In 1831, in the aftermath of the Indian Removal Act, Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot lampooned the American rationale for removing Native Americans from the South. “It has been customary to charge the failure of attempts heretofore made to civilize and christianize the aborigines to the Indians themselves,” he explained. “Whence originated the common saying, ‘An Indian will still be an Indian.’—Do what you will, he cannot be civilized—you cannot reclaim him from his wild habits—you may as well expect to change the spots of the Leopard as to effect any substantial renovation in his character.” The experience of the Cherokees, the largest Indian tribe in the South, demonstrated the fallacy of this racial explanation: “The Cherokees have been reclaimed from their wild habits—Instead of hunters they have become the cultivators of the soil—Instead of wild and ferocious savages, thirsting for blood, they have become the mild ‘citizens,’ the friends and brothers of the white man—Instead of the superstitious heathens, many of them have become the worshippers of the true God.” Rather than merely point to the transformation of Cherokee and other southeastern Indian societies, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix proclaimed that any perceived shortcomings of the Indians resulted from limitations imposed by the United States. Economic, political, and religious changes, he explained, did not entirely satisfy American society.1 The same government that spent several decades promoting a “civilization plan” to transform Native society now embraced the immutability of the Indian’s natural character. As President Andrew Jackson explained in his first annual message to Congress: “Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek.” Removal, Jackson self-servingly explained, was the only way to avoid the destruction of the Indians.2
Jackson’s detractors—Natives and non-Natives alike—frequently came to different conclusions about southeastern Indians. Although they hardly ignored distinctions between Indians and non-Indians, Boudinot and many others concluded that the transformation of the Native southeast had already demonstrated the potential for Indians to embrace the marketplace and perhaps even live up to Thomas Jefferson’s dream that Indians and Americans could “intermix and become one people.”3 By the 1820s, southeastern Indians routinely herded cattle and hogs, engaged in the Atlantic market, pursued English literacy and formal schooling, grew cotton, owned African slaves, hired attorneys to protect their legal claims, centralized their systems of governance, and otherwise embraced various elements that were common in the Old South. They built elegant homes and lavish plantations; constructed toll roads, taverns, steamboats, and ferries; and adopted the clothing of their white neighbors. They wrote new constitutions, codified laws, and organized centralized police forces. Although observers often attributed the greatest changes to so-called mixed-blood Indians, the transformative power of the marketplace touched virtually everyone in the Native southeast. As Reverend Samuel Worcester optimistically proclaimed: “those of mixed blood are generally in the van, the whole mass of the people is on the march.”4
This chapter revisits this history of the southeastern Indians, tribal peoples who have been too-often excluded from discussions of the “biracial South” or oversimplified as romantically adhering to ancient traditions and stubbornly opposing changes that emanated from Anglo-American society.5 In recent decades, scholars have complicated these images and have discovered vibrant communities that shaped and were shaped by the larger influences in the American South. Although the choices Natives made were often constrained by events and processes that were not of their choosing, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and to a lesser extent Seminoles chose cultural and economic innovations in order to secure their economic and political survival.6 In other words, they often embraced changes that originated in American society in order to ensure that they would not be subsumed by it. In particular, this chapter explores five changes—the spread of cattle, the rise of cotton production, the proliferation of race slavery, the embrace of schooling and literacy, and the centralization of Native polities. These often-controversial innovations helped Natives navigate through the tumultuous antebellum era, while making them more dependent on and culturally less distinct from their white neighbors.7 Cultural innovation, in other words, was both the cause and solution to many of the problems that southeastern Indians faced.
