester, appealed to the federal courts for relief. When the Supreme Court ruled on Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall declared Georgia’s law null and void in the face of federal law and ordered the missionaries released.

“It is glorious news,” Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot wrote to his brother Stand Watie when he heard the decision. “The question is forever settled as to who is right and who is wrong.” But Georgia refused to release Worcester for nearly a year, and Jackson made no attempt to use his power as chief executive to gain his freedom. “John Marshall has made his decision,” the President is said to have remarked “Now let him enforce it.”

The president preferred to use his power to aid the cause of Southern land seekers. In 1830 he signed the Indian Removal Act, empowering the federal government to exchange districts in the West for valuable Indian lands within existing states. Congress allocated $500,000 to reimburse Indians for improvements on their land, to cover their travel costs to the West, and to offset expenses during their first year in the new districts. But critics feared the money would be used for bribes, since the act did not oblige Indians to move.

In reality, it didn’t seem to matter whether Indians opted to stay or go. When more than 6,000 Choctaws applied for the right to remain in Mississippi, the government-appointed agent simply ignored most requests. But when the Indians accepted a treaty that endorsed removal in exchange for large reparations, Jackson convinced Congress to reject the pact on the grounds that the generous terms would set an expensive precedent. Federal negotiators then returned to the bargaining table at Dancing Rabbit Creek, reminding the Choctaws that they would face harsh Mississippi laws and repressive federal power if they refused to relocate.

The president got his way. “Our doom is sealed,” Chief David Folsom lamented. “There is no other course for us but to turn our faces to our new homes toward the setting sun.” By 1833, more than 18,000 Choctaws had been deported to the west.

Trail of Tears

The Chickasaws of northern Mississippi, like their neighbors to the south and east, had been losing territory piece by piece. In 1818, they had signed a treaty giving up their hunting grounds in Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1832, pressured by the Mississippi legislature, they agreed reluctantly to vacate their Mississippi lands once they located an acceptable home in the West. Five years later, emissaries to the new Indian Territory decided it would be best to settle with the Choctaws west of Arkansas. Chickasaw families and their African-American slaves began moving in the spring of 1837, and relocation proceeded steadily, despite an outbreak of cholera.

The much larger Cherokee nation was more deeply divided over the prospect of removal to the West. Georgia confiscated prime Cherokee lands to auction off in a lottery, and in 1834 the state militia smashed the printing equipment of the Cherokee Phoenix. The following year, several thousand mixed-blood Indians led by the wealthy Major Ridge, speaker of the Cherokee National Council, signed a treaty at New Echota and promised to migrate west within two years in exchange for $5 million. But 15,000 Cherokees, led by Principal Chief John Ross, signed a petition rejecting the action of the Treaty Party and vowed defiantly to remain.

Early in 1838 the government dispatched soldiers to enforce the New Echota Treaty. The troops rounded up entire families, looted and burned their homes, and conducted a forced march to the West that became known as the Trail of Tears. All told, roughly one-fourth of the 16,000 to 18,000 exiles died from violence, hunger, sickness, and exposure.

In the West, the bitterness that had divided the nation would live on for decades among survivors of the Trail of Tears. In the East, hundreds of Cherokees eluded the federal dragnet by hiding in the mountains. Remaining in their beloved region, they consolidated their holdings in the Qualla Boundary of western North Carolina and became known as the Eastern Cherokees.

Further south, the Creek nation was also divided by the threat of removal — and suffered heavily during eviction. After Chief William McIntosh betrayed the tribe by accepting a bribe to sign the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825, angry Creek warriors set fire to his home and shot him to death. When another treaty was signed in 1832 under pressure from the Alabama legislature, most Creeks opted to accept allotments of private land rather than depart for the West.

But by 1836, constant harassment by white settlers led to organized Creek resistance, providing an excuse for federal troops to enforce removal. Men who had joined the so-called “Creek Rebellion” in self-defense were marched west to Indian Territory in chains during the dead of winter. One contingent of 300 drowned in the Mississippi when a leaky riverboat capsized. Within a year, 18,500 Creeks had been deported. More than 3,500 — many of them children — died on the way west.

