1. James A. Folsom to Peter Pitchlynn, Oct. 31, 1831, 4026.3212, PPP.
INTRODUCTION: “WORDS ARE DELUSIVE”
1. Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), July 16, 1836, 2–3.
2. Southern Banner, July 16, 1836, 2–3; John Page to George Gibson, July 2, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; Benjamin Young to Thomas Jesup, July 6, 1836, box 12, The Office of the Adjutant General, Generals’ Papers and Books, General Jesup, entry 159, RG 94, NA; Major Ridge and John Ridge to Andrew Jackson, June 30, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Josiah Shaw to Lewis Cass, June 28, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Joseph W. Harris to Lewis Cass, July 25, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 91, M-234, NA.
3. The first usage I have found of “Indian Removal” is in the Evening Post (New York, N.Y.), Jan. 26, 1830. There are surely earlier occurrences, but regardless it is clear that the policy’s proponents favored the term. RDC, 6:2, p. 1070 (“words are delusive”).
4. Several scholars have fruitfully explored the genocide of Native Americans, including Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the term in the wake of World War II, kept extensive notes on “Indian Removal” and recorded instances of “physical” and “cultural genocide” that were committed at the time by “white genocidists.” Raphael Lemkin Collection, P-154, box 9, folder 14, American Jewish Historical Society, New York, N.Y. On terminology, see also Alf Lüdtke, “Explaining Forced Migration,” in Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World, ed. Bessel and Haake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17–18; Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History of Geography and Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004), 1–2; Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 2–3.
5. Examples of the use of “expulsion” include Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of Inhabitants of Augusta, Maine, Feb. 2, 1832, PM, COIA, SEN22A-G7, NA. For “extermination,” see [W.W. Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War and Sketches During a Campaign, by a Lieutenant (Charleston, 1836), 68, 115; James D. Elderkin, Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of a Soldier of Three Wars (Detroit, 1899), 19; Jacob Rhett Motte, Journey into Wilderness: An Army Surgeon’s Account of Life in Camp and Field during the Creek and Seminole Wars, 1836–1838, ed. James F. Sunderman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), 208; Southern Banner, Mar. 11, 1838, 2.
6. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 97 (march of “civilization” against the Chechens and Ingush); Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Removal of American Indians, Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: American Missionaries and Demographic Engineering,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 7 (2008): 3 (“necessity” of deporting Armenians from Turkey); Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 150 (“only with difficulty assimilate,” referring to Jews in Poland in 1938); Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 24 (“grandiose plan” to deport people to Siberia).
7. “The Indian question” entered the U.S. lexicon during the gubernatorial election of 1825 in Georgia and became widespread in the 1830s. “The Jewish question” began circulating widely in English in the 1840s, though Russian administrators invented the problem in the late eighteenth century. John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 30, 1825, 1–3 (“Indians”); “Memorial,” Cherokee Phoenix, Apr. 29, 1829, 1–4 (“exterminating”).
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, 1838), 321; Jennifer Pitts, “Introduction,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xv–xxviii; Benjamin C. Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 19–20 (“indigènes”); Procès-verbaux et rapports de la comission d’Afrique instituée par ordonnance du Roi du 12 Décembre 1833 (Paris, 1834), 67 (“talked about incessantly”).
9. Stephen D. Shenfield, “The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?” in The Massacre in History, ed. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 156 (“These Circassians”); Jens-Uwe Guettel, “From the Frontier to German South-West Africa: German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (Nov. 2010): 523–52; Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 13 (“indigenous inhabitants”); Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (Oct. 2017): 1137–70.
10. On the long history of population engineering in the United States, see Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).
11. The 1830s marked the emergence of the United States as “a modern nation-state,” writes Leonard Sadosky. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 215. On “removal” as a turning point, see Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ostler’s Surviving Genocide arrived just as my own book was going to press, and I was unable to incorporate its findings. Nehah Micco et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:424–25 (“the worst evil”); John Ross et al. to Lewis Cass, Feb. 14, 1833, CSE, 4:98 (“scheme”); George Colbert et al. to John Eaton and John Coffee, Aug. 25, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA (“act of usurpation”); Petition of residents of Mendon, Monroe County, New York, Feb. 14, 1831, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 14, 1831, HR21A-G8.2, NA (“indelible”); Petition of inhabitants of Brumfield, Portage County, Ohio, Jan. 17, 1831, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 14, 1831, HR21A-G8.2, NA (“whether the future Historian”).
12. Jeremiah Evarts, “Draft of a Protest against the Principles and Policy of the Indian Bill of May, 1830,” in Evarts, Cherokee Removal: The “William Penn” Essays and Other Writings, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 250–51 (“the banishment”); William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity (London, 1838), 410.
13. A recent, provocative exploration of the frontier in American history is Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2019).
14. Historians draw a crude if sometimes useful distinction between settler and extractive colonies. The now-voluminous literature on this subject began with Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocidal Research 8, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 387–409.
15. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Mar. 4, 1865, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp (accessed June 8, 2019); John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Philadelphia, 1876), 10:492.
16. I do not draw a categorical distinction between modern and premodern mass expulsions, as some scholars have. The literature on the subject is voluminous, but I have found the following books to be most useful: Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Naimark, Fires of Hatred; Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008); Bessel and Haake, eds., Removing Peoples; and Zahra, The Great Departure.
CHAPTER 1: ABORIGINIA
1. Isaac McCoy, Journal (typescript), Mar. 17, 1831, p. 138, MP; Randolph Orville Yaeger, “Indian Enterprises of Isaac McCoy—1817–1846” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1954), 414–15, 451–52, 556, 585.
2. Yaeger, “Indian Enterprises of Isaac McCoy,” 13–15; Kurt William Windisch, “A Thousand Slain: St. Clair’s Defeat and the Evolution of the Constitutional Republic” (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 2018), 181–85; J. Stoddard Johnston, ed., Memorial of Louisville (Chicago: American Biographical Publishing, n.d.), 1:58; Sami Lakomäki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 102–26.
3. McCoy, Autobiography (typescript), 7, MP.
4. McCoy, Autobiography, 23 (“strange and wicked”), 28 (green flies), 35 (“not so difficult”); George A. Schultz, An Indian Canaan: Isaac McCoy and the Vision of an Indian State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 8, 13–14.
5. McCoy, Journal (typescript), Mar. 8, 1829, p. 56, MP.
6. McCoy, Journal, Nov. 12, 1831, p. 198 (“pious”), May 29, 1822, p. 302 (“How grossly”); May 29, 1822, p. 302 (“How depraved”); Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, Embracing their Colonization (Boston, 1827), 14 (“the very filth”).
7. Isaac McCoy to Luther Rice, July 10, 1823, reel 3, frame 51, MP (“civilized” and “barbarous countryment”); Isaac McCoy to John S. Mechan, Dec. 10, 1824, reel 3, frame 991, MP (“hunted”); Isaac McCoy to John S. Mechan, Dec. 29, 1824, reel 3, frame 1042, MP (“The great mass”); McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, 17–18 (“total extermination”).
8. Isaac McCoy to Luther Rice, July 10, 1823, reel 3, frame 51, MP (“scheme”); McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, 25 (“the perishing tribes”), 30 (“morality”).
9. Isaac McCoy to Lewis Cass, Mar. 6, 1832, CSE, 3:240 (“one body politic” and “I am not enthusiastic”); Isaac McCoy to the Commissioners West, Oct. 15, 1832, CSE, 3:492 (“uniting the radii”).
10. The exact number of Cherokee individuals who moved to Arkansas Territory in the early nineteenth century is unknown. “I. Draft Amendment, on or before 9 July 1803,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0523-0002. Christian B. Keller attempts to bring some logic to Jefferson’s thinking on expulsion in Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Origins of Federal Indian Removal Policy,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144, no. 1 (2000): 39–66. See also Anthony F.C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 224–26, 256–56; Treaty with the Cherokees, 1817, and Treaty with the Delawares, 1818, Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Washington, D.C., 1904), 140–44, 170–71, 269–70; S. Charles Bolton, “Jeffersonian Indian Removal and the Emergence of Arkansas Territory,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 253–71.
11. Isaac McCoy to Lewis Cass, June 23, 1823, reel 2, frame 1071, MP.
12. Most native peoples in the Northwest were eventually expelled, a story recounted in John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), Meehchikilita quotation on 68; Schultz, Indian Canaan, 181 (“other colour”); Potawattomies to A.C. Pepper, July 14, 1835, CGLR, box 13, NA (“We are poor”).
13. John Metoxen to Isaac McCoy, July 20, 1821, reel 2, frame 39, MP (“farmers and macanics”); John McElvain to Thomas L. McKenney, May 27, 1830, CSE, 2:57 (“I . . . can truly say”); Shannon Bontrager, “ ‘From a Nation of Drunkards, We Have Become a Sober People’: The Wyandot Experience in the Ohio Valley during the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 628 (“a cruelty”); Elizabeth Neumeyer, “Michigan Indians Battle Against Removal,” Michigan History 55, no. 4 (1971): 279 (“far better”).
14. Henry C. Brish to S.S. Hamilton, Nov. 28, 1831, CSE, 2:691–92; Ben Secunda, “The Road to Ruin? ‘Civilization’ and the Origins of a ‘Michigan Road Band’ of Potawatomi,” Michigan Historical Review 34, no. 1 (2008): 118–49; White Pigeon Republican (St. Joseph, Mich.), Aug. 28, 1839, reprinted in Collections and Researches made by the Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan (Lansing, 1908), 10:170–72 (“they hunt with us”).
15. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians, 141–42 (“terms of intimacy”); Susan E. Gray, “Limits and Possibilities: White-Indian Relations in Western Michigan in the Era of Removal,” Michigan Historical Review 20, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 79, 82–85, 88 (“We could not have done”); James M. McClurken, “Ottawa Adaptive Strategies to Indian Removal,” Michigan Historical Review 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 38–39, 47–48, 51.
16. Peter C. Mancall, “Men, Women, and Alcohol in Indian Villages in the Great Lakes Region in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 425–48; Bontrager, “ ‘From a Nation of Drunkards, We Have Become a Sober People,’ ” 627 (“maintain them”).
17. William Hicks and John Ross, annual message, Oct. 13, 1828, PCJR, 1:144 (“burlesque”); John Ross to William Wirt, Nov. 11, 1831, PCJR, 1:231 (“ere long”); George Colbert et al. to John Eaton and John Coffee, Aug. 25, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA (“as long as the grass grows”); Peter Pitchlynn[?] to David Folsom, May 19, 1830, 4026.3186, PPP (“If we go”).
18. Mark F. Boyd, “Horatio S. Dexter and Events Leading to the Treaty of Moultrie Creek with the Seminole Indians,” Florida Anthropologist 11, no. 3 (Sept. 1958): 89 (“I am satisfied”); Alan K. Craig and Christopher Peebles, “Ethnoecologic Change among the Seminoles, 1740–1840,” Geoscience and Man 5 (1974): 83–96.
19. James Stuart, Three Years in North America (Edinburgh, 1833), 2:132 (“Europeans”); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 29 (“aristocratic”), 143; Michael F. Doran, “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68, no. 3 (Sept. 1978): table 2, p. 346.
20. Cherokee Account Book, 1823–1835, Box 5, William Holland Thomas Papers, DMR; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 115–58.
21. John Clark to the Governor of Alabama, Sept. 29, 1821, John Clark Letter, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (“suffered to intermix”); George Strother Gaines, Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, ed. James P. Pate (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 78 (“pretty good”).
22. Thomas Jefferson to Caspar Wistar, Oct. 22, 1815, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified November 26, 2017, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-09-02-0091 (“a great pity”); RDC (1825), 1:639–40 (“dispirited and degraded”); RDC (1828), vol. 4, 2:1564 (melting snow); RDC (1825–26), vol. 2, appendix, 40 (“in despair”); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 69, 79; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 191–226.
23. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1788), 64–65; Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 116–45; Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations (Philadelphia, 1805), 1:48; Elbert Herring to Lewis Cass, Nov. 19, 1831, p. 475, LS, OIA, reel 7, M-21, NA.
24. I am using Douglas H. Ubelaker’s conservative numbers. Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size: Changing Perspectives,” in Disease and Demography in the Americas, ed. John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 173; Memorial of the Cherokees, Dec. 1829, Committee of the Whole House, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-H1.1, NA. Translation from the original Cherokee by Patrick Del Percio.
25. I am relying on the numbers compiled by Jon Muller, “Historic Southeastern Native American Population,” available from the author. Perhaps the most detailed examination of health and reproduction in the early modern indigenous world is Seth Archer, Sharks upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawai’i, 1778–1855 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Judge Harper, “Memoir on Slavery, Part I,” Southern Literary Messenger 4, no. 10 (Oct. 1838): 609–18; W. Williams to J.J. Abert, Feb. 8, 1838, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Map File, RG 77, U.S. 125–6, NACP.
26. John Ross, annual message, Oct. 24, 1831, PCJR, 1:229 (“our population”); Cherokee Phoenix, July 21, 1828, 2 (“We repeat again”); Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA.
27. Isaac McCoy to the Commissioners West, Oct. 15, 1832, CSE, 3:493; Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 281–305.
28. Douglas R. Egerton, “ ‘Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 4 (1985): 463–80.
29. William Miles, “ ‘Enamoured with Colonization’: Isaac McCoy’s Plan of Indian Reform,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1972): 269, 278–79; Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, Jan. 6–July 29, 1821, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1756; U.S. Congress, Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 18th Cong., 2nd sess. (1825), 190, 215, 295, 309; H.N. Sherwood, “Early Negro Deportation Projects,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 2, no. 4 (Mar. 1916): 484–508.
30. Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (Oct. 2001): 915–76; Lacy Ford, “Reconfiguring the Old South: ‘Solving’ the Problem of Slavery, 1787–1838,” Journal of American History 95, no. 1 (June 2008): 116; Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Milledgeville, 1827), 199–201 (“wild, fanatical and destructive”).
31. RDC (1825), 1:640. The expansionist ambitions of Southern planters extended well beyond the indigenous lands in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, as Matthew Karp describes in This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
32. The office of Superintendent of Indian Trade, existing between 1806 and 1822, predated the office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, which was created in 1824. Thomas L. McKenney to Isaac Thomas, Dec. 14, 1816, Library of Congress Collection, RG 233, entry 756, box 57, NA; John Ross et al. to Lewis Cass, Feb. 14, 1833, CSE, 4:98.
33. James Barbour to William McLean, Apr. 29, 1828, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book D, 485, NA; RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1017 (“admirably adapted”); Lewis Cass to the Chiefs of the Creek Tribe, Jan. 16, 1832, CSE, 2:743; Removal of the Indians, Feb. 24, 1830, COIA, HR21A-D11.2, NA (“wrongs”).
34. Thomas L. McKenney to John Cocke, Jan. 23, 1827, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book C, 326, NA; Map no. 157, RG 75, Central Map File, Indian Territory, NACP.
35. RDC (1828), vol. 4, 2:1549.
36. Herman J. Viola, Exploring the West (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1987), 29–30 (“American Sahara”); Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains Performed in the Years 1819 and ’20 under the Command of Stephen H. Long (Philadelphia, 1823), 2:361; G. Malcolm Lewis, “William Gilpin and the Concept of the Great Plains Region,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 56, no. 1 (Mar. 1966): 35–36; Isaac McCoy to P.B. Porter, Jan. 29, 1829, Report of Committee on Indian Affairs, 20th Cong., 2nd sess., H.Rep. 87, p. 17; J.B. Clark to George Gibson, Apr. 13, 1831, CSE 1:548 (“greatly exaggerated”).
37. “Great system” is the phrase of the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Thomas L. McKenney. McKenney to Isaac McCoy, Oct. 13, 1826, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book C, 188, NA.
38. Inventory of Articles, Oct. 8, 1824, reel 3, frame 901, MP; Isaac McCoy to Lucious Bolles, Sept. 27, 1826, reel 5, frame 234, MP (“We have none” and “They could not compete”).
39. Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, Feb. 27, 1803, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-39-02-0500; Thomas C. McKenney to Wyandott Chiefs, Mar. 24, 1825, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book A, 424, NA (“He is your friend”). Though the literature on the “plan of civilization” is immense, a good starting place is Anthony F.C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999). Bernard Sheehan argues that Jefferson’s policy to civilize native peoples was tightly linked to the desire to make them disappear. Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973).
40. Thomas L. McKenney to Isaac Thomas, Dec. 14, 1816, Library of Congress Collection, RG 233, entry 756, box 57 of LC box 183, NA.
41. John C. Calhoun to James Monroe, Mar. 29, 1824, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book A, 9, NA (“humane & benevolent”); John C. Calhoun to John Crowell, Aug. 12, 1824, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book A, 177, NA (“in a short time”); “Civilization of the Indians,” ASPIA, 2:458 (“It requires”); Thomas L. McKenney to James B. Finley, Feb. 22, 1825, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book A, 366, NA.
42. RDC (1825–26), vol. 2, appendix, 40–43 (“approaching catastrophe”); John Joseph Wallis, “Federal government employees, by government branch and location relative to the capital: 1816–1992,” table Ea894-903 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, Fiscal Year 1997 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 46–47, table 2.
43. D.A. Reese to Lewis Cass, Mar. 10, 1832, CSE 3:255; Bustenay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1979); Mark Edward Lewis, China Between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 78–79; David Abulafia, “The Last Muslims in Italy,” Dante Studies 125 (2007): 271–87; John R. Perry, “Forced Migration in Iran during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Iranian Studies: Bulletin of the Society for Iranian Cultural and Social Studies 8, no. 4 (1975): 199–215.
44. Robert Walsh, An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (London, 1819), 92; David Ramsay, The History of South-Carolina (Charleston, 1809), 1:15.
45. “Indian Affairs,” Niles’ Weekly Register, Aug. 30, 1828, 13 (“in modern times”); “Examination of the Controversy between Georgia and the Creeks,” Vermont Gazette (Bennington, Vt.), Aug. 23, 1825, 1–2 (“the partitioners”).
46. RDC (1825–26), vol. 2, appendix, 40–43.
47. Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach Bernhard, Travels through North America during the Years 1825 and 1826 (Philadelphia, 1828), 1:170; William Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour to the United States (London, 1823), 438.
CHAPTER 2: THE WHITE PEOPLE OF GEORGIA
1. Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 30, 1825, 1–3.
2. RDC (1825), 1:643 (“must be very valuable”); Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), May 15, 1830, 3 (“savages”); Southern Recorder, June 19, 1830, 3 (“tributaries”); The Athenian (Athens, Ga.), Nov. 10, 1829, 2 (small tax); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2015), 117–20.
3. Georgia Journal, Jan. 16, 1830, 2 (“negrophiles”), Feb. 10, 1831, 3 (“Indianites”), May 25, 1819, 3 (“waste public lands”), July 10, 1830, 2 (“Georgia may forgive”), Oct. 3, 1829, 2 (“to some distant point”), Aug. 30, 1825, 1–3 (“submit”).
4. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), chaps. 1–2; Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 174–75; and Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1–127.
5. Memorial of the Head Men and Warriors of the Creek Nation of Indians, Feb. 6, 1832, The New American State Papers (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1972), 9:192–96.
6. Population figures compiled from the Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978–2008), 20 vols.; Martin Van Buren, Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, D.C., 1920), 2:293.
7. Conference of John Ross, Edward Gunter, and John Mason, Jr., Nov. 6, 1837, PCJR, 1:537–40.
8. The causes of the South’s shifting cultivation, which gave rise to the barren landscape described by the Augusta Chronicle, are still hotly debated. Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.), Nov. 24, 1830; John Majewski and Viken Tchakerian, “The Environmental Origins of Shifting Cultivation: Climate, Soils, and Disease in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South,” Agricultural History 81, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 522–49.
9. Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 11, 1835, 2 (“by force”); Southern Recorder, Dec. 29, 1831, 2–3 (“mere mockery”). The sectional politics within Georgia were more complicated than Nesbit implied. Watson W. Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 194–217.
10. RDC (1825), 1:639–40.
11. Trip Henningson, “Princetonians in Georgia,” Princeton and Slavery, https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princetonians-in-georgia (accessed Feb. 1, 2018); Joseph Yannielli, “Student Origins,” Princeton and Slavery, https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/origins (accessed Feb. 1, 2018); Chronicles of Erasmus Hall (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1906), 47, 55.
12. Edward J. Harden, The Life of George M. Troup (Savannah, Ga., 1859), 194 (“great moral and political truths”), 197 (“positive obligations”), 204 (“simply occupants”), 205 (“breach of faith”), 217 (“birthright”), 230 (“indisputable”), 351 (“the Governor of this State”), Edmund P. Gaines as quoted on 390 (“little European despot”), 401 (“Chief Magistrate”), 531 (“Where principal”); Articles of Agreement and Cession, Apr. 25, 1802, Governor’s Subject Files, Executive Dept., Governor, RG 1-1-5, Georgia Archives.
13. Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 207 (“Of all the old States”), 405 (“civilizing plan”); John Ross et al. to the Senate and House of Representatives, Mar. 12, 1825, PCJR, 1:104–5.
14. Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 69–97; Report of special agent, June 28, 1825, enclosed in T.P. Andrews to James Barbour, July 4, 1825, LR, OIA, reel 219, frames 363–71, M-234, NA.
15. Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 232 (“fomenting”), 289 (“the servant”).