The Eighteenth-Century Southeast
In the eighteenth century, several characteristics united the five largest southeastern tribes into a relatively coherent culture group. Politically, Natives lived in decentralized villages, where individuals who demonstrated the efficacy of their guidance shared and exercised power and authority. Villages operated largely independent of one another, although a range of familial and social ties connected them together. Villages united voluntarily to wage war or make treaties, as leaders lacked centralized polities or coercive power to mandate compliance. Without written languages, laws and lessons were transmitted orally, and treaties with foreign nations were negotiated through interpreters who recorded the “official” versions in English, Spanish, or French.8
Socially, a network of clans structured Native communities in the South. Indians presumed that these kinship groups, which structured a range of personal and familial obligations for every member of a community, descended from a natural force or animal. These clans were matrilineal (meaning that children took their familial identity from their mothers only), and households were structured in such a manner that allowed a matrilineage (multigenerational members of the same clan) to live under one roof or in a cluster. Just as importantly, Natives were traditionally matrilocal, meaning that husbands left their families and moved into their wives’ homes at marriage, where they were usually surrounded by their wives’ female relatives. As a result, women controlled the agricultural fields that surrounded their villages, growing corn, beans, squash and a variety of other crops. For their part, men gathered with members of their clan outside of villages to hunt deer and other animals for their meat and hides.9 Religiously, southeastern Indians remained largely untouched by Christian missionaries. Despite various missionary efforts, there were few Christian converts in the eighteenth century. Instead, Natives participated in a rich ceremonial life, the center of which was the annual Green Corn Ceremony, and they shared similar rituals, such the purification ceremonies of scratching and the taking of black drink.10 Economically, the southeastern Indians engaged in trade long before the arrival of Europeans, connecting them with the luxury items and rare materials of distant tribes. The trade of corn and deer occurred within households, serving as a symbolic and practical marital transaction, but basic necessities were largely produced locally.11
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, several forces and trends convinced Natives to pursue various social, economic, political, and cultural changes. First, the economic transformation of the American South toward a plantation economy resulted in declining demands for deerskins, a product whose supply dwindled concurrently with the devastation of the region’s white-tailed deer population. Second, Natives increasingly faced the land-grab of white American settlers and politicians, a process that intensified as Great Britain, Spain, and France withdrew from the region in the early nineteenth century. This ended the long-standing Native diplomatic practice of playing European powers off of one another in order to secure trade and diplomatic alliances. In the 1830s, the land-grab culminated in the forced removal of approximately fifty thousand Natives to Indian Territory, or what is now Arkansas and Oklahoma. Third, many of the changes were encouraged, magnified, and shaped by religious and cultural missionaries who urged southeastern Indians to embrace “civilization.” Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins, for example, spent nearly two decades directing the cultural and political reformation of the southeast from within Creek society. His extensive “plan of civilization,” along with the private efforts of countless Moravian, Baptist, and Methodist missionaries, brought new resources and opportunities into Native communities. This plan expedited innovations, though many had begun already and would likely have continued.12
Southeastern Indians began to participate in the Atlantic marketplace shortly after the first European traders arrived in the sixteenth century. Initially, the supply of deerskins could not meet the needs of the European leather market, and with this advantage Indians quickly obtained access to a litany of luxuries like mirrors, metal goods, beads, guns, and alcohol.13 As these goods slowly became necessities, Native families diverted more attention to the hunt and produced less corn and other essentials. The adoption of new technology (especially guns) enabled greater skin harvests and intensified competition between Indians to serve as suppliers. As a result, the deer population plummeted. The resulting scarcity of deerskins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries accelerated the trend toward market dependence, as women began to join the hunting parties so that they could maximize the number of skins that could be carried by dressing or preparing the skins in the fields. As a result, harvests suffered and hunger and malnutrition spread across Indian country. Missionaries recorded that Native Americans needed to “buy corn” even at “a time of great rain,” when they could have “obtain an abundance of bread . . . by . . . cultivat[ing] the earth.”14
Domesticated Animals
The declining population of deer and dependence on the marketplace led many Indians to augment their livelihoods with various economic pursuits. Many Native men turned to domesticated animals as a logical innovation. Hunting grounds became herding pastures, and herders incorporated domesticated animals in traditionally sanctioned manners. Just as hunters brought deer hides to market and consumed venison at home, herders typically brought hides and some meat to the marketplace and provided their villages with supplies of meat or milk. Indeed, whereas many Indians owned small herds, groups of Indians (either villages or clans) frequently controlled larger herds. At the same time, in the early nineteenth century, Indians maintained many of the cultural norms that shaped their lives when they were hunters. When Choctaw herders died, members of their clan killed the deceased person’s cattle, horses, and dogs in accordance with ancient funeral rituals. Choctaws reasoned that the animals “would be equally useful and desirable in the state of being which they enter at death.”15 The switch from hunting to herding also allowed many Indian men to fulfill coming-of-age rituals and otherwise maintain their sense of manhood in a difficult era. The use of feral stocks often mandated that “hunters” spend weeks tracking down their herds. In this manner, free-range techniques resulted in the continuation of the “cow-hunt” deep into the twentieth-century South.16
