An American Betrayal

Review by Elliott West

No episode in American Indian history is better known than the Cherokee “trail of tears,” the forced removal of about 16,000 persons from the hills of Georgia to Indian Territory in 1838-39. Often the story is told as a morality play. The state of Georgia and the federal government under Andrew Jackson are the bully boys and the Cherokees the victims whose courageous, brilliantly led resistance finally was not enough to save them from exile.

The episode was genuinely tragic, but as retold by Daniel Blake Smith, the events leading up to removal were ones of political complexity, moral dilemmas, and fascinating, if troubling, conflicts around a people’s search for identity and integrity.

Smith’s focus is not the usual one—the conflict between the Cherokees and the state and federal authorities—but rather the anguished divisions within the Cherokees. His story’s principal characters are John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. This pair, along with Ridge’s father, Major Ridge, typically are condemned as signatories of the Treaty of New Echota, the document authorizing removal over the objection of the vast majority of Cherokees.

If villains, however, Ridge and Boudinot were complicated ones. Pursuing assimilation with the white world, they were educated in New England and married daughters of prominent white families. Back in Georgia they applied their education and considerable skills to hurrying the work of assimilation. This was meant to unify and preserve the Cherokees as a people and to protect their ancestral home. They thought that when white authorities saw the Cherokees’ accomplishments and adoption of many white institutions—Boudinot founded the Cherokee Phoenix, the newspaper in the new syllabary—they would accept fundamentals of tribal culture and would leave their land unmolested.

Their overall goal was to avoid the very thing they later were disgraced for abetting—removal. A tidal change came with the gritty realities of the encroaching frontier. The avarice of officials and of invading white farmers convinced them that losing their homeland was likely. They were equally appalled at how contact with whites brought degradation and the loss of the best of older values of their people. These paragons of assimilation became defenders of essential Cherokee tradition.

This posed a terrible dilemma. Should the Cherokees fight to keep the land of their ancestors but lose their identity as a people, or accept the loss of their land to preserve who they were? John and Major Ridge and Boudinot chose removal, which left them at odds with the huge majority of their people. With admirable economy Smith traces their inner and political journey and tells as well the more familiar events leading to the Treaty of New Echota and the trail of tears. He casts new light on other characters, like Samuel Worcester, the clergyman who was both an ardent opponent of removal and John Ridge’s closest friend.

The course followed by the Ridges and Boudinot would spawn bitter divisions among the Cherokees that would last for generations. For the three men, the end came soon. Condemned by a tribal court, all were assassinated on the same day in June 1839.