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previous: Chapter 11 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Southern Indians by R. S. Cotterill University of Oklahoma Press Norman, Oklahoma, 1954 The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 13

p223 XII
After Half a Century

The enforced shrinking of their domain in the half-century between 1775 and 1825 had brought to the Southern Indians more spiritual anguish than physical inconvenience. The land ceded, except by the Cherokees, had been hunting grounds that had lost their utility because the hunters had changed their occupation when the hunted disappeared. The game reserve of the South, as of the North, which had been redundant as long as the Indians hunted merely for subsistence, had rapidly vanished in the mass slaughter when they became hunters for trade. Not the loss of their hunting ground but the extinction of the game limited the Southern Indians to an agriculture which had once been only a partial means of support. For a livelihood by farming the twenty-five million acres remaining to the four tribes in 1825 were as sufficient as their vast possessions in 1775 had been for hunting.

In the course of fifty years the Indians had changed their habits but not greatly their habitations. The Cherokees, forced to move many of their towns in Tennessee, most of those in North Carolina, and all in South Carolina, had gradually shifted their homes and their capital to Georgia. But the Creeks still lived on the Coosa, the Tallapoosa, and the Chattahoochee; the Choctaw towns still lay along the upper waters of the Pearl and the Chickasawhay; the Chickasaws clung still to their high divide between p224 the Yazoo and the Tombigbee.⁠1 The Indian towns were as constant in numbers as in location, and, although the Creeks had lost appreciably in the uprising of 1813 and the consequent migration to Florida, the Southern Indian population in 1825 was probably about the same as it had been fifty years before. Of this population the full-bloods, retaining their ancient gregariousness, generally preferred the village life with its social amenities, while the half-bloods were more inclined to "settle out" in search of individual betterment.

In all the four tribes the half-bloods had both multiplied and prospered. Not with superior intelligence, but with fuller understanding, they were better able to cope with and to profit from the chicanery of the white men. They were the chief patrons of the schools, the best farmers, where few were good, lived in the best houses, accumulated the most property, professed the loudest religion, and exhibited the worst morality in the entire Indian country. There was no apparent prejudice against mestizos and none against zambos among any of the Southern Indians except the Cherokees, among whom marriages between Negroes and Indians were prohibited, perhaps as a measure of avoiding the criticism of their white neighbors. Among the Chickasaws, the Colberts; among the Choctaws, the Folsoms and Le Flores; among the Creeks, the McIntoshes, Taitts, and McGillivrays; and among the Cherokees, the Rosses, Vanns, Hickses, Lowrys, and McCoys, were the actual rulers of the tribes. With the passing of Tinebe (1820), Pushmataha (1825), Big Warrior (1825), and Pathkiller (1827), they became the nominal rulers as well.

Only the Cherokees had made any appreciable change in the form of government since 1775. The Cherokees and the Creeks still had their head chiefs; the Chickasaws, their "king." The change of the Choctaws early in the century from head chief to district chiefs was not an innovation but a relapse. Only the Cherokees p225 had changed the ancient council into a legislature, and even there the making of laws was little more than the recording of customs. In 1825, little less than in 1775, the Indians were still governed by customs rather than by laws, for the carrying out of which no tribe, except the Cherokees, had been able, or inclined, to devise the adequate machinery. There is little indication that in the half-century the Southern Indian had become less individualistic or more tolerant of authority than in 1775. But if the governments had not grown strong, neither had they grown expensive, and except for the Cherokees the Indians lived a life enviably free from taxation. The few costs of administration were paid from the annuities which all tribes were receiving in return for surrendered land. In 1825 the Cherokees were receiving from the United States $15,000 a year, of which $9,000 was a permanent annuity and $6,000 due to expire the next year; the Chickasaws, the plutocrats of the South, were drawing $35,000 a year, of which, however, only $3,000 was permanent, while $10,000 expired in 1828 and $20,000 in 1833; the Choctaws were receiving $12,400, of which $5,400 was permanent and $6,000 expired in 1826; and the Creeks were receiving $14,500, of which $4,500 was permanent and $10,000 was to expire in 1829.⁠2 In addition to these sums, some of the leading chiefs received small individual annuities and many more had earned bribes of various amounts. By 1825 the annuities were generally in the form of specie, sent to the different agencies and there distributed to the head chiefs, with whom (so it was often charged) it frequently remained. The Cherokees, after they reformed their government in 1819, received their annuity at the agency and then carried it under guard to their treasury at Fortville.

It is possible that the idea of civilizing the Indians originated in altruism and that only as an afterthought did it occur to its originators that Indian civilization could be used not only to improve the recipient but also to benefit the sponsor. Logically beginning as a proposition for fitting the Indians for a life in the East, it was continued illogically to promote their removal to the West. p226 As a matter of fact, the government of the United States committed itself almost simultaneously to the support of these mutually inconsistent, if not contradictory, policies: in March, 1801, it authorized the spending of $15,000 a year to civilize the Indians in situ, and a month later signed the Georgia Compact foreshadowing removal. The Congress, however, did not hamper the president by actually appropriating any part of the sum it authorized him to spend, thus leaving him free to furnish domestic animals, implements of husbandry, merchandise, and instruction agents to whatever extent he could find the funds.