As a result, many Native men transitioned from hunter to herder in the antebellum South. One of the first Seminole leaders, for example, went by the name Cowkeeper because his village controlled vast herds in late-eighteenth-century Florida. During the First (1816–1818) and Second Seminole Wars (1835–1842), the Seminoles’ herds became targets for destruction by the U.S Army. At the end of both wars, the United States allowed its Creek allies to augment its own holdings in Georgia with “large droves of cattle . . . captured from the Enemy.”17 Livestock similarly existed throughout the southeastern nations. In 1822, the Choctaws (with a population of roughly fifteen to twenty thousand) owned 43,000 head of cattle, and ownership was widely spread across their society. As it was elsewhere in the Native South, Choctaw herds were proportionally larger than those held by their white neighbors.18
The incorporation of livestock into the Native economy resolved some problems and created others. Not surprisingly, American expansion frequently resulted in conflicts over herds. As backcountry settlers and Natives became neighbors, white settlers often ignored the property claims of the Indians, who in turn raided the herds of the white newcomers. For young warriors, raiding and stealing cattle and “committing [other] depredations on property”19 served both political as well as cultural purposes. While expressing their dissatisfaction with tribal leadership who seemed too eager to acquiesce to American demands, young warriors also demonstrated their manhood at a time of limited hunting and warfare and demonstrated their political defiance to both American and tribal leaders. They also intensified the demands in white society for the removal of the Indians. Only separation could protect the herds of the American backcountry.20
When forced removal became a reality for southeastern Indians, livestock both ameliorated and magnified the economic destruction. Although Natives transported many cows and horses on their forced journeys west, the material losses suffered revealed the Indians’ immersion in the livestock and market economy. One African-American Cherokee recalled that “the women and children were driven from their homes, sometimes with blows and close on the heels of the retreating Indians came greedy whites to pillage the Indian’s homes, drive off their cattle, horses, and pigs.”21 Natives from across the social spectrum left behind a multitude of domesticated animals (breeding sows, chickens, ducks, cows, hogs, and guinea hens), as well as agricultural tools (plows, chains, axes, chisels, hoes, ox yokes, harnesses, and saddles), domestic items (pots and pans, teacups and saucers, silverware, and pewter dishes), the tools of home manufacturing (spinning wheels, looms, and scissors), and luxury items (featherbeds, umbrellas, mirrors, and fur hats). Some Natives even left behind padlocks, one of the most explicit markers of a market-oriented society.22
Rather than destroy the Indian’s commitment to livestock or the marketplace, the disruptions of removal intensified it. The eastern Cherokee—a group of remnant Indians who resisted removal by either hiding in the less arable hills or staying on privately owned and state-regulated lands—augmented its traditional farming focus by becoming firmly entrenched in animal husbandry. In 1850, the 710 eastern Cherokees owned “516 swine, 416 sheep, 105 cows, 45 oxen, 135 ‘other cattle.’”23 For those who were removed to Indian Territory, livestock holdings became widespread and served as a similarly stabilizing force. The western Seminoles, whose population numbered only a few thousand, controlled several herds that were each estimated to exceed ten thousand.24 In 1835, Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy wrote that the Cherokee and Creek “fields are generally larger, their stocks of cattle greater . . . in proportion to numbers, than we will generally find among whites on the frontiers.”25 Though the size of the herds impressed McCoy and other observers, the free-range practices and vast grazing lands certainly led them to underestimate the antebellum cattle population.26 Nevertheless, a Chickasaw census from 1846 recorded 14,788 head of cattle for a population of 4,715.27
Despite the growing importance of cattle grazing, southeastern Indians also remained committed to the symbolically and economically significant cultivation of corn by Native women. When domesticated animals trampled on or ate from the fields of Indian women, for example, the burden often fell on men to make restitution. In the early nineteenth century, one Moravian missionary proclaimed that “if a Beast comes into the Fields [Natives] shoot it.”28 More than fifty years later, when their cornfields suffered from drought, some Creeks burned the prairies where their cattle grazed as a means of “conjuring for rain.”29 Natives repeatedly sacrificed their interests in cattle to protect their cornfields. In addition, the calendar of the southeastern Indians minimized conflicts between cattle and corn. Indian men captured the free-roaming cattle in spring—after the annual clearing of fields and before the planting. As a result, men could provide agricultural labor when it was needed most, and the sacred work of women continued.30
Agricultural Innovations
Southeastern Indians also pursued agricultural innovations in the early nineteenth century. Native peoples, of course, had for centuries developed highly effective techniques for growing and improving their cornfields, incorporating new seeds, irrigation techniques, and tools. By the nineteenth century, this tradition of agricultural innovation led many Indian communities to augment their corn-centered economies with cotton and other crops. The declining value of deerskins and the widespread dispossession of lands, led many market-oriented or dependent Indians to plant cash crops. On the eve of removal, whereas southeastern Native women tended cornfields (as they had for generations), many Native men managed cotton fields worked by African-American slaves.31