16. The Constitutionalist (Augusta, Ga.), Sept. 2, 1825, 3; Jennison, Cultivating Race, 194–95.
17. “To Socrates,” Georgia Journal, Aug. 9, 1825, 2 (“Troup and the Treaty”); RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1102 (“at the first prattle”); “To the People of the State of Georgia,” Savannah Republican, as reprinted in the Southern Recorder, Sept. 27, 1825, 1–2 (“A Native Georgian”).
18. RDC (1826), 2:775; Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 467.
19. Green, Politics of Indian Removal, 123; General Humming Bird et al. to Generals William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee, Nov. 14, 1826, ASPIA, 2:713 (“with great unanimity”); Levi Colbert et al. to Thomas Hinds and John Coffee, Oct. 24, 1826, ASPIA, 2:720 (“We have no lands”); 20th Cong., 2nd sess., H.Doc. 6, pp. 2–7 (Cherokees); Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 175. “Southern empire” became a common phrase in the 1830s. See Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
20. John Martin, “John McKinley: Jacksonian Phase,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 28, nos. 1–2 (1966): 7–31; RDC (1827), 71–76 (Reed); RDC (1825), 1:648–60 (Cobb).
21. Southern Recorder, Apr. 9, 1827, 2–3.
22. William H. Crawford to John Gaillard, Mar. 13, 1816, ASPIA, 2:28 (“It is believed”); “Crawfordism,” Macon Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), Apr. 30, 1827, 1; John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014); RDC (1828), vol. 4, 2:1566 (“a mixture”); Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 206.
23. U.S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 4; Garry Wills, “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 11.
24. Southern Recorder, Apr. 9, 1827, 2–3.
25. Southern Recorder, Apr. 9, 1827, 2–3. On southern domination of the federal government, see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
26. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 396–424.
27. Southern Recorder, Apr. 9, 1827, 2–3.
28. Georgia Journal, May 25, 1819, 3.
29. David Eltis, “Estimates of the Slave Trade,” Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/estimates/ygVmZkq4 (accessed Feb. 8, 2018).
30. Existing records show that 130 different ships, many owned by different investors, delivered over 38,000 of the enslaved people who arrived in the United States in the final two years of the trade. David Eltis, “Slave Trade Database,” Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/qWuTxkC5 (accessed Feb. 8, 2018), and http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/CakpCwJY (accessed Feb. 8, 2018); James McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). The number of permissible deaths is a common calculation in twenty-first-century humanitarian operations. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (New York: Verso, 2012).
31. Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), table 4.1, p. 140; Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 142–43, 150–51; Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 93; James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York, 1859), 443.
32. Deyle, Carry Me Back, 99, 102–4, 107, 113–19.
33. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 53; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 16–36, 46.
34. Harden, Life of George M. Troup, 458; Southern Recorder, Apr. 9, 1827, 2–3.
35. New Hampshire Observer (Concord), June 20, 1825, 2 (“seditious”); Essex Register (Salem, Mass.), July 4, 1825, 1 (“imbecile menaces”); Franklin Post and Christian Freeman (Greenfield, Mass.), Aug. 16, 1825, 2 (“madness and folly”); Rhode Island Republican (Newport, R.I.), Feb. 15, 2017, 3 (“bold and decisive stand”); Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), Aug. 13, 1825, 2 (“righteous retribution”); Laurence M. Hauptman and George Hamell, “George Catlin: The Iroquois Origins of His Indian Portrait Gallery,” New York History 84, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 130.
36. “Georgia and the Creeks,” The New-York Review, and Atheneum 1 (1825–26): 174, 187, 188, 189, 190.
37. Georgia Journal, Aug. 9, 1825, 2 (“doggerel verse”); “To the People of Georgia,” Southern Recorder, Aug. 9, 1825, 1 (“tender hearted”); Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 10, no. 4 (1990): 517–67.
38. Atticus, “To the People of Georgia,” Southern Recorder, Aug. 9, 1825, 1; “The Late Treaty,” Georgia Journal, Nov. 8, 1825, 2 (“were got rid of” and “sentimental trash”); Georgia Journal, May 31, 1824, 3 (“cant of the day”); Charleston Courier (Charleston, S.C.), Nov. 16, 1825, 2.
39. John Ross et al. to the U.S. Senate, Apr. 16, 1824, ASPIA, 2:502; “Address of the Creeks to the citizens of Alabama and Georgia,” Niles’ Weekly Register 37 (Aug. 29, 1829), 12.
40. John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 67–68; Reply of the Head Chief Hicks to the talk delivered by the Commissioner Col. White, May 5, 1827, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 5, M-234, NA.
41. Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, Embracing their Colonization (Boston, 1827), 12.
42. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 62–79 (quotation on 63–64).
43. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 147–48.
44. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Freedom, 172–77 (quotation on 175); Jeremiah Evarts to Joseph Nourse, Mar. 9, 1829, no. 18, ABC 11.1, vol. 2, Letters from Officers of the Board, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library; “First Inaugural Address of Andrew Jackson,” Mar. 4, 1829, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jackson1.asp, (accessed May 2, 2019). Two drafts of the address include a second sentence regarding native peoples: “A just and liberal policy is due to their dependent situation, and to our national character.” “Inaugural Address,” 1829, PAJ.
45. Martin Van Buren, Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, D.C., 1920), 2:295; Isaac McCoy, Journal (typescript), Feb. 27, 1829, p. 61, MP.
CHAPTER 3: THE DEBATE
1. Salem Gazette (Salem, Mass.), Dec. 15, 1829, 2; Delaware Gazette and State Journal (Wilmington, Del.), Dec. 18, 1829, 2; Savannah Georgian (Savannah, Ga.), Jan. 11, 1830, 2; Anthony R. Fellow, American Media History, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013), 83.
2. Ellen Cushman, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 39–70, 89–129; John Ross to George Gist, Jan. 12, 1832, PCJR, 1:234.
3. Memorial of the Cherokees, Dec. 1829, Committee of the Whole House, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-H1.1, NA.
4. Translations by Patrick Del Percio of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Newberry Library.
5. “Memorial of the Cherokees,” Cherokee Phoenix (New Echota, Cherokee Nation), Dec. 30, 1829, 3; Tiya Miles, “ ‘Circular Reasoning’: Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns,” American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2009): 221–43; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 91–108.
6. John Huss to [?], June 19, 1828, in Cherokee Phoenix, July 2, 1828, 2–3 (“the land they love”).
7. Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA.
8. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1829), 262, 265; Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race (New York, 1830), 136.
9. Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), Mar. 18, 1828, 2; Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.), Mar. 7, 1828, 1; Cherokee Phoenix, Feb. 11, 1829, 3; Thomas L. McKenney to Elias Boudinot, May 17, 1828, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book D, 454, NA.
10. George M. Troup to John Forsyth, Apr. 6, 1825, ASPIA, 2:780; E. Merton Coulter, Joseph Vallence Bevan: Georgia’s First Official Historian (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964), 53–72; Hasan Crockett, “The Incendiary Pamphlet: David Walker’s Appeal in Georgia,” Journal of Negro History 86, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 309–10; Arthur Foster, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Philadelphia, 1831), 314–17, 319; John MacPherson Berrien to Andrew Jackson, June 25, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA.
11. John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 165–71; “Address of Dewi [sic] Brown,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (1871–73): 32–33 (“had the natives”); Joel W. Martin, “Crisscrossing Projects of Sovereignty and Conversion: Cherokee Christians and New England Missionaries during the 1820s,” in Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape, ed. Joel W. Martin, Mark A. Nichols, and Michelene E. Pesantubbee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 67–92; “Letter from David Brown,” Essex Register (Salem, Mass.), June 27, 1825, 3 (“How would the Georgians”).
12. Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); William Apess, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, A Native of the Forest (New York, 1829), 14–15, 66 (“good people”), 140 (“exagerated account”); Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 227–42.
13. Missionary Herald 15, no. 4 (Apr. 1819): 75; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 156–58; Miles, “ ‘Circular Reasoning’ ”; M. Amanda Moulder, “Cherokee Practice, Missionary Intentions: Literacy Learning among Early Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Women,” College Composition and Communication 63, no. 1 (Sept. 2011): 75–97.
14. Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1974; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 14–15 (“This sort of machinery”); Francis Paul Prucha, “Thomas L. McKenney and the New York Indian Board,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48, no. 4 (Mar. 1962): 635–55.
15. Isaac McCoy to Rice McCoy, Dec. 21, 1829, reel 7, frame 270, MP; Satz, American Indian Policy, 14–15; [Lewis Cass,] “Removal of the Indians,” North American Review 30, no. 66 (Jan. 1830): 67, 71, 73, 74, 83.
16. [Lewis Cass,] “Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes, North American Review 22, no. 50 (Jan. 1826): 116, 119.
17. Bangor Register (Maine), Apr. 13, 1830, 3; Joseph Griffin, ed., History of the Press of Maine (Brunswick, Maine, 1872), 129; Jason M. Dorr, “Changing Their Guardians: The Penobscot Indians and Maine Statehood, 1820–1849” (University of Maine: M.A. thesis, 1998).
18. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 214–17; John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 97–105; John A. Andrew III, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 148–49; Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 15–40; J. Orin Oliphant, Through the South and the West with Jeremiah Evarts in 1826 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1956), 1–62; Jeremiah Evarts, Cherokee Removal: The “William Penn” Essays and Other Writings, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), 11, 74, 109, 177–78.
19. Memorial of Inhabitants of Topsfield, Massachusetts, Apr. 17, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Petition of inhabitants of Windham County, Connecticut, Feb. 8, 1830, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 1, 1830 to Jan. 18, 1831, folder 1, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Memorial from citizens of the City of New York, Apr. 3, 1830, Petitions, SEN21A-H3; Memorial of Citizens of Massachusetts, Feb. 8, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN 21A-H3, NA; Memorial of Inhabitants of Philipsburg, New Hampshire, Apr. 7, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Report of Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Mar. 29, 1830, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-D7, NA (burdensome duty); RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1019 (“contented majorities”), 1080 (“were nothing”).
20. Petition of citizens of New York, Dec. 28, 1829, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-G8, NA; Memorial of inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Jan. 7, 1830, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-G8, NA; Petition of the Inhabitants of Brunswick, Maine, Mar. 6, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of Inhabitants of North Yarmouth, Maine, Mar. 29, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA. On colonialism and Protestant evangelism in the early modern era, see Edward E. Andrews, Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
21. Petition of citizens of New York, Dec. 28, 1829, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-G8, NA (dark stain); Petition of Inhabitants of Lexington, New York, Feb. 8, 1830, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 1, 1830 to Jan. 18, 1831, folder 1, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Petition of citizens of Pennsylvania, Feb. 15, 1830, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 1, 1830 to Jan. 18, 1831, folder 2, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Memorial of the Officers of Dartmouth College, May 3, 1830, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 1, 1830 to Jan. 18, 1831, folder 1, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Memorial of the Inhabitants of Lafayette, New York, Jan. 7, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA (“tyrannical and oppressive”); Memorial of Inhabitants of North Yarmouth, Maine, Mar. 29, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA (“unparalleled perfidy”); Memorial of Inhabitants of Farmington, Connecticut, Feb. 27, 1830, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-G8, NA (“atrocious outrage”); Memorial of the Ladies, Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Mar. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA (“lasting dishonor”).
22. Petition of Inhabitants of Farmington, Jan. 6, 1830, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 1, 1830 to Jan. 18, 1831, folder 1, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women”; Miles, “ ‘Circular Reasoning’ ”; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
23. Memorial of Sundry Ladies of Hallowell, Maine, Jan. 8, 1830, PM, Indian Affairs, SEN21A-G8, NA (“domestic altar” and “endearments”); Petition of inhabitants of Lewis, New York, Jan. 24, 1831, COIA, Petitions, Jan. 24 to Feb. 8, 1831, folder 2, HR21A-G8.2, NA; Memorial of the Ladies of Burlington, New Jersey, Jan. 7, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA (“feebler sex”); Portnoy, Their Right to Speak, 67–71.
24. “To the People of Georgia,” Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 9, 1825, 1 (“meek”); The Athenian (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 17, 1830, 2 (“sickly”); The Athenian, Feb. 16, 1830, 3 (“morbid”); Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Mar. 24, 1831, 1–3 (“fearless, manly exercise”); “The Southern Indians—Again,” Southern Recorder, Feb. 13, 1830, 3 (“FEMALE petitions,” quoting the Pittsburgh Mercury); “Georgia Indians,” Southern Recorder, Feb. 6, 1830, 3 (“The ladies,” quoting the New England Review).
25. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 1:108–9 (“no reliance”); Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London, 1838), 1:300; RDC (1836), vol. 12, 4:4041 (“Anglo-Saxon”).
26. Neha Micco et al. to the President, Jan. 21, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 222, frame 274, M-234, NA; Tuskee-Neha-Haw et al. to John H. Eaton, Oct. 20, 1829, 21st Cong., 2nd sess., H.Rep. 109, p. 3.
27. George Lowrey, Lewis Ross, William Hicks, R. Taylor, Joseph Vann, and W.S. Coodey to John Eaton, Feb. 11, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 74, M-234, NA (“emboldened”); George Lowrey, Lewis Ross, William Hicks, R. Taylor, Joseph Vann, and W.S. Coodey to Andrew Jackson, Mar. 26, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 74, M-234, NA.
28. Phill Grierson vs. Sockahpautia, box 10, 1st series, no. 22, Creek Removal Records, entry 300, RG 75, NA; Phill Grierson vs. the Creek Nation, box 10, 1st series, no. 28, Creek Removal Records, entry 300, RG 75, NA; Cowemaltha et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 12, 1829, HR21A-D11.2, NA; George Lowrey, Lewis Ross, William Hicks, R. Taylor, Joseph Vann, and W.S. Coodey to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 25, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 74, M-234, NA (“It cannot be supposed”); James Williams to Hugh Montgomery, Mar. 4, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 74, M-234, NA.
29. “Indian Depredations,” Southern Recorder, Mar. 6, 1830, 2–3 (“the first fruits”); “Removal of the Indians,” Georgia Journal, Mar. 13, 1830, 3 (“rude and impudent,” “Fanatics,” “white savages”); Georgia Journal, Jan. 16, 1830, 2 (“local concerns”).
30. Isaac McCoy to Rice McCoy, Dec. 21, 1829, reel 7, frame 270, MP (“I hope”); List of recipients of “Indian Report,” [Feb. 24, 1829?], reel 7, frame 67, MP; Isaac McCoy to Rice McCoy, Dec. 21, 1829, reel 7, frame 270, MP (“of the spirit”).
31. Talbot W. Chambers, Memoir of the Life and Character of the Late Hon. Theo. Frelinghuysen (New York, 1863).
32. Frelinghuysen, in some instances, appears to have borrowed language from two Creek and Cherokee petitions that had arrived in Congress a few months before his speech. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 1:311, 318; Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of the Cherokees, Dec. 1829, Committee of the Whole House, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-H1.1, NA.
33. I am inferring the number of hours of Forsyth’s speech by word count. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 1:326, 328, 329, 336.
34. Ambrose Spencer to William Buell Sprague, Mar. 9, 1830, William Buell Sprague Papers, DMR; RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1014.
35. Remarks submitted to the Hon. Mr. Bell, Jan. 19, 1830, reel 7, frame 358, MP; Jeremiah Evarts to David Greene, Mar. 20, 1829, no. 24, ABC 11.1, vol. 2, Letters from Officers of the Board, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library (“Our treatment”); William S. Coodey to John Ross, May 17, 1838, PCJR, 1:639–40.
36. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1016, 1018, 1020, 1021, 1022.
37. Bell’s speech was not transcribed, but other congressmen quoted his phrase “mere device” several times. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:998 (“It requires no skill”), 1050 (“its hired patrole”), 1108 (“a mere device”).
38. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1015 (“vindicate”), 1030 (“the eyes of the world”), 1103 (“indulge,” “The Indians melt,” and “bound in conscience”).
39. Memorial of the Cherokees, Dec. 1829, Committee of the Whole House, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-H1.1, NA; Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA.
40. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1061 (“are the very means”), 1110 (“with the horrors”).
41. B. Brown to Charles Fisher, May 30, 1830, box 1, folder 3, in the Fisher Family Papers #258, SHC (“I have never witnessed”); John E. Owens, “The Proto-Partisan Speakership: Andrew Stevenson, Jacksonian Agent in the US House?” working paper, Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans, 2014, 32–33 (“Slaves of the Executive”). Available online at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/John_Owens7/publication/282150870_The_Proto-Partisan_Speakership_Andrew_Stevenson_Jacksonian_Agent_in_the_US_House/links/5605234e08ae8e08c08ae357/The-Proto-Partisan-Speakership-Andrew-Stevenson-Jacksonian-Agent-in-the-US-House.pdf?origin=publication_detail (accessed Aug. 24, 2018).
42. Martin Van Buren, Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Washington, D.C., 1920), 2:289.
43. New-York Observer (New York, N.Y.), Aug. 28, 1830, 2 (“threats and terrors”); Pennsylvania Intelligencer (Harrisburg, Pa.), June 8, 1830, 1 (“the highest authority”); David J. Russo, “The Major Political Issues of the Jacksonian Period and the Development of Party Loyalty in Congress, 1830–1840,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 62, no. 5 (1972): 3–51.
44. The Journal of the House of Representatives mistakenly lists James Ford as James Finch. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 21st Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, D.C., 1829), 730; RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1135; John Ross, “Message to the General Council,” July 1830, PCJR, 1:191.
45. Pennsylvania Intelligencer, June 8, 1830, 1 (“an ignoramus”); Daily National Journal (Washington, D.C.), Aug. 25, 1830, 3.
46. Pennsylvania Intelligencer, June 1, 1830, 3; Pennsylvania Intelligencer, June 15, 1830, 3.
47. There is more than one way to calculate the effect of the three-fifths clause. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 45, 89, 103n40, 125, 126–27 (“southern measure”), 164.
48. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1080 (“The Indians”), 1127 (“zealously”); Georgia Journal, July 10, 1830, 2; Deborah A. Rosen, “Colonization through Law: The Judicial Defense of State Indian Legislation, 1790–1880,” American Journal of Legal History 46, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 26–54.
49. College for colored youth: an account of the New-Haven city meeting and resolutions, with recommendations of the college, and strictures upon the doings of New-Haven (New York, 1831), 22.
50. William Apess, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe (Boston, 1835), 69; William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” in Apess, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequod Tribe (Boston, 1833), 60.
51. The amendment was proposed by William Ramsey, one of the key swing votes in Pennsylvania. U.S. Statutes at Large 4 (1846): 411–12; Journal of the House of Representatives, 21st Cong., 1st sess., 23:705; New-York Morning Herald (N.Y.), May 28, 1830, 2.
52. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1076.
CHAPTER 4: “FORKED TONGUE AND SHALLOW HART”
1. “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.
2. Isaac McCoy, “To Philanthropists in the United States, Generally, and to Christians in Particular, on the Condition and Prospects of the Indians,” [Dec. 1, 1831?], reel 7, frame 861, MP; John Henry Eaton to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 1, 1830, PAJ; Gabriel L. Lowe, Jr., “The Early Public Career of John Henry Eaton” (M.A. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1951), 31 (“It is hard to say”).
3. Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy: 1816–1830 (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1974), 112 (“not well-informed”), 223–36 (“It was my misfortune” on 235); Poem regarding the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit, [1843], 4026.3162, PPP (“good talker”).
4. 21st Cong., 1st sess., H.Rep. 319, pp. 196 and 200; Deborah A. Rosen, “Colonization through Law: The Judicial Defense of State Indian Legislation, 1790–1880,” American Journal of Legal History 46, no. 1 (2004): 26–54; Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Yardley, Pa: Westholme Publishing, 2014), 186.
5. Andrew Jackson to William Berkeley Lewis, Aug. 25, 1830, and John Coffee to Andrew Jackson, July 10, 1830, PAJ.
6. Margaret Kinard, “Frontier Development of Williamson County,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 8, no. 2 (June 1949): 127–53.
7. Andrew Jackson to the Chickasaw Indians, Aug. 23, 1830, PAJ.
8. Andrew Jackson to the Chickasaw Indians, Aug. 23, 1830, PAJ; Baltimore Patriot (Baltimore, Md.), Aug. 27, 1830, 2; Andrew Jackson to the Chickasaws, Aug. 23, 1830, and Levi Colbert et al. to John Eaton and John Coffee, Aug. 25, 1830, CSE, 2:240–44 (“unparalleled”).
9. John Eaton and John Coffee to the Chickasaws, Aug. 26, 1830, CSE, 2:246 (“Misery”); Evening Post (New York, N.Y.), Sept. 15, 1830, 1 (“earnest hope”); Andrew Jackson to James Knox Polk, Aug. 31, 1830, PAJ.
10. John Eaton and John Coffee to the Choctaws, Sept. 18, 1830, CSE, 2:256–57; Andrew Jackson to the Choctaw Indians, Aug. 26, 1830, PAJ.
11. The Athenian (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 17, 1830, 2–3 (“Again and again”); George W. Harkins, “The Choctaw’s Farewell,” New-York Observer (New York, N.Y.), Dec. 31, 1831, 3.
12. John Eaton and John Coffee to the Choctaws, Sept. 18, 1830, CSE, 2:256.
13. “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.
14. “Basis of a Treaty to be submitted to the Commissioners of the United States,” Sept. 25, 1830, 4826.29a and b, PPP; Choctaw leaders [anon.] to John Eaton and John Coffee,” Sept. 25, 1830, 4026.3191 (“truly distressing”), PPP.
