Conflict Resolution and United

States History:

Cherokee Removal

Student Handouts
 Table of Contents

Objectives
Map of Native Tribes in the Southeastern U.S.
Historical Background of U.S.-Cherokee Relations
Cherokee Renaissance, 1819-1829
Picture of the Home of John Ross
Cherokee Resistance to Georgia's Assertions of Sovereignty
President Andrew Jackson's Views on Native Tribes' Sovereignty
U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Worcester v. Georgia
Split in Cherokee Resistance
Mock Negotiations between Cherokees and U.S. Officials
 Directions
 Participants
o John Ross
o Nancy Ward
o Theodore Frelinghuysen
o Evan Jones
o Lewis Cass
o George Troup
o Wilson Lumpkin
o Elias Boudinot
 Positions and Interests
o Pro-Removal
o Anti-Removal
 Roles
 Debriefing
What Actually Happened?
Image of the Trail of Tears
Legacy of Cherokee Removal
Questions for Discussion

2
 Objectives
________

 Understand the scope of Cherokee land and

economic activity in the early 1800s

 Analyze the economic reasons pushing the

idea of Cherokee Removal

 Understand the backgrounds of the individuals

involved in negotiating a solution to the conflict
over the land of the Cherokee Nation in
Georgia

 Consider what alternative resolutions might

have been possible

 Recognize the suffering by the Cherokees on

their forced westward march, known as the
“Trail of Tears”

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Location of the Major Southeastern native tribes at the beginning of the
19th Century

4
 Historical Background
____________
 Cherokees inhabited a vast area in southeastern U.S. during
colonial period, including most of present-day Georgia

 Cherokees sided with the British during the American Revolution

 1785 Treaty of Hopewell: U.S. proclaimed sovereignty over

Cherokees and recognized tribal claims to most of their land

 1791 Treaty of Holston: U.S. conceded a degree of Cherokee

sovereignty and recognized some tribal laws and customs

 Federal Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790, 1802 and 1834 sought
to prevent exploitation of Indians

 Thomas Jefferson’s federal policy towards Indians: try to “civilize”

(assimilate) them and open Indian land east of the Mississippi to
white settlement

 1813-14, Cherokees fought alongside Gen. Jackson against the

Creeks

 Treaties of 1817 and 1819 Cherokees ceded territory in east in

exchange for western lands, asserting that it would be their last
land sale

 Missionaries, with $10,000 annual appropriation from Congress,

established mission schools to teach skills and convert
Cherokees to Christianity
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 Cherokee Renaissance, 1819-1829
 Cherokee elite educated at white missionary schools became
wealthy by shifting to white forms of agriculture, including cotton
plantations with slaves

 The Cherokee Nation become economically self-sufficient and

developed national pride

 The Nation became politically self-governing with a Constitution

adopted in 1827 modeled after that of the southern states and the
United States

 Land was held in common by the Nation—unoccupied land could

be used by any members but could not be sold.

 1822: A Cherokee, Sequoyah, developed a Cherokee syllabary

 1828: Cherokee Nation began publication of a national

newspaper

Sequoyah
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Home of John Ross, president of
Cherokee National Committee

Home of John Ross in Rome, Georgia, originally built in 1827

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 Cherokee resistance to Georgia’s
assertions of sovereignty
____________

 Georgia settlers continued to encroach upon

Cherokee and Creek lands

 1824: Cherokees presented a memorial to Congress

declaring their policy against leaving their eastern
lands

 1826-27: Creeks ceded their last piece of land in

Georgia

 1828: Georgia asserted its sovereignty over

Cherokee land, pronouncing laws of Cherokee Nation
null and void

 1829: Cherokees passed a law making it a capital

crime for anyone to sell any Cherokee land.

 1829: Gold was discovered on Cherokee lands in

Georgia and there was a land stampede. Georgia
required a permit from the state to go onto Cherokee
land.

