The Heathen School Read online

  Trade with white colonists brought another kind of disruption. Cherokee hunters responded vigorously to European demand for furs and (most importantly) deerskins; in return, they received firearms, housewares, tools and other manufactured goods, textiles, liquor, and grains. The result was a growing reliance on outside sources of supply, with a corresponding decline of indigenous craft traditions. As early as 1745, a Cherokee chief lamented, “My people cannot live independent of the English.… The clothes we wear we cannot make ourselves. They are made for us. We use their ammunition with which to kill deer. We cannot make our guns. Every necessary of life we must have from the white people.”13

  By around 1800, Cherokee fortunes had reached a nadir. Three-quarters of their land was gone. Many of their towns lay more or less destroyed. The deerskin trade was failing (with all forms of wildlife drastically reduced by overhunting). Traditional cultural norms and sanctions lay in disarray; shamans, for example, were discredited by their inability to slow the pace of decline. Individual Cherokees would respond in different ways—some by withdrawing to remote sites (the highest of the Appalachian highlands), others by migrating far to the west (the Arkansas Territory), still others by succumbing to acute personal despair (apathy and alcoholism).14

  Yet soon thereafter, the core population began a process of readjustment so powerful and positive that it would come to be called a “renascence.” In part, this meant embracing the “civilization” policy favored by the federal government. Thus many Cherokees turned to various forms of intensive farming. For some, raising livestock became a kind of surrogate for hunting. Others stepped up their production of grains, fruits, and garden vegetables. At least a few went straight into market-based plantation agriculture, raising cotton and other cash crops with the labor of enslaved blacks. These changes meant abandoning the clustered life of their traditional towns, with households dispersing across the countryside. Families became more nuclear in structure, property holding more individualized, the cultural ethos more competitive and entrepreneurial.15

  The process included wholesale political reorganization: first (1809) through the formation of a National Council with general oversight responsibilities, then (1817) with the creation of a three-branch system of governance, including a bicameral legislature elected on a representative basis, and, finally, the adoption (1827) of a national constitution closely modeled on that of the United States. The overall result was a far more centralized, more “republican” system than the Cherokees had known previously. Another result was a surge of ethnic pride. For, although the similarities to the pattern of the United States were immediately clear, Cherokee leaders envisioned using what they had created to promote and protect their people’s interests. “Civilization” in the service of independent nationhood, “civilization” that would yet preserve their core identity: thus their ultimate goal.16 Ultimately, their renascence might parallel—and partake of—the broader American rise to greatness. (Cherokee “exceptionalism”? Why not?)

  Education was another aspect of the program, and, after about 1820, schools proliferated throughout the Cherokee country. Then, at almost the same time, came the remarkable invention of an indigenous “syllabary” (a system of figural notations to represent each of eighty-six syllabic sounds in the spoken language) by the illiterate silversmith Sequoyah. Now the large majority of Cherokees who did not speak (or read) English might avail themselves of writing; many did so within a scant few years. Scarcely less striking was the spread of Christianity—at first by way of the schools, then through the strenuous exertions of Protestant missionaries. In the 1820s, circuit-riding preachers—principally Methodists and Baptists—reached even the most remote areas of the Nation, and returned with extravagant claims of new converts.17

  To be sure, these signs of “progress” did not go uncontested. Education and assimilation to white ways was the special province of a small minority, most of whom were of mixed-race parentage. White men had been settling among the Cherokees—marrying, buying property, starting businesses, joining in the life of the Nation—over the course of several generations. A national census from 1826 recorded the presence of 211 “intermarried whites” (within a total population of over 13,000). Estimates of “mixed-bloods” at around the same time reached into the thousands. Clearly, members of this latter group possessed important advantages in dealing with the non-native world: bilingual communication, knowledge of the market system, familiarity with mainstream (white) cultural ways—not to mention direct ties of blood and friendship. Increasingly, they assumed the status of a national bourgeoisie. Increasingly, too, they rose to positions of political leadership. But their prosperity and influence aroused resentment among the much larger mass of unassimilated “full-bloods” (whom federal agents sometimes referred to as “the real Indians”). Tensions around class and cultural difference simmered, and occasionally broke into the open. In the mid-1820s, just as the newly evolved governmental system was taking full effect, tradition-minded Cherokees mounted a vigorous pushback against the pace and direction of change. Some advocated rejection of the constitution, of Christianity, of white residents—and a return to the old tribal ways.18

  But these internal strains were repeatedly overshadowed by struggle with outsiders. White frontiersmen pressed in on several sides; clashes with them became inevitable. Boundaries were a constant point of dispute. Young Cherokees would turn to horse stealing and cattle rustling, in a sort of counterpoint to the taking of their lands. At the same time, political leaders in states claiming sovereignty over the Nation (Georgia, in particular) pressed their case ever more stridently. The federal government was caught in the middle, tilting this way and that, searching for some middle ground. Through it all, pressure to engross additional parts of the Nation’s territory grew and grew—as did Cherokee resistance.19