Several Native Americans (and white men who married Native women) built cotton gins in the heart of Indian country to facilitate and capitalize on this transformation—a change augmented by the contribution of dozens of spinning wheels and looms by Hawkins, the reformist Indian agent. William Claiborne built a cotton gin in the Choctaw nation and tried to monopolize the cotton trade from both Choctaw and Chickasaw villages.32 Abram Mordecai, similarly, built a gin house near the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers in Alabama.33 During the Creek Civil War (1813–1814), Mordecai’s neighbors, William and Jonathan Pierce, reported the destruction of their gin house, with three cotton machines, a press, 3,600 pounds of ginned cotton, and over 12,000 pounds of cotton seed.34 As the Pierces learned, in the early 1800s Natives did not uniformly embrace the transition to a cotton culture. Over time, though, opposition to cotton dissipated as it became more widespread. Only about twelve Choctaws, for example, grew cotton at the start the nineteenth century; a few decades later cotton fields and slave laborers were commonplace across the Native southeast. By 1828, one community of Choctaws raised 124,000 pounds of cotton. According to one estimate, a Mississippi plantation with 35 slaves would harvest a similar amount.35
After removal, innovations in agriculture continued even as animal husbandry obtained greater importance. This development tended to have a geographic dimension, as some parts of Indian Territory seemed more suitable for herding than other areas. Shortly after their arrival west, for example, some Choctaws established large cotton plantations along the Red River. In neighboring Cherokee society, cotton made similar inroads. In 1853, Agent George M. Butler concluded that “the common people are making slow but steady advances in the science of agriculture; the more enlightened and intelligent portion who have means, live in the same style of the southern gentlemen of easy circumstances.”36
As with livestock, the rise of cotton production occurred alongside the maintenance of several long-standing traditions. Corn remained an important dietary product, serving as the central element of Native cuisine throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Corn also remained an essential ritual component—with the Green Corn Ceremony and the Corn Dance continuing into contemporary southeastern society. Just as importantly, Natives maintained gender norms that associated women with fieldwork and men with hunting (and herding). Many Native men, in contrast to women, rejected offers to take wage-labor jobs picking cotton for their white (or Indian) neighbors on the frontier plantations of Alabama and elsewhere. They also tended to avoid working in the fields themselves. Instead, men maintained their masculinity by relying on the labor of their wives or on African slaves.37
African Slavery
Although not always connected to the cultivation of cotton, the arrival of African slavery and racial codes also gradually became entrenched among Natives in the early nineteenth century. In this manner, southeastern Indians became even more “civilized” in the eyes of many white Southerners. The owning of slaves had roots in a traditional system of captivity—one largely reserved for war captives and unconnected with manual labor. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, southeastern Indians purchased and employed the labor of thousands of African slaves. During the American Revolution, many African slaves took advantage of the chaos of war and escaped to Indian country, while intermarried traders brought others into Native villages. As a result, the free black population among Natives was often larger than the slave population, making the racial connection between Africans and slavery less pronounced in pre-removal Indian villages than elsewhere in the South. The population of slaves among the Indians remained relatively small, especially relative to free blacks. Like elsewhere in the South, ownership was concentrated under a small planter elite, but Native masters often asserted little control over their human property. Many Africans, for example, lived in semi-autonomous villages in Florida, paying tribute to Seminole villages and owners and receiving protection in return. At the other end of the spectrum, the Cherokees embraced slavery. Even there, though, the transition occurred slowly. On the eve of removal, only 207 of the 2,637 Cherokee households (8 percent of a total population of 16,524 Cherokees) owned slaves, and the 1,592 African slaves made up less than one-tenth of the total population living on Cherokee land. Furthermore, most Cherokee slaveholders (83 percent) owned fewer than ten slaves.38
The African slave population among the Indians consistently grew in the post-removal era. At first, only a small percentage of Indians owned slaves in the post-removal South, with a handful of owners claiming a majority of the slaves. During the era of removal, slaves constituted a small percentage of the southeastern Indian communities—nearly 10 percent of the total Cherokee population, 4 percent of the Creek, 3 percent of the Choctaw, and an even smaller percentage of the Chickasaw. By 1860, the patterns of slaveholding had changed, and the slave population grew faster than the Indian population. As a significantly greater percentage of Natives became slaveholders, African slaves formed a greater part of Indian society. This resulted from the Cherokees’ participation in the internal Southern slave trade, the natural increase of the slave population, inheritance patterns that resulted in the dispersal rather than consolidation of slave communities, and a stagnant Native population that struggled to recover from the devastation of removal. On the eve of the American Civil War, in which the southeastern Indians frequently supported the Confederacy, African slaves constituted 15 percent of the Cherokee population, 18 percent of the Chickasaw, 14 percent of the Choctaw, and 10 percent of the Creek.39