The Seminoles in Florida also faced deportation, but they staged a fierce and lengthy resistance. An 1823 treaty limited them to the swampy interior north and east of Tampa Bay. Nine years later, the Treaty of Payne’s Landing obligated them to move west by 1835. But one faction, led by Osceola, chose to fight to “the last drop of Seminole blood” rather than accept removal. “The white man says I shall go,” Osceola declared, “but I have a rifle, and I have some powder and some lead. I say we must not leave our homes and lands.”

Even the deceitful capture of Osceola under a flag of truce, and his premature death in a South Carolina prison in 1838, could not end the Second Seminole War. When the government finally called off the conflict in 1842, federal officials had spent $20 million and had lost 1,500 men in order to transport 3,000 Seminoles to the West — a cost of $66,000 and five soldiers for every 10 men, women, and children removed. The few hundred Seminoles who remained moved to the swampland of south Florida and proudly proclaimed themselves “the unconquered people.”

Slavery and Mules

Whether Indians resisted successfully or suffered removal, their lives were shaped in large part by the demands of Southern planters. “Native Americans in the South cannot be understood apart from the plantation regime and its aftermath,” notes historian Theda Perdue of the University of Kentucky. “Southern Indians have had to contend with a society whose economy was based on the cultivation of crops which could produce enormous profits and on the exploitation of nonwhite labor. They also have had to contend with a people obsessed with the issue of race.”

After 1830, Southern planters responded to abolitionist arguments against black slavery with ever more strident assertions of white superiority, making it difficult for free non-white Southerners to defend their rights. In state after state, Indian residents lost the right to vote, to serve on juries, to bear arms, or to marry across racial lines.

Beyond such civil rights restrictions lay a broader menace: Free Indians, like free African-Americans, could be threatened with exposure to an unjust court system. Whites who coveted Indian land, for example, regularly allowed livestock to stray onto the desired property, and then threatened to bring a case for theft when the owner tied up their animal. This “tied mule” tactic could force Indians, fearful of the decision of a white court, to surrender land so that charges would be dropped.

The outbreak of the Civil War increased racial pressures on Indians. Some — including wealthy slave owners of mixed-blood ancestry and their followers — promptly joined the planter cause. But most resented Confederate efforts to draft free Native Americans into labor camps alongside slaves, and many hid in the mountains and swamps to avoid service. In Robeson County, North Carolina, the ten sons of Allen Lowrie, a Tuscarora descendent, avoided conscription by entering the swamps of the Lumber River and raiding plantations for food. One son, Henry Berry Lowrie, led a guerrilla band that continued to battle the conservative Home Guard and protect the interests of local Indians well into the era of Reconstruction.

After federal troops withdrew from the South in the 1880s, the increased persecution of black Southerners prompted many Indian groups with diverse ancestry to reaffirm their Indian identity. The Catawbas of South Carolina continued their traditional pottery making, while also accepting missionaries from the Mormon Church. In North Carolina, the Indians of Robeson County were denied admission to white schools and refused to attend black schools. To win their political support, Democratic lawmakers passed an act confirming their Indian status and providing them with separate, Indian-run schools.

As the 1880s drew to a close, the U.S. Army was concluding a generation of warfare against Indians in the West with a concerted campaign against the Apaches and their legendary leader, Geronimo. After evading 5,000 armed troops, Geronimo was captured through deceit, as Osceola had been. In 1886 he and 500 other Apaches were deported from Arizona to Florida — a reverse Trail of Tears. New train lines were opening Florida to visitors, and hotel operators and railroad interests lobbied hard for access to the Apache prisoners at St. Augustine and Pensacola. Eager visitors came on special excursions — sometimes more than 400 per day — to gawk at Geronimo and Naiche, the son of Cochise. “I had good luck today. Saw Geronimo,” wrote one tourist. “He is a terrible old villain, yet he seemed quiet enough.”

In the century to come, the descendants of those who had so violently displaced Geronimo and other Native Americans would come to view them as intriguing objects of study, noble emblems of nature, and profitable sources of tourism. Nevertheless, Indians would remain a significant and diverse presence in the 20th century — even in the South, where so many had been stripped of their land and systematically expelled. The Indian people, dismissed as a “vanishing race” in the 19th century, would rise like the Cherokee phoenix in the years ahead.