15. Isaac McCoy to the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives, Dec. 15, 1829, reel 7, frame 255, MP; Comstick et al. to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 22, 1830, PAJ; John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 115–37 (“the deposit” on 119).
16. Petition of citizens of county of Seneca, Ohio, Dec. 1829, COIA, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-G8.2, NA (“useless”); Memorial of the representatives of the Religious Society of Friends in the states of Indiana, Illinois, and the western parts of Ohio, Apr. 8, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA (“insatiable avarice”); Memorial of Inhabitants of New Petersburg, Ohio, Apr. 12, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Petition of residents from Claridon, Geauga County, Ohio, Jan. 1831, COIA, Petitions, Feb. 14, 1831, HR21A-G8.2, NA (“it would be manifest”); Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears, 199.
17. Laurence H. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 101–90; Mary H. Conable, “A Steady Enemy: The Ogden Land Company and the Seneca Indians” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1994), 1–138; William G. Mayer, “The History of Transportation in the Mohawk Valley,” Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association 14 (1915): 227; Big Kettle, Seneca White, and Thomson Harris to Andrew Jackson, Jan. 11, 1831, PAJ.
18. Big Kettle, Seneca White, and Thomson Harris to Andrew Jackson, Jan. 11, 1831, PAJ; James Kent, Commentaries on American Law (New York, 1826), 1:6.
19. 21st Cong., 1st sess., H.Rep. 319, p. 199; C.C. Clay, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama (Tuskaloosa, Ala., 1843), 272, pp. 600–601; RDC (1830), 6:338–39; Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), June 19, 1830, 3 (“the dearest rights”); Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Sept. 22, 1831, 1 (“Indian testimony”).
20. Laws of the State of Mississippi Embracing All Acts of a Public Nature from January Session, 1824, to January Session 1838, Inclusive (Jackson, Miss., 1838), 349; John G. Aikin, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Alabama: Containing All the Statutes of a Public and General Nature, in Force at the Close of the Session of the General Assembly, in January 1833 (Tuskaloosa, Ala., 1833), 396; Oliver H. Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1837), 800, 810; 21st Cong., 1st sess., H.Rep. 319, p. 197 (“strolling”).
21. Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), Apr. 9, 1827, 3 (“Abstractly”); 21st Cong., 1st sess., H.Rep. 319, p. 242 (“said persons”); Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia, 808, 811; D. A. Reese to Lewis Cass, Mar. 10, 1832, CSE 3:253–56 (“real Indians”); Charles Caldwell, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race, (New York, 1830), 82 (“hybrid offspring”); The Athenian, Sept. 28, 1830, 2 (“aristocratical half breeds”); John Ridge and Stand Watie to John F. Schermerhorn, Feb. 28, 1836, enclosed in Schermerhorn to Lewis Cass, Feb. 27, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA (“nearly a white man”); Lewis Ross to John Ross, Feb. 23, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA (“motley crew”).
22. John L. Allen to John H. Eaton, Feb. 7, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA (“native freedom”); Tuskee-Neha-Haw et al. to John H. Eaton, Oct. 20, 1829, 21st Cong., 2nd sess., H.Rep. 109, p. 3 (“tied”); Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA (“We have never been”).
23. Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), Jan. 12, 1831, 2.
24. John Ross, annual message, Oct. 11, 1830, PCJR, 1:201–3 (“a stamp”); John Ross to Elias Boudinot, Feb. 4, 1831, PCJR, 1:212–14 (“piercing cold”).
25. Nehah Micco et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:424–25; “Oto Cho” (Ishtehotopa) et al. to Andrew Jackson, May 28, 1831, PAJ; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA.
26. John H. Eaton to the Red Men of the Muscogee nation, May 16, 1831, CSE, 2:290; Return J. Meigs, extract from journal, Aug. 9, 1834, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445, p. 168 (“degraded”); Andrew Jackson to John Pitchlynn, Aug. 5, 1830 (“I feel conscious”), and Andrew Jackson to William Berkeley Lewis, Aug. 25, 1830 (“I have used”), PAJ.
27. Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 12, 1831, 2.
28. Clayton would later express regret for his role in the trial, an apology that came too late for the Cherokees. Southern Recorder, Nov. 13, 1830, 2; Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.), Nov. 17, 1830, 2; The Constitutionalist (Augusta, Ga.), Apr. 2, 1830, 2 (“wandering savages”); Cherokee Phoenix (New Echota, Cherokee Nation), Oct. 1, 1830, 1 (“intermeddling”); Tim Alan Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 111–24; “An Act to authorize the survey and disposition of lands,” Dec. 21, 1830, Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia, 561.
29. John Ross to Hugh Montgomery, July 20, 1830, PCJR, 1:194; Commercial Advertiser, Jan. 12, 1831, 2; Vermont Gazette (Bennington, Vt.), Jan. 25, 1831, 1; Robert S. Davis, “State v. George Tassel: States’ Rights and the Cherokee Court Cases, 1827–1830,” Journal of Southern Legal History 12 (2004): 41–72; Garrison, Legal Ideology of Removal, 122 (“a vast multitude”).
30. Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 167.
31. John Berrien, “To the Public,” Savannah Georgian (Savannah, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1831, 1–2; Royce Coggins McCrary, Jr., “John MacPherson Berrien of Georgia (1781–1856)” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Georgia, 1971), 144n174.
32. William Wirt also referred to a guardianship relationship in one of his opinions as attorney general in 1828, but he insisted that indigenous nations were nonetheless “independent” and “governed solely by their own laws.” William Wirt to the President of the United States, July 28, 1828, and John MacPherson Berrien to the Secretary of War, Dec. 21, 1830, Official Opinions of the Attorneys General of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1852), 2:133, 402–4; Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.), 22, 44 (1831).
33. John Ross to the Cherokees, April 14, 1830, PCJR, 1:217; D.A. Reese to George Gilmer, June 8, 1831, LR, OIA, reel 74, M-234, NA.
34. Jonathan Elliot, Historical Sketches of the Ten Miles Square forming the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., 1830), 166–67; Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 165–66; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 95.
35. Elliot, Historical Sketches, 165–67 (“impressed”); Isaac McCoy to General Noble, [Feb. 2, 1828?], reel 6, frame 268, MP; RDC (1828), vol. 4, 2:1568–69; “Speech of the Hon R.B. Rhett” Charleston Mercury (Charleston, S.C.), July 13, 1860, 4.
36. John A. Andrew III, From Revivals to Removal: Jeremiah Evarts, the Cherokee Nation, and the Search for the Soul of America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 182; John H. Eaton to John Coffee, Oct. 12, 1830, John Coffee Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (“Economy in expenditure”); John H. Eaton to Superintendents and Agents of Indian Affairs, Jan. 14, 1831, p. 126, LS, OIA, reel 7, M-21, NA (“The Indian business”); John H. Eaton to Isaac McCoy, Apr. 13, 1830, CSE, 2:276.
37. Grant Foreman, “An Unpublished report by Captain Bonneville with Introduction and Footnotes,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 10, no. 3 (Sept. 1932): 329–30; Isaac McCoy to John H. Eaton, Apr. 1831, CSE, 2:432, 435.
38. M. Stokes to Lewis Cass, Aug. 5, 1833, CSE, 4:495 (“general and correct”); John H. Eaton to John Bell, Jan. 17, 1831, LS, OIA, reel 7, p. 126, M-21, NA (“each tribe”); John H. Eaton to Isaac McCoy, Apr. 13, 1831, p. 179, LS, OIA, reel 7, M-21, NA (“We have no satisfactory”); Lewis Cass to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 16, 1832, CSE, 2:768 (“imperfect”); Lewis Cass to M. Stokes, H.L. Ellsworth, and J.F. Schermerhorn, Mar. 18, 1833, CSE, 3:617 (“vague and unsatisfactory”).
39. John H. Eaton to John Coffee, May 16, 1831, CSE, 2:291–92.
40. John H. Eaton to John Bell, Jan. 17, 1831, LS, OIA, reel 7, p. 126, M-21, NA; John H. Eaton to Isaac McCoy, Apr. 13, 1831, LS, OIA, reel 7, p. 179, M-21, NA; Isaac McCoy to the Secretary of War, Aug. 18, 1831, CSE, 2:563; M. Stokes to Lewis Cass, Aug. 5, 1833, CSE, 4:495 (“greatly embarrassed”).
41. Isaac McCoy to the Secretary of War, Aug. 18, 1831, CSE, 2:561–66; Roley McIntosh et al. to Andrew Jackson, Oct. 21, 1831, PAJ (“ultimate ruin”); RG 77, Civil Works Map File, I.R. 50, NACP; RG 75, Central Map File, Indian Territory, no. 105, NACP.
42. M. Stokes to Lewis Cass, Aug. 5, 1833, CSE, 4:496 (“I am much mistaken” and “incorrect”); D. Kurtz to William Clark, Aug. 13, 1833, CSE, 3:748 (“Upon examining”); Elbert Herring to William Clark, Nov. 29, 1833, CSE, 4:736; Matthew Arbuckle to John H. Eaton, Dec. 11, 1830, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA.
43. Lewis Cass to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 16, 1832, CSE, 2:781.
44. J. Montgomery to John H. Eaton, Mar. 27, 1831, CSE, 2:421–22 (“perseverance”); “Letter from David Brown,” Essex Register (Salem, Mass.), June 27, 1825, 2; “Journal of Isaac McCoy for the Exploring Expedition of 1828,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1936): 250; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA.
45. Lewis Cass to the Chiefs of the Creek Tribe, Jan. 16, 1832, CSE, 2:742–43 (“fine country”); John H. Eaton to the Red Men of the Muscogee nation, May 16, 1831, CSE, 2:290 (“altogether favorable”); Copy of a petition by the Principal Men of the Pottawatamis, Ottawas, and Chippewas to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 30, 1835, CGLR, box 2, Chicago, NA (“deceived”); Reply of the Head Chief Hicks to the talk delivered by the Commissioner Col. White, May 5, 1827, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 5, M-234, NA (“it is bad”); Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 131 (“good for nothing”); James Gould et al. to the Chiefs of the Wyandot Nation, Dec. 15, 1831, CSE, 3:165–68 (“the most abandoned”).
46. Reply of the Head Chief Hicks to the talk delivered by the Commissioner Col. White, May 5, 1827, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 5, M-234, NA (“Bad Indians”); Levi Colbert to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 23, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA; Charles Dickens, American Notes (London, 1842), 2:95–100; Snyder, Great Crossings, 131 (“long separated”); John Ross to James C. Martin, Nov. 5, 1837, PCJR, 1:536; David La Vere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).
47. Nehah Micco et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:424–25; Western Creeks to Andrew Jackson, June 12, 1830, PAJ (“sorrows”); Richard M. Hannum to John Pope, Dec. 13, 1832, CSE, 3:551–52 (“Young women”); John Dougherty to William Clark, Oct. 29, 1831, CSE, 2:718–19 (“monstrous”).
48. “Oto Cho” (Ishtehotopa) et al. to Andrew Jackson, May 28, 1831, PAJ (“Some of our people”); Levi Colbert to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 23, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA; Guy B. Braden, “The Colberts and the Chickasaw Nation,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 17, no. 3 (Sept. 1958): 232–33.
49. Memorial of the Chickasaw Chiefs to the President of the United States, Nov. 22, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA.
50. U.S. officials claimed that white men were behind the Chickasaw petition, a charge that some historians have accepted, though there is no real evidence. A delegation of Chickasaw representatives and their allies hand-carried the letter to Washington, but the Jackson administration refused to negotiate with them. Memorial of the Chickasaw Chiefs to the President of the United States, Nov. 22, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA; James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 228–30; Amanda L. Paige, Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Chickasaw Removal (Ada, Okla.: Chickasaw Press, 2010), 44–46.
51. B. Brown to Charles Fisher, May 30, 1830, box 1, folder 3, in the Fisher Family Papers #258, SHC; John Henry Eaton to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 1, 1830, PAJ; Henry Leavenworth to Samuel Preston, Feb. 21, 1830, Henry Leavenworth, Letters to Samuel Preston, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (“There is a set”).
52. Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 42; John W. Barriger, Legislative History of the Subsistence Department of the United States Army (Washington, D.C., 1877), 73 (“He will make”); Thomas P. Roberts, Memoirs of John Bannister Gibson (Pittsburgh, 1890), 229 (“was always in order”).
53. Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, General Correspondence, LR, Entry 10, RG 192, NA; Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, Fiscal Year 1997 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 47, table 2-11.
54. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1070 (“Whoever”); John Eaton to Greenwood LeFlore, May 7, 1831, reel 2, IRW (“We are preparing”); J.H. Hook to Greenwood LeFlore, June 23, 1831, CSE, 1:17 (“promptitude”); James R. Stephenson to George Gibson, Apr. 1, 1831, CSE, 1:852–53.
CHAPTER 5: THE PLAN OF OPERATIONS
1. “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.
2. Robert Mills, Guide to the National Executive Offices and the Capitol of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1841), 20; A Full Directory for Washington City, Georgetown, and Alexandria (Washington, D.C., 1834); Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London, 1838), 1:266 (“Its seven”).
3. Stephanie L. Gamble, “Capital Negotiations: Native Diplomats in the American Capital” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2014), 1–2, 104–7; “Letters from Washington,” New-York Observer (New York, N.Y.), Feb. 12, 1831, 4 (“public tables”).
4. Lewis Cass, Regulations Concerning the Removal of the Indians, May 15, 1832, CSE, 1:343–49 (“systematic”); George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Nov. 12, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 338–50, NA (“complete accountability”); Return J. Meigs, extract from journal, Aug. 9, 1834, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445, p. 169 (“made all nature”); George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Jan. 30, 1835, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 427–28, NA (“of a multifarious”).
5. Thomas L. McKenney to John H. Eaton, Mar. 18, 1829, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book E, 353, NA (“unremitting”); John Bell to Lewis Cass, July 17, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA (“in the best” and “A bungler”); John Kennedy and Thomas W. Wilson to C.A. Harris, Dec. 6, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 114, M-234, NA (“competent”); John C. Mullay to C.A. Harris, Apr. 19, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 82, M-234, NA (“great number” and “to an immense”); John C. Mullay to C.A. Harris, Nov. 6, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 114, M-234, NA; Extract of a letter from M. Stokes, Apr. 3, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 82, frame 683, M-234, NA.
6. Michael Zakim, “Paperwork,” Raritan 33, no. 4 (Spring 2014): 52–53; Shelf list of Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, NA; George Gibson to J. Van Horne, Oct. 31, 1836, CGLS, vol. 4, p. 217, NA (“Finis”).
7. I am estimating the linear length of records relating to the 1830s, since they are not filed chronologically. Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, NA. The early history of the bureaucracy of the Bureau of Indians Affairs is explored in Stephen J. Rockwell, Indian Affairs and the Administrative State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
8. J.H. Hook to William Armstrong, Oct. 1, 1832, CSE, 1:171 (“Where medical”); George Gibson to John Page, July 15, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 229–38, NA (“when actually required” and “must be”); J.T. Sprague, Dec. 3, 1836, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 257, account 547, NA.
9. Papers Relating to Claims for Commutation Pay by Heirs of George Gibson, box 1, Gibson-Getty-McClure Papers, LC; Kurt Windisch, “A Thousand Slain: St. Clair’s Defeat and the Evolution of the Constitutional Republic” (Ph.D. diss., University of Georgia, 2018), 16; Biography of George Gibson, 1818–1854 and undated, box 1, Gibson-Getty-McClure Papers, LC; Thomas P. Roberts, Memoirs of John Bannister Gibson (Pittsburgh, 1890), 228; Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775–1939 (1962; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1989), 178–79; George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Jan. 16, 1835, CGLS, vol. 2, p. 417, NA “(It will not do”); Ethan Davis, “An Administrative Trail of Tears: Indian Removal,” American Journal of Legal History 50, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 2008): 49–100.
10. George Gibson to J.P. Simonton, July 11, 1832, CSE, 1:117 (“of the size”); George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Jan. 14, 1835, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 413–15, NA (“numbers”); George Gibson to William Clark, Oct. 13, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 334–37, NA (“muster roll”); George Gibson to William Clark, May 6, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 190–92, NA (“with a view”); George Gibson to John Page, July 15, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 229–38, NA (“detachment”); George Gibson to William Armstrong, July 19, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 257–61, NA; J.H. Hook to William Armstrong, Oct. 1, 1832, CSE, 1:171 (“It is not warranted”); Lewis Cass, Regulations Concerning the Removal of the Indians, May 15, 1832, CSE, 1:344; J.B. Clark to George Gibson, May 5, 1831, reel 2, IRW (“It placed me”).
11. Mark Walson, Birthplace of Bureaus: The United States Treasury Department (Washington, D.C.: Treasury Historical Society, 2013), 14–16; John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (New York, 1848), 103 (“rigid economy”).
12. George Gibson to W.S. Colquhuon, Sept. 21, 1831, CSE, 1:44; George Gibson to J.P. Taylor, July 13, 1831, CSE, 1:24; George Gibson to S.V.R. Ryan, Nov. 9, 1831, CSE, 1:50; George Gibson to George S. Gaines, Mar. 31, 1832, CSE, 1:75–77; George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Aug. 12, 1833, CSE, 1:287 (“The word inclusive”); George Gibson to John Page, July 15, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 229–38, NA (“from” and “to”); J. Brown to George Gibson, May 30, 1832, CSE, 3:450–51 (“waste and extravagance”); George Gibson to Jacob Brown, July 11, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 222–24, NA (“It gives me”).
13. George Gibson to J.R. Stephenson, Dec. 27, 1830, CSE, 1:5–6 (“Too much”); George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Apr. 12, 1832, CSE, 1:77–78 (“strictly economical” and “and lop it off”); George Gibson to John Page, July 15, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 229–38, NA (“I would impress”); J.H. Hook to A.C. Pepper, Aug. 12, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 282–84, NA (“You are urged”); George Gibson to Wiley Thompson, Feb. 28, 1835, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 477–83, NA (“Let nothing”); George Gibson to J.P. Simonton, May 5, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 96–97, NA (“Wherever money”).
14. William Armstrong to George Gibson, Oct. 13, 1832, CSE, 1:386–87 (“every exertion”); John Page to George Gibson, Jan. 6, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, 1834, NA (“incur”); John Page to George Gibson, Apr. 25, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, 1834, NA (“enormous”); John Page to George Gibson, May 1, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA (“I never did”); A.M.M. Upshaw to C.A. Harris, Aug. 1, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 143, frame 689, M-234, NA (“We are moved”).
15. Upshaw, despite his occasional sympathy for Chickasaws, was not above cheating them of their funds. Amanda L. Paige, Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Chickasaw Removal (Ada, Okla.: Chickasaw Press, 2010), 253; George Gibson to Templin W. Ross, Oct. 1, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 314–18, NA (“with every regard”); George Gibson to Joseph Kerr, July 21, 1832, CSE, 1:126 (“consistent”); George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Nov. 12, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 338–50, NA (“With respect”); Davis, “An Administrative Trail of Tears,” 92.
16. Davis, “An Administrative Trail of Tears,” 99; George Gibson to William Clark, Oct. 13, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, pp. 334–37, NA.
17. Thomas L. McKenney to James Barbour, Jan. 4, 1828, LS, OIA, Miscellaneous Immigration, RG 75, entry 84, M21, book D, 229, NA; J.T. Sprague, Oct. 23, 1836, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 257, account 547, NA.
18. Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1974; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 73; “On Claims to Reservations under the Fourteenth Article of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, with the Choctaw Indians,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 1523, American State Papers: Public Lands (Washington, D.C., 1861), 8:691–93 (“negro servant”); Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, p. 167 (“soured”) and p. 168 (“confused and impaired”), NA; James Murray and Peter D. Broom to the President of the United States, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 3, NA (“arbitrary”).
19. Mary E. Young, “Indian Removal and Land Allotment: The Civilized Tribes and Jacksonian Justice,” American Historical Review 64, no. 1 (Oct. 1958): 38.
20. By one estimate, five thousand Choctaw people remained in Mississippi as late as 1838, fully seven years after deportation began, suggesting that between a third and half of the entire nation had intended to stay in the region and become citizens of the state. That figure is in line with the one given by the Choctaw Nation in the 1850s. James Murray and Peter D. Broom to the President of the United States, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 3, NA; “Claims of the Choctaw Nation,” 44th Cong., 1st sess., H.Misc.Doc. 40, p. 23, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, NA (“to suffer”); William Ward to Samuel Hamilton, June 21, 1831, 4026.3194, PPP; “On Claims to Reservations under the Fourteenth Article of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, with the Choctaw Indians,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 1523, American State Papers: Public Lands, 8:691 (“emigrating agents”); Deposition of Adam Jones, Jan. 31, 1838, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, NA (“there were too many”); Deposition of Captain Bob, alias Mingohomah, July 12, 1844, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 3, NA.
21. Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, NA; Mahlon Dickerson to George W. Martin, Sept. 5, 1833, U.S. Congress, Senate, Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 69, pp. 13–14; J.H. Eaton to Lewis Cass, Sept. 20, 1833, CSE, 4:565 (“so torn”).
22. [?] to Peter Pitchlynn, Aug. 8, 1834, 4026.3351, PPP.
