How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [62]
[Secretary of War] Barbour called for a decision upon the application of the Arkansas Cherokee Indians. Westward of the spot on which they are located is a large tract which goes by the name of Lovely’s Purchase.… White people have discovered that the land is excellent and they are swarming thither like bees. They are covering it with unlicensed settlements, and the people of the territory are loudly claiming that the land should be offered for sale. This collision between the just and the reasonable demands of our own people and the pledge seemingly given to the Indians is very embarrassing. I observed, however, to Mr. Barbour that, as the pledge in its utmost extent assured to the Indians only an outlet, or, in other words a right of way, they might be informed that in the grants of lands upon Lovely’s Purchase a right of peaceful way would be reserved for them.
The following week, Arkansas’s territorial delegate (and future senator) Ambrose Sevier complained to the president that the new treaty would be the second time that the eastern end of Arkansas had been given to Indian peoples. The first reduction, in 1824, had resulted from the fact that General Jackson, making treaties right and left after the War of 1812, inadvertently had granted to the Choctaws land upon which whites had already settled. This second reduction resulted from a compromise that gave the Cherokees the bulk of Lovely’s Purchase. Under the proposed compromise, the upper half of Arkansas’s western border would shift eastward to the corner of Missouri, then angle from that point through Lovely’s Purchase to the Arkansas River (the southern extent of the Cherokee lands). The lower half of the Arkansas border would then also shift eastward to connect with the upper half, resulting in today’s bent western border.
1828 treaty: Arkansas boundary adjustments
Arkansas’s territorial delegate wasn’t the only one who objected. The Cherokee delegates opposed the treaty as well. Their instructions were clear: get the government to abide by its promise to remove the whites from Lovely’s Purchase and do not cede any land. But the government made it equally clear that it would only abide by that promise if the Cherokees moved further west.
Some of the delegates suggested that they simply go home. That too, however, had risks. The 1828 presidential campaign was in full swing. Jackson had been nominated for a rematch against Adams. Should Jackson win, the Cherokees would lose; Jackson was not a compromiser. If any of the English-speaking members of the Cherokee delegation read Washington’s Daily National Journal while in town, they may have encountered its article on Jackson. Referring to the War of 1812 battle at Horseshoe Bend, when Jackson faced the British-allied Red Sticks, the article stated what the Cherokee delegates no doubt already knew: “The battle had ended—the poor untutored, misguided, and deluded savages had thrown down their arms and sued for mercy; but Jackson orders them to be exterminated; and keeps up the massacre until the shades of night stay the wave of human slaughter.… Cold is their bed of clay, while Jackson is worshipped as a God.”8 Many voters subscribed to the view of the Carolina Observer that Jackson had displayed patriotism “in the defense of his country … controlling and directing the irregular valor of militia … with which he chastised the cruelty and overawed the ferocity of the Indians.”
The Cherokee delegates took the deal.
When news of the treaty reached the Arkansas Cherokees, the esteem in which Sequoyah had been held evaporated. To say that the Cherokees were upset would be an understatement. “Poles have been erected,” the Arkansas Gazette reported, “in front of the houses of the delegation, on which their heads are to be exhibited as soon as they return.” Learning of this, Sequoyah did not go home. He sought refuge among the Cherokees still living in Georgia.9 By October there were news reports that, though