Here’s a copy of the treaty of New Echota, FYI.
http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/che0439.htm
I’m still trying to find any details of the US citizenship offer.
Looks like I had my acreage wrong. (And maybe I’m conflating the various proposals.) The treaty appears to give the Cherokee the option of staying in North Carolina, Alabama or Tennessee, becoming citizens of those states, and receiving 160 acres of land (not 400) per head of household (not per person).
Spoke wrote:
With all due respect, Spoke, I’ve thought this through for the majority of my life. Just because I don’t agree that you’ve framed a legitimate question (for the reasons I’ve cited) doesn’t mean that you’re thinking and I’m not.
First of all, the scalper didn’t always wait until the scalpee was dead. There were actually many survivors of scalpings.
Secondly, scalping was not a fate reserved to warriors. female settlers were scalped as well.
I’m not at all sure any of the victims of this practice appreciated the “honor” which was bestowed upon them.
Back to the Pequot/Shoshone dichotomy, different tribes practiced scalping differently. The Cherokee, with the exceptions of psychopathic renegades, were neither savages nor murderers. No chief or honorable warrior would scalp a female settler. There is no honor in it. It is a worthless trophy.
A form of sexism, which, at the time, was viewed with aplomb by Native American feminists.
You’re glossing over the magnitude (hell, the sheer geographic magnitude) of the problem. It was not possible for Uncle Sam to maintain patrols of Cherokee land.
For that matter, why should it be the responsibility of Uncle Sam? Why didn’t the Cherokee secure their own borders?
You know the reasons as well as I. It was simply not logistically feasible for them to do so. They were too few, and the territory was too large. Furthermore, if the Cherokee had taken it upon themselves to remove squatters, it would have led to the very sort of bloodbath Jackson wanted to avoid.
I still see no realistic proposals for dealing with the problem that was facing Jackson.
What problem facing Jackson? Dammit, the problem was facing the Cherokee. Jackson’s job was to enforce the law. He should have done his job.
Turning all this around to make the Cherokee into a “problem” for that jackbooted thug is positively the most bizarre revisionism I’ve ever seen.
I don’t buy it.
Well I’ll chime in, with the reservations I expressed above, and say that AJ should have granted citizenship to all Cherokee, and title to the land that the Cherokee were occupying at the time. The government should have then used its police power to protect the property of the Cherokee just as they would have for any other citizen. Unoccupied land within the Cherokee territory would then have been divided amongst the white settlers. That is how I would have split the baby.
Please. Talk about revisionism.
A quick search yields The Scalping of Barbara Culp. From that site:
Let’s not try to sanitize the past, shall we.
The Charokee were victimized by the Removal, we all agree, but let’s not try to turn them into plaster saints.
Once again, Lib, imagine that you are Jackson. (Or President Jesus, if you prefer.) What would you do?
“Enforce the law” is no answer, if by “enforce the law” you mean post the border and evict all squatters. That was not a feasible option. Who would bear the cost of such a huge undertaking? Citizens of the US would certainly not bear that cost happily. Would the Cherokee have assumed financial responsibility? Would they have paid taxes?
Again, Lib, I’m looking for practical solutions, not platitudes.
Once again, Lib, imagine that you are Jackson. (Or President Jesus, if you prefer.) What would you do?
“Enforce the law” is no answer, if by “enforce the law” you mean post the border and evict all squatters. That was not a feasible option. Who would bear the cost of such a huge undertaking? Citizens of the US would certainly not bear that cost happily. Would the Cherokee have assumed financial responsibility? Would they have paid taxes?
Again, Lib, I’m looking for practical solutions, not platitudes.
Perhaps an example which may shed some light on this OP is that of the Chippewa of Wisconsin. Like the Cherokee, they were a relatively peaceful nation that largely interacted well with whites. Like the Cherokee, they were a large nation in numbers, and they covered a fairly large plot of land. Also like the Cherokee, they occupied land that had minerals/natural resources (copper, iron, timber) which were coveted by westward moving Americans. Like the Cherokee, they were given a removal order in 1850, this order by President Zachary Taylor. But then some things different from the Cherokee case began to happen.
First, Wisconsin had an established white population. The Chippewa had already relinquished their usufructuary rights to their lands through treaty, and white settlement had already begun. Many white settlers in Wisconsin were outraged at the removal order, which actually came about because of a little politicking between Taylor and Minnesota Territory Governor Alexander Ramsey (Ramsey wanted the Federal jobs associated with Indian Affairs to be in MN). The settlers were outraged because of the peaceful nature of the Chippewa. Taylor then died in office. A Chippewa delegation went to Washington to meet with the new President, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore revoked the removal order, and by treaty in 1854, reservations were established for the Wisconsin Chippewa.