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Andrew Jackson is elected president of
the United States, 1828

 Jackson did not believe that native tribes were

sovereign entities entitled to self-government

 He pursued a policy of Indian Removal and won

Congressional approval for Indian Removal in May
1830

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 U.S. Supreme Court Supports the
Cherokees
____________
 In 1832, the United States Supreme Court held in
Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia acts were void and
recognized the Cherokee Nation as a “domestic,
dependent nation” where the laws of Georgia had no
force.

 The state of Georgia ignored this decision and

surveyed Cherokee land in preparation for its
distribution by lottery to Georgia citizens.

 Andrew Jackson, re-elected in 1832, ignored the

Court’s decision and the United States ratified over 70
treaties, acquiring 100 million acres of Indian land
between 1830 and 1836.

 In 1834, a special Indian territory was established in

the area that became Oklahoma

10
 Split in Cherokee Resistance
____________
 Led by Major Ridge, a prominent Cherokee leader, his
son, John Ridge, and nephew Elias Boudinot, a group
of Cherokees (the “treaty” or “removal” party) believed
that the Cherokees should stop resisting and move
west.

 This small group agreed to the Treaty of New Echota

in December 1835.

 By this Treaty, the Cherokees agreed to the sale of

Cherokee lands in the east, the purchase of new lands
in the area that became Oklahoma, and removal to
the west at federal expense.

 In 1836, the Treaty of New Echota was ratified by the

U.S. Senate.

 Cherokee president John Ross and his followers

remained steadfast in their refusal to vacate their
lands in Georgia.

 On Feb. 22, 1837 John Ross sent another memorial

and petition to Congress.

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 Directions for Mock Negotiations,
March 1837
__________
John Ross has sent a final memorial and petition to the Senate and
House of Representatives on February 22, 1837. He receives no
response. We will imagine instead that President Jackson has
responded and has agreed to have his secretary of War, Lewis Cass,
Senators Theodore Frelinghuysen and George Troup, Georgia
Governor Wilson Lumpkin and Reverend Evan Jones meet with
Cherokee Chief John Ross, Nancy Ward and Elias Boudinot.

Divide into groups of nine or ten:

1s = Chief John Ross

2s = Reverend Evan Jones
3s = Nancy Ward
4s = Senator Frelinghuysen
5s = Lewis Cass
6s = Elias Boudinot
7s = Governor Lumpkin
8s = Senator George Troup
9s-10s = One or two observer/recorder/reporters. The observers
may simply be “observers,” or we could hypothesize that
Frances Trollope, a British novelist, and Alexis De
Tocqueville, a liberal French aristocrat, who did both travel
through the United States in 1830 and write about what they
saw, are invited to observe the negotiations and to write
about them. (In fact, neither was in the United States in
1837.)

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 John Ross, Cherokee Chief

John Ross was born to a Scottish father and a one-quarter Cherokee

mother. He grew up in a well-off Anglo-Indian world where his father
provided his children tutors and other educational advantages. His
Cherokee mother instilled in him pride in his Indian ancestry. He
established Ross Landing (now Chattanooga, Tennessee) for trading traffic
on the Tennessee River, gained lucrative government contracts to supply
the Indians and soldiers, and expanded his agricultural holdings and his
slaves. Ross began his political career as an occasional clerk to the
Cherokee chiefs, became a delegate to Washington in 1816, and in 1819
became president of the National Committee, the Cherokee legislature.
After service in the Creek War, he married Elizabeth (Quatie) Brown-
Henley, a full-blooded Cherokee, and moved to Coosa (now Rome),
Georgia, where he built a two-storied house, and became quite wealthy
with his fields and ferry. He oversaw the development of the first
constitutional governor of an American Indian tribe, which placed premier
importance on maintaining the Cherokees’ homelands. In 1828, Ross was
elected the first chief under the new constitution. (See Document 6: June
22, 1836 Memorial to Congress, and Feb. 22, 1837 Petition and Memorial
to Congress.)