  Some had already given up and joined the scattering of predecessors in Arkansas (to be known henceforth as the Western Cherokees); most were determined to stay. The choice, as presented to them in virtually continuous negotiations, amounted to this: Cede us more of your land, or remove yourselves entirely; there is no third way. (The hook was baited just a bit. Land cessions would be linked to equivalent territorial grants in the West—in short, would be officially part of an exchange.) In 1819, the Cherokees agreed to yield just over a quarter (four million acres) of what they still retained—this as a “guaranteed” final step. There would be no full-scale removal, and no further cessions. As described by one of the resident missionaries: “[T]his deliverance, beyond expectation, has spread joy and gladness through the nation.” From now on, wrote another in a letter to a chief, “you are allowed to sit quietly around your own fires and under your own trees, and all things are … set before you and your children.”20

  As the Cherokee renascance went forward, American culture at large was caught in the maelstrom of the Second Great Awakening. Revivals were everywhere—in the cities, the small towns, even the villages of the rural countryside. These, in turn, lent a surge of energy to the mission movement. By 1820, no fewer than eleven different denominational and interfaith organizations were fully engaged in “the Great Cause.”21

  Within this group, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions held pride of place: more workers in the field, more sites, more schools and training grounds, more converts won (or claimed) overall. At first, the board’s focus was overseas. Previous missionary efforts with the native people of America had proved disappointing; moreover, the pool of potential converts was vastly greater in “the Eastern hemisphere.” Still, a case could be made the other way. “Many … have thought it strange,” the board reflected in 1816, “that while so much has been doing for the distant heathen in India, so little should have been done for the not less destitute tribes on our continent, and within our borders.” Indeed, revival activity had aroused strong feelings of guilt about dispossessing Indians. (At least this was true of a good many evangelical Christians.) A leading preacher, in an of
t-reprinted sermon on missionary goals, said the following: “[W]e are living in prosperity on the very lands from which the wretched pagans have been ejected; from the recesses of whose wilderness a moving cry is heard, ‘when it is well with you, think of poor Indians!’ ” The upshot was compromise: Missionary efforts should be directed both ways—to the domestic and foreign fields alike. The Cornwall school was itself an expression of that divided frame, with its mix of scholars from many far-flung parts of the world, alongside others from Indian groups within the territorial United States.22

  In time, the arm of the American Board’s outreach would embrace dozens of native communities, from Oneidas and Senecas east of the Great Lakes, to Ojibwa in the far north, to Choctaws and Chickasaws in the lower South, to Pawnees, Dakota Sioux, and other Plains Indians farther west. The goal was everywhere the same: “to convey to them the benefits of civilization and the blessings of Christianity.” If all went according to plan, someday “the red man and the white man shall be found mingling in the same benevolent and friendly feelings, fellow citizens in the same civil and religious community, and fellow-heirs to a glorious inheritance in the kingdom of Immanuel.” In short: Converting the one and reviving the other would lead to a truly biracial and bicultural consummation.23

  There was room for debate about the most efficacious “means.” Should “civilization” of the Indian precede or follow his religious conversion? Was some degree of schooling, especially the attainment of literacy, a necessary qualification for church membership? Or might “unbelief” be directly reversed without any distinct preparatory steps? Missionary groups could, and did, take different positions; the American Board, for one, generally advocated a civilization-first approach. In practice, however, both elements would usually advance together—as suggested by the wide use of the single catchall term “Christian civilization.”24

  Among the various Indian missions, the one with the Cherokees was—by the 1820s—a showpiece. It had not always been so. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Cherokees rejected overtures from missionaries, suspecting that these folk, like other whites, were moved chiefly by greed for their land. In 1800, they did grant entrée to a small group of Moravians. And in the 1810s, they opened up to other denominations—Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists (the American Board). Their main interest in doing so was the creation of schools; but inevitably, too, there would be growing emphasis on faith and conversion. Churches appeared in several parts of the Nation; some of the pastors were themselves Cherokee. Evangelicals all across the country (especially in New England) reacted with excitement to news of this “striking change.” Tangible support, both money and goods, arrived in quantity. Visitors arrived, too—among others, President James Monroe. The 1826 census counted approximately 10 percent of Cherokees as converts; many more were said to be churchgoers, though not finally “committed.” Increasingly, religion became melded with other aspects of the renascence; to be Christian was, almost by definition, to be “civilized,” as well. But this alignment served to accentuate existing differences within the Nation. Again, well-to-do “mixed-bloods” proved most apt for conversion, while the vast majority of “real” Cherokees—by and large, the “full-bloods”—remained loyal to traditional belief and practice.25

  Indeed, for all the promise of renascence, deep pools of skepticism remained among Cherokees of every background. Would white people actually accept Indians—any Indians—as “fellow citizens in the same … community” and “fellow heirs” to God’s kingdom? Did they truly believe in the essential equality of the different races? And would they finally allow even “the most civilized tribe” to retain its own land in the heart of the rapidly expanding American republic?

