The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue

Author:Theda Perdue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

John Ridge had a distinguished career as a Cherokee statesman, but he signed the removal treaty of 1835 and in 1839 paid for that act with his life. From Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America (Philadelphia: F. W. Greenough, 1838–44); copy in the Rare Book Collections, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

5

THE TREATY OF NEW ECHOTA

“IF ONE HUNDRED PERSONS are ignorant of their true situation, and are so completely blinded as not to see the destruction that awaits them,” Elias Boudinot wrote in 1837, “we can see strong reasons to justify the action of a minority of fifty persons to do what the majority would do if they understood their condition—to save a nation from political thralldom and moral degradation.”1 Boudinot and his associates, members of the so-called “treaty party,” repeated this explanation many times to justify their actions in concluding the Treaty of New Echota, which provided for removal, in late December 1835. Their love of their nation, they cried, made their deed right and would, they hoped, exonerate them in the end. What the fate of the Cherokees might have been had there been no negotiation at New Echota is impossible to tell, of course, but to Boudinot, his uncle Major Ridge, his cousin John Ridge, his brother Stand Watie, and a handful of others, it would have been a fate worse than removal.2

The Removal Act of 1830 left many things unspecified, including the means by which the removal of the eastern Indian nations to the country set aside for them west of the Mississippi would be arranged. The reason for this apparent vagueness, however, is clear. Every Trade and Intercourse Act passed by Congress, from the first in 1790 to the last in 1834, stipulated that all sales of land by tribes to the United States must be accomplished by treaty. The treaty system, well established by the 1830s, rested on the supposition that the treaties were contracts between sovereigns equally empowered to agree or disagree with the proposals on the table. Through negotiation they reached a mutually satisfactory arrangement, and by signing and ratifying the document, they obligated themselves to fulfill its terms. Voluntarism was the guiding principle of treaty making. Unless it was a peace treaty at the end of a war, neither side could force the other to negotiate. The government of Andrew Jackson could demand that the Cherokee Nation discuss the terms of a removal treaty, but if the Nation’s leaders refused to talk or, after talking, refused to agree, there was nothing legal the president could do. That is why the actions of Georgia are so important to the history of the removal of the Cherokees. That state, with the connivance of the president, intended to make life for the Cherokees so miserable they would decide that emigration was salvation and eagerly sign any treaty presented to them just to get away. The Cherokee Nation also reached into Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

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