Jeffersonian Indian Removal and the Emergence of Arkansas Territory

Abstract

THE PHRASE INDIAN REMOVAL is often associated with the Trail of Tears, the forced migration of the Five Civilized Tribes in the 1830s begun under President Andrew Jackson. Arkansas was an important part of the trail, traversed by all five of the tribes on their way into exile in what is now Oklahoma, but it played a larger role in the less well-known removal program that was initiated by President Thomas Jefferson and continued to be national policy through the 1820s.1 Jeffersonian Indian removal had its origins in the president's long-held view that the migration of eastern Indian tribes across the Mississippi River would be good for both whites and Native Americans, providing economic opportunity for the former and giving the latter time and space in which to develop their potential for what he thought of as civilization, the critical element of which was farming individually-owned plots of land rather than hunting on vast amounts of communal acreage. The Louisiana Purchase provided the president with an opportunity to test this concept, and for twenty years, beginning in 1808, Arkansas was the government's destination of choice for removed tribes. As a result, it became home to the western Cherokee nation, a group of settlers who represented at least 20 percent of the total population of Arkansas by the time it became a separate territory in 1819.2 While historians have analyzed Jefferson's ideas and policies with respect to Indian removal, they have paid less attention to their impact on the settlement and development of the Louisiana Purchase and have generally ignored the role of Arkansas as the focus of migration.3 Similarly, recent studies that have added greatly to our knowledge of Indian immigrants to Arkansas have paid relatively little attention to the Jeffersonian policies that helped to bring this immigration about.4 There is good reason for emphasizing, as they do, that Native Americans exercised a large degree of control over their own affairs, but it is also true, in this case at least, that federal policy shaped Indian fates.5 This essay addresses each of these issues. It explains how geography affected the development of upper Louisiana and made the Arkansas portion of it a potential home for eastern Indians, and it analyzes the movement of the Cherokee nation as a product of both Cherokee initiative and Jeffersonian persuasion. Geography had long been a factor in the political development of the Mississippi River Valley. Under the Spanish colonial regime, the Mississippi River basin was divided into two districts, with the lower portion administered by the colonial governor in New Orleans and Upper Louisiana, or the Illinois Country as it was called, under the control of a deputy governor stationed at St. Louis. The imprecise but recognized boundary between the two regions extended west from the mouth of the Ohio River, although the village of New Madrid, located thirty miles below that line, was also included in Upper Louisiana.6 The substantial trading center at Arkansas Post, near the mouth of the Arkansas River, and the tiny garrison at the Chickasaw Bluffs at the site of modern Memphis, Tennessee, were the northern-most outposts of Lower Louisiana. Distance was the critical factor in creating this division. An upstream barge trip from New Orleans to St. Louis required at least two months, and the overland journey, which followed a circuitous route through Natchitoches on the Red River, Fort Miro on the Ouachita River at present-day Monroe, Louisiana, and Arkansas Post, took over a month. Arkansas Post was somewhat less than halfway from New Orleans to St. Louis by water.7 Of critical importance to the growth of Upper Louisiana was the natural population basin formed by the Mississippi River Valley between the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio Rivers.8 That geographical feature, which had made Cahokia a Native American population center in the thirteenth century, created a nexus of European settlement on both sides of the Mississippi by the middle of the eighteenth century. …