A Christian Missionary Defends the Cherokees (1829)   Jeremiah Evarts, chief administrative officer of the large interdenominational missionary consortium known as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), had definite ideas about the proper relation between the Indian tribes and the United States

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A Christian Missionary Defends the Cherokees (1829)

Jeremiah Evarts, chief administrative officer of the large interdenominational missionary consortium known as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), had definite ideas about the proper relation between the Indian tribes and the United States. Born in Vermont and trained as an attorney, he had become convinced early in his life that God had a special mission for the United States to lead the way in the conversion of the world to Christianity. American leadership required that the United States be a “beacon of goodness” that radiated the light of justice and morality in all its affairs. Christian citizens were obligated, he believed, to critique their leaders if they strayed from the path and demand they return. Otherwise, Evarts feared, God would punish the United States with disasters and destruction.

Since 1817, the ABCFM had maintained a significant presence in the Cherokee Nation. Several missionaries lived there, operated schools, conducted religious services, studied the language, worked on a translation of the Bible, and sent back to headquarters in Boston a steady stream of correspondence and reports on their progress. Evarts read all the reports, studied what additional sources he could find, and developed a deep and abiding respect for the Cherokees. Furthermore, with a lawyer’s eye, he analyzed the history of Indian policy in all of its legislative and administrative aspects. To him, the Constitution clearly authorized Congress and the president to conduct relations with the Indians outside the involvement of the states. Treaties were the acts of sovereigns, and the policy of the United States had always been to respect the sovereign rights of the tribes. By definition, therefore, tribal sovereignty was superior to the claims of the individual states.

Neither Evarts nor his associates in New England were Jacksonian Democrats. They believed that the Constitution intended the national government to take an active, leading role in public affairs, to override and inhibit the narrow and selfish provincialism of the states, and to set the moral tone for the country.

Evarts was both outraged and terrified by the events of the winter of 1828-1829. Georgia’s extension of jurisdiction over the Cherokees and the Cherokee protest to the president had elicited the response of the Jackson administration, which claimed support among Episcopalian and Dutch Reformed church officials in New York. Evarts regarded the new Indian policy of the Jackson administration as unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, and fraught with danger. Thus motivated, between August 5 and December 19, 1829, Evarts wrote and published in the Washington National Intelligencer twenty-four articles entitled “Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians.” Published under the pseudonym William Penn, Evarts’s essays constitute a propagandistic masterpiece of historical, legal, and moral analysis of America’s relations with the Indians. The essays, reprinted in dozens of papers and published as a separate pamphlet, responded to Jackson’s position and shaped the arguments on removal that resounded in Congress and the press during the early months of 1830.

The selection printed here is a summary of the “William Penn” essays written by Evarts late in 1829 as the body of a petition that opponents of removal could sign and send to their congressmen. Entitled “A Brief View,” this selection represented one of many efforts by Evarts and those of like mind to bombard Congress with expressions of popular outrage.

In the various discussions, which have attracted public attention within a few months past, several important positions, on the subject of the rights and claims of the Indians, have been clearly and firmly established. At least, this is considered to be the case, by a large portion of the intelligent and reflecting men in the community. Among the positions thus established are the following: which, for the sake of precision and easy reference, are set down in regular numerical order.

1. The American Indians, now living upon lands derived from their ancestors, and never alienated nor surrendered, have a perfect right to the continued and undisturbed possession of these lands.

2. Those Indian tribes and nations, which have remained under their own form of government, upon their own soil, and have never submitted themselves to the government of the whites, have a perfect right to retain their original form of government, or to alter it, according to their own views of convenience and propriety.

3. These rights of soil and of sovereignty are inherent in the Indians, till voluntarily surrendered by them; and cannot be taken away by compacts between communities of whites, to which compacts the Indians were not a party

4. From the settlement of the English colonies in North America to the present day, the right of Indians to lands in their actual and peaceable possession, and to such form of government as they choose, has been admitted by the whites; though such admission is in no sense necessary to the perfect validity of the Indian title

5. For one hundred and fifty years, innumerable treaties were made between the English colonists and the Indians, upon the basis of the Indians being independent nations, and having a perfect right to their country and their form of government.

6. During the revolutionary war, the United States, in their confederate character, made similar treaties, accompanied by the most solemn guaranty of territorial rights.

7. At the close of the revolutionary war, and before the adoption of the federal constitution, the United States, in their confederate character, made similar treaties with the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws.

8. The State of Georgia, after the close of the revolutionary war, and before the adoption of the federal constitution, made similar treaties, on the same basis, with the Cherokees and Creeks.

