Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones

by William G. McLoughlin

Overview

Champions of the Cherokees is the story of two extraordinary Northern Baptist missionaries, father and son, who lived with the Cherokee Indians from 1821 to 1876. Told largely in the words of these outspoken and compassionate men, this is also a narrative of the Cherokees' sufferings at the hands of the United States government and white frontier dwellers. In addition, it is an analysis of the complexity of interracial relations in the United States, for the Cherokees adopted the white man's custom of black chattel slavery. This fascinating biography reveals the unusual extent to which Evan and John B. Jones challenged prevailing federal Indian policies: unlike most other missionaries, they supported the Indians' right to retain their own identity and national autonomy. William McLoughlin vividly describes the "trail of tears" over which the Cherokees and Evan Jones traveled eight hundred miles through the dead of winter—from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina to a new home in Oklahoma. He examines the difficulties that Jones encountered when, alone among all the missionaries, he expelled Cherokee slaveholders from his mission churches. This book depicts the Joneses' experiences during the Civil War, including their chaplaincy of two Cherokee regiments who fought with the Northern side. Finally, McLoughlin tells how these "champions of the Cherokees" were adopted into the Cherokee nation and helped them fight detribalization.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691607429
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1003
Pages:	522
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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Champions of the Cherokees

Evan and John B. Jones

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By William G. McLoughlin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04770-6

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CHAPTER 1

Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1821

Let the Indians, the original proprietors of the soil that sustains us, be placed under the intellectual and moral wing of the American Eagle, and they will cease to pine away before the superior arms and arts of the Whiteman, and they will become patriotic citizens, amiable and harmless. — Petition of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board to Congress, 1819

Prophecy assures us that "the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord. ..." Never, since the first settlement of America has the condition of the Aborigines presented a prospect of melioration equal to the present. Solitary exertion is no longer employed. ... Large societies are formed for their support, and our national government is contributing of its influence and funds to promote the glorious design. The [Baptist] convention has sought a share in this blessed charity. — American Baptist Missionary Magazine, 1821

The decision of most Indian tribes in the West to join Chief Tecumseh and the British in a war against the United States in 1812 had disastrous consequences for the Cherokees even though they were one of the few tribes that fought with the United States. After the war, the white Americans were caught up in a tremendous upsurge of patriotic exuberance and expansionism. Having beaten the British a second time, they believed a divine destiny had opened the whole continent to them. They rushed across the Appalachians by the hundreds of thousands to take possession of the rich Mississippi Valley, previously a place of British, Spanish, and Indian intrigue unsafe for settlement. But in crossing the mountains they faced a dilemma. What were they to do about the quarter million Indians in eighty different tribes still inhabiting large tracts in the valley east of the Mississippi? Treaties had guaranteed possession of their homelands to these tribes forever, and each of the tribes claimed the right of nationhood and self-government. Some were tiny tribes of less than one thousand inhabiting tracts of only several square miles; other tribes numbered twenty thousand and occupied thousands of square miles. Some of these large tribes, particularly in the Deep South, occupied the most fertile parts of the valley — land coveted to grow cotton for the burgeoning textile industry in old and New England.

Under George Washington's original Indian policy, adopted in 1792, the United States was committed to dealing with each tribe as an independent nation; it made treaties with them granting them certain rights and privileges in order to persuade them to ally with the young republic rather than its enemies. One of the privileges was a guarantee of their right to self-government within their boundaries and protection from all efforts (domestic or foreign) to intrude upon them. In return, the War Department, which managed Indian affairs until 1849, expected the Indians to give up their hunting or fur trading economy and become farmers. As farmers, the Indians would need much less land and would be expected to sell their former hunting grounds to the United States which, in turn, would sell it to the white families pouring into the valley of the West. Congress agreed to provide the Indians with free gifts of plows, hoes, axes, spinning wheels, and looms; it also provided resident Indian agents whose job was to induce the Indian men to take up agriculture. These federal agents hired white blacksmiths to mend Indian plows and scythes, shoe Indian horses, repair Indian hoes and mattoxes; they hired white women to teach Indian farm wives how to spin, weave, and sew their own clothes. Washington's Indian policy also encouraged Christian missionaries to settle among the tribes to provide schools for their children and to inculcate Christian moral values. Self-interest combined with philanthropy in this effort to "civilize and Christianize" the "savage and heathen children of the forest."

Washington, and the Presidents who followed him, promised the Indians that as soon as they became civilized, Christian farmers, they would be admitted to full and equal citizenship. Then they would share with all other Americans in the glorious destiny of the republic. The early Presidents also encouraged intermarriage between whitemen and Indians as an important step in cementing the bonds between the two peoples and merging them into one. Underlying this policy was the prevailing philosophical and scientific belief that "all men are created equal." As Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading scientists of his day, wrote, "I believe the Indian, then, to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman." The Bible confirmed this view, teaching that "God hath made of one blood all nations." Indians, it was believed, had failed to share in the rapid progress of humankind in Europe at first because of the ocean barrier separating the two continents and later due to the repressive monarchical systems of the first invaders of the Americas. Now, under a benevolent republican system, the Indians would soon be able to improve themselves until they knew all that Europeans knew. As least, this was the prevailing view among the educated and enlightened Eastern leaders of the new nation. Westerners had a rather different perspective.

