Indian Removal and women’s protest

I. Gender in Traditional Cherokee Society

  • Women played a major role in society
    • Matrilineal kinship
  • Women were the heads of household
  • Children related only to their mothers’ relatives
    • Maternal uncle most important man in child’s life
  • Matrilocal, multi-generational households
    • Women owned houses and belongings; had control over the land they improved
    • Marriages easily dissolved
  • Participated in council meetings
  • Some served as “war women”
  • Decided fate of captives

II. Nanye’hi, or Nancy Ward (1738-1822)

  • Took up arms against the Creek; named a Beloved Woman of Chota
  • Intermediary/diplomat
    • Pardoned white captive, Mrs. Bean
    • Mrs. Bean taught her how to weave on a loom and brought with her dairy
  • Introduced significant changes to Cherokee garments/diet
  • Helped negotiate Treaty of Hopewell (1785)
    • Forced to cede large tracts of land
    • Last treaty in which women participated
  • 1808: Warned Cherokee not to sell any more land to whites; urged taking up arms if necessary

III. Changes to Cherokee society, post-Revolution

  • Revolution worsened conditions
  • US government and missionaries instituted a “civilization” program
    • Sought to reproduce whites’ familial/social structure
  • Male-headed households
  • Some leading Cherokee embraced this plan
    • Acquired slaves, altered property-ownership; inheritance patterns to benefit men
    • Intermarriage with whites and blacks led to a new, influential group of that supported assimilation
  • Women still had a strong voice within the Cherokee Nation in 1817-18, but centralization of power thereafter diminished their influence

Cherokee women speak in protest of further land cession in 1817:

“The Cherokee ladys now being present at the meeting of the Chiefs and warriors in council have thought it their duties as mothers to address their beloved Chiefs and warriors now assembled. Our beloved children and head men of the Cherokee nation we address you warriors in council. We have raised all of you on the land which we now have, which God gave us to inhabit and raise provisions. We know that our country has once been extensive but by repeated sales has become circumscribed to a small tract and never have thought it our duty to interfere in the disposition of it till now, if a father or mother was to sell all their lands which they had to depend on, which their children had to raise their living on, which would be bad indeed and to be removed to another country. We do not wish to go to an unknown country which we have understood some of our children wish to go over the Mississippi but this act of our children would be like destroying your mothers. Your mother and sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our lands. “

IV. Cherokee acculturation

  • By late 1820s: Had built prosperous farms, businesses, grain and lumber mills
  • Most literate in English
    • Schooled by Protestant missionaries
  • Had developed their own alphabet; published a tribal newspaper in both Cherokee and English
  • 1827: Established a constitutional form of government
    • Only “free male citizens” entitled to vote; women thus formally excluded from political power

V. 1828 Election: Andrew Jackson

  • Precipitates a crisis
  • Jackson’s TOP priority was removing Indians from southeastern US
    • His rationale twofold:
      • Unacceptable to have an independent nation within the US
      • “For their own good”
  • Georgia, followed by Alabama and Mississippi pass restrictive laws
    • Declaring land theirs by fiat; forbade gold mining; nullified all Cherokee laws; prohibited Indians from testifying against whites
  • Opposition swings into action; trying to gain momentum before AJ takes office in March 1829

VI. Opposition to Cherokee Removal among whites

  • Why so fierce?
    • Most people saw it for what it was: a land grab
    • Violated the nation’s promise to Indians that assimilation would lead to equal rights
      • Second Great Awakening; promoted an idea of the nation as “benevolent” and law-abiding
    • Many church groups had personal ties with Native Americans or missionaries who worked with them
    • Rise of powerful religious press helped spread the word
    • Fear that it would lead to the growth of slavery (in areas where the Indians left) and spread of slavery into new Western lands
  • Opponents came from all parts of the country
    • Esp. the Northeast
    • Esp. young adults
  • The stressed how the crime of removal would dishonor on the federal govt
  • Reflected rising sectionalism; debates over the very nature of the republic and its stance toward the politically powerless and non-whites

VII. Right to petition

  • Petition drives began even before passage of the Indian Removal Act
    • Unprecedented, massive outpouring of petitions and pamphlets
    • First time that significant number of women addressed a national political issue
  • Right to petition dates back to pre-Revolutionary era
    • Right to petition the King without fear of prosecution
      • In the US Constitution, this traditional right became part of the First Amendment
        • “…the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances…”
  • Constitutionally protected right held by women

VIII. Jeremiah Evarts (William Penn)

  • Missionary, reformer
    • Wrote “The William Penn Essays” opposing Indian Removal
      • Most widely distributed pamphlet since Paine’s Common Sense
      • Insisted on sovereignty of the Cherokee people
      • Argued removal was both illegal and immoral
    • Believed Americans were ill informed; tried to create a groundswell of opposition

IX. “The Ladies’ Circular”

  • Catherine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney organized a national women’s petition drive
  • Petition extended the idea of female benevolence
  • American women had a duty to “this helpless race,” just as they had a duty to the poor
  • Beecher and Sigourney went to great lengths to conceal their identities
  • Beecher has a nervous breakdwon
  • Democrats made an issue of women’s petitioning
  • Mocked male anti-removalists for failing to keep their women under control

X. Indian Removal Act 

  • Widely unpopular, esp. in the North
    • Barely passed the House of Representatives
  • Cherokees immediately appeal to Supreme Court
    • Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831); ruling says Cherokees have full rights to their lands
  • Jackson responds by withdrawing federal troops; leaves Cherokees to the mercy of the state of Georgia
    • Missionaries imprisoned for refusing to recognize the authority of Georgia’s laws
      • Two appeal to the Supreme Court
        • Worcester v. Georgia (1832) Ordered missionaries released
  • Crisis of governmental authority
    • Jackson ignored two Supreme Court decisions

XI. Catherine Beecher (1837)

“If petitions from females will operate to exasperate; if they will be deemed obtrusive, indecorous, and unwise, by those to whom they are addressed; if they will increase, rather than diminish the evil which it is wished to remove; if they will be the opening wedge, that will tend eventually to bring females as petitioners and partisans into every political measure that may tend to injure and oppress their sex, in various parts of the nation, and under the various public measures that may hereafter be enforced, then it is neither appropriate nor wise, nor right, for a woman to petition for the relief of oppressed females.”

XII. Effects on white reformers (Hershberger article)

  • Helped to embolden other women
    • Lydia Sigourney begins publishing under her own name in 1832
    • Angelina Grimké, who became a prominent abolitionist, challenged Beecher’s arguments that women should stay out of politics entirely
  • Among anti-slavery activists
    • Dampened support for the colonization movement
    • Growing support for immediate emancipation
    • Radicalizing effect in general

XIII. Forced removal

  • 1835: Unauthorized faction (mostly acculturated Cherokee) signs the Treaty of New Echota
    • Not approved by the National Council or the Principal Chief John Ross
    • Women not present during the proceedings
  • Summer 1838: rounded up for deportation; in 1839 forced to walk to Oklahoma
    • Horrific conditions; women having to walk while in labor
    • Some experienced atrocities by government troops
    • As many as 1/4th died on the horrific journey

XIV. Effects on Cherokee

  • Theda Perdue points to a rise in domestic violence
    • Men venting frustration over helplessness
  • Exacerbated social divisions
    • Split between “progressives” and traditionalists
  • Resentment of progressives, since those who signed the removal treaty were mostly acculturated
  • But Perdue concludes that Cherokee women had already lost power prior to the 1830s crisis