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Then as now, the candidates were hardly as evil as the opposition’s claims. Likewise, the mudslingers were not necessarily in the control of the candidates. Adams disclaimed any connection to the accusations made about Mrs. Jackson. Jackson, however, knew for a fact that Adams was responsible, according to press reports quoting “an anonymous source.”7 As for the truth, Adams lamented in his diary, “In the excitement of contested elections and of party spirit, judgment becomes the slave of will. Men of intelligence, talents, and even of integrity on other occasions, surrender themselves up to their passions.”

The bottom line in politics is always a complicated line. In this case, we can actually see that complicated line. It is the eastern border of Texas.

ARKANSAS, OKLAHOMA

SEQUOYAH

The Cherokee Line

Se-Quo-Ya, who invented the alphabet of the Cherokee language … what has become of this remarkable man?… Is he still alive? Or does his venerable head repose beneath some unknown clod of the grand prairie? These are questions that we cannot now satisfactorily answer.

—EMANCIPATOR AND WEEKLY CHRONICLE, DECEMBER 4, 1844

The fact that only one state line preserves a treaty with American Indians reflects both the absence of respect for their lands and the special status those treaties accorded each tribe—not of independent nations, as the Cherokees maintained, but of “dependent domestic nations,” as the Supreme Court ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831). Thus the boundaries in Indian treaties are unaffected by state lines. The one state line that does preserve a treaty with an Indian nation is the line (bent, as it happens) separating Arkansas and Oklahoma. Among those responsible for this line was Sequoyah, a man most remembered for his development of written symbols for the Cherokee language.

Sequoyah and his fellow Cherokee leaders were, in a sense, the Founding Fathers of today’s Cherokee Nation, whose land is now in Oklahoma but had been in the southern Appalachians and upper Tennessee River Valley. European Americans’ Founding Fathers emerged when the progress of the colonists led to their quest for independence from the British. A similar progression also led to American Indians’ quest for independence. Like our Founding Fathers, the Cherokee leaders shared both a desire for freedom and profound disagreements. Sequoyah, like Thomas Jefferson, was not only politically involved but also had a scholarly and inventive mind. Highly revered today, Sequoyah was also, in his own day, like Jefferson, highly reviled.

Sequoyah (ca. 1767-ca. 1843) (photo credit 19.1)

Sequoyah was not, however, the Cherokee Jefferson. Though many aspects of Sequoyah’s story have been challenged as having been mythologized, Sequoyah was not, by any account, the son of a prominent father, as was Jefferson.1 Sequoyah’s father is traditionally said to have been a white man, this being the reason he was also known as George Guess. If so, his father most likely died or moved on, since Sequoyah never learned English.2 Some maintain, however, that Sequoyah was a full-blooded Cherokee who added to his name that of a white man he had killed. According to this view, to assume that Sequoyah’s identity as George Guess indicates he had a white father implies that his great linguistic achievement was racially enabled.3

Unlike Jefferson’s, Sequoyah’s early political ambitions are uncertain. What is certain is that politics then were as convoluted as politics today. It was Jefferson who commenced a policy to relocate Indian populations out beyond the Mississippi River, in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase.4 The Cherokee leaders disagreed on the issue of migration. Recognizing this (having experienced several similar fundamental disagreements), Jefferson sent a message to the leaders, stating:

I understand by the speeches which you have delivered me that there is a difference of disposition among the people of … your nation; some of them desiring to remain on their lands,