How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [61]
Everyone was thrilled except, initially, the missionaries. While Sequoyah’s creation clearly contributed to Cherokee literacy, it did so in a way that also contributed to Cherokee independence. “By the use of this alphabet,” one missionary wrote, “so unlike any other, the Cherokees cut themselves from the sympathies and respect of the intelligent of other nations.”7
As with the shamans, this pocket of dissension was quickly overwhelmed by an avalanche of admiration and support. By 1825 a report to the secretary of war stated that the Cherokees “are in advance of all other tribes. They may be considered as a civilized people. Their march has been rapid.”
After acquiring special printing fonts, the Cherokees began churning out a tribal newspaper. Soon English-language newspapers were running stories about the new Cherokee alphabet. Sequoyah was now a national celebrity.
His fame coincided with increased conflicts with white settlers in the Arkansas land (to which they had agreed to migrate in order to escape such conflicts). Settlements were springing up in an area known as Lovely’s Purchase. Years back, Indian agent William Lovely had bought land from the Osages (in a legally dubious transaction) to serve as buffer between the Cherokees who had accepted President Jefferson’s invitation to migrate and the local, resentful Osages. By the time the 1817 treaty was signed, Lovely had passed away, but his widow, Persis Lovely, remained on their homestead. Hence, in the 1817 treaty, the United States promised that “all citizens of the United States, except P. Lovely, who is to remain where she lives during life, [will be] removed from within the bounds as above named.” The federal government, however, was yet to fulfill its promise to remove the whites from within the stipulated boundaries.
Seeking enforcement of the treaty, the Cherokees sent a delegation to Washington in early 1828 that included, as a shrewd public relations move, their nationally known figure, Sequoyah. The delegates met in several sessions with the secretary of war and once with President John Quincy Adams. Sequoyah was a big hit. He was interviewed (via translators) by scholars and sat for his portrait. President Adams himself noted in his diary, “George Guess is the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, by which, I told him, he had rendered a great service to his nation in opening to them a new fountain of knowledge.” The only thing absent from everyone’s good wishes to Sequoyah and his fellow Cherokees was any expression of enforcing the treaty.
Indeed, even when the government had been negotiating the 1817 treaty, plans were afoot for the future removal of the Cherokees from the land being promised. In 1816 Andrew Jackson’s fellow negotiator, Jonathan Meigs Sr., wrote to the secretary of war:
[The Cherokees] are aware, even if placed in the west of Arkansas, that they must probably make cession of lands to the United States in that country, but they presume that they shall be less pressed on that subject there than here; and to guard against, or rather to provide for such a contingency, it has been suggested to me by an intelligent Cherokee that in allotting a tract of land for them … to have only three definite lines drawn to designate such allotment, leaving the boundary westward open as a wilderness, so that as they make cessions on the east side, they may make proportionate advances on the west.
Quite possibly some Cherokees were aware of the government’s plan; if not, clearly the Arkansas chiefs suspected it, since they instructed the delegation to Washington not to make any concessions of land.
Initially, President Adams advised his secretary