23. Patrick B. McGuigan, “Bulwark of the American Frontier: A History of Fort Towson,” in Early Military Forts and Posts in Oklahoma, ed. Odie B. Faulk, Kenny A. Franks, and Paul F. Lambert (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1978), 9–25; Robert Gudmestad, “Steamboats and the Removal of the Red River Raft,” Louisiana History 52, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 389–416; Benjamin Reynolds and George S. Gaines to John H. Eaton, Feb. 7, 1831, CSE, 1:674–75.
24. J.H. Hook to P.G. Randolph, July 2, 1831, CSE, 1:21–22; George Gibson to J.R. Stephenson, Aug. 27, 1831, CSE, 1:36–37; George Gibson to John B. Clark, Apr. 5, 1831, CSE, 1:8–9 (“proper intervals”); J.H. Hook to Greenwood LeFlore, June 23, 1831, CSE, 1:15–17; J.H. Hook to Wm. S. Colquhoun, July 5, 1831, CSE, 1:27–28; George Gibson to T.S. Jesup, Sept. 21, 1831, CSE, 1: 43; George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Nov. 4, 1831, CSE, 1:49–50; J.B. Clark to George Gibson, Oct. 19, 1831, CSE, 1:586; J.B. Clark to George Gibson, July 30, 1831, CSE, 1:561–62 (“No one”).
25. I am excluding for the moment those who tried to stay in Mississippi. Approximately 2,400 Choctaw families were expelled, and, assuming 6 people per family on average, only 100 families were compensated under Article 19 of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Liabilities of Choctaw Indians to Individuals, 43rd Cong., 2nd sess., H.Exec.Doc. 47, pp. 12–13; John Coffee to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 23, 1831, CSE, 2:600 (“almost nothing”).
26. George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), 595–98.
27. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73–96; Michael Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (Boston, 1839), 223–24 (“So much”); Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 80–82.
28. Steamboat explosions were not unusual. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom, 105–11. William S. Colquhoun to George Gibson, Dec. 10, 1831, CSE, 1:593 (“disgusting sight”); James B. Gardiner to George Gibson, June 20, 1832, CSE, 1:690 (“their native modesty”); [?] to Lewis Cass, May 2, 1832, 4026.3220, PPP (“well agree”); James B. Gardiner to George Gibson, June 2, 1832, CSE, 1:687–88 (“scalded”).
29. William S. Colquhoun to George Gibson, Dec. 10, 1831, CSE, 1:427; J. Brown to George Gibson, Dec. 15, 1831, CSE, 1:593; Thomas Nuttall, Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory During the Year 1819 (Philadelphia, 1821), 75–78.
30. J. Brown to George Gibson, Dec. 22, 1831, CSE, 1:428; J. Brown to George Gibson, Dec. 29, 1831, CSE, 1:431–32 (“horrid”); J. Brown to George Gibson, Jan. 4, 1832, CSE, 1:432; J. Brown to George Gibson, May 4, 1832, CSE, 1:447–48 (“indifferently made”).
31. “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.
32. F.W. Armstrong to Lewis Cass, Feb. 8, 1832, CSE, 3:191–92; Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 58.
33. Foreman, Indian Removal, 58–59, 59n16.
34. The per capita cost of $25 does not include the year of rations to be paid after deportation. RDC (1830), vol. 6, 2:1076 (“five times five millions”); “Estimate of the expense of removing seven thousand Chaktaw from their old to their new homes by waggons,” reel 2, frame 456, IRW; George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Apr. 18, 1836, CGLS, vol. 3, p. 511, NA.
35. Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Estimates, 1832–36, RG 75, entry 205, NA; Elbert Herring to Col. William Ward, Mar. 19, 1832, CSE, 2:800 (“What amount”); William S. Colquhoun to George Gibson, Apr. 15, 1832, CSE, 1:604 (“quite insufficient”).
36. Greenwood LeFlore to the Secretary of War, June 7, 1831, reel 2, William S. Colquhoun to George Gibson, Jan. 3, 1832, reel 2, and F.W. Armstrong to Elbert Herring, Mar. 8, 1833, reel 3, IRW; Peter Pitchlynn[?] to David Folsom, May 19, 1830, 4026.3186, PPP (“in a precipitate manner”); “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP (“tyrant”); Mushulatubbe at al. to John Henry Eaton, June 2, 1830, PAJ; Greenwood LeFlore to Lewis Cass, Mar. 6, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 170, M-234, NA (“compensate”); Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, pp. 212–13, NA (“We dreaded”); R. Halliburton, Jr., “Chief Greenwood LeFlore and His Malmaison Plantation,” in After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi, ed. Samuel J. Wells and Rosseana Tubby (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 56–63.
37. Some 300 people entered the swamp, but the captain of the Talma reported rescuing only 265. Joseph Kerr to Lewis Cass, June 14, 1832, CSE, 1:1719–20; William A. Taylor, “Senator Joseph Kerr,” The “Old Northwest” Genealogical Quarterly 6 (Jan. 1903): 69; Foreman, Indian Removal, 62n24; George Gibson to Joseph Kerr, July 21, 1832, CSE, 1:126.
38. Petition of citizens of county of Seneca, Ohio, December 1829, COIA, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-G8.2, NA (“useless”); To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives, Jan. 31, 1831, CSE, 2:403–4; History of Seneca County, Ohio (Chicago, 1886), 310.
39. List of Sales, Mar. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:328, 331, 332, 333, 335, 338, 339, 343, 345, 348, 353; “Indian Sale,” Sept. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:597; Henry C. Brish to S.S. Hamilton, Nov. 28, 1831, CSE, 2:691–92; John McElvain to Elbert Herring, Feb. 7, 1832, CSE, 3:190.
40. List of Sales, Mar. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:332, 335, 338; Henry C. Brish to William Clark, July 16, 1832, CSE, 5:118–20 (“immense quantity”).
41. The precise numbers of deportees vary slightly in different accounts. William Clark to William B. Lewis, Nov. 18, 1833, CSE, 5:113; Henry C. Brish to S.S. Hamilton, Nov. 28, 1831, CSE, 2:691–92; Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme, 2014), 207–12; Henry C. Brish to S.S. Hamilton, Nov. 16, 1831, CSE, 2:725; Henry C. Brish to William Clark, Nov. 26, 1831, CSE, 2:723–24 (“extremely dissipated” and “blood-thirsty”).
42. Steve Ehlmann, Crossroads: A History of St. Charles County, Missouri (Marceline, Mo.: Walsworth Publishing Company, 2004), 45–61; Henry C. Brish to William Clark, Dec. 13, 1831, CSE, 2:725–26; William Clark to Elbert Herring, Dec. 20, 1831, CSE, 2:722–23.
43. John McElvain to Lewis Cass, Nov. 15, 1831, CSE, 2:684–85 (“live well”); Small Cloud Spicer et al. to William Clark, Dec. 10, 1831, CSE, 3:9–10; Henry C. Brish to Samuel S. Hamilton, Jan. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:24–25; Henry C. Brish to Samuel S. Hamilton, Jan. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:24–25; Postscript to Small Cloud Spicer et al. to William Clark, Dec. 10, 1831, CSE, 3:9 (“what then remains”).
44. Henry C. Brish to William Clark, May 8, 1832, Henry C. Brish to William Clark, May 16, 1832, and Henry C. Brish to William Clark, July 16, 1832, CSE, 5:116–20 (quotations).
45. Of the 398 deportees who left Ohio, only 352 reached their destination, but some families turned back along the way. Henry C. Brish to William Clark, July 16, 1832, CSE, 5:118–20; Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears, 211.
46. J. Brown to George Gibson, Sept. 13, 1832, CSE, 1:476–77.
47. John McElvain to S.S. Hamilton, Feb. 21, 1832, CSE, 3:213–14; F.W. Armstrong to Lewis Cass, Apr. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:302–3.
48. Lewis Cass, Regulations Concerning the Removal of the Indians, May 15, 1832, CSE, 1:343–49.
49. Steve R. Waddell, United States Army Logistics: From the American Revolution to 9/11 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 30–45; Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army, 143–44, 181–83, 202; 13th Cong., 3rd sess., H.Doc., 53, p. 9 (“palm”); “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.
50. Lewis Cass, Regulations Concerning the Removal of the Indians, May 15, 1832, CSE, 1:343–49.
51. George Gibson to George S. Gaines, Aug. 13, 1831, CSE, 1:32; J. Brown to George Gibson, Dec. 15, 1831, CSE, 1:427.
CHAPTER 6: THE CHOLERA TIMES
1. Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 32.
2. John A. Walthall, Galena and Aboriginal Trade in Eastern North America, Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, vol. 17 (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1981), 12; Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737–1832 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 97, 102, 105, 117.
3. Alexander Macomb to Henry Atkinson, May 5, 1832, The Black Hawk War, 1831–32 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library), vol. 2, 1:351; Alfred A. Cave, Sharp Knife: Andrew Jackson and the American Indians (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2017), 133–34; Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 70–72; George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 37–42.
4. The editor of the Galenian practiced what he preached, volunteering in the militia and taking several scalps, which he later put on display in his home. Murphy, Gathering of Rivers, 162–65; Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 89, 149–51; Lewis Cass to William Clark, May 22, 1832, Black Hawk War, 1831–32, vol. 2, 1:405; Trask, Black Hawk, 262.
5. Jung, Black Hawk War of 1832, 79, 98–100, 115, 127; Jackson’s endorsement of John Robb to Andrew Jackson, June 12, 1832, PAJ (“must be chastised”).
6. “Asiatic Cholera Pandemic of 1826–37,” George Childs Kohn, ed., Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 2008), 15; G.F. Pyle, “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” Geographical Analysis 1 (1969): 59–75; J.S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera: America’s Greatest Scourge (New York: MacMillan, 1938), 86–88.
7. Chambers, Conquest of Cholera, 95; David A. Sack et al., “Cholera,” Lancet 363 (Jan. 17, 2004): 223–33.
8. “The Cholera Epidemic of 1873 in the United States,” 43rd Cong., 2nd sess., H. Ex. Doc. 95, pp. 572–76 (“paper barrier” and “brought disease”); Chambers, Conquest of Cholera, 90, 94, 97, 577; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 74–79; Trask, Black Hawk, 275.
9. Some Ho-Chunks (Winnebagos), Potawatomis, and Menominees aided the U.S. war effort for their own strategic reasons, as described in John W. Hall, Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Trask, Black Hawk, 270–71, 277 (“extracted”), 282–89 (“work of death” on 284); Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 172; Hall, Uncommon Defense, 195–205.
10. “Indian War,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Baltimore, Md.), June 18, 1832, 2 (“dispassionate”); Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), Aug. 17, 1832, 2 (“in the injustice”).
11. “The Cholera Epidemic of 1873 in the United States,” 43rd Cong., 2nd sess., H. Ex. Doc. 95, p. 577. Ramon Powers and James N. Leiker, “Cholera among the Plains Indians: Perceptions, Causes, and Consequences,” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 320–21, 331–33; Chambers, Conquest of Cholera, 102–3.
12. J. Brown to George Gibson, Apr. 20, 1832, CSE, 1:443–44.
13. “An Act, to amend an act entitled, ‘an act further to define and carry into effect the act to extend the laws of this state over the persons, and property of the persons called Indians, in this state,’ ” Dec. 9, 1831, Laws of the State of Mississippi Embracing All Acts of a Public Nature from January Session, 1824, to January Session 1838, Inclusive (Baltimore, 1838), 358; William Armstrong to George Gibson, Sept. 1, 1832, CSE, 1:376–78; Journal of William S. Colquhoun, Sept. 13, 1832 to Dec. 20, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA; William Armstrong to George Gibson, Sept. 10, 1832, CSE, 1:378–79; F.W. Armstrong to George Gibson, Oct. 28, 1832, CSE, 1:391; F.W. Armstrong to George Gibson, Oct. 21, 1832, CSE, 1:388–89 (quotations).
14. Journal of William S. Colquhoun, Sept. 13, 1832 to Dec. 20, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA.
15. A.S. Langham to George Gibson, Nov. 8, 1832, CSE, 1:737–38; William Armstrong to George Gibson, Nov. 10, 1832, CSE, 1:398–99; F.W. Armstrong to George Gibson, Nov. 21, 1832, CSE, 1:400 (“Scarce a boat”); Roads 51 (1833), Civil Works Map File, RG 77, NACP; Roads 1 (Dec. 10, 1827), Civil Works Map File, RG 77, NACP; William Howard to J.J. Abert, May 3, 1834, 23rd Cong., 2nd sess., H.Doc. 83, serial 445, pp. 1–14.
16. William Armstrong to George Gibson, Nov. 10, 1832, CSE, 1:398 (“cholera times”); Journal of J.P. Simonton, Nov. 16, 1832 to Dec. 19, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA (“sheer want” and “Having received”); Journal of J. Van Horne, Nov. 2, 1832 to Dec. 18, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA (“old, lame”).
17. Journal of J. Van Horne, Nov. 2, 1832 to Dec. 18, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA.
18. George Strother Gaines to Anthony Winston Willard, Aug. 8, 1857, in Gaines, Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, ed. James P. Pate (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 123 (“pet”), 124 (“useless agencies”); Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “The Armstrongs of Indian Territory,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 30, no. 4 (1952): 294 (“talked loudly”); Lieut. Montgomery to F.W. Armstrong, Mar. 22, 1833, reel 3, IRW (“spoiled” and “largely economised”); F.W. Armstrong to George Gibson, Mar. 31, 1833, reel 3, IRW; Journal of William S. Colquhoun, Sept. 13, 1832 to Dec. 20, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA (“naked”); F.W. Armstrong to Lewis Cass, Nov. 21, 1832, reel 2, IRW (“tyrant and cruel” and “outrageous”).
19. Copy of Lieut. J.A. Phillips’ Journal, Nov. 14, 1832 to Dec. 9, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA.
20. A.S. Langham to George Gibson, Nov. 8, 1832, CSE, 1:737–38; Journal of J.P. Simonton, Nov. 16, 1832 to Dec. 19, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA (“suffered dreadfully”); F.W. Armstrong to George Gibson, Dec. 2, 1832, CSE, 1:401–2 (“We have been”); Journal of J. Van Horne, Nov. 2, 1832 to Dec. 18, 1832, CGLR, box 6, Choctaw, 1833, NA.
21. Isaac McCoy to the Commissioners West, Oct. 15, 1832, CSE, 3:497 (“the path”); G.J. Rains to George Gibson, Apr. 5, 1833, CSE, 1:841–42 (“except by age”); G.J. Rains to George Gibson, June 10, 1833, CSE, 1:831; J.H. Hook to G.J. Rains, May 6, 1833, CSE, 1:255 (“much to be lamented”).
22. G.J. Rains to George Gibson, June 19, 1833, CSE, 1:845; F.W. Armstrong to Elbert Herring, Sept. 20, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 170, M-234, NA (“Will the Government”); F.W. Armstrong to Elbert Herring, Nov. 8, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 170, M-234, NA; George Gibson to G.J. Rains, Jan. 21, 1834, CGLS, vol. 2, p. 141, NA (“This is a disagreeable”); G.J. Rains to George Gibson, Apr. 18, 1834 to Dec. 18, 1832, CGLR, box 7, Choctaw, 1834, NA (“let to starve”).
23. G.J. Rains to George Gibson, Nov. 4, 1833, CSE, 1:851; John Campbell to Elbert Herring, Nov. 20, 1833, CSE, 4:722.
24. George Gibson to J.B. Gardiner, June 28, 1832, CSE, 1:102 (“the plan of removal”); Daniel Dunihue, “Journal of Occurrences,” Aug. 21, 1832, Conner Prairie Museum Archives, Fishers, Indiana (“It will [be] but a short time”); George Gibson to J.B. Gardiner, Sept. 1, 1832, CSE, 1:153; James B. Gardiner to Lewis Cass, Feb. 25, 1833, CSE, 4:113.
25. J.F. Lane to George Gibson, Sept. 25, 1832, CSE, 1:730; J.J. Abert to George Gibson, Oct. 2, 1832, CSE, 1:384 (“swelled”); Carl Wittke, ed., History of the State of Ohio (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1941), 3:36; James B. Gardiner to George Gibson, Oct. 8, 1832, CSE, 1:706 (“settled plan”); Daniel R. Dunihue to Alexander R. Dunihue, Sept. 11, 1832, “Removal of Indians from Ohio: Dunihue Correspondence of 1832,” Indiana Magazine of History 35, no. 4 (Dec. 1939): 419; J.B. Gardiner to Daniel R. Dunihue, July 28, 1832, “Removal of Indians from Ohio,” 414 (“flowery”); Henry Harvey, History of the Shawnee Indians, From the Year 1681 to 1854, Inclusive (Cincinnati, 1855), 227–28 (“they would get to see” and “My friend”).
26. Daniel Dunihue, Diary, Sept. 2, 5, and 13, 1832, Conner Prairie Museum Archives, Fishers, Indiana; Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 200–201; “Journal of John Shelby,” A Sorrowful Journey, ed. Randall L. Buchman (Defiance, Ohio: Defiance College Press, 2007), 15–16 (“offending”).
27. Daniel R. Dunihue to Alexander R. Dunihue, Sept. 29, 1832, “Removal of Indians from Ohio,” 420 (“tawney”); James B. Gardiner to Lewis Cass, Oct. 1, 1832, CSE, 3:478–79 (“miserable”); Dunihue, Diary, Oct. 3, 1832.
28. James B. Gardiner to Lewis Cass, Feb. 25, 1833, CSE, 4:115; Daniel R. Dunihue to Alexander R. Dunihue, Oct. 23, 1832, “Removal of Indians from Ohio,” 423.
29. “The Cholera,” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, Ark.), Oct. 31, 1832, 2 (“Keep cool” and “trust,” quoting the Republican); “The Cholera,” Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.), Nov. 5, 1832, 4; “The Cholera,” Rochester Union and Advertiser (Rochester, N.Y.), Nov. 17, 1832, 2; Dunihue, “Journal of Occurrences,” Oct. 25, 1832.
30. James B. Gardiner to William Clark, Oct. 25, 1832, CSE, 4:118; “Journal of John Shelby,” 42, 44; J.J. Abert to George Gibson, Nov. 9, 1832, CSE, 1:396–97; J.J. Abert to George Gibson, Nov. 17, 1832, CSE, 1:399; “Journal of John Shelby,” 47–50 (“wept bitterly”).
31. Dunihue, Diary, Sept. 28, Nov. 9, Nov. 15, 1832 (“laughing”), Dec. 9, 1832.
32. “Journal of John Shelby,” 62–65; James B. Gardiner to William Clark, Oct. 25, 1832, CSE, 4:117; Sami Lakomäki, “From Ohio to Oklahoma and Beyond: The Long Removal of the Lewistown Shawnees,” The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity, ed. Stephen Warren (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 48; “Journal of John Shelby,” 57–59, 62 (“various changes”).
33. Reuben Holmes to B. McCary, Black Hawk War, 1831–32, vol. 2, 1:414–16.
34. Black Hawk, Black Hawk’s Autobiography, ed. Roger L. Nicholas (1833; Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999), 13, 82–84 (“war chiefs”); “From the Seat of War,” American (New York, N.Y.), June 12, 1832, 2 (“of undoubted bravery”); John Ridge to Stand Watie, Apr. 6, 1832, Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, ed. Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton (1939; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 8 (“intellectual warfare”).
35. The commander of the Georgia Guard threatened Boudinot with “a sound whipping” if he were “too free” in his remarks about the armed force. The Supreme Court had jurisdiction by writ of error under the twenty-fifth section of the Judiciary Act of 1789. Cherokee Phoenix (New Echota, Cherokee Nation), Mar. 12, 1831, 3, and Sept. 3, 1831, 2–3; Samuel A. Worcester v. the State of Georgia, 31 U.S. Reports 515, 516 (1832).
36. John Sergeant’s notes, box 5, file 18, pp. 16–19, John Sergeant Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (“a State”); Cherokee Phoenix, Oct. 21, 1829, 2, and Apr. 14, 1830, 1; Memorial of the Cherokees, Dec. 1829, Committee of the Whole House, Petitions, “Various Subjects,” HR21A-H1.1, NA; Jill Norgren, The Cherokee Cases: The Confrontation of Law and Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 117.
37. Samuel A. Worcester v. the State of Georgia, 31 U.S. Reports 515, 559, 561 (1832).
38. William M. Davis to Lewis Cass, June 24, 1832, CSE, 3:381 (“It was trumpted”); Elias Boudinot to Stand Watie, Mar. 7, 1832, Cherokee Cavaliers, 4–6; John Ridge to Stand Watie, Apr. 6, 1832, Cherokee Cavaliers, 10.
39. John Ridge to Stand Watie, Apr. 6, 1832, Cherokee Cavaliers, 8; RDC (1833), vol. 8, 2:2013–14.
40. RDC (1833), vol. 8, 2:2027–28.
41. The Constitutionalist (Augusta, Ga.), Apr. 2, 1830, 2; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave (London, 1855), 21, 27–30, 45–48 (quotations); F.N. Boney, “Thomas Stevens, Antebellum Georgian,” South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (1973): 226–42.
42. Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Apr. 12, 1832, 3 (“the perpetuity”); Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), Apr. 19, 1832, 3 (“A palpable”); The Constitutionalist, May 4, 1832, 2 (“rights and interests”); Georgia Journal, May 24, 1832, 2 (“local concerns”).