Due to the unsettled political conditions west of the Appalachians prior to 1815, very few missionaries had visited the tribes located there. While most of the tribes had made some progress toward becoming horse-and-plow farmers by 1815, they had not advanced much in learning English or mastering European ideas and Christian doctrines. The victory over the British in 1815 produced a new interest in missions to the Indians, but it also reinforced deep-seated antagonism toward them among frontiersmen. By siding with the British and Chief Tecumseh in the war, as most Western tribes did, the Indians had broken their treaties and demonstrated again their savagery by killing and scalping white settlers. That betrayal led many white Americans to call for reevaluation of Washington's Indian policy and to look for some way to remove the Indian nations from the path of white expansion and progress. In 1816, Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812 and rising spokesman for the West, said bluntly that it was high time to give up treating the Indians as independent nations and instead allow Congress to decide what was best for them.

As this tension brewed, a conflict arose between the supporters of missionary benevolence, who were trying to lift the Indians up toward full citizenship, and the frontier settlers, land speculators, cotton growers, and entrepreneurs who either could not wait for this slow process or had serious doubts as to its possibility. Thomas Jefferson had suggested an alternative to Washington's policy after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 almost doubled the size of the United States by adding the western half of the Mississippi Valley — an alternative which received increasing support after 1815. Jefferson persuaded Congress to pass a law enabling the President to grant to any tribes that agreed to move west of the Mississippi an equivalent tract of land in that wilderness in exchange for its land east of the Mississippi. Few of the tribes found this suggestion attractive. They knew that the far West was already occupied by other tribes who would oppose their intrusion; they also had a deep religious attachment to the homeland of their ancestors. Even after their defeat in 1815 and the forced cessions of much of that homeland — extracted from them as the price of betrayal — most Indian tribes refused to make treaties of exchange and removal. They much preferred to keep what was left of their original land and utilize the continued economic aid of the government and educational assistance of missionaries to develop their skills as farmers, traders, and entrepreneurs so that they could someday share as equals in the "manifest destiny" of their conquerors.

For fifteen years after the War of 1812 Indian mission enterprises flourished, and the federal government continued to provide money to assist the various denominations build schools and model farms among the Indian nations east of the Mississippi. The notion of separation of church and state was still in its infancy. Most of the New England states in 1815 still imposed religious taxes to support the established churches of the Puritans. Chief Justice John Marshall said that the First Amendment did not apply to the states, only to Congress, but he saw no objection to Congress's supporting mission schools (though no one brought a test case). Indian missionaries likewise had no qualms about using federal tax money to advance Christianity and to add Indian members to their particular denominations. To promote the rapid uplift of the Indians and prepare them for citizenship, Congress passed, in 1819, the Indian Civilization Act. Under this act Congress provided thousands of dollars annually to subsidize missionary work.

Consequently, in the postwar years, all of the major Protestant denominations formed extensive mission organizations. Some were interdenominational, but most simply absorbed or coordinated the activities of local mission societies into nationwide denominational societies. The Baptist mission society, representing one of the largest and fastest growing denominations in the country, described this new federally funded Indian mission effort in glowing terms: "Solitary exertion" by lone missionaries on horseback, "is no longer employed. ... Large societies are formed for their support and the national government is contributing of its influence and funds to promote the glorious design." Committed to the belief that the United States was, in fact, "a Christian nation," few Protestants questioned the propriety of using the taxpayers' money to Christianize the heathen Indians in order to qualify them for citizenship.

Auxiliary religious organizations were also formed by Christian churchgoers on a national basis to publish tracts and Bibles, to promote ministerial education, to spread Sunday schools, and to increase temperance. The total Christian energy of the country was mobilized for a massive moral reform movement that historians have since described as part of America's "Second Great Religious Awakening." It was also part of the rising nationalism of America — the attempt to describe who was a true American.

In accepting federal funds for Indian missions, the missionaries gladly became agents of the government's Indian policies — trying to make "good Americans" of them. Lewis Cass, the Secretary of War who set the rules for missionary funding at the time of the Indian Civilization Act, said that missionaries who accepted government funds were under obligation "to impress on the minds of the Indians, the friendly and benevolent views of the government towards them and the advantage to them in yielding to the policy of [the] government and cooperating with it in such measures as it may deem necessary for their civilization and happiness." Neither the missionaries nor the Indians at that time recognized the complications that would follow if the government's policies ever became less benevolent.