With the growth of slavery came a greater association of race and slavery. In 1830, for example, the U.S. agent charged with creating a census for emigrating Creeks concluded that Africans “seem to be in every way identified with these people . . . the only difference is the color.”40 The following decade, the Creeks denied citizenship to anyone, even if born to a Creek mother, who had “more than half African blood.”41 By 1860, southeastern Indians generally lived with strict slave codes that frequently banned manumission and linked blackness and slavery. The marginalization of Africans remained a contentious process throughout the southeast—with matrilineal clan memberships and tribal loyalties occasionally trumping racial identities within communities. At the same time, though, using race within a Native hierarchy allowed many Indians to distinguish themselves from the largest group of nonwhite Southerners and associate themselves as “civilized” members of the American South. In contrast, in the antebellum era, southeastern Indians rarely created racial barriers with white Americans or Natives of mixed white-Indian ancestry. Instead, the Native children of intermarriages with white men—by virtue of their membership in a matrilineal clan—were routinely embraced as Natives and fully incorporated as members of villages and even village or national chiefs. In this manner, Natives secured a nebulous place in a region and nation that was increasingly presumed biracial.42
Educational Innovations
As Natives struggled to control the marketplace, they frequently turned to the tools of formal education—especially literacy—to prepare a generation for the emerging economy and the demands of the marketplace. As they did with most elements of white society, Natives rejected the initial offers by missionaries to build schools or educate their children. In the eighteenth century, southeastern Indians routinely turned away missionaries who “so long plagued them with that they no ways understood.”43 By the early nineteenth century, as demands for Native lands increased, Natives actively invited mission schools to their communities. Although many Indians remained suspicious of the missionary efforts, most of the antimissionary energy went toward controlling rather than eliminating their presence. Among the Creeks, for example, in 1822 “Big Warrior, with the advice of his council, [forbade] the missionaries in the nation to preach.” Instead, he “allow[ed] them to keep schools for the instruction of his youthful subjects in the various branches of useful learning.”44 Missionaries could teach reading, writing, and gender-appropriate skills. Even as they turned to missionaries for assistance, though, they insisted that women were farmers and men were hunter/herders. Natives withdrew young girls from schools during harvests and took boys out of school during hunting season. Still other family members resisted the teaching of “agriculture and mechanics” to boys or spinning and alien notions of cleanliness to girls.45
Although they continued to oppose some of the teachings of the Christian missions and schools, these institutions eventually proliferated in the Native South. For the Choctaws, a Protestant mission school came in 1818. The boarding school accommodated eighty pupils but hardly met the demand, evidenced by the more than three hundred applications it received. Three years later, an additional school opened and a total of 150 Choctaw students attended, while still more attended the distant Choctaw Academy in Kentucky. The Creeks similarly allowed some of their children to attend mission schools, with one reverend concluding that “the progress of the children was as good, as in any school.”46 These schools taught more than reading and the fundamentals of Protestant Christianity: girls were taught skills related to domestic labor (especially spinning cotton and using looms), and boys were taught agricultural and mechanical skills.47
Schools proliferated in Indian Territory, where the Cherokees created their own public-education system, opening 126 public schools before 1860. This made the Cherokees potentially more educated than their white neighbors in Arkansas, where approximately 180 chartered private academies and no public school system served a population fifteen to twenty times larger than the Cherokees’.48 In 1842, the Choctaw General Council created a system of schools that provided separate educational opportunities for men and women and established the Spencer Academy for the future leaders of the Choctaw nation. This satisfied the needs of the Choctaws, who “have at late become anxious that their children should be educated” and insisted that it be done “in their own nation.” As a result, many boarding schools became day schools, and Choctaw children attended newly created schools where Native families could oversee and regulate the curriculum.49 The first missionary school came to the Seminoles in 1848, where they were ministered to by John Bemo, a Seminole who had become a preacher on his earlier travels through New England. Nevertheless, the unbending attitudes toward preexisting spiritual beliefs led Bemo and other missionaries to have difficulty attracting Seminole students.50
Although Natives frequently viewed reading and writing with distrust—proclaiming that they would rather “hear the talk themselves”—many of them turned to literacy as a means of protecting tribal interests.51 Whereas many southeastern leaders learned English to protect their diplomatic interests, the Cherokees created their own alphabet (the syllabary), published a series of books and pamphlets to support their case for self-determination, and released a weekly newspaper. In this manner, Cherokees from disparate villages came to imagine themselves as members of the same nation and sharing similar concerns with neighboring Indians. Outside of the Cherokee nation, the Cherokee Phoenix became a widely recognized and innovative voice for Indian rights—giving public voice to the arguments opposed to removal in the late 1820s and 1830s. Established in February 1828, the newspaper and excerpts from it became widely distributed in the United States and Europe in an attempt to “state the will of the majority of our people on the subject of the present controversy with Georgia, and the present removal policy of the United States Government.”52 Not surprisingly, the United States seized the printing press in 1835 in an attempt to repress the opponents of removal.