43. William M. Davis to Lewis Cass, June 24, 1832, CSE, 3:381–82 (“perilous”); Copy of letter from John McLean to Chief John Ross, May 23, 1832, 4026.107-a.1, John Ross Papers, Helmerich Center for American Research, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; U.S. Statutes at Large 2 (1802): 141; Gerard N. Magliocca, “The Cherokee Removal and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duke Law Journal 53 (2003): 897 and n135.
44. Elisha W. Chester to John Ross, July 20, 1832, CSE, 3:424; Elisha W. Chester to Lewis Cass, Aug. 11, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 75, M-234, NA (“pressing evils”).
45. H. David Williams, “Gambling Away the Inheritance: The Cherokee Nation and Georgia’s Gold and Land Lotteries of 1832–33,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 519–39; David A. Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians: Power and Policy in Early National Georgia, 1780–1825,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 199–226; John Ridge to John Ross, Feb. 2, 1833, PCJR, 1:259.
46. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1965), 250–51, 254–59 (quotation on 257); Richard Sutch, “Slave prices, value of the slave stock, and annual estimates of the slave population: 1800–1862,” table Bb209–214 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
47. William Wirt to John Sergeant, Dec. 22, 1832, reel 23, William Wirt Papers, Maryland Historical Society; Norgren, The Cherokee Cases, 126–30; Tim Alan Garrison, The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 191–97.
48. John Ross, Annual Message, Oct. 10, 1832, PCJR, 1:255.
49. Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), Mar. 31, 1832, 3; John H. Martin, Columbus, Geo., from its Selection as a “Trading Town” in 1827, to its Partial Destruction by Wilson’s Raid, in 1865 (Columbus, Ga., 1874), 7, 8, 10, 35.
50. Stephen F. Miller, The Bench and Bar of Georgia (Philadelphia, 1858), 2:202, 248–54.
51. Columbus Enquirer, Apr. 14, 1832, 3 (“the dearest interest”); Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA.
52. Columbus Enquirer, Aug. 25, 1832, 2 (“system”); Eli S. Shorter et al. to Lewis Cass, Oct. 16, 1835, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445; Shorter, Tarver, & Co. et al. to Lewis Cass, Nov. 18, 1835, “Documents Relating to Frauds,” 363 (“bare-naked”); Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA; Eli S. Shorter to John B. Hogan, Feb. 24, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 768, M-234, NA (“scrupulously regardful”).
CHAPTER 7: THE FINANCIERS
1. Stephen F. Miller, The Bench and Bar of Georgia (Philadelphia, 1858), 2:256 (“I have been”), 260 (“itched”); Oliver H. Prince, A Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1837), 90; Savannah Georgian (Savannah, Ga.), Dec. 9, 1831, 2 (“more real capital,” quoting the Columbus Enquirer).
2. John H. Martin, Columbus, Geo., from its Selection as a “Trading Town” in 1827, to its Partial Destruction by Wilson’s Raid, in 1865 (Columbus, Ga., 1874), 8 (“strip”); Savannah Georgian, June 15, 1831, 4; Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), May 2, 1833, 3; Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), Nov. 23, 1833. 1; Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Nov. 10, 1831, 3.
3. On one occasion, a “general panic pervaded the Indians” when the Montgomery County sheriff entered the Creek Nation with a party of volunteer militia. As the troops advanced, “every hut and shelter was abandoned, and not an Indian was to be seen.” Georgia Journal, Feb. 27, 1830, 3; Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), Mar. 27, 1830, 3; William Moor to Nehah Micco, Dec. 6, 1831, and Neha Micco, Tuskemhow, and Nehah Locko Opoy to John Crowell, Dec. 13, 1831, CSE, 2:708–9; Neha Micco et al. to the President, Jan. 21, 1830, frame 274, John Crowell to Lewis Cass, Dec. 15, 1831, frame 545, John Crowell to John H. Eaton, June 30, 1830, frames 315–316, and John Crowell to John H. Eaton, Aug. 8, 1830, frames 319–324, LR, OIA, reel 222, M-234, NA; Sandy Grierson vs. the Creek Nation, box 10, 1st series, no. 31, Creek Removal Records, entry 300, RG 75, NA; Abraham Smith vs. Sandy Grayson, 1831, box 10, 1st series, no. 19, Creek Removal Records, entry 300, RG 75, NA.
4. Nehah Micco et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:424–25; John H. Eaton to the Red Men of the Muscogee nation, May 16, 1831, CSE, 2:290; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA (“We admit”).
5. Tuskeneah to Andrew Jackson, May 21, 1831, PAJ.
6. Garland B. Terry et al. to Andrew Jackson, May 31, 1831 PAJ (“intense suffering”); Southern Recorder, June 23, 1831, 3 (“beyond description”).
7. For a modern-day analogue in which states privatized indigenous lands, see Joe Bryan and Denis Wood, Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas (New York: Guilford Press, 2015), 96–126. John H. Eaton to George R. Gilmer, June 17, 1831, CSE, 2:307–8; Samuel S. Hamilton to John Crowell, July 25, 1831, p. 306, LS, OIA, reel 7, M-21, NA (“regrets”); Lewis Cass to the Chiefs of the Creek Tribe, Jan. 16, 1832, CSE, 2:742–43; Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 169–73.
8. Columbus Enquirer, Feb. 25, 1832, 3.
9. Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 27–64, 311–54; Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History (New York: Penguin, 2002), 160–75; C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Land Management, 1983), 18–96.
10. Elijah Hayward to F.W. Armstrong, Apr. 28, 1832, Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 69, p. 6.
11. John Robb to Enoch Parsons, Oct. 14, 1833, CSE, 3:787; Peter S. Onuf, “Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Apr. 1986): 186–88.
12. George W. Martin to Lewis Cass, Aug. 9, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 188, M-234, NA; “TO THOSE WHO CLAIM RESERVATIONS,” 1831, 3026.337, PPP.
13. B.F. Butler to Lewis Cass, Dec. 28, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 188, M-234, NA; Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, NA.
14. B.S. Parsons and Thomas Abbot to Lewis Cass, Sept. 7, 1832, LR, OIA, frames 307–9, reel 223, M-234, NA; Ne-Hah Micco et al. to the Secretary of War, Nov. 15, 1832, CSE, 3:527–28.
15. Ishtehotopa King to Andrew Jackson, July 17, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 136, frame 608, M-234, NA; Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Thomas J. Abbott to Lewis Cass, Sept. 29, 1832, CSE, 3:471; B.S. Parsons to Lewis Cass, Oct. 16, 1832, LR, OIA, frames 281–282, reel 223, M-234, NA (“in Every way”); B.S. Parsons to Lewis Cass, Oct. 21, 1832, LR, OIA, frames 283–285, reel 223, M-234, NA (“negro woman”).
16. Thomas J. Abbott to Lewis Cass, May 1833, CSE, 4:236; Tuckabatchee Hadjo and Octeahchee Emathla to Andrew Jackson, Feb. 18, 1831, PAJ.
17. Creek Census, 1832, CSE, 4:334, 394; Choctaw Census, CSE, 3:149; Arrell Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 179.
18. In the ranking of corporations, I have excluded firms whose maximum authorized capital is unknown. I have calculated the slave population using the 1840 U.S. Census. Where counties lay only partially within the boundaries of the Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations in the 1830s, I took a proportional fraction. For the value of slaves, I used the average price in 1836 of $547. Robert E. Wright, “US Corporate Development 1790–1860,” The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD), https://repository.upenn.edu/mead/7/ (accessed Sept. 25, 2018); Richard Sutch, “Slave prices, value of the slave stock, and annual estimates of the slave population: 1800–1862,” table Bb209–214 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
19. Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City (New York, 1870), vol. 2, 2:107–10 (“a clever man,” “quick,” “as affable,” and of “great wealth”); Andrew Beers to Joseph D. Beers, Oct. 1801, box 26, folder 787, LPC (“all manner”); Joseph D. Beers to Starr, Feb. 24, 1812, box 26, folder 787, LPC; Alice Curtis Desmond, Yankees and Yorkers (Portland, Me: Anthoensen Press, 1985), 14–23, 69 (“became the best customer”); J.D. Beers to Benjamin Curtis, Jan. 2, 1857, box 27, folder 818, LPC; J.D. Beers to Joseph Curtis, July 1, 1861, box 27, folder 819, LPC.
20. Henry Reed Stiles, Genealogies of the Stranahan, Josselyn, Fitch and Dow Families in North America (Brooklyn, 1868), 77–78; E. Mils to J.D. Beers, Jan. 30, 1825, box 26, folder 790, LPC; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2015), 117–20; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 259–62; J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Jan. 25, 1835, box 26, folder 795, LPC; J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Jan. 10, 1835, box 26, folder 795, LPC (“The poor Negroes”); William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies (London, 1823), 1.
21. “Slave labor camp” is Peter H. Wood’s term. J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Mar. 27, 1835, box 26, folder 796, LPC (“don’t think”); J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Feb. 6, 1835, box 26, folder 795, LPC (“Oh you don’t know”); J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Feb. 28, 1835, box 26, folder 795, LPC (“is all done”); J.D. and Mary Beers to Eliza and Lewis Curtis, Jan. 25, 1835, box 26, folder 795, LPC (“makes it another”); Desmond, Yankees and Yorkers, 37; Peter H. Wood, “Slave Labor Camps in Early America: Overcoming Denial and Discovering the Gulag,” in Inequality in Early America, ed. Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 222–39.
22. Eric Kimball, “ ‘What have we to do with slavery?’ New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies,” and Calvin Schermerhorn, “The Coastwise Slave Trade and a Mercantile Community of Interest,” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 181–94, 209–24; Niles’ Register, Sept. 5, 1835, 9.
23. Poem regarding the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit, [1843], 4026.3162, PPP.
24. In the Antebellum era, it was common for southern states to purchase large stakes in state-chartered banks. Laws of the State of Mississippi Embracing All Acts of a Public Nature from January Session, 1824, to January Session 1838, Inclusive (Jackson, Miss., 1838), 237 (“give impulse”), 298–99, 436; Charles Hillman Brough, “The History of Banking in Mississippi,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society (1900), 3:317–40; Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 123–54, 219–48; Fritz Redlich, Molding of American Banking: Men and Ideas (New York: Hafner, 1951), 2:333–35; “State Bonds Sold,” Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.), Sept. 11, 1833, 2; Account Sales, 1833–34, box 40, folder 1077, LPC.
25. George R. Gilmer, Sketches of some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, of the Cherokees, and the Author (New York, 1840), 468 (“cotton”); An Act to Establish a Branch of the Bank of the State of Alabama in the Tennessee Valley (New York, 1833), 27 (“Indian titles”), 31–32.
26. Nathan Mitchell and J.B. Toulmin to Baring Bros, Nov. 3, 1832, p. 2636, reel C-1372, Baring Papers, LR, General, Public Archives, Canada (“Like all new states”); William H. Brantley, Banking in Alabama, 1816–1860 (privately printed, 1961), 1:267–73; Daniel Bell and Son to Frederick Huths and Co., May 22, 1833, Daniel Bell and Son Letter, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; Dublin Morning Register, May 29, 1833, 2; Thomas Wilson and Co. to J.D. Beers and Co., Sept. 14, 1832 [1833?], box 35, folder 969, LPC.
27. David Hubbard to J.D. Beers, Nov. 17, 1834, box 39, folder 1058, LPC (“Our sections”); David Hubbard to J.D. Beers, Jan. 10, 1835, box 39, folder 1058, LPC (“pouring in”); Articles of Association, Mar. 2, 1835, box 39, folder 1058, LPC.
28. For a history of land companies during Indian Removal, see Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); Boston and Mississippi Cotton Land Company Papers, DMR.
29. Report of John Bolton, Sept. 18, 1835, p. 48 and 60, Letter book, NYMS; John D. Haeger, The Investment Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Economic Development of the Old Northwest (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 110, 156–57; Memorandum of Agreement, Oct. 15, 1835, box 36, folder 989, LPC; Thomas M. Barker to Lewis Cass, July 17, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA (“at the Cost”). In the ranking of corporations, I have excluded firms whose maximum authorized capital is unknown. Robert E. Wright, “US Corporate Development 1790–1860,” The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD), https://repository.upenn.edu/mead/7/ (accessed Sept. 25, 2018).
30. Callie B. Young, ed., From These Hills: A History of Pontotoc County (Fulton, Miss.: Pontotoc Woman’s Club, 1976), 69–76; John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, Apr. 25, 1835, p. 16, NYMS (“rather bitter”); John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, June 16, 1835, p. 39, NYMS (“really Hot”).
31. John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, Mar. 25, 1835, p. 3, NYMS (“immense profits”); John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, Apr. 20, 1835, p. 15, NYMS (“the rich planter”); John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, Apr. 25, 1835, p. 16, NYMS (“deep rich”); John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, May 25, 1835, p. 33, NYMS.
32. Wendy Cegielski, “A GIS-Based Analysis of Chickasaw Settlement in Northeast Mississippi: 1650–1840” (M.A. thesis, University of Mississippi, 2010), 64; John Howard Blitz, An Archaeological Study of the Mississippi Choctaw Indians, vol. 16, Archaeological Report (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1985), 34–35; Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 120–21; William G. Siesser, “Paleogene Sea Levels and Climates: U.S.A. Eastern Gulf Coastal Plain,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 47 (1984): 261–75.
33. Public Dinner Given in Honor of the Chickasaw and Choctaw Treaties (Mississippi, 1830), 3 (“exchange”); David Hubbard to J.D. Beers, Jan. 10, 1835, box 39, folder 1058, LPC (“sought for”); Columbus Enquirer, Apr. 24, 1835, 3 (“It is confidently”).
34. Ethridge, Creek Country, 96, 132–33, 155, 170–71, 280n24; Mary Theresa Bonhage-Freund, “Botanical Remains,” Archaeology of the Lower Muskogee Creek Indians, 1715–1836, ed. Mary Theresa Bonhage-Freund, Lisa D. O’Steen, and Howard Thomas Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 190–92; Blitz, Archaeological Study of the Mississippi Choctaw Indians, 17 (names of months); Cegielski, “A GIS-Based Analysis of Chickasaw Settlement,” 27; John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, June 1835, p. 35, NYMS.
35. Public Dinner Given in Honor of the Chickasaw and Choctaw Treaties, 2, 4; L. Atkison to Farish Carter, June 5, 1833, folder 9, in the Farish Carter Papers #2230, SHC (“the best”); John Bolton to the Trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company, May 6, 1835, p. 22, NYMS.
36. Poem regarding the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit, [1843], 4026.3162, PPP; Nehah Micco et al. to John H. Eaton, Apr. 8, 1831, CSE, 2:424–25; Opothle Yoholo et al. to Lewis Cass, Sept. 4, 1835, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445, p. 318; “The Late Treaty,” Georgia Journal, Nov. 8, 1825, 2.
37. Bonhage-Freund, “Botanical Remains,” 150–56.
38. R. Alfred Vick, “Cherokee Adaptation to the Landscape of the West and Overcoming the Loss of Culturally Significant Plants,” American Indian Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 394–417; Steven G. Platt, Christopher G. Brantley, and Thomas R. Rainwater, “Native American Ethnobotany of Cane (Arundinaria spp.) in the Southeastern United States: A Review,” Castanea 74, no. 3 (Sept. 2009): 271–85.
39. Peter Pitchlynn[?] to David Folsom, May 19, 1830, 4026.3186, PPP; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA (“white brethren”); John Ross, Annual Message, Oct. 10, 1832, PCJR, 1:255.
40. Cherokee Phoenix (New Echota, Cherokee Nation), Nov. 18, 1829, 2–3; Thomas L. McKenney to John Cocke, Jan. 23, 1827, Library of Congress Collection, RG 233, entry 756, NA box 57 of LC box 184, NA; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA (“slowly and reluctantly”).
41. Isaac McCoy, Journal (typescript), Apr. 15, 1838, p. 483, MP; William Armstrong to George Gibson, Sept. 14, 1833, CSE, 1:414.
42. G.J. Rains to George Gibson, July 29, 1834, CGLR, box 7, Choctaw, 1834, NA; Abraham Redfield to David Greene, Aug. 25, 1834, frames 846–847, reel 779, Unit 6, ABC 18.4.4, Letters from Officers of the Board, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library; David Carter to Hugh Montgomery, Aug. 30, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA (“government and government agents”); Benjamin F. Currey to Lewis Cass, Sept. 15, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA (“Let me”).
43. Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (New York, 1853), 81–83, 238.
44. Isham Harrison to James T. Harrison, Feb. 10, 1836, folder 4, James T. Harrison Papers #02441, SHC (“Virgin lands”); Baldwin, Flush Times, 83 (“rose”); Neah Micco at al. to Lewis Cass, Sept. 27, 1832, CSE, 3:464.
CHAPTER 8: “A COMBINATION OF DESIGNING SPECULATORS”
1. Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City (New York, 1866), 110 (“high-toned”); Map of real estate, box 38, folder 1031, LPC; Inventory of real estate, box 30, folder 867, LPC; Joseph Curtis to Lewis Curtis, July 6, 1863, box 27, folder 821, LPC (“a consistent”); Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), Dec. 13, 1836, 2 (“distinguished”); Stephen F. Miller, The Bench and Bar of Georgia (Philadelphia, 1858), 2:248 (“a man”).
2. Opothle Yoholo’s exact words: “The homes which have been rendered valuable by the labor of our hands, are torn from us by a combination of designing speculators, who haunt your office, and who, like the man among the tombs, are so fierce that no one can pass that way.” Opothle Yoholo et al. to Robert W. McHenry, Mar. 23, 1835, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Creek Removal Records, Reports, 1836–38, RG 75, entry 293, box 3, NA; Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (New York, 1853), 82 (“mesmeric”); Samuel Gwin to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, Nov. 24, 1835, Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 69, pp. 18–19 (“ravenous”); Elizabeth Arnold and James McConnell, “Hijacked Humanity: A Postcolonial Reading of Luke 8:26–39,” Review & Expositor 112, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 2015): 591–606; Christopher Burdon, “ ‘To the Other Side’: Construction of Evil and Fear of Liberation in Mark 5.1–20,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 27, no. 2 (2004): 149–67; Joshua Garroway, “The Invasion of a Mustard Seed: A Reading of Mark 5.1–20,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 32, no. 1 (Sept. 1, 2009): 57–75. Thanks to Jamie Kreiner for references regarding the story of the Gerasene demoniac.
3. Opothle Yoholo et al. to Lewis Cass, Sept. 4, 1835, “Documents Relating to Frauds, &c., in the sale of Indian Reservations of Land,” 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 425, serial 445, p. 318; Opothle Yoholo et al. to the House and Senate, Jan. 24, 1832, COIA, HR22A-G8.2, NA; Samuel George Morton, Catalogue of Skulls of Man and the Inferior Animals, 3rd. ed. (Philadelphia, 1849); Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 225–26, 308–14; Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 55–103; James Colbert to Lewis Cass, June 29, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 136, frame 614, M-234, NA.
4. Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and supplement, 1830, Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Washington, D.C., 1903–), 2:310–19; 44th Cong., 1st sess., H.Misc.Doc. 40, p. 73; Choctaw Nation v. United States, Nov. 15, 1886, 119 U.S. 1 (7 S.Ct. 75, 30 L.Ed. 306), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/119/1 (accessed Oct. 23, 2018).
5. Choctaws should have received two to three million acres, depending on how one estimates family size. “Claims of the Choctaw Nation,” 44th Cong., 1st sess., H.Misc.Doc. 40, p. 23; 43rd Cong., 2nd sess., H.Exec.Doc. 47, p. 17; 44th Cong., 1st sess., H.Misc.Doc. 40, p. 23.
6. The speculators’ schemes are summarized in Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 47–72. John Coffee to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 23, 1831, CSE, 2:600 (“almost nothing”); William S. Colquhoun to Samuel S. Hamilton, Nov. 19, 1831, CSE, 2:687; John W. Byrn to the Secretary of War, Dec. 18, 1831, CSE, 2: 717; John W. Byrne to the Indian Office, Apr. 18, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 170, M-234, NA (“His sun”); John W. Byrne to the Secretary of War, Dec. 18, 1831, CSE, 2:717; Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Journal of Pray, Murray, and Vroom, pp. 215–34, RG 75, entry 268, box 1, NA (“collected”); William S. Colquhoun to Lewis Cass, Sept. 20, 1833, CSE, 4:566.
7. 23rd Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 22, serial 267, vol. 2, pp. 33, 49–50, 95, 105, 128; “Message from the President of the United States, with Documents relating to the Character and Conduct of Samuel Gwin,” 24th Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 213, serial 298, vol. 2, pp. 1–4, 17; Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
8. 23rd Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 22, serial 267, vol. 2, pp. 151–53; “Message from the President of the United States, with Documents relating to the Character and Conduct of Samuel Gwin,” 24th Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 213, serial 298, vol. 2, pp. 1–2 (“Fraudulent” and “confined”), 4.
9. 23rd Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 22, serial 267, vol. 2, pp. 11–12, 99, 117; “Message from the President of the United States, with Documents relating to the Character and Conduct of Samuel Gwin,” 24th Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 213, serial 298, vol. 2, pp. 73 and 76 (quotations); James P. Shenton, Robert John Walker: A Politician from Jackson to Lincoln (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 11–13, 25–26, 33, 121, 127–30, 148, 158, 160; Vicksburg Register (Vicksburg, Miss.), Oct. 8, 1835, 1. The purchases of the Chocchuma Land Company were compiled using the U.S. Bureau of Land Management patent database and include all Mississippi patents belonging to four partners, Robert J. Walker, Thomas G. Ellis, Malcolm Gilchrist, and Robert Jemison.
