The Epilogue by John Sedgwick

On Politics [not the sentimental view]

Removal is often seen today as the Cherokee Holocaust, an unspeakable tragedy that will define the tribe forever as one consigned to the Trail of Tears. Sadly, that is only too true, but it overlooks the fact that removal was probably inevitable. Twenty-one thousand people were never going to be able to hold on to their territory in the face of mass expansion by a dynamic burgeoning nation that dramatically outnumbered them, possessed military power that had twice defeated the greatest empire on earth, was backed by an economy that was the envy of the world, was convinced it should rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific as its manifest destiny, and completely surrounded them. Whether the Cherokee lands stretched over their original 125,000 square miles or the 78 million acres they were ceded in Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation was never going to survive as an independent, sovereign nation within America’s borders.

The tribe, at its height surely the most dynamic in America, was a glory that deserved far better. Jackson’s implacable demand for removal was heartless, and Georgia’s straight-out land theft by means of a lottery was criminal, but the Cherokee Nation was in no position to resist either. And with the Civil War looming, the American government was never going to help, whatever the Supreme Court ruled.

It was lamentable, but the Cherokee Nation had no future in the east, and probably none anywhere. The only question was what would become of its people. Jackson demanded removal, but presidents before had held out the offer of assimilation, making the Cherokee Americans like anyone else. As an indigenous people the Cherokee were foreign nationals who were determined to remain independent despite the forces of integration that rose up everywhere around them. That was understandable, but hopeless. Rather than face the facts, the Cherokee took refuge in varying degrees of denial, always a temptation when the future appears dire.

In this, they were not well served by either of the two preeminent Cherokee leaders of the day, John Ross and Major Ridge. Their views were diametrically opposed, but similarly detached from reality. The three leading Ridges held to their belief so tightly that they were willing to die for it, and Ross clung to his so fiercely that he seemed to have been complicit in the killings. Their competing attitudes drew on the divisions of class, race, power and money, but at bottom, they may simply have been personal, as befitted a diminutive Scot and an imposing Cherokee who literally did not speak each other’s language. The remarkable evolution of Cherokee society might have united the two men in pride over the nation’s progress and heritage, but it did the opposite, as Major Ridge identified with the prosperous mixed-bloods and Ross with the full-bloods who had been left behind. The rub between them created a national friction that would ultimately explode in flames.

But it didn’t have to, and that was the tragedy. Ross and Ridge had created the modern Cherokee government together and they served it together as its top officials. The had thought as one, but they split over Jackson’s demand for removal, and the gulf  only widened over time. It is the work of politics to resolve such conflicts peacefully, but Cherokee politics was not up to the job. For a society that always operated by consensus, there was little tradition of compromise. The marvelous balance of opposites in the Cherokee cosmology left few means for humans to make adjustments when things went off. Prioritizing stability, society was too threatened by instability to address it meaningfully. The warrior culture offered few gradations between war and peace, all or nothing. When the medicine men proved powerless against smallpox, the Cherokee did not revise their system of medicine, but abandoned it in despair. When the settlers demanded land, the Cherokee blithely ceded it or fought to the death, leaving themselves worse off either way. When the modern ways of the settlers were considered superior to the traditional ones, the traditional ones were either clung to defiantly or discarded like old clothes.

The issue of removal was so stark as to be existential, and seemed to offer only two, mutually exclusive positions. Stay or go. But there were plenty of gentler variations available. If Ross had been wiling to listen, he would have realized that staying was untenable, made plans to leave sooner, sold his people on those plans, greatly reducing hardships when removal was thrust upon them. For their part the Ridges might have seen that the west was hardly a panacea, acknowledged that resistance was legitimate, and worked to make removal more attractive. Few Cherokee could start over as easily  as the Ridges. It didn’t help that Ross was principal; chief for life, insulated from legitimate opposition, or that he responded to the dissent of Major Ridge and his son John by removing them from the government. Rather than try to understand the Ridges, and work with them, Ross declared them traitors who should be shot on sight, ending any discussion. The Ridges too easily turned to outraged indignation when Ross failed to share their point of view. Once the government split into two parties on the issue, only Sequoyah was left to speak for the nation, and his voce was too weak to carry any message of unity. And so politics shifted to that ‘other means’ of General Clausewitz – to war. While Jackson’s removal killed too many Cherokee, their own ensuing civil war, and their attacks on each other in the greater American Civil War, killed far more. . . .the Trail  of Tears had proved to be a long one.