Legal Innovations
The southeastern Indians’ creation of written laws and constitutions may have been their most innovative use of schooling and literacy. Natives codified many of their laws before removal—often as an attempt to counter efforts to deny their political sovereignty and reduce them to private landowners—and all but the Seminoles created constitutions to transform their political structure in the antebellum era. The Choctaws wrote their first constitution in 1826, and the Cherokees ratified theirs in 1827. The Chickasaws and Creeks reformed their nations without constitutions, formalizing the annual meetings of national councils prior to removal, and then reinforcing these changes with constitutions in the 1850s. These constitutions recognized or created bicameral legislatures, national councils, and centralized police forces (“law menders” among the Creeks and “light horsemen” among the Cherokee).53 Most of these changes diminished the authority of matrilineal clan affiliations and local village autonomy in favor of a centralized state—replacing local clan leaders with centralized chiefs and ending traditional forms of justice with the establishment of courts. Not surprisingly, then, Native women frequently resisted these changes, insisting on the continued use of clan laws alongside male-centered centralized authorities. Creeks maintained kin-based villages as their basic political unit, but other tribes created districts and other innovative structures. In this manner, the five southeastern tribes became centralized nations.54
These written laws, often written and supported by literate Indians who attended various schools in the region, frequently supported new economic attitudes and behavior. In 1822, for example, Choctaw chief Hoolatahomba promoted a set of new laws for the Six Towns District in Mississippi. These laws, among many things, criminalized the theft of cattle and the neglect of crops. The Creeks and Cherokees both made stealing property a crime punishable by the tribe (rather than by individuals or clans), regulated contracts, and otherwise imposed on the centralized state to enforce the laws. Many of the new laws also protected the interests of Native slaveholders. As early as 1818, the Creeks mandated that “if a Negro kill an Indian, the Negro shall suffer death, and if an Indian kill a Negro, he shall pay the owner the value.” In 1836, as the U.S. Congress passed the gag rule to squelch discussion of slavery, the Choctaw council banned teaching abolitionist beliefs, prohibited the education of slaves themselves, and criminalized the arming of slaves. Soon after, the Chickasaws followed with a similar set of slave codes. In 1841, the Choctaws declared that freed slaves had to leave the nation. By 1858, the slave code of the Chickasaws included many restrictions that appeared throughout the slave South—they prohibited educating slaves, banned miscegenation, required masters to transport slaves out of the nation upon emancipation, severely punished assistance to runaways, and otherwise established black legal inferiority.55
At the same time, legal innovation helped Natives control the changes often associated with the economic and social transformation of the Native South. Several southeastern Indians employed prenuptial agreements as a means of protecting the property rights of intermarried Indian women. Similarly, early-nineteenth-century Creek and Cherokee legislation protected matrilineal inheritance practices, secured women’s traditional rights to own land, and otherwise proclaimed the common ownership of lands. Even traditionalists often concluded the necessity of adopting a system of laws to preserve tribal lands.56 As their legal system transformed from one based on clan obligations to one based on centralization and literacy, educated Native leaders used American law to protect tribal interests. This was especially important as the United States attempted to use the law to effect removal.
The Cherokees’ most famous legal maneuvering took place within the American legal system. The Cherokees arranged for legal dignitaries William Wirt and John Sergeant to represent their legal interests. Wirt, a former U.S. attorney general who prosecuted Aaron Burr, and Sergeant, a congressman from Philadelphia who served as the legal advisor to the Second Bank of the United States, were hardly minor legal figures. On the contrary, Cherokee leaders recognized that protecting their sovereignty required learning and even playing by the rules of the same society that was threatening.57 The use of a legal defense, however, proved futile. Although the Supreme Court recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokees in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), no legal justification could halt President Jackson’s removal strategy and the subsequent Trail of Tears. Jackson could only maintain his logic for removal—the “savage” Indians had to be removed from the South in order to make way for “civilization”—by ignoring much of the evidence in front of him.
