The Cherokee Nation: Mirror of the Republic

Abstract

through its own agents and through federally subsidized missionaries undertook an ambitious and comprehensive effort to change the economy, institutions, and culture of the Cherokee Indian Nation. By 1830, substantial change had occurred. The Cherokee had schools, churches, plantations, slaves, and a written language, newspaper, and constitution. At precisely that point, President Andrew Jackson encouraged the state of Georgia to extend its jurisdiction over the most populous part of the Cherokee Nation. By both action and inaction, the federal executive abetted thousands of trespassers who violated both United States treaties guaranteeing protection of Cherokee borders and a Supreme Court decision upholding treaty guarantees against the sovereign pretensions of the state of Georgia. The president and his War Department fostered a small faction of the tribe who, in 1835, signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding Cherokee holdings in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, and promising to remove the Cherokee people to present-day Oklahoma. The vast majority of the tribe rejected the Treaty, whose signers possessed no authority under the Cherokee constitution. In 1838, volunteer militia under federal command expelled approximately 16,000 Cherokee from their lands. They rode, walked, sickened, and died along the Trail of Tears to the Cherokee Nation West. After those who survived had settled in the West, earlier migrants or Old Settlers, those who had participated in the Treaty of New Echota, and the new arrivals from the Cherokee Nation East struggled violently over who should control the government of the still civilized but deeply divided Nation. As often as their story has been told, the Cherokee experiment in building and defending a modem Nation still evokes varied and conflicting interpretations. How civilized' -or acculturated-were the Cherokee of the 1830s? Did the transformation of their social and political institu-