A History of the American People

pronunciation and one with grammatical accuracy. '147 During a Cabinet discussion of what
Monroe called the absolute necessity' thatthe Indians should move West of the Mississippi,'
Calhoun, Secretary of War, argued that the great difficulty' was not savagery but preciselythe
progress of the Cherokees in civilisation.' He said there were 15,000 in Georgia, increasing just
as fast as the whites. They were all cultivators, with a representative government, judicial courts, Lancaster schools and permanent property.’ Their ‘principal chiefs,’ he added,write
their own State Papers and reason as logically as most white diplomatists.’
What Calhoun said was true. The Cherokees were advancing and adopting white forms of
social and political organization. Their national council went back to 1792, their written legal
code to 1808. In 1817 they formed a republic, with a senate of thirteen elected for two year
terms, the rest of the council forming the lower house. In 1820 they divided their territory into
eight congressional districts, each mapped and provided with police, courts, and powers to raise
taxes, pay salaries, and collect debts. In 1826 a Cherokee spokesman gave a public lecture in
Philadelphia, describing the system. The next year a national convention drew up a written
constitution, based on America's, giving the vote to all free male citizens' over eighteen, except those of African descent.' The first elections were held in summer 1828. A Supreme Court had
been functioning five years. The first issue of the republic's own paper, the Cherokee Phoenix,
appeared February 28, 1828. Its capital, New Echota, was quite an elaborate place, with a fine
Supreme Court building, a few two-story red-brick homes, including one owned by Joseph ('Rich
Joe') Van, which is still to be found near what is now Chatsworth, Georgia, and neat rows of log
cabins.
The trouble with this little utopia-as the whites saw it-was that it was built as a homogeneous
Indian unit. It mattered not to the whites that this self-contained community virtually eliminated
all the evils whites associated with Indians. The Phoenix campaigned strongly against alcohol
and there was a plan to enforce prohibition. The courts were severe on horse thieves. The
authorities urged all Indians to work and provided the means. There were 2,000 spinning-wheels,
700 looms, thirty-one grist-mills, eight cotton gins, eighteen schools-using English and a new
written version of Cherokee. The 15,000 Indians of this settled community owned 20,000 cattle
and 1,500 slaves, like any other civilized' Georgians. But its very existence, and still more its constitution, violated both state and federal law, and in 1827 Georgia petitioned the federal government toremove' the Indians forthwith. The discovery of gold brought in a rush of white
prospectors and provided a further economic motive. The election of General Jackson at the end
of 1828 sealed the community's fate. In his inaugural address he insisted that the integrity of the
state of Georgia, and the Constitution of the United States, came before Indian interests, however
meritorious. A man who was prepared to wage war against his own people, the South Carolinans,
for the sake of constitutional principles, was not going to let a `utopia of savages' form an
anomaly within a vast and growing nation united in a single system of law and government. And
of course, with hindsight, Jackson was absolutely right. A series of independent Indian republics
in the midst of the United States would, by the end of the 20th century, have turned America into
chaos, with representation at the United Nations, independent foreign policies, endless attempts
to overthrow earlier Indian treaties and territorial demands on all their white neighbors.
Some whites supported the Cherokee Republic at the time. When Congress, in response to the
Georgia petition, decreed that, after January 1, 1830, all state laws applied to Indians, and five
months later passed a Removal Bill authorizing the President to drive any eastern Indians still
organized tribally across the Mississippi, if necessary by force, a group of missionaries
encouraged the Cherokee Republic to challenge the law in the Supreme Court. But in Cherokee