During the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, the southeastern Indians underwent a transformation that ultimately resulted in their being called the “Five Civilized Tribes.” Although this ethnocentric moniker would be eventually taken up as a political tool and source of pride by the Natives themselves, in the antebellum era outsiders repeatedly and favorably measured the “progress” of the southeastern Indians on the terms of white Southern “civilization.” As a result, Baptist missionary Roger Williams and many others distinguished “the other class of Indians [that] embraces the Cherokees, Creeks, and some other southern tribes, who have become partially civilized, have instituted governments, and are practicing agriculture and the mechanic arts. These Indians . . . are in a different situation from those at the north.”58 Indeed, many white Americans optimistically concluded that the “the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws . . . are steadily advancing in civilization, and only require that their rights may be respected by the government, to ensure results much desired by every philanthropist and Christian.”59 In short, in antebellum America, southeastern Natives appeared to be acculturating to the Southern norm.
Despite these optimistic conclusions, southeastern Indians repeatedly demonstrated that embracing innovation and accepting commodities from the marketplace did not necessarily mean accepting the values of American society or deferring to it. Just as white Southerners frequently maintained values that differed from their Northern or European trading partners, southeastern Indians maintained cultural and political distinctions of their own. The emergence of market-oriented behavior did not result in the widespread embrace of American jurisdiction, and cultural changes did not mean political acquiescence. Instead, Natives embraced many traits that were associated with the loaded term “civilization” as a means of surviving regional and national economic and diplomatic trends. Many Indian men pursued the options of the marketplace these became available and as traditional hunting pursuits became less viable. At the same time, many tribes pursued societal changes as a means of resisting the efforts of the United States to dispossess them of their lands and otherwise eradicate tribal sovereignty. Although some Indians contemplated a future as a Native constituent state of the republic, most pursued innovations as attempts to resist the United States rather than join it. James Silk Buckingham recognized as much in 1842: “As these Indians . . . made some advances in civilization . . . they were exceedingly averse to moving, and rejected all offers made to them.”60 It should be no surprise then, that the racial lines that separated Indians from white Americans became clarified in the years that their cultures converged. Members of both Native and Southern societies recognized their own necessities of drawing lines and defining their communities.
NOTES
1. Cherokee Phoenix, November 12, 1831.
2. Andrew Jackson, “First Annual Message to Congress,” in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson (1829; repr., Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), 2:458.
3. Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1803, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, 12 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892–1899), 7:214.
4. Samuel Worcester to William S. Codey, March 15, 1830, in Christian Register (April 24, 1830): 67.
5. James Taylor Carson, “‘The Obituary of Nations’: Ethnic Cleansing, Memory, and the Origins of the Old South,” Southern Cultures 14 (Winter 2008): 6–31.
6. James Taylor Carson advocated the term “innovative,” rather than “progressive” or “acculturated,” in Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), esp. 71, 87–88.
7. Opposition to these innovations manifested themselves most explicitly during the Creek Civil War (1813–1814). See Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
8. Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Tyler Boulware, “‘Rim of the Gap’: Negotiating Identity on the Southern Colonial Frontier” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2005).
9. Theda Perdue explores the importance of clan and gender identities in Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
10. Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976).
11. Cameron B. Wesson, Households and Hegemony: Early Creek Prestige Goods, Symbolic Capital, and Social Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 22–57; Kathryn Holland Brand, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
12. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
13. Richard White, Roots of Dependence: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); James Merrell, The Indian’s New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 4–91.
14. Joyce B. Phillips and Paul Gary Phillips, eds., The Brainerd Journal: A Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1823 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 33–34.
15. James Taylor Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution, and Culture Change: The Choctaw Cattle Economy, 1690–1830,” Agricultural History 71 (1997): 12.
16. John Solomon Otto, “Open-Range Cattle-Ranching in South Florida: An Oral History,” Tampa Bay History 8 (Fall/Winter 1986): 27. Even when herds were easily found, Natives often stalked their animals in order to perform cultural rituals. See Perdue, Cherokee Women, 121–123.
17. John K. Mahon, ed., “The Journal of A. B. Meek and the Second Seminole War, 1836,” Florida Historical Quarterly 38 (April 1960): 313, 315; Andrew Jackson to David B, Mitchell, July 8, 1818, Panton Leslie Papers, reel 21 (microfilm), Florida State University Library, Tallahassee.
18. In antebellum Alabama, the cattle population closely approximated the state’s total human population. See Brooks Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 167.