10. Deposition of Captain Bob, alias Mingohomah, July 12, 1844, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 3, NA.
11. Choctaw Claims, n.d., box 10, folder 79, in the Fisher Family Papers #258, SHC.
12. Claims 160 (Immaka), 187 (Oakalarcheehubbee), 196 (Illenowah), and 199 (Okshowenah), Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 1, NA.
13. Claims 242 (Elitubbee), 251 (Abotaya), 205 (Shokaio), 245 (Chepaka), 250 (Hiyocachee), Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Pray, Murray, and Vroom, Evidence, 1837–38, RG 75, entry 270, box 1, NA; Case 20 (Ahlahubbee), J.F.H. Claiborne, Minutes, 1842–43, folder 40, J.F.H. Claiborne Papers #00151, SHC.
14. [?] to Peter Pitchlynn, Aug. 8, 1834, 4026.3351, PPP (“deep reflection”); Reuben H. Grant to Peter Pitchlynn, Nov. 12, 1836, 4026.3436, PPP (“There is a great”).
15. U.S.-Chickasaw treaties of 1832 and 1834, Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 2:356–62, 418–23.
16. James Colbert to Lewis Cass, June 29, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 136, frame 614, M-234, NA; William S. Colquhoun to Lewis Cass, Sept. 20, 1833, CSE, 4:566; Statement of Gordon D. Boyd, Mar. 7, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 146, frame 548, M-234, NA (“cholera cases”); Statement of Samuel Ragsdale, May 17, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 146, frame 581, M-234, NA (“very poor”); U.S. Censuses of 1830 and 1840.
17. Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Chickasaw Removal Records, Reports of Land Sales and Deeds, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 255, box 1, NA; William S. Colquhoun to Lewis Cass, Sept. 20, 1833, CSE, 4:566; David Hubbard to Lewis Curtis, June 2, 1837, box 1, NYMS; Benjamin Reynolds to C.A. Harris, June 2, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 146, M-234, NA.
18. The General Land Office sold approximately 4,400 square miles of Chickasaw land between 1836 and 1840. It auctioned most of the remaining land by 1850. 31st Cong., 2nd sess., S.Exec.Doc. 2, p. 14; “Chickasaw Fund,” 29th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 8, p. 75 (“residue”); Richard Bolton to Lewis Curtis, Sept. 8, 1835, p. 67, letter book, NYMS; Isham Harrison to James T. Harrison, July 27, 1835, folder 4, James T. Harrison Papers #02441, SHC (“speculation”); Article 7, U.S.-Chickasaw treaty of 1832, Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 2:358–59; Richard Bolton to Lewis Curtis, July 27, 1835, p. 55, NYMS; John Bolton to Lewis Curtis, July 16, 1835, NYMS; Statement of Gordon D. Boyd, March 7, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 146, M-234, NA (“capitalists”).
19. “Chickasaw Fund,” 29th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 8.
20. “Chickasaw Fund,” 29th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 8.
21. “Chickasaw Fund,” 29th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 8, pp. 75–86.
22. I am converting the dollar amount by using the labor cost of an unskilled worker. Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2019, www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/; Exceptions to the Account stated, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, exhibiting in detail all the moneys which from time to time had been placed, in the Treasury to the credit of the Chickasaw Nation (Washington, D.C., 1869), 1, 2, 3, 7.
23. Memorial of the Chickasaw Chiefs to the President of the United States, Nov. 22, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, M-234, NA.
24. B.M. Lowe to Levi Woodbury, May 3, 1836, Correspondence of the Secretary of Treasury Relating to the Administration of Trust Funds for the Chickasaw and Other Indian Tribes, S Series, 1834–72, RG 56, M-749, NA; J.D. Beers to Elbert Herring, Mar. 4, 1836, LR, OIA, Stocks, reel 853, RG 75, M-234, NA (“Under the circumstances”); J.D. Beers to Levi Woodbury, Mar. 21, 1836, no. 29, Correspondence of the Secretary of Treasury Relating to the Administration of Trust Funds for the Chickasaw and Other Indian Tribes, S Series, 1834–72, RG 56, M-749, NA (“this pressing time”); “Chickasaw Fund,” 29th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 8, p. 67; Richard E. Sylla, Jack Wilson, and Robert E. Wright, “Price Quotations in Early United States Securities Markets, 1790–1860,” Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (New York: New York University, Stern School of Business, 2002), table DS5; Robert J. Ward to F.P. Blair, Oct. 27, 1836, p. 130, Correspondence of the Secretary of Treasury Relating to the Administration of Trust Funds for the Chickasaw and Other Indian Tribes, S Series, 1834–72, RG 56, M-749, NA.
25. The total Chickasaw investment in the Decatur bank was $750,000, but only $500,000 was loaned out in the form of specie certificates. 35th Cong., 2nd sess., S.Misc.Doc. 8, pp. 8–9; Levi Woodbury to Charles Macalester and J.D. Beers, Jan. 28, 1836, no. 13, J.W. Garth to Levi Woodbury, March 25, 1836, no. 39, and Levi Woodbury to Andrew Jackson, June 30, 1836, Correspondence of the Secretary of Treasury Relating to the Administration of Trust Funds for the Chickasaw and Other Indian Tribes, S Series, 1834–72, RG 56, M-749, NA; James Durno to Levi Woodbury, July 28, 1836, 24th Cong., 2nd sess., H.Rpt. 194, pp. 79–80; “State Bonds created for the Branch Bank at Montgomery,” Bank of the State of Alabama, Branch Bank at Montgomery, General Financial Statements, 1839–1848, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; Charles C. Mills to Farish Carter, Sept. 11, 1836, folder 12, Farish Carter Papers #2230, SHC (“decided advantage” and “There has never been”).
26. Opinion of Alfred Balch on the contract of Aug. 28, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 320, M-234, NA (“On one side”); Creek chiefs to the President, May 21, 1831, LR, OIA, reel 222, frames 441–43, M-234, NA; William Moor to Nehah Micco, Dec. 6, 1831, CSE, 2:710 (“an old helpless”); List of white intruders living in the Creek Nation, Dec. 13, 1831, LR, OIA, reel 222, frames 549–51, M-234, NA; Neah Micco and Tus-Ke-Neah-Haw to the Secretary of War, Dec. 20, 1832, CSE, 3:565–66.
27. John B. Hogan to Uriah Blue, Apr. 3, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA; U. Blue to George Gibson, Dec. 21, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA; Extract of a letter from Jeremiah Austill to the Secretary of War, July 26, 1833, CSE, 4:487; Jeremiah Austill to Lewis Cass, July 31, 1833, CSE, 4:493; Copy of bond and oath, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frames 908–09, M-234, NA (“indenture” and “highly respectable”); Opothle Yoholo et al. to the President of the United States, Jan. 7, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 505, M-234, NA.
28. Opothle Yoholo et al. to Dr. McHenry, Mar. 23, 1835, box 3, correspondence of certifying agents, entry 293, RG 75, NA; Eli S. Shorter to Lewis Cass, May 2, 1834, “Documents Relating to Frauds,” 129; Deposition of John Taylor, Jan. 16, 1837, The New American State Papers (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1972), 10:58–61 (“it made no difference”); John B. Hogan to Uriah Blue, Apr. 3, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA (“white proof”).
29. “Documents Relating to Frauds,” 181 (“malefactors”), 182, 222, 228, 236.
30. Elijah Corley to Scott and Cravens, Mar. 25, 1835, New American State Papers, 9:513–514 (“rogued”); Eli Shorter to John S. Scott and M.M. and N.H. Craven, Jan. 28, 1835, New American State Papers, 9:510–11 (“Give up” and “Swear off”); Eli Shorter to John S. Scott and E. Corley, and M.M. and N.H. Craven, Mar. 1, 1835, New American State Papers, 9:511–13 (“Stealing”); Benjamin P. Tarver to M.A. Craven, Mar. 1, 1835, New American State Papers, 9:513 (“Hurrah”).
31. J.W.A. Sanford to George Gibson, Sept. 30, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA; Christopher D. Haveman, Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 138–39.
32. William Hunter to John B. Hogan, Aug. 12, 1835, CGLR, box 8, Creek, NA (“would die”); Opothle Yoholo et al. to the President of the United States, Jan. 14, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 225, frames 38–41, M-234, NA; George Gibson to John B. Hogan, Jan. 25, 1836, CGLS, vol. 3, p. 426, NA; Cass quoted in Haveman, Rivers of Sand, 139.
33. See the accounts in Christopher D. Haveman, ed., Bending Their Way Onward: Creek Indian Removal Documents (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 118–76.
34. George F. Salli to Lewis Cass, May 13, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 225, frames 151–52, M-234, NA (“There was no garbage”); David Hubbard to Lewis Cass, May 1, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 237, frames 425–28, M-234, NA (“clotted”); John Page to C.A. Harris, May 8, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 1327, M-234, NA (“I talk to them”).
35. Columbus Enquirer, May 1, 1835, 2; Copy of petition drafted by Eli Shorter, Feb. 14, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 744, M-234, NA (“insolent”); John B. Hogan to George Gibson, Jan. 23, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA (“contemptible”).
36. George Gibson to Jacob Brown, Oct. 20, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 307–11, NA (“perfectly”); George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Nov. 12, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 338–50, NA (“uncertain”).
37. This small contingent of Cherokees was about half of what Harris had expected. The rest remained in their cabins or took refuge in the mountains. Joseph W. Harris to George Gibson, Mar. 8, 1834, CGLR, box 1, Cherokee, NA; March 23 and 31, Journal of Occurrences of a Company of Cherokee Emigrants, for the months of February, March, April, May, 1834, CGLR, box 1, NA.
38. April 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, Journal of Occurrences of a Company of Cherokee Emigrants, for the months of February, March, April, May, 1834, CGLR, box 1, NA.
39. Joseph W. Harris to Drs. Alders Sprague and Bushrod W. Lic, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 274, account 1109–A(13), NA (“a proper police”); April 11 and 12, Journal of Occurrences of a Company of Cherokee Emigrants, for the months of February, March, April, May, 1834, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Letters Received, 1831–36, RG 75, entry 201, box 1, NA.
40. April 14, 15, 16, and 30, May 5 and 6, Journal of Occurrences of a Company of Cherokee Emigrants, for the months of February, March, April, May, 1834, CGLR, box 1, NA.
41. Joseph W. Harris to Drs. Alders Sprague and Bushrod W. Lic, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 274, account 1109-A(13), NA; Joseph W. Harris to George Gibson, May 9, 1834, CGLR, box 1, Cherokee, NA; Journal of Occurrences of a Company of Cherokee Emigrants, for the months of February, March, April, May 15, 1834, CGLR, box 1, NA (“easy journeys”); Joseph W. Harris to George Gibson, June 5, 1834, CGLR, box 1, Cherokee, NA.
42. J.W. Harris to Wiley Thompson, Aug. 23, 1835, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA.
43. J.W. Harris to Wiley Thompson, Plan of Operations in Detail for the Removal of Florida Indians, Aug. 23, 1835, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA.
44. J.W. Harris to Wiley Thompson, Aug. 23, 1835, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA.
45. George Gibson to Lewis Cass, Nov. 12, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 338–50, NA; J.P. Simonton to George Gibson, Sept. 2, 1834, CGLR, box 12, Creek, NA (“hard and flinty” and “sickly”).
46. S. Grantland to Farish Carter, Apr. 3, 1836, folder 12, Farish Carter Papers; Samuel Gwin to the Commissioner of the General Land Office, May 7, 1835, Report from the Secretary of the Treasury, 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 69; John B. Hogan to Andrew Jackson, Apr. 22, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 243, frame 892, M-234, NA; Samuel Given to Lewis Cass, May 22, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 188, M-234, NA.
CHAPTER 9: 1836: THE SOUTHERN WORLD AT WAR
1. Larry E. Rivers, “Leon County, Florida, 1824 to 1860,” Journal of Negro History 66, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 235–45; Heintzelman diary, Nov. 15, 1839, reel 3, Samuel Peter Heintzelman Papers, LC.
2. Jeffrey Ostler, “ ‘To Extirpate the Indians’: An Indigenous Consciousness of Genocide in the Ohio Valley and Lower Great Lakes 1750s–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 4 (Oct. 2015): 587–622.
3. RDC (1828), vol. 4, 2:1584–85 (“distinguished individuals”); Wilson Lumpkin to Lewis Cass, May 31, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 75, M-234, NA (“speedy extermination”); Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Apr. 14, 1838, 2 (“evil”).
4. [?] to Peter Pitchlynn, Aug. 8, 1834, 4026.3351, PPP.
5. Memorial of the Cherokee Nation, May 17, 1833, PM, COIA, SEN23A-G6, NA.
6. Kenneth L. Valliere, “Benjamin Currey, Tennessean Among the Cherokees: A Study of the Removal Policy of Andrew Jackson, Part I,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 140–58; Benjamin F. Currey to Elbert Herring, Nov. 13, 1831, CSE, 2:681; John Robb to Benjamin F. Currey, Nov. 24, 1831, p. 487, LS, OIA, reel 7, M-21, NA; Benjamin F. Currey to Elbert Herring, Apr. 20, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 75, M-234, NA; Benjamin F. Currey to Elbert Herring, Sept. 9, 1833, LR, OIA, reel 75, M-234, NA; Lewis Ross to John Ross, Feb. 23, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA; Extract of a letter from Lewis Ross to John Ross, Mar. 5, 1834, enclosed in Currey to Herring, Feb. 7, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA; Kenneth L. Valliere, “Benjamin Currey, Tennessean Among the Cherokees: A Study of the Removal Policy of Andrew Jackson, Part II,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 251–59; John Ross to a Gentleman of Philadelphia, May 6, 1837, PCJR, 1:490–503; John Ross to John Howard Payne, Mar. 5, 1836, PCJR, 1:390 (“demonical”).
7. James William Van Hoeven, “Salvation and Indian Removal: The Career Biography of the Rev. John Freeman Schermerhorn, Indian Commissioner” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1972), 27–28 (“foreign missionary”), 35–36, 56, 69–70, 94 (“in the dark”), 97; John Freeman Schermerhorn to Andrew Jackson, May 14, 1824, PAJ (“your old friend”).
8. John Freeman Schermerhorn to Andrew Jackson, June 23, 1831, PAJ.
9. Van Hoeven, “Salvation and Indian Removal,” 21.
10. Van Hoeven, “Salvation and Indian Removal,” 141 (“bigoted”), 166 (“more designing”), 204 (“prostituted”); Isaac McCoy, Journal (typescript), Dec. 14, 1834, p. 389, MP; George A. Schultz, An Indian Canaan: Isaac McCoy and the Vision of an Indian State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 140.
11. Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 181 (“certain notorious”); Van Hoeven, “Salvation and Indian Removal,” 204 (“Sginuhyona”); Patrick Del Percio to the author, Dec. 13, 2018; John Ross in answer to inquiries from a friend, July 2, 1836, PCJR, 1:427–44.
12. Van Hoeven, “Salvation and Indian Removal,” 270; James Gadsden to Andrew Jackson, Nov. 14, 1829, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 8, M-234, NA; Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 125 (“a social blessing”); W.S. Steele, “The Last Command: The Dade Massacre,” Tequesta 46 (1986): 6 (“19/20”); James Gadsden to Lewis Cass, June 2, 1832, CSE, 3:368–69 (“half-starved”); Treaty with the Seminoles, 1832, Charles J. Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Washington, D.C., 1903–), 2:344.
13. Woodburne Potter, The War in Florida (Baltimore: Lewis and Coleman, 1836), 38 (“hard and unconscionable”), 60 (“I never”); John Eaton to Lewis Cass, Mar. 8, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 101, M-234, NA; Lewis Cass to John H. Eaton, Mar. 27, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 42–44, NA; James Gadsden to Lewis Cass, Nov. 1, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 81, M-234, NA (“White man’s treaty”); Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Samuel Cooper, Oct. 22, 1840, box 2, folder 7, EAH; Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Dec. 23, 1840, HCP (“out of his element”); C.S. Monaco, “ ‘Wishing that Right May Prevail’: Ethan Allen Hitchcock and the Florida War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 93, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 167–94.
14. Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek and supplement, 1830, Kappler, ed., Indian Affairs, 2:395; Monaco, “ ‘Wishing that Right May Prevail,’ ” 181–82 (“made”); Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Samuel Cooper, Oct. 22, 1840, box 2, folder 7, EAH.
15. Major Ridge et al. to the Senate and House, Nov. 28, 1834, COIA, HR23A-G7.2, NA; John Ridge et al. to Benjamin F. Currey, Nov. 1, 1834, enclosed in Currey to Herring, Nov. 10, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA; Memorial of the Cherokee Indians, Nov. 28, 1834, PM, COIA, SEN23A-G6, NA (“can now alone”); John Ross to John H. Eaton, May 29, 1834, PCJR, 1:294–95.
16. John Ross to John Ridge, Sept. 12, 1823,” PCJR, 1:303; Valliere, “Benjamin Currey . . . Part II,” 251 (“prostituted”); Memorial of the Cherokee Indians, Nov. 28, 1834, PM, COIA, SEN23A-G6, NA (“patriots”); John Ross to Lewis Cass, Feb. 9, 1836, PCJR; Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Story of the Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People (New York: MacMillan, 1970), 254–78.
17. J.W. Harris to George Gibson, Dec. 30, 1835, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA; John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (New York, 1848), 91 (“cruelly”).
18. Frank Laumer, Dade’s Last Command (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 9, 16, 180, 192–96; [W.W. Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War and Sketches During a Campaign, by a Lieutenant (Charleston, 1836), 39.
19. J.W. Harris to George Gibson, Dec. 30, 1835, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA; Frank Laumer, “Encounter by the River,” Florida Historical Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Apr. 1968): 322–39; [Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War, 46; John Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, ed. John K. Mahon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), 58.
20. Andrew Jackson to José Masot, May 23, 1818, PAJ (“savage”); Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Viking, 2001), 150–52, 154 (“confiscated”); Mark F. Boy, “Asi-Yaholo or Osceola,” Florida Historical Quarterly 33, no. 3/4 (Jan.–Apr. 1955): 257–58.
21. Patricia R. Wickman, Osceola’s Legacy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 1–22; Wiley Thompson to Elbert Herring, Oct. 28, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 84, M-234, NA; John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1967), 93–94.
22. Lewis Cass to Winfield Scott, Jan. 21, 1836, American State Papers: Military Affairs (Washington, D.C., 1861), 6:61–63.
23. Alexander Beaufort Meek, “Journal of the Florida Expedition, 1836,” Alexander Beaufort Meek Papers, DMR; Potter, War in Florida, 60–62 (“ladies” and “gallant men”); Myer M. Cohen, Notices of Florida and the Campaigns (Charleston, S.C., 1836), 115 (“last look”); Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Feb. 12, 1836, 3.
24. Scott was the author of Infantry-Tactics, a three-volume manual for the “exercise and manoevres of the United States’ infantry,” published in 1835. Lewis Cass to Winfield Scott, Jan. 21, 1836, American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:61–63; “Major General Scott’s Address,” American State Papers: Military Affairs, 7:197 (“a Cretan labyrinth”); Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 147–49; Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, 77, 88–89; James Barr, A Correct and Authentic Narrative of the Indian War in Florida (New York, 1836), 17.
25. Federal Union, Dec. 11, 1835, 2; John B. Hogan to Thomas Jesup, June 24, 1836, Letters Received during the Creek War, 1836–38, from Camps and Forts, box 15, The Office of the Adjutant General, Generals’ Papers and Books, General Jesup, entry 159, RG 94, NA; Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 103.
26. John K. Mahon, “The Journal of A.B. Meek and the Second Seminole War, 1836,” Florida Historical Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Apr. 1960): 305 (“Creoles”); Lewis Cass to John B. Hogan, Jan. 21, 1836, CGLS, vol. 3, p. 417, NA.
27. A Cherokee to William Schley, Feb. 1, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA (“massacre”); Isaac Baker to William Schley, Feb. 1, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA; Sarah H. Hill, “ ‘To Overawe the Indians and Give Confidence to the Whites’: Preparations for the Removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 95, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 469; Isaac Baker to William Schley, Feb. 1, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA (“We need”).
28. John Page to George Gibson, May 12, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; Lewis Cass to Winfield Scott, Jan. 21, 1836, American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:61–63; Duncan Clinch to Roger Jones, Oct. 9, 1835, order book, 1834–35, Duncan Lamont Clinch Papers, LC; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 273–90; George Gibson to D.L. Clinch, Oct. 22, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 312–13, NA; Duncan Clinch to Roger Jones, Dec. 9, 1835, order book, 1834–35, Duncan Lamont Clinch Papers, LC (“spirit”); John C. Casey to Thomas Basinger, Jan. 2, 1836, folder 1, in the William Starr Bassinger Papers #1266-Z, SHC (“Indian negroes”); Laumer, Dade’s Last Command, 235–39.
29. [Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War, 20–22 (“mild character”); J.W. Phelps to Helen M. Phelps, Jan. 16, 1837, John Wolcott Phelps Papers, LC (“large reward”); Wiley Thompson to Lewis Cass, Apr. 27, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 105, M-234, NA.