9. By the constitution of the United States, the exclusive power of making treaties with the Indians was conferred on the general government; and, in the execution of this power, the faith of the nation has been many times pledged to the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and other Indian nations. In nearly all these treaties, the national and territorial rights of the Indians are guaranteed to them, either expressly or by implication.

10. The State of Georgia has, by numerous public acts, implicitly acquiesced in this exercise of the treaty-making power of the United States.

11. The laws of the United States, as well as treaties with the Indians, prohibit all persons, whether acting as individuals, or as agents of any State, from encroaching upon territory secured to the Indians. By these laws severe penalties are inflicted upon offenders; and the execution of the laws on this subject, is specially confided to the President of the United States, who has the whole force of the country at his disposal for this purpose.

The positions here recited are deemed to be incontrovertible. It follows, therefore,

That the removal of any nation of Indians from their country by force would be an instance of gross and cruel oppression:

That all attempts to accomplish this removal of the Indians by bribery or fraud, by intimidation and threats, by withholding from them a knowledge of the strength of their cause, by practicing upon their ignorance, and their fears, or by vexatious opportunities, interpreted by them to mean nearly the same thing as a command;—all such attempts are acts of oppression, and therefore entirely unjustifiable:

That the United States are firmly bound by treaty to protect the Indians from force and encroachments on the part of a State; and a refusal thus to protect them would be equally an act of bad faith as a refusal to protect them against individuals: and

That the Cherokees have therefore the guaranty of the United States, solemnly and repeatedly given, as a security against encroachments from Georgia and the neighboring States. By virtue of this guaranty the Cherokees might rightfully demand, that the United States shall keep all intruders at a distance, from whatever quarter, or in whatever character, they may come. Thus secured and defended in the possession of their country, the Cherokees have a perfect right to retain that possession as long as they please. Such a retention of their country is no just cause of complaint or offence to any State, or to any individual. It is merely an exercise of natural rights, which rights have been not only acknowledged but repeatedly and solemnly confirmed by the United States.

Although these principles are clear and incontrovertible, yet many persons feel an embarrassment from considering the Cherokees as living in the State of Georgia. All this embarrassment may be removed at once by bearing in mind that the Cherokee country is not in Georgia, in any sense affecting sovereignty, right of soil, or jurisdiction; nor will it rightfully become a part of Georgia, till the Cherokees shall first have ceded it to the United States. Whenever that event shall take place, it will immediately fall into the States of Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama; not by virtue of any compact to which the Cherokees have been a party, but in consequence of compacts not existing between these States and the United States….

Again, it is supposed that the existence of a little separate community of Indians, living under their own laws, and surrounded by communities of whites, will be fraught with some great and undefined mischief. This supposed evil is set forth under learned and hard names. It is called an anomaly, an imperium in imperio [empire within an empire], and by various other pedantic epithets. When the case is accurately examined, however, all the fog clears away, and nothing appears in the prospect but a little tract of country full of civilized Indians, engaged in their lawful pursuits, neither molesting their neighbours, nor interrupting the general peace and prosperity.

If the separate existence of the Indian tribes were an inconvenience to their neighbours, this would be but a slender reason for breaking down all the barriers of justice and good faith. Many a rich man has thought it very inconvenient, that he could not add the farm of a poor neighbour to his possessions. Many a powerful nation has felt it to be inconvenient to have a weak and dependent state in its neighbourhood, and has therefore forcibly joined the territory of such state to its own extensive domains. But this is done at the expense of honour and character, and is visited by the historian with his severest reprobation….

And as to the learned chimera of imperium in imperio, it is, and always has been, one of the most common things in the world. The whole of modern Germany is nothing else but one specimen after another of imperium in imperio. Italy has an abundance of specimens also. As to our own country, we have governments within governments of all sizes, and for all purposes, from a school district to our great federal union. And where can be the harm of letting a few of our red neighbours, on a small remnant of their own territory, exercise the rights which God has given them? They have not the power to injure us; and, if we treat them kindly and justly, they will not have the disposition. They have not intruded upon our territory, nor encroached upon our rights. They only ask the privilege of living unmolested in the places where they were born, and in possession of those rights, which we have acknowledged and guaranteed….

May a gracious Providence avert from this country the awful calamity of exposing ourselves to the wrath of heaven, as a consequence of disregarding the cries of the poor and defenceless, and perverting to purposes of cruelty and oppression, that power which was given us to promote the happiness of our fellow-men.