Jacksonland: A Great American Land Grab (31 page)

Rather than send them back to their homes to die, or send them out on the road to die, the Cherokees were left in their camps to die. J. W. Lide, one of the doctors contracted to care for the emigrants, reported

a high grade of Diarrhea, hazardous Dysentery, and urgent Remittent Fever prevailing to a great and deplorably fatal extent. Measles and Whooping Cough appeared epidemically among the Cherokees about the first of June which Diseases more generally much aggravated by the Circumstances connected with the assemblage.

It was all a “natural result” of collecting “men, women and children of all ages and conditions, changing suddenly, and very materially all their habits of life, especially in reference to Regimin, Exercise, &c., with exposure to the intense heat that has prevailed in this country.” Doctors moved among the Cherokees attempting to treat them but encountered constant frustration. The doctors often did not speak their patients’ language, and could not persuade suspicious natives to take prescribed medicines. Given the level of medical science in 1838, some Cherokees may have been making rational decisions. The lack of records makes it impossible to estimate the number of fatalities in the camps, but the claims made at the time were devastating. One missionary with the Cherokees (Elizur Butler, the same man who, with Samuel Worcester, went to a Georgia prison in 1831 for ministering to the Cherokees without a license) wrote home that he had heard claims that “
two thousand”
people had died in the camps. If this claim was even half true, it meant that more people perished in the camps than would die on the road during the migration to follow.

Winfield Scott and some Cherokees (including Major Ridge, following these events from his new home in the West) knew who was to blame for the catastrophe. “
The loss was the fault of the Cherokees,” said Scott, “for having faith in the ability of John Ross to save them.” Ross and his people, they said, should have recognized sooner that they must depart. Nobody died in Major Ridge’s party, which had moved at a good time and in good order. It was undeniably true that Ross bargained until the very last day. He had used his people as a bargaining chip. Had he told them to prepare for emigration, he would have lost his leverage. Instead he forced the government to deal with him.

But to blame Ross for not capitulating sooner presumes too much. This argument presumes that the people would have followed his directions no matter what those directions were. It suggests that ordinary people among the Cherokees could not think for themselves, even on a subject that directly affected their homes, their families, and every other aspect of their lives. They
had
thought for themselves, and truly, deeply did not want to surrender their homes. Ross had some power to shape events, but had to govern his actions by what public opinion could bear. If he had abruptly announced in 1835 or 1837 or even at the start of 1838 that he favored removal, it is not clear how many people would have followed him. Major Ridge, with all his power and prestige, had persuaded only a small minority. Even after Ross agreed to lead the emigration, a significant fraction of Cherokees defied the decision to move west, and faded into the North Carolina mountains. The principal chief’s political situation demanded that he fight to the end, proving to his people that absolutely everything possible had been done in their defense. That was the only way he could have the credibility to rescue them from the true cause of their trouble: the government that was compelling fifteen thousand people to move against their will.

Even after his agreement with Poinsett was struck, Ross remained in Washington for several weeks, until he was certain that the government was producing what it promised.

1838 June 25

Paid to John Ross, by requisition of the Treasury . . . arrears of annuities, per act 12th June, 1838

25,000.00.

He also insisted that the Treasury pay his delegation’s travel expenses, $
7,000 for two seasons in Washington. His bags weighed down with cash, the chief took a route home through North Carolina. This allowed him to retrieve his seventeen-year-old daughter, Jane, from the Moravian school she was attending in the town of Salem. Jane, too, would now be going west. Father and daughter took a stagecoach on one of the arduous routes over the Appalachians—Salem was near Cherokee country, but the mountains required a detour more than a hundred miles to the northwest, a painful four-day ordeal to Abingdon, Virginia, and several more days to come back south again. Along the way John and Jane Ross encountered other passengers who climbed in and out of the stagecoach, sharing bits of what Ross called “
thrilling news” about “the unhappy condition of the Cherokees.” (He doubtless meant “thrilling” in an old sense of the word—piercing or penetrating.) It is not clear if the travelers knew the identity of the brown-eyed, gray-haired father to whom they passed on their information and rumors.