30. I determined the number of slaves working on Creek land by examining county-level data, using fractional figures when counties spanned the border between the Creek Nation and the United States. John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), 69.
31. Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
32. Isham Harrison to James T. Harrison, July 27, 1835, folder 4, James T. Harrison Papers #02441, SHC (“so numerous”); Isham Harrison to James T. Harrison, Oct. 14, 1834, folder 3, James T. Harrison Papers; David Hubbard to John Bolton, Aug. 23, 1835, p. 62, NYMS.
33. Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 71–75.
34. RDC (1836), vol. 12, 3:3335–36.
35. RDC (1836), vol. 12, 3:3342 (“hordes”); 3345–47 (“the very heart”). Jackson wrote one response on the back of a letter from Georgia governor William Schley, and Secretary of War Cass conveyed it to the Governor. William Schley to the President, Feb. 23, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 76, frame 936, M-234, NA; Lewis Cass to William Schley, Feb. 23, 1836, American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:628; Extract of a private letter from General Andrew Jackson to the Secretary of War, Oct. 1, 1837, letter book 6, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, LC.
36. John Page to George Gibson, May 8, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; John Page to George Gibson, May 16, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; Lewis Cass to Thomas Jesup, May 19, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 225, frames 26–30, M-234, NA; Lewis Cass to George Gibson (memorandum), May 19, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; Laurence M. Hauptman, “John E. Wool in Cherokee Country, 1836–1837: A Reinterpretation,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1, 10–11.
37. “An Act Authorizing the President of the United States to accept the service of volunteers, and to raise an additional regiment of dragoons or mounted riflemen,” Chapter 80, 24th Cong., 1st sess., U.S. Statutes at Large 5 (1836): 32–33; Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, Fiscal Year 1997 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 46–47, table 2; 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 77, p. 3 (“a continual”); “An Act to provide for better protection of the western frontier,” Chapter 258, 24 Cong., 1st sess., U.S. Statutes at Large 5 (1836): 67.
38. George Washington to Timothy Pickering, July 1, 1796, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-00674 (accessed April 11, 2019); Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 45; James P. Ronda, “ ‘We Have a Country’: Race, Geography, and the Invention of Indian Territory,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1999): 739–55; Lewis Cass to Thomas H. Benton, Feb. 19, 1836, American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:150–52; American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:149 (“from the interior”), 154.
39. Residents of Jackson County, Missouri, to the Senate and House, May 10, 1836, COIA, HR25A-G7.2, NA; RDC (1836), vol. 12, 3:3337–39 (quotations); American State Papers: Military Affairs, 6:154.
40. A.R. Turk to Andrew Jackson, June 13, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA.
41. Columbus Enquirer (Columbus, Ga.), May 20, 1836, 3 (“We cannot”); Columbus Enquirer, May 27, 1836, 3 (“store and counting-houses”); Columbus Enquirer, June 9, 1836, 3; Columbus Enquirer, June 16, 1836, 2 (“instigators”).
42. John Page to George Gibson, May 16, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; John Page to George Gibson, May 30, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA (“we were starving”); Diary of Thomas Sidney Jesup, box 2, folder 6, EAH; John T. Ellisor, The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 205–10.
43. Macon Weekly Telegraph (Macon, Ga.), Mar. 17, 1836, 1 (quoting the Savannah Georgian); Ellisor, Second Creek War, 210–11, 260; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 88 (“have had uninterrupted”).
44. John Page to George Gibson, May 30, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA (“whip”); Ellisor, Second Creek War, 211–21, 245–47, 257–58, 263 (“virtually over”).
45. Columbus Enquirer, July 14, 1836, 3 (“removal”); Sylvester Churchill Journals, July 3 to July 11, 1836, Sylvester Churchill Papers, LC; Southern Banner, July 16, 1836, 2; Christopher D. Haveman, Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 186–87.
46. The second auditor determined that ninety-seven people died along the way. The final cost was $28.50 per person, which does not compare favorably with deportations conducted by the federal government. J. Waller Barry to George Gibson, Aug. 10, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; A. Iverson to C.A. Harris, June 17, 1837, enclosure, J.W.A. Sanford, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 261, account 691, NA.
47. Contract with the Alabama Emigrating Company, Aug. 13, 1836, Bending Their Way Onward: Creek Indian Removal in Documents, ed. Christopher D. Haveman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 226–31; Edward Deas to George Gibson, Nov. 22, 1836, LR, OIA, frames 553–556, reel 237, M-234, NA; Opothle Yoholo et al. to Andrew Jackson, Dec. 25, 1836, box 3, folder 13, EAH.
48. William Bowen Campbell to David Campbell, Correspondence, June 20, 1836, Campbell Family Papers, DMR (“hunted”); Southern Banner, July 2, 1836, 2; Heintzelman diary, Aug. 18, 1836, reel 2, Samuel Peter Heintzelman Papers, LC; Jonathan G. Reynolds to Henry Wilson, Mar. 31, 1837, box 5, EAH (“The people”).
49. William Bowen Campbell to Fanny Campbell, Correspondence, July 29, 1836, Campbell Family Papers, DMR (“hunting”); Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1836, 3 (“The savage”); Georgia Journal, Feb. 7, 1837, 3 (“infected”); Benjamin Young to Thomas Jesup, July 6, 1836, box 12, The Office of the Adjutant General, Generals’ Papers and Books, General Jesup, entry 159, RG 94, NA; J.S. McIntosh to Thomas Jesup, Aug. 13, 1836, box 12, The Office of the Adjutant General, Generals’ Papers and Books, General Jesup, entry 159, RG 94, NA; Southern Recorder (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 23, 1836, 2; Federal Union, Aug. 23, 1836, 3; Southern Banner, Aug. 27, 1836, 3; Jacob Rhett Motte, Journey into Wilderness: An Army Surgeon’s Account of Life in Camp and Field during the Creek and Seminole Wars, 1836–1838, ed. James F. Sunderman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), 69–70; Ellisor, Second Creek War, 268, 271–72, 284, 288, 292, 293, 301.
50. Ellisor, Second Creek War, 267, 379.
51. Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 238–40, 243–45; Alice Curtis Desmond, Yankees and Yorkers (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen Press, 1985), 34; Christian Intelligencer (New York, N.Y.), Feb. 18, 1837, 4 (“injuries”); William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip, in Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 279, 280, 284, 288, 305.
52. New-York Observer (New York, N.Y.), Feb. 11, 1832, 2 (“most respectable”); “Meeting in Aid of the Cherokees,” New-York Observer, Feb. 11, 1832, 2 (“diffuse”).
53. Apess, Eulogy on King Philip, 304, 308.
54. Apess, Eulogy on King Philip, 307.
55. American Land Company, First Annual Report of the Trustees of the American Land Company (New York, 1836), 27; “Government Land Speculators,” Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.), Nov. 23, 1839, 2 (“pious”).
56. H.W. Jernigan to J.W.A. Sanford, Aug. 5, 1836, John W.A. Sanford Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.
CHAPTER 10: AT THE POINT OF A BAYONET
1. J.R. Mathews et al. to Lewis Cass, June 24, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; George M. Lavender to John Ridge, May 3, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Josiah Shaw to Lewis Cass, June 28, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Spencer Jarnigan to C.A. Harris, Aug. 26, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Major Ridge and John Ridge to Andrew Jackson, June 30, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA.
2. Memorial of the Cherokee Nation, May 17, 1833, PM, COIA, SEN23A-G6, NA; John Ross et al. to the Senate and House of Representatives, June 21, 1836, PCJR, 1:437.
3. Tuelookee, Oct. 24, 1836, p. 84, John Cahoossee’s widow, Oct. 19, 1836, p. 66, Canowsawsky, Oct. 24, 1836, p. 83, Tatterhair, Oct. 24, 1836, p. 85, Whiteman Killer, Oct. 24, 1836, p. 88, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Property Valuations, 1835–39, RG 75, entry 224, box 3, Hutchins, Shaw, and Kellog, NA.
4. Nos. 8, 9, 10, and 11, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Property Valuations, 1835–39, RG 75, entry 224, box 1, NA.
5. Yohnuguskee or Drowning Bear, Oct. 21, 1836, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Property Valuations, 1835–39, RG 75, entry 224, box 3, Hutchins, Shaw, and Kellog, p. 74, NA.
6. James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900; reprint, New York: Dover, 1995), 523; Yohnuguskee or Drowning Bear, Oct. 21, 1836, p. 74, John Walker and Salagatahee, Oct. 21, 1836, p. 73, Two Dollar, Oct. 22, 1836, p. 75, Sutt, Oct. 22, 1836, p. 76, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Property Valuations, 1835–39, RG 75, entry 224, box 3, Hutchins, Shaw, and Kellog, NA.
7. Book E, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, General Abstract of Valuations and Spoliations, RG 75, entry 238, box 1, NA.
8. Wilson Lumpkin to B.F. Butler, Oct. 26, 1836, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 32–34, NA (“but a sense”); Wilson Lumpkin to Martin Van Buren, June 19, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 82, M-234, NA (“with great labour” and “business”); Wilson Lumpkin and John Kennedy to Lieutenant Van Horne, May 31, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 114, M-234, NA (“embarrassment and error”); John C. Mullay to C.A. Harris, Apr. 19, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 82, M-234, NA; Wilson Lumpkin and John Kennedy to Messrs. Welch and Jarrett, Nov. 22, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 114, M-234, NA (“in a spirit”).
9. Wilson Lumpkin to J.E. Wool, Sept. 24, 1836, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 18–19, NA (“will be executed”); Wilson Lumpkin to C.A. Harris, Oct. 26, 1836, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 28–31, NA; Wilson Lumpkin and John Kennedy to John E. Wool, Jan. 23, 1837, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 70–72, NA (“We would invite”); Wilson Lumpkin and John Kennedy to C.A. Harris, June 5, 1837, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 23–26, NA (“to carry off”); Wilson Lumpkin and John Kennedy to Nathaniel Smith, Oct. 24, 1837, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, LS, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 223, box 1, pp. 77–78, NA (“the imperative command”).
10. Fred S. Rolater, “The American Indian and the Origin of the Second American Party System,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 76, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 180–203; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975), 56–57.
11. John Ross to Richard Taylor et al., Apr. 28, 1832, PCJR, 1:242–43; John Ridge to Stand Watie, Apr. 6, 1832, Cherokee Cavaliers: Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-Watie-Boudinot Family, ed. Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton (1939: reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 8.
12. Richard Taylor to Elijah Hicks, Mar. 12, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA.
13. Steven D. Byas and Stephen D. Byas, “James Standifer, Sequatchie Valley Congressman,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 90–97; Nancy N. Scott, ed., A Memoir of Hugh Lawson White (Philadelphia, 1856), 154, 170; W.H. Underwood to Benjamin F. Currey, Mar. 7, 1836, enclosed in Currey to Herring, Apr. 6, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Benjamin F. Currey to Andrew Jackson, Nov. 24, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 76, M-234, NA; Hugh Lawson White to J.A. Whiteside, Sept. 17, 1835, National Banner and Nashville Whig (Nashville, Tenn.), Sept. 17, 1835, 3.
14. Linda K. Kerber, “The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian,” Journal of American History 62, no. 2 (Sept. 1975): 271–95; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 378; Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (Boston, 1838), 4 (“primary object”); Hopkins Turney in the Congressional Globe (Washington, D.C., 1838), vol. 6, Appendix, 358 (“nothing more”); Joshua Holden to Benjamin F. Currey, Feb. 11, 1836, enclosed in Currey to Herring, Apr. 6, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA; Rezin Rawlings to Benjamin F. Currey, Feb. 18, 1836, enclosed in Currey to Herring, Apr. 6, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA.
15. Conference of John Ross, Edward Gunter, and John Mason, Jr., Nov. 6, 1837, PCJR, 1:537–40; John Ross to Lewis Ross, Nov. 6 – Nov. 11, 1837, PCJR, 1:542 (“under circumstances”).
16. John Quincy Adams to Sherlock S. Gregory, Nov. 23, 1837, Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, reel 153; Sherlock Gregory to the Senate and House, Feb. 13, 1838, COIA, HR25A-G7.2, NA; Sherlock Gregory to the Senate and House, Dec. 3, 1837, COIA, HR25A-G7.2, NA; John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 594n76; Memorial of Citizens of Condor, New York, Apr. 30, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA; Memorial of Citizens of Portland, Maine, May 7, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA; Memorial of Citizens of Holliston, Massachusetts, May 7, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA; Memorial of Citizens of Bristol, Connecticut, May 11, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA.
17. Memorial of Citizens of Union, New York, May 11, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA.
18. Memorial of Citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, May 11, 1838, PM, COIA, SEN25A-H6, NA.
19. 25th Cong., 2nd sess., H.Doc. 316, pp. 2, 3 (“cup of bitterness”); 24th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 286; 25th Cong., 2nd sess., S.Doc. 121, p. 36 (“fraud” and “delusion”); John F. Schermerhorn to Lewis Cass, Mar. 3, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA (“overshot”); John Ridge and Stand Watie to John F. Schermerhorn, Feb. 28, 1836, enclosed in Schermerhorn to Lewis Cass, Feb. 27, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA (“Do you love” and “rich”).
20. Wilson Lumpkin to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 24, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA (“too ignorant”); Wilson Lumpkin, The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907), 1:167 (“treated as children”); Wilson Lumpkin to Andrew Jackson, Sept. 24, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 80, M-234, NA (“just as much”); Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), Nov. 12, 1835, 2; William Drayton, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia, 1836), 102; Chancellor Harper, Memoir on Slavery (Charleston, 1838), 11–12.
21. William Lindsay to C.A. Harris, July 20, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 114, M-234, NA (“slave”); Theda Perdue, “Clan and Court: Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 562–69; Daniel S. Butrick, Cherokee Removal: The Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick (Park Hill, Okla.: Trail of Tears Association, 1998), 36 (“How vain”).
22. Amanda L. Paige, Fuller L. Bumpers, and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr., Chickasaw Removal (Ada, Okla.: Chickasaw Press, 2010), 115–70.
23. W. Williams to J.J. Abert, Feb. 8, 1838, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Map File, RG 77, U.S. 125–6, NACP.
24. W. Williams to J.J. Abert, Feb. 8, 1838, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Map File, RG 77, U.S. 125–6, NACP.
25. W. Williams to J.J. Abert, Feb. 8, 1838, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Map File, RG 77, U.S. 125–6, NACP.
26. Alexander Macomb to Winfield Scott, Apr. 6, 1838, and Alexander Macomb to Winfield Scott, May 3, 1838, 25th Cong., 2d sess., H.Doc. 453, pp. 1–2; Winfield Scott to Joel Poinsett, May 18, 1838, 25th Cong., 2d sess., H.Exec.Doc. 219, pp. 7–8 (“an early”); W. Williams to J.J. Abert, Feb. 8, 1838, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Map File, RG 77, U.S. 125–6, NACP (“the most inoffensive”).
27. John Niven, John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 215; Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), June 6, 1833, 3; Washington News (Washington, Ga.), April 6, 1830, p. 3; George Washington Featherstonhaugh, A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor (London, 1847), 2:255–56.
28. After placer mining was exhausted in the early 1830s, there was a second boom in the 1840s, set off by hard rock mining. Otis E. Young, “The Southern Gold Rush, 1828–1836,” Journal of Southern History 48, no. 3 (1982): 391; Georgia Constitutionalist (Augusta, Ga.), Aug. 2, 1838, 2 (“high price”). None other than J.D. Beers dominated the gold mining industry in Georgia in the early 1830s, and he declined to reveal how much gold he was shipping abroad. I am indebted to Ann Daly for sharing her knowledge of gold mining in the 1830s.
29. Southern Banner, Nov. 25, 1842, p. 2; Congressional Globe (Washington, D.C., 1838), vol. 6, Appendix, 562 (“permanent residence”).
30. Congressional Globe, vol. 6, Appendix, 480, 484–85.
31. Congressional Globe, vol. 6, Appendix, 480, 484–85.
32. Stephen Neal Dennis, A Proud Little Town: LaFayette, Georgia: 1835–1885 (Walker County, Georgia Governing Authority, 2010), 209, 211.
33. The 1850 U.S. Census enumerates 1,664 enslaved people and 11,408 white people.
34. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1788), 172–73; Congressional Globe, vol. 6, Appendix, 361.
35. Congressional Globe, 6:423; John Ross to Mrs. Bayard, June 5, 1838, PCJR, 1:644.
36. Orders, No. 34, May 24, 1838, 25th Cong., 2d sess., H.Doc. 453, pp. 14–15; Federal Union, Apr. 24, 1838, 2.
37. There were thirty-one companies of militia in the Cherokee Nation when Scott arrived, and eventually twenty-six companies of regulars joined them, though Scott then began dismissing the volunteers. Winfield Scott to Joel Poinsett, May 18, 1838, and Winfield Scott to Joel Poinsett, June 15, 1838, 25th Cong., 2d sess., H.Doc. 453, pp. 7–8, and 22–23; Sarah H. Hill, “ ‘To Overawe the Indians and Give Confidence to the Whites’: Preparations for the Removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 95, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 473 (“to broil”), 477–78, 483 (“so large”); N.W. Pittman and H.P. Strickland to Henchin Strickland, June 6, 1838, folder 1, in the John R. Peacock Collection #1895-Z, SHC (“taking Indians” and “what it was cracked up”); Butrick, Cherokee Removal, 1–2. Sarah H. Hill, “Cherokee Removal Scenes: Ellijay, Georgia, 1838,” Southern Spaces, Aug. 23, 2012, http://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838 (accessed July 7, 2016).
38. Hill, “ ‘To Overawe the Indians,” 490 (“no crime”); John Gray Bynum to J.H. Simpson, June 5, 1838, folder 25, in the William Preston Bynum Papers #117, SHC (“A more religious”); John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 20–40, 105; Sharlotte Neely, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 11–35.
39. Butrick, Cherokee Removal, 1–3, 6, 8, 9.
40. Dennis, A Proud Little Town, 256–57 (“in every direction”); Winfield Scott to A.P. Bagby, June 26, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 82, M-234, NA; John Kennedy, Thomas W. Wilson, and James Liddell to C.A. Harris, May 4, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 82, M-234, NA (“ragged”); Butrick, Cherokee Removal, 4.
41. Return of Property left by Indians and sold by the Agents in Cass County, Georgia, and Return of Property for the Counties of Cherokee, AL, and Cobb, Gilmer, Floyd . . . in Georgia, Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Returns of Property, 1838, RG 75, entry 227, box 1, NA; Return of Property left by the Indians in Macon County, North Carolina (“work hands”), Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Cherokee Removal Records, First Board, Returns of Property, 1838, RG 75, entry 227, box 2, NA.
42. Matthew T. Gregg and David M. Wishart, “The Price of Cherokee Removal,” Explorations in Economic History 49, no. 4 (Oct. 1, 2012): table 4, p. 431.
43. Since data are incomplete for three of the detachments that followed the northern and Hildebrand routes, I am extrapolating from the mortality rates of other detachments that traveled along the same route. Gregg and Wishart, “The Price of Cherokee Removal,” table 4, p. 431; Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 435–36.
44. Russell Thornton’s estimate of a total loss of eight thousand is the most often-cited figure, but Jack D. Baker, the president of the Oklahoma Historical Society and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, points out that Thornton erred in his calculation by assuming that the Drennon Roll of 1851 included all Cherokees living in the West, when in fact it contained only those who had migrated after the Treaty of New Echota, plus their descendants. The Old Settler Roll of 1851 must be added to the Drennon Roll for a complete count of Cherokees. Baker also notes that, given the Old Settler Roll’s enumeration of 3,273 individuals in 1851, Thornton’s estimate of 5,000 in 1835 seems unlikely. After correcting for these errors, a reprojection yields a figure of about 3,500. The figure of 1,000 deaths comes from extrapolating from known data. On three deaths: Butrick, Cherokee Removal, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47.
45. Grant Foreman, Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), 305, 311; George Hicks and Collins McDonald to John Ross, Mar. 15, 1839, PCJR, 1:701.
CHAPTER 11: ’TIS NO SIN
1. Pensacola Gazette (Pensacola, Fla.), Mar. 16, 1839, 2 (“perfect knowledge”).
2. Lewis Cass to John H. Eaton, Mar. 27, 1835, CGLS, vol. 3, pp. 42–44, NA.
3. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34–37; John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (New York, 1848), 94, 272–73, 283; John Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, ed. John K. Mahon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966), 88 (“famish”).
4. Wiley Thompson to Elbert Herring, Oct. 28, 1834, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 84, M-234, NA (“lose many”); J.W. Harris to George Gibson, May 11, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA; J. Van Horne to George Gibson, May 23, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA (“These people”); J. Van Horne to George Gibson, June 5, 1836 [mistakenly dated May 5], CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA (“It would have had a wholesome effect”); other Van Horne quotations: Journal of a party of Seminole Indians conducted by Lieut. J. Van Horne, May 23, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA.
5. Joseph W. Harris to Lewis Cass, July 25, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 91, M-234, NA (quotations); Journal of a party of Seminole Indians conducted by Lieut. J. Van Horne, May 23, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA.
6. Journal of a party of Seminole Indians conducted by Lieut. J. Van Horne, May 23, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA; J. Van Horne to George Gibson, June 5, 1836 [mistakenly dated May 5], CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA (“even while”); Joseph W. Harris to Lewis Cass, July 25, 1836, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 91, M-234, NA; J. Van Horne to George Gibson, Aug. 23, 1836, CGLR, box 15, Creek, NA (“dissipated”).
