Part 3
THE CIVILIZATION PROGRAM

After the American Revolution, when the Cherokee Nation lost large tracts of its land, the United States government and missionaries sought to transform Cherokee gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality and the body. This involved transforming Cherokee men into farmers and Cherokee women into submissive housewives. Traditional Cherokees resisted, but eventually wealthier members of that society, many of them of mixed ancestry, began to accept a radical alteration of gender roles. American presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson agreed that the Indians must either be removed from the East or become civilized. The spinning wheel and plow became the symbols of the civilization program. Many Cherokee women welcomed the spinning wheels so they could clothe their families. This was especially true after the deerskin trade expanded, when they faced a scarcity of deerskins for family use.

Thomas Jefferson assumed the Indians were capable of civilization but believed that they would become extinct unless they turned to agriculture and adopted Western European gender roles, the practice of owning private property, and Christianity. Since Jefferson doubted they would adopt these values, he planned to move the Indians who lived east of the Mississippi River to the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase. Like Jefferson, Presidents Monroe, Adams, and Madison all supported civilization programs. Monroe signed an appropriation bill in 1819 that provided ten thousand dollars annually for the civilization of the Indians. These early presidents envisioned Cherokee lands as eventually becoming part of the United States.¹

Since Cherokee women contributed significantly to the sustenance of their families, Europeans saw them as exploited drudges. Jefferson addressed the role of women in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

The women are subjected to unjust drudgery. This I believe is the case with every barbarous people. With such, force is law. The stronger sex imposes on the weaker. It is civilization alone that replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality. That first teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves. Were we in equal barbarism, our females would be equal drudges. The man with them is less strong than with us, but their women stronger than ours; and both for the same obvious reason; because our man and their woman is habituated to labor, and formed by it. With both races the sex which is indulged with ease is the least athletic.²

Jefferson misunderstood that women’s economic and political power stemmed from the work he saw as drudgery. Before long, missionaries and the United States government would attempt to change all that. Both justified their “civilization program” as a means for liberating Cherokee women from drudgery. But the practical effect was to undermine women’s sources of power and destabilize gender and class relations.

As part of its plan, the federal government helped fund the Brainerd Mission, in East Tennessee near Chattanooga, in 1817. The missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) set up the mission as an exemplary one to convert and civilize the Cherokees. The school educated three hundred Cherokee men and women over two decades. The ABCFM missionaries—among them Daniel Butrick, Ard Hoyt, Sophia Sawyer, Cyrus Kingsbury, and Samuel Worcester—were Congregationalists from Boston.

A central goal of this initiative was controlling women’s sexual behavior. The missionaries disapproved of participation in ceremonies, polygamy, fornication, nudity, gambling, drinking, conjuring, dancing, infanticide, witchcraft, ball play, and card playing. The Cherokees received more missionaries and missionary funds in the early nineteenth century than did any other tribe. The missionaries sought to “elevate” Cherokee women through submission to patriarchal values.³ Those at the Brainerd Mission extolled the virtues of their most famous convert, Catharine Brown.

Cherokee women lost and gained power in a variety of ways in the nineteenth century. The disruption of gender roles was integrally tied to the dispossession of the Cherokees’ land. The following documents reveal voices—those of Catharine Brown, missionaries, Wahnenauhi, and selected authors of articles in the Cherokee Phoenix, the Cherokee newspaper—espousing the ideals of true womanhood.

ENDNOTES

¹ Theda Perdue, “Women, Men, and American Indian Policy: The Cherokee Response to Civilization,” in Negotiators of Change, edited by Nancy Shoemaker (New York: Routledge, 1995), 90–114; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Object and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 179–80.

² Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), 92–93.

³ Jeremiah Evarts, Memorandum, April–May 1822, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers (hereafter ABCFM Papers), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., quoted in William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 139. See also Harriet J. Kupferer, Ancient Drums, Other Moccasins: Native North American Cultural Adaptation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988); William G. McLoughlin, “Who Civilized the Cherokees?” Journal of Cherokee Studies 13 (1988), 65.