On March 3, 1819, the Congress of the United States essayed to supplement these activities by authorizing and actually appropriating $10,000 for the employment of capable persons, always of good moral character, to instruct the Indians (both Northern and Southern) in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation, and to teach the Indian children reading, writing, and arithmetic. This cautious appropriation, the President decided, could be best utilized in the support of schools already established and to be established by the various religious denominations and benevolent societies.⁠3

The Indians of the South, while willing to have their children educated to an understanding of the white man's way, were intolerant of the white man's religion, which they considered uselessly encumbered with morality. They were persuaded to accept the missions as the only practicable method of securing the teaching. The first of these Southern Indian missions was that begun among the Cherokees in December, 1801, at Spring Place under the sponsor­ship of the Society of United Brethren, known generally as Moravians. Spring Place was near the Conasauga River and on the Georgia Road. Close by was the home of Joseph Vann, who, with a reputation yet unsullied, was and remained the chief sponsor of the school. Until 1817, Spring Place was the only school in existence among the Southern Indians,⁠4 but in that p227 year the American Board of Foreign Missions established a second at Brainerd among the Cherokees⁠a and the next year a third at Eliot for the Choctaws. Permission to establish Brainerd was secured by Cyrus Kingsbury from the chiefs at Turkey Town, in 1816, where they had assembled in the vain hope of rejecting the treaty to which their untrustworthy delegation had consented at the Chickasaw council house. For the proposed school the United States bought from John McDonald 160 acres of ground on Chickamauga Creek in the eastern outskirts of the present Chattanooga, and there in January, 1817, the missionaries began erecting their buildings: a mission house, a schoolhouse, a dining hall and kitchen, a gristmill, sawmill, barn, stable, and (for the boys) five log cabins. By May 18, Brainerd had forty-seven pupils and fifty acres of ground under cultivation.⁠5

Eliot was located about three miles south of the Yalobusha River, some thirty miles above its junction with the Yazoo. It was named for the noted Massachusetts apostle to the Indians. By 1820 it had sixty acres of cleared land, a horse mill, a joiner-and‑blacksmith shop, 22 other buildings, a wagon, 2 carts, 2 plows, 7 horses, a yoke of oxen, 220 cattle, 60 hogs, and a keelboat, all valued at $11,478.⁠6 From these statistics it becomes evident that whatever difficulties the missionaries had in surpassing religion or receiving the three R's, they were success­fully setting the unemulating Choctaws an example of thrift.

Anyone cynically inclined would not fail to notice the great increase in missionary ardor after the President's decision to subsidize the missions. Three missions were established before 1820; eighteen were added by 1826. It would appear from the statistics available that the Choctaws most approved, or least resisted, the missions, having among them nearly half of the entire number;⁠7 p228 that the Creeks were the last and most reluctant to admit either teaching or preaching as was shown by the precarious existence among them of but one school;⁠8 that the small Chickasaw nation was perhaps academically overstocked with two schools;⁠9 that the Cherokee schools were the best equipped in the Indian South;⁠10 that at the close of 1825 the schools had ninety-six teachers ministering to some six hundred "scholars"; and that the United States was underwriting their efforts to the extent of $7,280 a year.

What access of civilization resulted from this vigorous plowing of the vineyard is problematical. The Indians in 1825 were certainly more agriculturally inclined, but this oblique approach to civilization resulted less from propaganda and formal instruction than from the exhaustion of their game supply. There is little evidence that the missionaries were qualified to give, and still less that the Indian children were inclined to accept, an agricultural training which they were required to exemplify by work at the missions themselves.

It seems clear that the missions were much more success­ful in teaching weaving, sewing, and other household arts to the girls than in imparting a knowledge of farming and mechanics to the boys. Moreover, the "scholars" of both sexes had as noticeable a tendency to backslide in education as their white neighbors had in religion. But whatever their lack of enthusiasm for vocational training, they preferred it to the cultural education in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The teachers, being without knowledge of the Indian languages and, with rare exception, devoid of any p229 wish to learn them, taught only in English pupils who rarely knew any English at all. Under such conditions reading became a matter of memory without meaning; writing, of copying without comprehension; and arithmetic, an exercise in misunderstanding. Small wonder that the "scholars" were addicted to running away from school.