Arriving in the Cherokee Nation, Ross began working to ensure that the Cherokees accepted emigration. Cherokee leaders held a council in late July, at which Ross did not quite admit he had made an agreement with Secretary Poinsett; he said talks were going well until Poinsett “
suddenly terminated” the discussions and dictated terms. But
he also explained how the terms were better than before, and said that Winfield Scott was a man they could deal with.

Scott was such a man. He was a man of the army, determined to protect his reputation and his service, but could see the Cherokee point of view. When he learned of his superiors’ arrangement with Ross, he wrote a barbed letter to Washington. “
I shall not stop here to complain that . . . the whole subject has been contemptuously taken out of my hands,” he wrote as part a 106-word sentence that listed all of the complaints he said he was not making. But the same letter said he would be “extremely delighted if something more could be done to soothe the feelings of the Cherokees, and to compensate them in money, at least, in part discharge of that great debt of justice due from the United States.” Scott negotiated a contract with Ross, under which designated Cherokees would arrange the emigration and the United States would pay the expenses. Ross said moving the Cherokees westward would cost $65.88 per person, probably something well in excess of $700,000. Scott found this excessive, but being “
extremely unwilling to delay the emigration,” he accepted.

 • • • 

There was a different general who could not accept the accommodation with John Ross. It was the man who commanded Ross at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, who had been outmaneuvered by Ross for a time in 1816, and who could not spare soldiers to help Ross defend Cherokee land against intruders in 1820. It was the man who had been elected president in 1828, the same year that Ross was made principal chief, and who like Ross had made innovative use of political tools in a dawning democratic age. It was the man who had met Ross in the Executive Mansion, who had offered him $2.5 million for Cherokee land in 1833 only to see him spurn it, who believed that Ross agreed to $5 million in 1835 only to see him reject that, and who had finally gone around Ross by signing a treaty with his opposition. It was the man who sent word in 1836 that the U.S. government would have no more communication
with Ross, “either orally or in writing,” about the terms of Cherokee removal. Now it emerged that Ross
had
been able to communicate about removal, had increased the payout, had restored his government’s revenue, and had regained some control of the situation.

At the time, the master of the Hermitage was the most well-connected and influential convalescent senior citizen in America. “
I am still in the land of the living,” he began a chatty letter to Francis P. Blair, the publisher of the main Democratic paper in Washington. Friends sent him inside information on the Missouri election (“
Benton is safe beyond a doubt”), offered him political advice (“
It is
indispensable
for us to have a new candidate for the Vice Presidency”), and appealed for help (“It has been the wish of my youngest son James . . .
to be placed at West Point”). So it was natural that an appeal came to Jackson on August 23, 1838, from a federal official unhappy about John Ross. It was the superintendent of Cherokee removal, who was in effect being replaced by the Cherokee chief. The superintendent wrote a friend in Nashville, who personally carried his complaint to the Hermitage. The volcano erupted. Jackson sent a message to President Van Buren’s attorney general, writing in a hand so shaky as to be almost indecipherable.

private

My dear Sir,

Col. Walker has just shewn me several communications from Genl Smith removing agent for the Cherokees, & others. . . .

The contract with Ross must be arrested or you may rely on upon it, the expence and other evils will shake the popularity of the administration to its centre.

What madness & folly to have had any thing to do with Ross, when the Agent was proceeding well with the removal and on principles of economy that would have saved at least 100 percent from what the contract of Ross will cost.

Ross would consume so much money that the administration would be forced to ask Congress for more, creating “a fine chance” for the Whigs to attack.

I have only time to add as the mail waits, that the contract with Ross must be arrested.

And the more he repeated this, the more he sensed a partisan conspiracy.

The time & circumstances under which Genl Scott made this contract shews, that he is [no] economist, or is, Subrosa, in league with Clay & Co, to bring disgrace on the administration—the evil is done—it behooves Mr VanBuren to act with energy to throw it off his shoulders.