Position: Opposed Removal

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 Nancy Ward
Cherokee Leader

Nancy Ward was a “War Woman,” a title traditionally awarded to

women who distinguished themselves while accompanying war parties
to cook food, carry water and perform other gender specific tasks, and
later a “Beloved Woman.” After her husband’s death in battle in 1755,
Ward had rallied the warriors. She also had aided the patriot cause
during the American Revolution. In 1817, 1818, and later in 1831,
Nancy Ward, now an elderly woman, and other women, prepared
petitions to the National Council, arguing against the ceding of more
land, then against the allotment of land to individuals, and finally
against removal (See Document 5: Nancy Ward Petition.)

Position: Opposed Removal

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 U.S. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen

Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen was a devoutly religious, anti-

Jacksonian freshman senator from New Jersey, who had been
president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions. In 1830, he argued for six hours over a period of three days
against the removal bill. He based his arguments on the equality of all
men, natural law, the United States Constitution, prior treaties, fairness
and justice. “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the
skin?” he asked. He became known as the “Christian statesman.”
Frelinghuysen and other northern congressmen tried to add provisions
guaranteeing Indians rights provided by treaties. Frelinghuysen went
on to become president of the American Bible Society, chancellor of
New York University, vice-presidential candidate for the Whigs in 1844,
and president of Rutgers College. (See Document 7: Speech before
the Senate, April 30, 1830.)

Position: Opposed Removal

15
 Reverend Evan Jones

Reverend Evan Jones was a Baptist minister. Born in Wales and educated
in London, Jones immigrated to Philadelphia at the age of 33. He had no
sympathy for slavery and even less for the white frontier people of the
South who kept trying to drive the Cherokees to the west. A man of great
energy and a domineering personality, Jones headed the Baptist mission to
the Cherokees for forty years. By 1827, he had concluded that the
Cherokees had made great advances toward civilization, and shifted his
principal effort from farming and education towards evangelism. He
collected an every-expanding team of Cherokee converts and exhorters to
assist him in spreading Christianity among the Cherokees in North
Carolina, a large part of northern Georgia and a small area in Tennessee,
competing with the Methodists and Moravians. He was perhaps the only
white missionary to learn to speak with sufficient confidence to preach as
well as to write in Sequoyan. Even after many of the other missionaries
stopped their resistance to Cherokee removal after 1832, Jones continued
wholeheartedly in support of Cherokee Chief John Ross. (See Document
8: Excerpt from “William Penn” essays in Defense of Cherokees, 1829.)

Position: Opposed Removal

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 Lewis Cass,
Secretary of War

Lewis Cass was President Jackson’s Secretary of War during the period
1831-1836. This included responsibility for the management of Indian
affairs. He had previously been Governor of the Michigan Territory, 1813-
31, where he gained a great deal of experience working with Indian tribes
since the office of territorial governor included that of superintendent of
Indian affairs. By the mid 1820s, Cass had become widely regarded as one
of the best informed, most experienced and thoughtful experts in the
country on Indian policy. He was reputed to be a hardheaded, tough, but
fair, negotiator. By 1830, he believed that, as a practical necessity, the
Indians must all be removed west of the Mississippi, but advanced humane
ideals for organizing the new Indian territory. He published several articles
explaining that the land could not be held by the Indians solely for hunting,
but must give way to the needs of “providence” in using the land for
production. Although he was not a racist, his writings were used by the
government to rationalize highly discriminatory policies. (See Document 9:
Lewis Cass’s article, “Removal of Indians,” in the North American Review,
1830.)

Position: Supported Removal

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 George Troup
U.S. Senator from Georgia

George M. Troup was born in the part of Georgia that later became
Alabama. He was educated at Princeton University. During the 1820s,
while governor of Georgia, Troup orchestrated a campaign of bluster,
threat and audacity that enabled him to acquire the rich lands of the
Creek Indians for the state of Georgia and earned him great political
popularity. He believed that the Indians were an inferior race to the
white man, one step above the African slaves, and fared that the North
would deal with the Indians in a way that would set a precedent for
dealing with the slaves. In the early 1830s, as U.S. Senator from
Georgia, Troup wanted the Cherokees removed. Troup was supported
by wealthy coastal planters and merchants. Although both Troup and
Lumpkin favored Indian removal, they were political rivals. (See
Document 10: Troup’s March 5, 1832 letter to the Georgia Journal.)