In October, 1820, the Cherokee legislature enacted that "whereas much inconvenience and expense have devolved on the missionaries from the scholars running away from school," they should be paid in such cases for the clothing, board, and tuition of the absentees. One of the "inconveniences" resulting from truancy was that it left the teachers to do all the mission work themselves. A considerable part of the avidity with which the Cherokee children learned the alphabet which Sequoyah invented (1822) was due to the release it brought them from the hideous and almost hopeless task of learning to read and write English.⁠11

Practically all the half-bloods spoke English, but the language they used showed few traces of missionary influence. The linguistic knowledge of the full-bloods was generally limited to the fields of profanity and obscenity, in both of which they revealed to the astonished and embarrassed missionaries a remarkable virtuosity. To this ability to speak English, if such be considered an evidence of advancing civilization, may be added other indications of Indian improvement. They had adopted the American dress, although their manner of combining the various items was not always orthodox and in the summer they often relapsed into their ancient approach to nudity; the clothing of the women conformed to white standards better than did that of the men. In comparison with their condition fifty years earlier, they lived in better houses, log cabins for the masses, quite often frame houses for the half-bloods, and an occasional brick for the well-to‑do. They had more constant food, more furniture, more implements and utensils, and more creature comforts of various kinds. All these material things they had gained from the Americans, and the gain was not small. Perhaps their greatest intangible gain, whether resulting p230 from American pressure or from their own improved understanding, had been the total abandonment of intertribal war.

On two vital points they had remained unchanged, unimproved. They had not accepted the white man's religion or his idea of holding land in severalty. Many of the half-bloods, perhaps the greater part of them, were affiliated with the frontier religious denominations, but the full-bloods remained almost to a man skeptical and intolerant. The Indians, especially the elders, were glad to receive teachers for their children, provided the teacher did not turn preacher. The Creeks, indeed, in their one school at Withington refused any religious instruction or exhortation.⁠12 In 1825 the Southern Indians were as strongly communistic as in 1775; the development of agriculture among them had not altered their conception of land as a tribal possession or inclined them to the acceptance of any private owner­ship thereof. Tribal owner­ship permitted private utilization and private control but forbade private alienation. Among the Cherokees by positive law, and in the other tribes by equally positive custom, an occupant of land could transfer his holdings only with tribal consent. To the Southern Indians, tribal owner­ship of land seemed to be the foundation of tribal unity; private owner­ship an evidence, if not a cause, of tribal disintegration. Their tribal land was to them not a property but a home. This home they were unwilling by private owner­ship to exploit, by cession to divide, or by emigration to abandon.

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The Author's Notes:

1 C. W. Long, acting sub-agent of the Chickasaws, in the course of a ten-page description of Chickasaw conditions in 1824, said that the Chickasaws lived in four districts: Pontacock, ten miles north of the agency, where the old town was abandoned; Chesafaliah, ten miles northeast of the agency; Chuquafalia, four miles east of Chesafaliah, and Big Town (where the whole nation had lived till 1789), four miles from Chuquafalia (I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Long to McKenney, November 5, 1824).

2 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, statement of annuities by William Lee, second auditor, October 14, 1800.

3 The government undertook to pay two‑thirds of the cost of the buildings in these schools, and to give them an annual appropriation proportioned to the number of students (I. O. R., Letter Book D, 378; 48 Cong., 2 sess., II, pt. 2, Sen. Doc. No. 95).

4 In 1803 the Presbyterian missionary with money collected from the northern churches established two schools, on Sale Creek and on the Hiwassee. Both died in 1810 (Brown, op. cit., 468).

5 Jedidiah Morse, Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs, 159. Brown, op. cit., 480; Marion L. Starkey, The Cherokee Nation, 34. Brainerd was named for Rev. David Brainerd.

6 Morse, op. cit., 185.

7 Of the nine Choctaw schools, only Eliot and Mayhew were of any considerable size. Mayhew, established in 1822 by the American Board of Foreign Missions, possessed a frame dining room, four log houses, four cabins, three store­houses, a joiner-and‑blacksmith shop, three stables, and two cribs (Morse, op. cit., 192); W. A. Love, "The Mayhew Mission to the Choctaws," Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Vol. XI, 363‑402.).

8 Withington, the only Creek school, was established in 1823 by the Baptist General Convention.

9 The two Chickasaw schools were Monroe, established by the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia in 1821, and Charity Hall, established by the Cumberland Missionary Society in 1821. The former was suspended in 1829.

10 Of the eight Cherokee schools at the close of 1825, Brainerd was the largest, the Valley Towns second, and Spring Place third. The Valley towns school was established (in the southwest corner of North Carolina) by the Baptist General Convention in 1820. An excellent account of the Cherokee missions is R. S. Walker, Torchlights to the Cherokees. The Cherokee schools were distributed thus: four in Georgia and two each in Alabama and Tennessee.

11 Probably the best account of this "Cherokee Cadmus" is Grant Foreman's Sequoyah.

12 I. O. R., Retired Classified Files, Webb to Capers, May 25, 1823; ibid., Smith to –––––, September 20, 1825.

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Thayer's Note:

a Further details are given by Grant Foreman in The Five Civilized Tribes, p354.

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