7. Jacob Rhett Motte, Journey into Wilderness: An Army Surgeon’s Account of Life in Camp and Field during the Creek and Seminole Wars, 1836–1838, ed. James F. Sunderman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), 205.
8. Brent R. Weisman, “Nativism, Resistance, and Ethnogenesis of the Florida Seminole Indian Identity,” Historical Archaeology 41, no. 4 (2007): 198–212; Samuel Watson, “Seminole Strategy, 1812–1858: A Prospectus for Further Research,” in America’s Hundred Years’ War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763–1858, ed. William S. Belko (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 155–80.
9. I have interpolated from the figures in Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775–1939 (1962; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1989), 228; Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, 25 (“ridiculous”); Reynold M. Wik, “Captain Nathaniel Wyche Hunter and the Florida Indian Campaigns, 1837–41,” Florida Historical Quarterly 39, no. 1 (July 1960): 68.
10. Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 143 (“outlines”); Thomas S. Jesup to J.R. Poinsett, Apr. 9, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 138, M-234, NA; Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Feb. 27, 1840, HCP (“Wholly ignorant”).
11. [W.W. Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War and Sketches During a Campaign, by a Lieutenant (Charleston, S.C., 1836), 69 (“one vast”), 73 (“celerity”); Myer M. Cohen, Notices of Florida and the Campaigns (Charleston, S.C., 1836), 154; Motte, Journey into Wilderness, 189, 300; George Henry Preble, “A Canoe Expedition into the Everglades in 1842,” Tequesta 5 (1945): 44, 49; William Bowen Campbell to David Campbell, Correspondence, Nov. 9, 1836, Campbell Family Papers, DMR.
12. Motte, Journey into Wilderness, 32, 124; Frank Laumer, Dade’s Last Command (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 2; Horn, “Tennessee Volunteers,” 244; Motte, Journey into Wilderness, 68–69 (“slight”); Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army, 229; Proceedings of the Board of Examination, Aug. 23, 1836, letter book 6, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, LC; G.W. Allen to William S. Foster, Feb. 10, 1837, box 3, folder 15, EAH.
13. John Campbell to David Campbell, Correspondence, July 10, 1836, Campbell Family Papers (“the progress”); [Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War, 28; Woodburne Potter, The War in Florida (Baltimore, 1836), 143, 147 (“quartered”); John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842 (1967; revised ed., Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1985), 120; Edward A. Mueller, “Steamboat Activity in Florida during the Second Seminole War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 64, no. 4 (Apr. 1986): 407–31; Army and Navy Chronicle, July 1 to Dec. 31, 1836, vol. 3, 299 (“enfeebled”); Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 379.
14. Michael G. Schene, “Ballooning in the Second Seminole War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Apr. 1977): 480–82 (“entirely impracticable” on 481); F. Stansbury Haydon, “First Attempts at Military Aeronautics in the United States,” Journal of the American Military Foundation 2, no. 3 (Autumn 1938): 131–38 (Gaines quotation on 135).
15. James M. White to James Barbour, June 4, 1831, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 68, M-234, NA.
16. Thomas Jesup’s account of the Capture of Osceola, 1858, box 5, EAH; Thomas S. Jesup to C.A. Harris, June 5, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 149, M-234, NA (Jesup quotations); Thomas S. Jesup to J.R. Poinsett, June 7, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 151, M-234, NA; Truman Cross to Thomas Jesup, July 27, 1837, box 5, EAH.
17. Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Apr. 14, 1840, HCP; Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Apr. 15, 1840, HCP (“hackneyed”); Robert M. McLane to Catherine Mary McLane, Nov. 24, 1837, Box 2, Louis McLane Papers, LC; Henry IV, part 1, 1.2.99–100.
18. Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Mar. 17, 1842, pp. 169–70, HCP (“How absurd!”); J.R. Vinton to Thomas S. Jesup, May 10, 1844, Correspondence, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, DMR (“war of posts”); Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 119, 261, 282.
19. Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Apr. 2 and 15, 1840, HCP; John Campbell, “The Seminoles, the ‘Bloodhound War,’ and Abolitionism, 1796–1865,” Journal of Southern History 72, no. 2 (May 2006): 281 (“Peace-Hounds”); Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 265–67.
20. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 119, 261, 282; Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Samuel Cooper, Dec. 16, 1840, box 2, folder 7, EAH; Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, May 18, 1840, HCP (“imbecile dotard”).
21. Department of Defense, Selected Manpower Statistics, Fiscal Year 1997 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 46–47; Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 103–6; [Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War, 112–13 “all the specious talk”); James M. Denham and Canter Brown, Jr., “South Carolina Volunteers in the Second Seminole War: A Nullifier Debacle as Prelude to the Palmetto State Gubernatorial Election of 1836,” in America’s Hundred Years’ War, 213–15; John Burbidge to Rosina Mix, Feb. 23, 1836, folder 1, Rosina Mix Papers #02201-z, SHC (“A great consideration”).
22. W.S. Steele, “The Last Command: The Dade Massacre,” Tequesta 46 (1986): 9; James M. Denham, “ ‘Some Prefer the Seminoles’: Violence and Disorder among Soldiers and Settlers in the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842,” Florida Historical Quarterly 70, no. 1 (July 1991): 39. Dollar conversion is by relative labor earnings. Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2019.
23. Alexander Beaufort Meek, “Journal of the Florida Expedition, 1836,” Alexander Beaufort Meek Papers, DMR (“Indians”); William Bowen Campbell to David Campbell, Correspondence, June 19, 1836, Campbell Family Papers (“excitement”); William Bowen Campbell to Fanny Campbell, Correspondence, Oct. 23, 1836, Campbell Family Papers (“broken down”).
24. Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, July 1845, p. 151, HCP (“eternal dripping”); John K. Mahon, “Letters from the Second Seminole War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (Apr. 1958): 339 (“The Dr.”); “Recollections of a Campaign in Florida,” Yale Literary Magazine 11, no. 11 (Dec. 1845): 77; Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, 102 (“Indians, Indians!”); Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 379 (“general sinking”); Capt. P. Morrison to J.R. Poinsett, July 26, 1838, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 436, M-234, NA (“completely prostrated”).
25. “The Last Days of Fort Roger Jones,” 1839, William W. Pew Papers, DMR, Duke University.
26. James D. Elderkin, Biographical Sketches and Anecdotes of a Soldier of Three Wars (Detroit, 1899), 35 (“whole stock”); Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, 94, 99 (“lay”); Denise L. Doolan, Carlota Dobaño, and J. Kevin Baird, “Acquired Immunity to Malaria,” Clinical Microbiology Reviews 22, no. 1 (Jan. 2009): 13–36.
27. C. Casey, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 240, account 20458, NA; I. Clark, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 260, account 629, NA; L.B. Webster, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 260, account 638, NA; Bemrose, Reminiscences of the Second Seminole War, 94, 102.
28. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 325; Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 401, 447.
29. Horn, “Tennessee Volunteers,” 174; “Recollections of a Campaign in Florida,” Yale Literary Magazine 11, no. 11 (Dec. 1845): 76; Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Dec. 20, 1840, p. 102, HCP; Heintzelman diary, Dec. 22, 1840, reel 3, Samuel Peter Heintzelman Papers, LC; William Bowen Campbell to David Campbell, Correspondence, Nov. 2, 1836, Campbell Family Papers (“drunkard”).
30. Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Mar. 7, 1842, p. 166, (“harrowing”), Mar. 7, 1842, p. 168, (“soporifics”), and July [?], 1845, p. 152, HCP.
31. John W. Phelps, “Letters of Lieutenant John W. Phelps, U.S.A., 1837–1838,” Florida Historical Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Oct. 1927): 70.
32. Potter, War in Florida, 40.
33. Cohen, Notices of Florida and the Campaigns, 189–90; [Smith], Sketch of the Seminole War, 247 (“scalped”); Horn, “Tennessee Volunteers,” 356 (“weltering”), 358, 360 (“Who . . . can suppress”), 366 (“in a most”).
34. Electus Backus, “Diary of a Campaign in Florida, in 1837–8,” The Historical Magazine 10 (Sept. 1866): 282 (“grab game”); Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Dec. 19, 1840, HCP (“bagging the game”); Phelps, “Letters of Lieutenant John W. Phelps,” 67–84; Heintzelman diary, Oct. 29, 1836, reel 2, Samuel Peter Heintzelman Papers (“examined”); Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Dec. 16, 1840, HCP.
35. Motte, Journey into Wilderness, 120 (“miserable”), 205, 218–19; Frank L. White, Jr., “The Journals of Lieutenant John Pickell, 1836–1837,” Florida Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Oct. 1959): 165; Richard Fields to John Ross, Dec. 6, 1837, PCJR, 1:564–66 (“I never”).
36. Nathan R. Lawres, “Reconceptualizing the Landscape: Changing Patterns of Land Use in a Coalescent Culture,” Journal of Anthropological Research 70, no. 4 (2014): 563–64; Thomas Jesup, June 6, 1838, letter book 7, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, LC; Mahon, “Letters from the Second Seminole War,” 345.
37. “Recollections of a Campaign in Florida,” Yale Literary Magazine 11, no. 111 (Jan. 1846): 130–37 (“fate”); Heintzelman diary, Aug. 7, 1839, reel 3, Samuel Peter Heintzelman Papers (“treacherous”); Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 254.
38. John Eaton to Lewis Cass, Mar. 8, 1835, LR, OIA, reel 806, frame 101, M-234, NA; Horn, “Tennessee Volunteers,” 248; Denham and Brown, “South Carolina Volunteers,” 226 (“to discover”); Samuel Forry, “Letters of Samuel Forry, Surgeon U.S. Army, 1837: Part I,” Florida Historical Quarterly 6, no. 3 (Jan. 1928): 134 (“pockets”); Diary of Nathaniel Wyche Hunter, Nov. 1839, pp. 28–29, HCP (“knocked”).
39. Robert M. McLane to Louis McLane, Jan. 6, 1838, Box 2, Louis McLane Papers, LC (“I speak”); Articles of Agreement and Association of the Florida Peninsula Land Company (New York, 1836); John Lee Williams, The Territory of Florida (New York, 1837), 301; Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 287 (“spirit”).
40. Thomas S. Jesup to J.R. Poinsett, June 16, 1837, LR, OIA, reel 290, frame 158, M-234, NA; Truman Cross to Thomas Jesup, July 27, 1837, box 5, EAH; J.R. Poinsett to Thomas S. Jesup, July 25, 1837, Court of Inquiry—Operations in Florida, 25th Cong., 2nd sess., H.Doc. 78, serial 323, no. 3, p. 33; Thomas Jesup to J.R. Poinsett, Feb. 11, 1838, 25th Cong., 2d sess., H.Exec.Doc. 219, pp. 5–7; Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 202 (“ought to be”); Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Samuel Cooper, Oct. 22, 1840, box 2, folder 7, EAH (“to avoid”).
41. 28th Cong., 1st sess., H.Doc. 82, p.2; Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 325; Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount.”
42. Estimates of the size of the Seminole population varied widely. If there were five thousand people, then approximately 20 percent died during the war, but that estimate may be too high. The uncertainty reflects just how little the United States knew about the people it was fighting. In converting to 2018 dollars, I am using labor cost, which is measured as a multiple of the average wage of unskilled workers. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount.”
43. George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); “Notes on the Passage Across the Everglades,” Tequesta 20 (1960): 57–65.
44. “Notes on the Passage Across the Everglades,” 57–65.
AFTERWORD: THE PRICE OF EXPULSION
1. Isaac McCoy, History of Baptist Indian Missions (Washington, D.C., 1840), 581–82 (“He must be”); George A. Schultz, An Indian Canaan: Isaac McCoy and the Vision of an Indian State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 182–203.
2. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 162–64, 179–84; Leslie Friedman Goldstein, “A ‘Triumph of Freedom’ After All? Prigg v. Pennsylvania Re-examined,” Law and History Review 29, no. 3 (Aug. 2011): 786n81; Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 7, table 1; W.L.G. Smith, The Life and Times of Lewis Cass (New York, 1856), 702 (“greater moral”); Willard Carl Klunder, Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996), 289 (“swallow Cuba”), 296–97, 310 (“the abominable”).
3. Wilson Lumpkin, The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907), 1:40 (“particular mission”); Head men and warriors of Upper Creeks to James Wright, May 1, 1771, enclosed in Memorial of James Wright to the Lords of Trade, 1771, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), vol. 28, 2:806–15.
4. Virginia Miller, “Dr. Thomas Miller and His Times,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 3 (1900): 308–9.
5. Black Hawk, Black Hawk’s Autobiography, ed. Roger L. Nicholas (1833; Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999), 79.
6. “The President’s Visit,” Niles’ Register, June 15, 1833, 256; Black Hawk, Black Hawk’s Autobiography, 80–85.
7. Black Hawk, Black Hawk’s Autobiography, 7, and introduction, xiv–xv; Roger L. Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path, 2nd. ed. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley & Sons, 2017), 164.
8. Hopoethle-Yoholo to T.S. Jesup, June 12, 1836, Correspondence, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, DMR; Opoithleyahola to Abraham Lincoln, Aug. 15, 1861, LR, OIA, reel 230, frames 595–596, M-234, NA; A.B. Campbell to Joseph K. Barnes, Feb. 5, 1862, and George W. Collamore to William P. Dole, Apr. 21, 1862, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C., 1899), series 2, 4:6–7, 11–12.
9. The Choctaws chartered a school system a year after the Cherokees but put it into operation in 1842, nearly a decade before their Cherokee neighbors. William G. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees’ Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 86–120; Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 272–96; John Ross to John Howard Payne, Mar. 5, 1836, PCJR, 1:390 (“the only chance”); Clarissa W. Confer, The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
10. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/SzPhOxXs (accessed May 8, 2019); Patricia R. Wickman, Osceola’s Legacy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 89–103 (quotation on 100).
11. Wickman, Osceola’s Legacy, 144–53 (quotation on 150).
12. John T. Fulton, Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury, Settled Indian Accounts, RG 217, entry 525, box 240, account 20610, NA; “Journal of John Shelby,” A Sorrowful Journey, ed. Randall L. Buchman (Defiance, Ohio: Defiance College Press, 2007), 49; Journal of Edward Deas, Feb. 4, 1836, CGLR, box 9, Creek, NA; Census of North Carolina Cherokees, 1840, William Holland Thomas Papers, DMR; “To Philanthropists in the United States, Generally, and to Christians in Particular, on the Condition and Prospects of the Indians,” [Dec. 1, 1831?], reel 7, frame 861, MP (“experiment”).
13. There is no precise way of calculating the cost of expulsion, given that some of the expenses were absorbed by the U.S. Army in fighting wars or conducting operations against native peoples. The difference between the sum total of the average annual expenses of the army and the Indian Department between 1820–29, before expulsion, and 1830–42, during expulsion, is approximately $75 million. To approximate federal expenditures on deportation in 1836 and 1838, I subtracted the average annual War Department and Indian Department expenditure between 1820 and 1829 from the expenditures in 1836 and 1838. Budget statistics are available in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1949). I am converting to 2018 dollars by measuring the cost of deportation as a percentage of the output of the entire economy. Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790 to Present,” MeasuringWorth, 2019.
14. Figures calculated from data available in Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, Erin Meyer, Jose Pacas, and Matthew Sobek, IPUMS USA: Version 8.0 [dataset] (Minneapolis, Minn.: IPUMS, 2018), https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V8.0.
15. Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Choctaw Removal Records, Claiborne, Graves, Tyler, Gaines, and Rush, Journal of Proceedings, 1842–45, RG 75, entry 274, box 2, NA.
16. U.S. Census of 1840 and 1860, Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, and Steven Ruggles, IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 13.0 [Database] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2018), http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V13.0; Virginia O. Foscue, “The Place Names of Sumter County, Alabama,” Publication of the American Dialect Society 65, no. 1 (1978): 62.
17. Nance’s first two purchases were just outside the Choctaw Nation, but as the General Land Office patent database shows, he later purchased 200 acres within its former boundaries. James Nance to George Nance, Sept. 10, 1832, James Nance to his sister, Jan. 7, 1833, and James Nance to George Nance, Sept. 11, 1836, James Nance Letters, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; U.S. Census of 1850 and 1860.
18. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 133–78.
19. David Leavitt Reciever &c. against Richard M. Blatchford, John L. Gramham, & Lewis Curtis . . . Million and First Half Million Trusts (New York, 1852), 100, 403; Fritz Redlich, Molding of American Banking: Men and Ideas (New York: Hafner, 1951), 2:342–43; William L. MacKenzie, The Lives and Opinions of Benj’n Franklin Butler (Boston, 1845), 147 (“did some”).
20. To convert dollar values in this instance I am using the multiple of the average wage that a worker would need to purchase the commodities. Statement of Sales of Furniture at No. 30 West 14th St, box 30, folder 867, LPC; Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount”; Assets belonging to the Estate of J.D. Beers, August 1865, box 30, folder 867, LPC; Inventory of real estate, box 30, folder 867, LPC.
21. I am using relative labor earnings to convert to 2018 dollars. Lewis Curtis to William Giles, n.d., box 29, folder 857, LPC; Joseph Curtis to Benjamin Curtis, Sept. 12, 1865, box 27, folder 823, LPC; Benjamin Curtis to Joseph Curtis, Feb. 3, 1866, box 27, folder 823, LPC.
22. “American Women Near European Thrones,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), Sept. 12, 1908, 6 (“fashionable”); “Heirlooms and Flowers Mark Society Wedding,” Bridgeport Telegram (Bridgeport, Conn.), Aug. 17, 1923, 1 (“one of the most brilliant”).
23. William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 157; “Garrison Journal; At the Fish Library, a Chronicle of Death and Taxes,” New York Times, Jan. 6, 1992, B4.
24. One speculator’s accounting of 120 square miles of land showed an 80 percent profit, yet the trustees of the New York and Mississippi Land Company insisted on a minimum profit of 200 percent. I calculated Chickasaw losses by assuming that speculators resold property for twice what they paid for it on paper. That estimate is sufficiently conservative to allow for the cost of doing business. Individual reserves sold for a total of $3,827,236. For unreserved lands, I include only the three million acres that sold for $3,073,570 through 1841, when land companies were most active. On profits: David Hubbard to J.D. Beers, Jan. 10, 1835, box 39, folder 1058, LPC; Richard Bolton to Lewis Curtis, Dec. 9, 1836, box 1, NYMS; Richard Bolton to John Bolton, Sept. 25, 1835, box 1, NYMS. On reserve sales: Records Relating to Indian Removal, Records of the Commissary General of Subsistence, Chickasaw Removal Records, Reports of Land Sales and Deeds, 1836–39, RG 75, entry 255, box 1, NA. On the size of corporations in the 1830s: Robert E. Wright, “US Corporate Development 1790–1860,” The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD), https://repository.upenn.edu/mead/7/ (accessed Sept. 25, 2018). Using the 1847 Chickasaw Census, I am assuming 3.6 people per family, excluding slaves, since they were considered a form of wealth. Regarding Choctaw losses, in 1860, the U.S. Senate estimated that the Choctaws were owed nearly $3 million, but that sum does not account for the collusion between speculators and the forced sale of millions of acres, which lowered market prices. Assuming that speculators averaged a 100 percent profit, it is easy to arrive at losses exceeding $10 million. Creek losses must be figured by subtracting the price paid to Creeks (3¢ per acre, if on average they received $10 for every allotment) from the price at which speculators sold Creek lands (anywhere from $2 to $4 per acre). 44th Cong., 1st sess., H.Misc.Doc. 40, pp. 31–32; Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 107–12.
25. 24th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 246, p. 5.
26. John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); J. Anthony Paredes, “Back from Disappearance: The Alabama Creek Indian Community,” in Southeastern Indians since the Removal Era, ed. Walter L. Williams (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 123–41; John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 208–10; Lawrence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 191–220; John Ross et al. to the Seneca Delegation, Apr. 14, 1834, PCJR, 1:284–86.
27. Louise Barry, “The Fort Leavenworth-Fort Gibson Military Road and the Founding of Fort Scott,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 9, no. 2 (May 1942): 115–29.
28. Frederick Douglass, “Let the Negro Alone,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 4:206.
29. George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 120–32.
30. Lewis Cass to Jonathan Jennings, John W. Davis, and Marks Crume, July 14, 1832, CSE, 2:876; John Ross to Lewis Cass, Feb. 14, 1833, PCJR, 1:262.
31. Memorial of Creeks, Feb. 3, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Big Kettle, Seneca White, and Thomson Harris to Andrew Jackson, Jan. 11, 1831, PAJ; Memorial of the Chickasaw Chiefs to the President of the United States, Nov. 22, 1832, LR, OIA, reel 136, frame 276, M-234, NA; Georgia Journal (Milledgeville, Ga.), May 11, 1824, 2.
32. Memorial of Inhabitants of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Feb. 14, 1831, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of Inhabitants of Chesterville, Maine, Feb. 15, 1831, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of the Inhabitants of Lafayette, New York, Jan. 7, 1830, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA; Memorial of Inhabitants of Lincoln County, Maine, Feb. 19, 1831, PM, Protection of Indians, SEN21A-H3, NA.
33. On rebuilding and survival, see David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2019). “A poem composed by a Choctaw of P.P. Pitchlynn’s party while emigrating last winter to the West,” [1832], 4026.8176, PPP.