  It was in this doubt-filled atmosphere that members of the Nation learned of the “scandal” attending the marriages of two of their own most favored sons. And it was amid this troubled citizenry that John Ridge and Elias Boudinot would soon take up the mantle of leadership. For their compatriots who welcomed them home, as for the school that had disowned them, events were moving toward a profound denouement.

  • CHAPTER EIGHT •

  “Even the stoutest hearts melt into tears”

  As controversy swirled around the Gold-Boudinot engagement, the school entered a kind of limbo. To whatever extent possible, its leaders—the agents and principal—sought to maintain a familiar round of regular business. Rev. Bassett reported hopefully that the current scholars were busy with no fewer than a dozen academic subjects: “reading, writing, English grammar, geography, history, rhetoric, geometry, surveying, navigation, natural philosophy, and the Latin and Greek languages.” To be sure, this sprawling curriculum created significant (and familiar) challenges: “[A]s but few were pursuing the same studies at the same time, the labor of instruction has ever been much greater than, in other circumstances, it would have been.” There were discipline challenges, as well: Bassett noted his particular “regret … that some of the beneficiaries were indolent and inattentive to the regulations of the institution.” Indeed, seven had been dismissed during the months of May and June alone. The ranks were further thinned by the deaths from illness of two young Hawaiians later in the summer. Others, however, were newly admitted—at least five, possibly more. On a different front, resentment flared around the old sticking point of the “preference” afforded certain scholars by gifts from private benefactors. Equality had always been a key principle of life at the school; hence the agents reemphasized that all “must conform to the regulations … in relation to their apparel as well as in other respects.” (Those regulations were designed to minimize overt signs of difference.) Moreover, individual “donations” of spending money should be “put into a common stock,” and subsequently “given to the scholar on whom bestowed…[only] at the discretion of the Executive Committee.”1

  But all this was beside the point—like whistling in the face of a rising wind. For the leaders of the American Board had already begun to consider permanent closure of the school. In his position as board secretary and day-to-day manager, Jeremiah Evarts was necessarily at the center of their discussion. His letters to the school’s agents, while repeatedly protesting their public stance against intermarriage, also raised a different—and fundamental—question: “whether it is practicable, in the majority of cases, to take ignorant & uncivilized boys, place them in a school by themselves, & have them educated so that they will become men, capable of taking an active part in human affairs.”2

  Evarts was not alone in his concerns. At a meeting in September 1824, the American Board faced the issue of the future with unusual directness. “As the School increases in age,” its leaders declared, “and [as] the more advanced students are completing the term originally fixed as the period of their education, it becomes more and more a question of delicacy and difficulty to decide whither they shall be sent, and how they shall be employed.” Some—at least a few—could be “sent to their native land, and there be associated with missionaries in such … work as they are able to manage.” However, many others “are not capable of rendering any essential service”; with these the requisite “talents, industry, self-denial, and other qualifications” were lacking. Nor were the scholars themselves entirely to blame. Their experience in the surrounding community was a bewildering mix of interest and condescension. As Lyman Beecher and others had noticed at the start, they were liable to a kind of “puffing” by outsiders of all sorts; thus there was real danger that they might come to “feel very big.” At the same time, they were “treated in various respects, as though they were and must be inferior to ourselves.… These different kinds of treatment, which result from inquisitive curiosity, mixed with Christian benevolence on the one hand, and from established prejudices, on the other, make the young men feel as though they were mere shows, a feeling which is too accurate an index of their real situation.”3

  Taken together, these comments expressed a complete, and startling, turnabout. And they do suggest that the �
��marriage crisis” may not have been entirely unwelcome to board leaders. Even as they deplored the prejudice it called forth, they could imagine using it as a pivot for change. Operational problems had beset the school virtually from the start: problems of pedagogy, of discipline, of health, of cultural difference and personal discord. Almost nothing had gone exactly as planned—up to, and very much including, the pair of now-notorious engagements. Of course, the school had tried to shield its ongoing struggles behind a strenuous campaign of public relations. Time after time, its leaders had drawn a picture of glorious goals in process of rapid fulfillment. But their own internal records told a different story, one that was full of disappointment and frustration.

  Only thus can their readiness to give up on the school be understood. How—given all they had previously claimed—might a decision to close be explained to the world at large? For a start, they could point to the matter of local opposition; Evarts, for example, noted the way “the people of Litchfield county…[had become]…more & more convinced that there were insuperable difficulties in conducting the school.” With one another, they might go somewhat deeper, and fault “the character of the individuals who had been educated at the school.” Evarts’s reference to “ignorant & uncivilized boys” unable to “become men capable of taking an active part in human affairs” was unusually candid; the phrasing revealed an antipathy that he and his colleagues had previously sought to suppress. If the school was to go under—so they assured themselves—it would not be from mistaken premises or misdirected effort on their part. Poor “character” and lack of “capability” in the scholars could henceforth be seen as decisive factors—this, and their uncomfortable relation to the wider community. Meanwhile, the tumult around the “intermarriages” furnished a most convenient cover. Never mind what was, or wasn’t, “morally wrong” here; years of practical experience provided sufficient reason to close.4