3. Indian Removal and the Vile Maxim

The problem of driving an awareness of their true wants into the heads of "rude barbarians" also beset the US government in the course of its program of Indian removal and annexation. The most striking instance, perhaps, arose in the 1880s, as Washington prepared to rescind the solemn treaties recognizing ownership of Eastern Oklahoma by the Five Civilized Tribes. The Indian Territory had been granted to these nations in perpetuity after they had been brutally expelled from their traditional homes under an 1835 "treaty" that several Indian leaders were forced to accept, recognizing that "they are strong and we are weak"; "We were all opposed to selling our country east," the signers wrote to Congress, condemning the US government for "making us outcasts and outlaws in our own land, plunging us at the same time into an abyss of moral degradation which was hurling our people to swift destruction." For the English settlers, peace treaties had a special meaning, explained by the Council of State in Virginia in the 17th century: when the Indians "grow secure uppon the treatie, we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cutt downe theire Corne." The concept survives to the present.

The 1835 treaty replaced earlier ones, going back to 1785, when the newly liberated colonies forced a treaty on the Cherokees (who had, not surprisingly, supported the British in the revolutionary war), taking lands held by the Cherokees under earlier treaties while stating that Congress "want none of your lands, nor anything else which belongs to you." This was a "humane and generous act of the United States," the US representative declared. In 1790, George Washington assured the Cherokees that "In future you cannot be defrauded of your lands": the new government "will protect you in all your just rights...The United States will be true and faithful to their engagements." President Jefferson added that "I sincerely wish you may succeed in your laudable endeavors to save the remnant of your nation by adopting industrious occupations, and a government of regular law. In this you may always rely on the counsel and assistance of the United States." In the years that followed, settlers encroached on Indian territory and new treaties were dictated, imposing further cessions of land. In what remained, a successful agricultural society was established, with textile manufacture from 1800, schools, printing presses, and a well-functioning government that was much admired by outsiders. A report submitted to the War Department in 1825 gave a "glowing description of the Cherokee country and nation at the time," Helen Jackson writes in her exceptional (in many ways) 19th century history of Indian removal, quoting extensive passages of praise for the advanced civilization that the Cherokees had developed and the "republican principles" on which it was based. Meanwhile, the leading thinkers of Europe lectured on the strange lack of "psychic power" that caused the Indians to "vanish" and "expire as soon as Spirit approached" with the European presence.

However impressive, progress was being made by the wrong people, who once again stood in the way of the advance of "progress" in the Politically Correct sense of the term. Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 was followed by the imposed treaty of 1835, in which the signers relinquished all claims of the Civilized Nations to their lands east of the Mississippi. Jackson was deeply moved by his generosity in "having done my duty to my red children"; "if any failure of my good intention arises, it will be attributable to their want of duty to themselves, not to me." He was not only granting "these children of the forest" an opportunity "to better their condition in an unknown land" as "our forefathers" did, but even paying "the expense of his removal," an act of "friendly feeling" that "thousands of our own people would gladly embrace" if only it were extended to them.

Three years later, 17,000 Cherokees were driven at bayonet point to Oklahoma by the US Army "over a route so marked with new-dug graves that it was ever afterwards known as the Trail of Tears" (Thurman Wilkins); perhaps half survived "the generous and enlightened policy" of the US government, as the operation was described by the Secretary of War, with the routine self-acclaim for unspeakable atrocities.

Reviewing the remarkable achievements of the Cherokee nation before and after, and the treatment accorded them, Helen Jackson writes that "In the whole history of our Government's dealing with the Indian tribes, there is no record so black as the record of perfidy to this nation. There will come a time in the remote future when, to the student of American history, it will seem well-nigh incredible" -- a judgment with which it is hard to quarrel, though the future is still remote.¹⁴

¹⁴ Jackson, Century. Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 3, 4, 287. Peace treaty, Stannard, American Holocaust, 106. Andrew Jackson, Rogin, Fathers, 215f. On estimates of the toll, see Lenore Stiffarm with Phil Lane, "The Demography of Native North America," in Jaimes, State.