Cherokee Chief John Ross Is The Unsung Hero Of 'Jacksonland'
This to me was one of the great undiscovered stories ... the truth is that he and the rest of the Cherokees managed to hold out against pressure to give up their lands, using ... the tools of an emerging democracy. They started their own newspaper — no Indian nation had ever done that before. There was Cherokee in the newspaper, there were also English articles in the newspaper, and they used it as a political tool, because the articles would effectively go viral, they'd be reprinted in other newspapers, and spread across the United States, and get the Cherokee viewpoints out.
The Cherokees also realized that in a democracy they were very badly outnumbered — there were very few of them, they weren't allowed to vote anyway in federal elections, and so they needed white allies. They got them.
They even sued in the United States Supreme Court, and they won. John Marshall, possibly the most famous Chief Justice of all ... ruled in their favor, and stated in a really astonishing ruling that it was blindingly obvious that the Cherokees had the right to govern themselves on their land, and had had that right since before Colonial times. It's a complicated story, but in the end, nothing happened to enforce that ruling. The Cherokees lost, even when they won.
On the Cherokees' willingness to assimilate
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Steve Inskeep is one of the hosts of NPR's Morning Edition. His previous book was Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi. Linda Fittante hide caption
itoggle caption Linda Fittante
Steve Inskeep is one of the hosts of NPR's Morning Edition. His previous book was Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi.
Linda Fittante
This is one of the things that I think makes this a profoundly modern story. We're not dealing with Indian nations who insisted upon their independence absolutely. We're dealing, when we think of the Cherokees, of people who were not entirely happy about the wave of white settlement that had come over the continent, but were willing to be part of this new world, and John Ross particularly was willing to be part of this new world ... it is really powerful to think about that, and read about that — and also heartbreaking, because of what happened.
On Ross's ultimate failure and the the Indian Removal Act
Cherokees did not believe that it was their legal requirement to move, and in the spring of 1838, even as American soldiers were preparing stockades to put them in, to collect them for shipment to the West, it was discovered that Cherokees were out planting corn, assuming they would be there in those same fields in the fall. The removal began anyway, and one of the most memorable letters that survives from that time is a soldier who describes going out into the North Carolina countryside, rounding up hundreds of Cherokees with his men, making them walk along the road. He describes what a terrible ordeal this was, for children or the elderly to walk mile after mile. And he describes there being no sounds at all, except the sounds of thunder, often sounding in the distance, as if to suggest the judgment that awaited the soldiers for this "act of oppression." This is what the soldier himself called it.