Position: Supported Removal

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 Wilson Lumpkin
Governor of Georgia

Wilson Lumpkin grew up on the Georgia frontier. He was U.S.

Commissioner among the Creek and Cherokee Indians 1818-21.
Lumpkin was Congressman from Georgia 1824-31, Governor of
Georgia 1831-35 and U.S. Senator from Georgia 1837-41. He was a
devout Baptist, and often had the missionaries as well as the traders
and smaller planters behind him. Lumpkin had participated in a survey
of the northwest corner of Georgia which was claimed by the Cherokee,
and became an enthusiast for the construction of a railroad link from
the agricultural heartland of the state tot her river network in the
northwest. He strongly favored removal of the Cherokees. (See
Document 11: Nov. 24, 1832 Message to Georgia Legislature.)

Position: Supported removal

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 Elias Boudinot
Cherokee Removal leader

Elias Boudinot was a full-blooded Cherokee who had studied as an

adolescent at the missionary boarding school in Cornwall, Connecticut.
In 1826, he married Harriet Gould, one of the daughters of the white
school employees. The managers of the school disavowed these
actions, but adverse public opinion forced the school to close.
Boudinot was the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix from 1828 to 1832.
By 1832, Boudinot and his cousin, John Ridge, had concluded that
removal was inevitable and that delaying the inevitable might destroy
the wealth and moral fiber of the Cherokee Nation. They tried to
persuade John Ross to make a treaty. After 1832, Boudinot argued for
removal, and became a leader of the “Treaty or Removal Party.”

Position: Supported Removal

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 Pro-Removal Positions and Interests
Positions: Governor Lumpkin and Senator Troup
 Most Natives in northeastern areas have been killed or removed.
 Federal government had promised removal of Indians from Georgia
since 1802.
 Cherokees were not a sovereign entity (because you cannot have a
sovereign state within a sovereign state) and were subject to the laws
of Georgia.
Interests: Land
 States rights
 Fear of setting a precedent regarding the African slaves
 Economic development in western Georgia (prevented by Indians)
 The frontier folk felt that the Indians were savages and wanted them
removed because they had been victims of Indian attacks.

The federal government (Secretary Cass)

Position: Pro-Removal
Interests:
Cass: Indian removal legally, economically and morally justified and
morally necessary to help them survive as a race and become civilized.
President Jackson:
 National growth, unity and security
 A fervent nationalists but wanted limited federal power
 Federal government was offering extremely generous terms to the
Indians
 Removal was the only was to safeguard tribal integrity from white laws.

The Treaty or Removal Party (Elias Boudinot)

Position (after 1832): Pro-Removal
Interests:
 Better to work with the federal government in order to preserve the
Cherokee Nation
 Make the best deal for their holdings in Georgia.

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 Anti-Removal Positions and Interests
Missionaries (Reverend Evan Jones)
Position: Anti-Removal
 Christian benevolence
 Fairness
Interests:
 Lucrative missionary (“civilizing”) activities with the southeastern Indians
 Long personal connections with the Cherokees

Northern Congressmen (Senator Frelinghuysen)

Position: Anti-Removal
 The Constitution and prior treaties
 Fairness
Interests:
 Political interest in making Jackson look bad
 Geopolitical interest in NOT allowing southern states to benefit from grab
of Indian lands.
 Fear that removal might be a precedent for slavery

Majority of Cherokee Indians (John Ross and Nancy Ward)

Position: Anti-Removal
 Cherokees had been in Georgia long before the white man arrived
 Federal government had made repeated promises that it would help the
Indians, not move them to other lands.
 Treaties with the federal government since 1785 recognized their
sovereignty.
Interests:
 Continuing to live on their traditional lands in Georgia
 Recognition as a sovereign people
 Fair treatment
 Fear that if they could not sustain their legal rights in Georgia, they
would not be able to sustain them anywhere.
 Fear that bribes, intimidation and fraud would be involved in removal as
it had been in the expropriation of Creek and Cherokee lands 1814-17.