The Chippewa have been largely prosperous, if you will, as well. Depending on whose numbers you rely on, they are one of the two or three largest Tribes in North America today. If you are looking for a “what could have been done instead of a removal,” the Chippewa may be a good case study. There are differences, yes. And the model of the U.S. v. Chippewa removal is by no means a success story, as it still involved much suffering. It is a decent place to start, however.
Personally, the Cherokee would have survived with or without removal. Andrew Jackson did them no favors. To assume they would have been anhilated without removal is probably innacurate.
You know, Spoke, when I thought you were merely being devil’s advocate, I appreciated the opportunity to address these issues. But you seem to have taken the side of that racist madman. You’ve dismissed everything I’ve said as irrelevant, thoughtless platitudes. And then you cited 16 18th century renegade psychos, documented in the propoganda of a government that hated them, as examples of the whole Cherokee nation and its history.
And you say that enforcing the law was not a feasible option, which means nothing more than that the law and the whole system that supported it was a joke.
And frankly, saying that the Cherokee were some kind of problem for Jackson is no different than saying that the Jews were a problem for Hitler. Bullshit. I’m done here. Enjoy yourself.
Ugh, correction. The Chippewa maintained some usufructuary rights to land ceded by treaty, and were given the promis that they would be allowed to live on the ceded land in treaties signed in 1837 & 1842.
At last, a serious proposal.
This one is feasible, though I doubt the Cherokee would have agreed to it. There would also need to be financial recompense for the land being taken. A drawback is that this proposal would have probably resulted in the destruction of Cherokee culture in the long run. (Or more accurately, its absorption into the larger culture through intermarriage.)
One other thought which just occured to me: A big part of the problem is financial. How would Jackson finance a standing army to patrol Cherokee lands? Perhaps a better solution than removal would have been for the Cherokee to cede mineral rights to the US in exchange for police protection.
Then, the gold (and later marble and bauxite) extracted from North Georgia would be used to finance the police force required to prevent squatting.
The Cherokee keep their land, all of it, and the US gets gold for its treasury, and a way to finance its military commitment to the region. When the gold played out (which didn’t take long), timber rights might have to come into play as well.
I don’t see the need for this “standing army.” A simple police force, like every other region had would be sufficient.
Yes, the culture would probably be gone today, but what is wrong with that? Cultures come and go through history all the time, they assimilate, divide, evolve. Nothing is static. I am not one of those people that thinks every culture should be preserved forever as a living entity. My proposal would have effectively ended the Cherokee nation, as a quasi-independent entity, and absorbed them into the US.
Let me just say, again, that I have not made any great study of this era. I think what happened on the Trail of Tears was tragic and wrong, but I also think it is unrealistic, given the time, to think that the Cherokee were going to be able to keep all of their lands forever.
The standing army would only be necessary if 12,000 or 18,000 Cherokee expected to hold an area the size of New Jersey. They were not numerous enough to patrol it themselves, so some sort of military force from the US would be required. And that takes money. This is a practical consideration that must be faced.
Granted, that information is not specific to the Cherokee, but it does tend to suggest that the scalping of a female victim in general was not an anomaly.
I’m not trying to demonize Native Americans; I’m only trying to humanize them. They were as capable of atrocities as Old Hickory.
Gold was still being mined from the N. Georgia seams until the big gold strikes of in California made mining there more profitable, and with the advances in mining technology, gold is still produced there today.
It’s a mistake to look at what happened as an inevitability, or cultural clash, or the expantion of white settlements. One traveler through Cherokee land said, for example, when you came upon a farm, until you saw the owner, you couldn’t tell if the farm was owned by whites or Cherokees. What happened to the Cherokee happened because of deliberate decisions by the State of Georgia and the United States government to strip the Cherokee of their land. People violated Cherokee borders because Georgia encouraged them to and the President approved of it.
Remember, this was the man nicknamed “King Andy” for his imperious nature. This was the man who threatened to hang the governor of South Carolina during the nulification dispute. Jackson had really vocal attitudes about the Bank of the US, about nulification, about increasing the franchise, about the tarrif, and about almost everything, and he was successful in most of what he advocated. Jackson never showed any sympathy for the Cherokee or took any action on their behalf.
Grandaddy on my Mother’s side was a “redskin” from North Georgia (do the math) fine man , american citizen, I never saw him smoke a peace pipe, etc. His grandparents were Cherokee. Mom is a dark eyed/ drk haired Indian princess and produced many beautiful children (along with my decidedly WASP Dad) myself excluded. This isn’t uncommon in this part of the world. The Cherokee nation was immense. I’ve met tons of Southerners from the region that are obviously (by admission and/or appearance) decendant of these Native American peoples that don’t pay any attention to the heritage. If you’re not a native you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. Its a flavor that we appreciate in “the South” same as the “french cajun” identity that is popular. Many of us native Southerners are decendant of these Cherokee and Cree tribes.