As missionary efforts flourished, however, so did a countervailing force from whites on the western frontier who deeply resented aid to the Indians. Angry over Indian alliance with the British in 1812 and bitter about the many deaths caused by Indians in the war, frontiersmen were not assuaged by the massive land cessions exacted from the losers. Many believed that the Indians, twice conquered in their support of British imperial aims, had now lost all right to the land they occupied. Western taxpayers resented a federal policy which left the Indians free of taxes and supplied them from the United States treasury with farming tools to get rich while the average frontier family had to pay taxes and struggle for success on its own self-reliance. Land speculators and entrepreneurs argued that precious national resources in timber, iron, coal, and other minerals needed for American industrial development (not to mention the rich soil that would provide wheat or corn for rising cities and cotton for rising factories) would remain untapped or underutilized so long as Indian nations claimed ownership. The Indian nations were considered stumbling blocks to American development, not potential sharers in it. As new Western states were added to the Union, state politicians argued that Indian nations within state boundaries were political anomalies — nations within nations. Congressmen from every Western state from Georgia to Michigan insisted that all the soil and all the people within their state's boundaries should be under one jurisdiction. Indians, if they chose to remain where they were, would have to take their chances like other citizens and not continue in an artificial hothouse environment under government support and protection.

In addition, a growing skepticism was developing among whites, east and west, as to the potential improvement of the Indians. The new nation had already compromised its doctrine of human equality by sustaining African slavery in its Constitution. More and more whites came to doubt Jefferson's views of Indian equality and to suggest that the redmen, being a "colored people," were predestined by God to die out in competition with the chosen, white, Anglo-Saxon race. New scientific studies proclaimed that the whiteman constituted the human norm; "colored" peoples were abnormal or subnormal. "Once a savage, always a savage," had always been a popular frontier cliché. As the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River became more heavily populated after the War of 1812, several forces combined to increase pressure for Jefferson's policy of "removal and exchange of land" to settle "the Indian question." First of all, the Westerners steadily increased the number of Western votes and in 1824 Andrew Jackson, the Westerners' candidate for President, had come close to winning election; by 1828 his victory marked the arrival of "Western" power to the political spectrum. Second, the discovery of the cotton gin had given a new impetus to land speculation in "the black belt," that area of soil especially suitable for cotton production. Much of this area had been in the hands of the Southeastern Indian tribes prior to the war; now it seemed imperative to the growth of prosperity of the new nation that they should be removed to make way for those who could exploit the land to its fullest. Finally, a series of land cessions, beginning with those extracted by Jackson in the treaties with the defeated tribes after 1815, had whetted the appetites of land speculators and prospective cotton planters for total removal.

The impetus had started, and it gathered speed from 1815 to 1830. The rhetoric of Indian incompetence and inveterate treachery, coupled with the growing belief that the Indians had made hardly any progress under the combined efforts of federal and missionary aid to become "civilized" and "Christianized," was taken at face value by Easterners who knew little of the Western tribes. The older notion that the Indians were capable of progress gave way to the notion of "the vanishing Indian." James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, provided new support in the East for the economic and political policies of the West.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Champions of the Cherokees by William G. McLoughlin. Copyright © 1990 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustrations, pg. ix
• Tables, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xii
• Abbreviations, pg. xiii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER I. Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1821, pg. 9
• CHAPTER II. The High Cost of Educating the Cherokees, 1821-1827, pg. 32
• CHAPTER III. Competing with Methodists and Medicine Men, 1827–1833, pg. 64
• CHAPTER IV. Trial for Murder, 1833, pg. 97
• CHAPTER V. Secret Aid to Cherokee Resistance, 1833-1836, pg. 118
• CHAPTER VI. Evangelism and Resistance from Tennessee, 1836–1838, pg. 143
• CHAPTER VII. Removal and Expulsion, 1838-1841, pg. 171
• CHAPTER VIII. Schools, Evangelism, Publishing, 1841–1844, pg. 203
• CHAPTER IX. Bushyhead’s Slave, the Starr Gang, and Frye’s Rebellion, 1844-1846, pg. 230
• CHAPTER X. Evan Jones in Defeat, 1846–1847, pg. 257
• CHAPTER XI. Separating the Churches from Slavery, 1848-1852, pg. 276
• CHAPTER XII. Evangelism, Education, and the Feud with Willard Upham, 1852-1856, pg. 298
• CHAPTER XIII. Pro-Slavery, Anti-Slavery, 1856–1860, pg. 337
• CHAPTER XIV. The Joneses in the Civil War, 1860-1865, pg. 377
• CHAPTER XV. The Joneses and Cherokee Reconstruction, 1865-1870, pg. 417
• CHAPTER XVI. John Β. Jones as Federal Agent, 1870-1874, pg. 445
• Epilogue, pg. 484
• Bibliographical Notes, pg. 485
• Index, pg. 489