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 . The Roles
The Negotiators
 Should participate in the negotiations in a manner
consistent with their characters and interests, while
trying to use conflict resolution skills.

The Observer/Recorder/Reporters
 Do not take part on the actual negotiation process

 Objectively observe and record the process and the

results

 Note especially:
o if and when rhetoric got in the way of coming
to an agreement,
o if and when there were missed opportunities,
o the most effective efforts by the negotiators to
come to an agreement, and
o the terms of any agreements.

 Summarize the results and the process in the

debriefing

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 Debriefing
The Process: Ask the observer/recorder/reporters from
each group to summarize the process in their group’s
negotiations.
 To what extent did the parties use active listening skills?
 To what extent did the parties brainstorm and evaluate possible
alternatives?
 To what extent were the parties able to articulate their interests?
 To what extent did rhetoric get in the way of pursuing the parties’
interests?
 What were the impediments to resolution?

The Results: Ask the observer/recorder/reporter for each

group to summarize the results of the group’s negotiations.
 Were the parties able to reach a mutually acceptable solution?
Why or why not?
 To what extent were the roles played with historical accuracy?

Compare the process and results from the different groups.

 Discuss similarities and differences among the groups process
and results
 Discuss reasons for similarities and differences

Compare the results with what actually happened

Consider the historical impact
Consider the questions for discussion

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 What Really Happened?

o Chief John Ross’ efforts to overturn the Treaty of Echota and to

avoid removal failed
o US Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott continued to build stockade forts at
various points on the route from Georgia to Oklahoma
o In the summer of 1838, thousands of Cherokees were herded into
camps and onto steamboats and moved west
o The federal government wanted to demonstrate that removal
would not be a big burden and limited the amount of funds so
there were inadequate provisions
o Since they resisted leaving, the Cherokees had undertaken no
planning and were not prepared for the arduous trip.
o By fall 1838, John Ross and other leaders had convinced Maj
Gen. Scott to permit the Cherokees to conduct their own removal
o Thirteen parties left for the west in October; the last party arrived
in March 1839
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 “The Trail of Tears”

More than 4,000 Cherokees (more than a fifth of the entire

Cherokee population) died during Removal (the exact
count of deaths is uncertain)

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The Legacy of Cherokee Removal
____________
 Political strife between members of the Removal Party and
other Cherokees continued after Removal: in 1839
members of the clan to which John Ridge, Major Ridge and
Elias Boudinot belonged killed them.

 Although the Cherokees negotiated a fairly lenient treaty

with President Johnson during Reconstruction, they never
attained the economic or political stability that they had had
prior to Removal.

 Removal deepened Indian mistrust of the federal

government.

 By forcibly removing the Cherokees from their ancestral

lands in the east to land set aside for Indians in the west,
the federal government established the precedent for
creating Indians reservations on non-Native lands.

 However, Cherokee culture did not die with removal: most

Cherokees are assimilated but take pride in their heritage
and Cherokee identity.

 The 2000 census showed 250,000 Cherokees nationwide.

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is the largest. There is
also an Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina.
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 Questions for Discussion
____________
1. Do you believe that it was inevitable that the Cherokees would be
forced out of their ancestral lands? Why or why not?

2. At what point did the Cherokees lose their struggle to maintain

their lands?

3. Were there alternative strategies that the Cherokees might have

pursued that might have enabled them to maintain their lands?

4. Could the Cherokees have created a broader coalition of

influential allies to support them? If so, what groups might have
joined?

5. What were the most influential factors behind the Indian Removal
policy: race, economics, or culture?

6. Are there ways that groups with less power, such as the
Cherokees, can enhance their power to make their bargaining
position more symmetrical?

7. Were removal, assimilation or eradication the only alternatives

available for the Cherokees? For Native Americans in general?
Have there been instances in the United States or other countries
when indigenous populations have maintained their lands,
cultures and communities?
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