Nation v. Georgia, the Marshall Court ruled that the tribe did not constitute a nation within the
meaning of the US Constitution and so could not bring suit. The missionaries then counselled
resistance and on September 15, 1831 eleven of them were convicted of violating state law and
sentenced to four years' hard labor. Nine had their convictions overturned by submitting and
swearing an oath of allegiance to Georgia. Two appealed to the Supreme Court and had their
convictions overturned. But Georgia, encouraged by President Jackson, defied the Court's ruling.
The end came over the next few years, brought about by a combination of force, harassment-
stopping of annuities, cancellations of debts-and bribery. The Treaty of New Echota, signed in
December 1835 by a greedy minority led by Chief Major Ridge, ceded the last lands in return for
$5.6 million, the republic broke up, and the final Cherokee stragglers were herded across the
Mississippi by US cavalry three years later.
If Georgia hated Indians with self-serving hypocritical genuflexions to the rule of law, the
humbug of Arkansas was even more striking. It was the keenest of all the states to assert the
superiority of white 'civilized' values over the savage' Cherokees, what its legislature denounced as arestless, dissatisfied, insolent and malicious tribe, engaged in constant intrigues.' Testimony
from anyone with a quarter or more Indian blood was inadmissible in Arkansas courts. The state
operated a system of apartheid with laws prohibiting dealings between whites and Indians. Yet
ironically Arkansas was the most socially backward part of the United States. Its whites tended
to be either solitaries-isolated hunters, trappers, and primitive farmers-or clannish, self-sufficient,
and extremely violent. Its 14,000 inhabitants got a territorial government in 1819, but its courts
and legislature were ruled by duels as much as by law or debate. In 1819 the brigadier general
commanding the militia was killed in a duel and five years later the same happened to a superior
court judge, his assassin being his colleague on the bench and the occasion a squalid game of
cards. The Flanagan clan respected no law, human or divine, but were slaves to their own selfish lusts and brutal habits.' The Wylie clan were illiterate,wonderfully ignorant' and as full of superstition as their feeble minds were capable of, believing in Witches, Hobgoblins, Ghosts, Evil Eyes ... They did not farm, had no fences round their shanty habitations and appeared to have lived a roving, rambling life ever since the Battle of Bunker Hill when they fled to this wilderness.' Yet Arkansas was harder on the Indians than any other territory or state. The sight of Indian families, expelled from Georgia and Arkansas, heading west with their meager possessions was not uncommon in the 1830s, a harsh symbol of the age of mass settlement. In winter 1831, in Memphis, Tennessee, Comte Alexis de Tocqueville, in America to study the penal system on behalf of the French government, watched a band of Choctaws being marshaled across the Mississippi. He wrote:The Indians had their families with them, and they
brought in their train the wounded and the sick, with children newly-born and old men on the
point of death.' He added: Three or four thousand soldiers drive before them the wandering race of aborigines. These are followed by the [white] pioneers who pierce the woods, scare off the beasts of prey, explore the course of the inland streams and make ready the triumphal march of civilisation across the desert.' Under President Jackson, he noted, all was done lawfully and constitutionally. The Indians were deprived of their rights, enjoyed since time immemorial,with
singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood and without
violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world.' It was, he concluded,
impossible to exterminate a race with `more respect for the laws of humanity.’
Jackson finished the Indians east of the Mississippi, and effectively laid down the ground rules
which insured that they would not survive as substantial units west of it either. But he did not