I enclose a letter under cover to you, unsealed, which you may read, seal, & deliver it to him, that you may aid him with your views in getting out of real difficulty.

yr friend in haste,

Andrew Jackson

P.S. I am so feeble I can scarcely wield the pen—but friendship dictates it, & the subject excites me. Why is it that the Scamp Ross is not banished from the notice of the administration

He continued writing until he had reached the extreme lower-right-hand corner of the page, without even leaving room for punctuation at the end.

One reason Jackson was still considered powerful, of course, was that he had installed his own adviser as president. But the responsibility was Van Buren’s now. He did not act on Jackson’s advice. The administration left Ross in charge of the emigration despite swirling concerns about the cost.

Ross was, to be sure, questioned about whether it would really cost
$65.88 per person to move the Cherokees. He thought about this, and replied that instead of lowering the price, he would raise it.
He had left out an allowance for soap on the trail; with soap, the total cost should be $66.24. After the removal, which proved slower and more expensive than anyone had anticipated, Ross raised the price again to $103.25 per person, based on actual expenses—more than $1.2 million in all. His critics were outraged that Ross assigned the contract to his own brother Lewis, leading to suspicions that the family was profiteering. It does seem very likely that John Ross’s brother took a profit from the contract, just as white contractors would have done; it is plausible some of the benefits found their way to the principal chief. Ross, like Andrew Jackson, had a way of making political decisions that matched his interests or those of his family and friends. But
John Ross took no actual salary for his work on the removal. And in his billing practices, it would be hard to claim that Ross bargained any harder than the U.S. authorities who had bargained so long and so ruthlessly with him. After the removal, the federal government tried for years to avoid paying the full sum the Cherokees demanded. John Ross, studying his figures, tweaked the price upward yet again, this time to $
1.357 million, which was finally paid in full in the 1840s. Fifty-seven years after the emigration, in 1895, one more federal audit found that Ross’s billing was reasonable, given the horrible conditions and slow travel on the roads. Removal was “
accomplished with a much less expense to the United States than if it had been involuntary,” with armed guards herding civilians.

 • • • 

Some of Ross’s last days in the eastern Cherokee country were spent on the banks of the Tennessee River. He arrived on the evening of Saturday, November 10, to find many campfires burning on the south bank. It was the quiet campsite of one of the last Cherokee parties to leave for the west—1,613 people in this detachment, their goods and supplies loaded in ninety-one wagons, most of the people on foot and footsore,
the horses off somewhere in the dark. The detachment had come here to cross the river at a place called Blythe’s Ferry. Peering across the dark water, Ross saw lights on the far bank, and learned that a dozen wagons had already been shipped across the river that day, from the Cherokee Nation to the whiteside. Actually, both sides were the whiteside now. The Indian map, in this part of the country, was no more. Ross paid his respects to the conductor of the group, found a place to sleep amid the campfires, and woke to a scene that he later described with a note of pride to Winfield Scott:

At dawn of day the Emigrants were in readiness and Commenced crossing the river—four boats were put in requisition and continued running until dusk, two of them were manned by Cherokees themselves. At the close of the day about sixty one waggons of the detachment with the people were safely lodged across the river. The business of crossing was again resumed early this morning, and before twelve Oclock eighteen waggons, carriages &c with all the people were over. . . . In this performance of this duty it is admitted by all who were present, and I assure you there were not few, including travelers, that nothing but good management, perseverance and energy could have accomplished it so satisfactorily.

The Cherokee Nation had been divided into thirteen groups, each of them somewhat more or less than a thousand. Eleven groups were on the road ahead of this detachment, which was the last to travel by road; one final detachment was a small group of those especially sick or unfit, and Ross would travel with them in December, leaving late enough in the season that the water route should be open. The groups had been moving out one by one since September, ready or not: a detachment encamped near Fort Payne, in Alabama, was reported to be in no condition to travel (“
at least Two third are in a destitute condition and in want of shoes Clothing and Blankets”), but the soldiers at Fort Payne told them they would be issued no more rations if they remained in
place after October first.
Another party made it on the road even though it was being harassed by debt collectors, with “horses taken from our Teams for the payment of unjust & just Demands.”