19. Benjamin Hawkins to Wade Hampton, August 26, 1811, in Letters, Journals and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins, ed. C. L. Grantz, 2 vols. (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1980), 2:590.
20. Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution, and Culture Change,” 1–18; Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 182–183.
21. Eliza Whitmire, in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George Rawick, 19 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), 12:380–381.
22. Mary Young, “The Cherokee Nation: Mirror of the Republic,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 516–517.
23. John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 70.
24. William W. Savage, “Indian Ranchers,” in Ranch and Range in Oklahoma, ed. Jimmy M. Skaggs (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1978), 34.
25. Isaac McCoy to Lewis Cass, March 6, 1832, 23rd Congress, 1st sess., S. Doc. 512 (1833), 3:343.
26. U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1843), 343.
27. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott & Grambo, 1851–1857), 1:498.
28. “Bro. Martin Schneider’s Report of his Journey to the Upper Cherokee Towns,” in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country 1540–1800, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (Johnson City, Tenn.: Watauga Press, 1928), 261.
29. “Indian Superstitions,” Christian Secretary (November 29, 1850): 1.
30. Richard A. Sattler, “Cowboys and Indians: Creek and Seminole Stock Raising, 1700–1900,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22 (1998): 79–99.
31. Daniel H. Usner, Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relationships with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 297–317.
32. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 57.
33. Albert James Pickett, History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period, 2 vols. (Charleston, S.C.: Walker and James, 1851), 2:190.
34. Richard S. Lackey, ed., Frontier Claims in the Lower South (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1977), 35.
35. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 81; White, Roots of Dependence, 129; Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 146–148; John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 9.
36. Butler, quoted in William G. McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) 59.
37. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 81–82.
38. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 58. By contrast, about 36 percent of white Southerners owned slaves in 1830 and slaves comprised nearly the same percent of the region’s population. Equally contrasting, in 1850, almost 27 percent of slave-holders owned ten or more slaves. John B. Boles, Black Slaveholders, 1619–1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 107.
39. Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 42, 116; Claudio Saunt, “The Paradox of Freedom: Tribal Sovereignty and Emancipation during the Reconstruction of Indian Territory,” Journal of Southern History 70 (February 2004): 64–65. The population of Africans among the Seminoles eludes scholars.
40. Quotation in Daniel F. Littlefield, Africans and Creeks: From the Colonial Period to the Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 112.
41. Quotation in Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelveste and the Creek Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 40.
42. For a discussion of the debate over race in the Native southeast, see Theda Perdue, “Race and Culture: Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South,” Ethnohistory 51 (Fall 2004): 701–723; Claudio Saunt, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, and Circe Sturm, “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South,” Ethnohis-tory 53 (Spring 2006): 399–405.
43. Quotation in Henry T. Malone, Cherokees of the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956), 96.
44. Niles Weekly Register, August 3, 1822.
45. Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 67.
46. “Notes furnished A. J. Pickett by the Rev. Lee Compere of Mississippi,” April 6, 1848, Albert James Pickett Manuscripts, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery.
47. Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “The Choctaw Academy,” Chronicles of Oklahoma (December 1928): 453–480.
48. Edgar Wallace Knight, Public Education in the South (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1922), 97–98.
49. “Tribes of Indians West of the Mississippi,” The Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal (January 27, 1844): 17; Valerie Lambert, Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 36.
50. Jack M. Schultz, The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma: Maintaining a Traditional Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 46–47.
51. Quoted in Saunt, New Order of Things, 189.
52. Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828.
53. Lambert, Choctaw Nation, 44.
54. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 87–123, 176–190.
55. Clara Sue Kidwell, The Choctaws in Oklahoma: From Tribe to Nation, 1855–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), xv, 5. Creek Agency Records, McIntosh Papers, Laws of the Creek Nation, June 12, 1818, David B. Mitchell Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago; Laws of the Muscogee Nation, March 1824, Antonio J. Waring, Jr., Papers, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah; Littlefield, Chickasaw Freedmen: A People without a Country (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 13.
56. Frank, Creeks and Southerners, 131; Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation, 29–3l; Rennard Strickland, Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 41.
57. Jill Norgren, “Lawyers and the Legal Business of the Cherokee Republic in Courts of the United States, 1829–1835,” Law and History Review 10 (Autumn 1992): 256.
58. Baptist Missionary Magazine 10 (December 1830): 362–363.
59. M., “Our Indian Tribes,” New York Observer and Chronicle (April 6, 1854): 109.
60. James Silk Buckingham, Slave States of America (1842; repr., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 521.