Champions of the Cherokees: Evan and John B. Jones [Course Book ed.] 9781400860319

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
CHAPTER I. Mission to the Cherokees, 1817–1821
CHAPTER II. The High Cost of Educating the Cherokees, 1821-1827
CHAPTER III. Competing with Methodists and Medicine Men, 1827–1833
CHAPTER IV. Trial for Murder, 1833
CHAPTER V. Secret Aid to Cherokee Resistance, 1833-1836
CHAPTER VI. Evangelism and Resistance from Tennessee, 1836–1838
CHAPTER VII. Removal and Expulsion, 1838-1841
CHAPTER VIII. Schools, Evangelism, Publishing, 1841–1844
CHAPTER IX. Bushyhead’s Slave, the Starr Gang, and Frye’s Rebellion, 1844-1846
CHAPTER X. Evan Jones in Defeat, 1846–1847
CHAPTER XI. Separating the Churches from Slavery, 1848-1852
CHAPTER XII. Evangelism, Education, and the Feud with Willard Upham, 1852-1856
CHAPTER XIII. Pro-Slavery, Anti-Slavery, 1856–1860
CHAPTER XIV. The Joneses in the Civil War, 1860-1865
CHAPTER XV. The Joneses and Cherokee Reconstruction, 1865-1870
CHAPTER XVI. John Β. Jones as Federal Agent, 1870-1874
Epilogue
Bibliographical Notes
Index

Citation preview

Champions of the Cherokees

Champions of the Cherokees EVAN AND JOHN B. JONES

William G. McLoughlin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, NewJersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McLoughlin, William Gerald. Champions of the Cherokees : Evan and John B. Jones / William G. McLoughlin. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Cherokee Indians—Missions. 2. Cherokee Indians—Government relations. 3. Jones, Evan, 1788-1873. 4. Jones, John Buttrick, 1824-1876. 5. Missionaries—Southern States—Biography. 6. Baptists—Missions—Southern States—History. I. Title E99.C5J625 1989 266'.6'089975022—dc20 [B] 89-33171 ISBN 0-691-04770-7 (alk. paper) Publication of this book has been aided by the Whitney Darrow Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Sabon Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

This Book is Dedicated to the Memory of Omar Mercado (1948-1987)— a teacher, chess player, and lover of the Spanish classics, who fought as a young man to free his country from a dictator and who died defending his country from an invasion by the proxy army of a foreign nation. A hero.

It is impossible to civilize Indians. There was never a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization. It is not in their nature. They are destined to extinction.. . . I do not think they are, as a race, worth preserving. I consider them as essentially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race which is now taking their place on this continent. They are not an improvable breed, and their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world. In point of fact, they are rapidly disappearing and ... in fifty years from this time there will not be any of them left. —Henry Clay, speaking as a member of the Cabinet, December 25,1825 Christmas Day

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgments

xii

Abbreviations

xiii

INTRODUCTION

3

CHAPTER I

Mission to the Cherokees, 1817-1821

9

CHAPTER II

The High Cost of Educating the Cherokees, 1821-1827

32

CHAPTER III

Competing with Methodists and Medicine Men, 1827—1833

64

CHAPTER IV

Trial for Murder, 1833

97

CHAPTER V

Secret Aid to Cherokee Resistance, 1833-1836

118

CHAPTER VI

Evangelism and Resistance from Tennessee, 1836-1838

143

CHAPTER VII

Removal and Expulsion, 1838-1841

171

CHAPTER VIII

Schools, Evangelism, Publishing, 1841—1844

203

CHAPTER IX

Bushyhead's Slave, the Starr Gang, and Frye's Rebellion, 1844-1846

230

CHAPTER X

Evan Jones in Defeat, 1846—1847

257

CHAPTER XI

Separating the Churches from Slavery, 1848-1852

276

viii · Contents CHAPTER XII Evangelism, Education, and the Feud with Willard Upham, 1852-1856

298

CHAPTER XIII Pro-SlaveryjAnti-Slavery, 1856-1860

337

CHAPTER XIV

The Joneses in the Civil War, 1860-1865

377

CHAPTER XV The Joneses and Cherokee Reconstruction, 1865-1870

417

CHAPTER XVI John B. Jones as Federal Agent, 1870-1874

445

EPILOGUE

484

Bibliographical Notes

485

Index

489

Illustrations (After page 256)

Evan Jones (1788-1873) and his son, John Buttrick Jones (1824—1876). (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) Lucius Bolles (1779-1844). (Courtesy of the American Baptist Historical Society, Rochester, New York.) Lewis Downing (18??—1872). (Courtesy of Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.) Heman Lincoln (1779-1869). (Courtesy of the American Baptist Histor­ ical Society, Rochester, New York.) Jesse Bushyhead (1804-1844). (From a painting belonging to Mrs. T. W. McSpadden, courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) John Ridge (1803—1839). (From a McKenney and Hall lithograph made from a painting by Charles Bird King in 1826. Courtesy of the Smithson­ ian Institution.) Elias Boudinot (1802—1839). (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical So­ ciety.) Stand Watie (1806-1871). (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Soci­ ety.) John Ross (1790-1866). (Courtesy of the Gilcrease Institute, Tulsa, Oklahoma.) Members of the Southern Cherokee delegation. (Courtesy of the Okla­ homa Historical Society.) Dog-trot log cabin with double stone chimneys and double porches, typ­ ical of the homes of the more well-to-do Cherokees. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) A dog-trot house with stick-and-wattle chimneys, typical of the homes of the average Cherokee. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) Rose Cottage, home of John Ross. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) Home of one of the missionaries of Park Hill. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.)

χ · List of Illustrations The Joseph Vann home. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.) The home of John Murrell. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Soci­ ety.) Cherokee Male Seminary. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Soci­ ety.) Cherokee Female Seminary. (Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Soci­ ety.) Flier for the Indian International Fair of 1879. (Courtesy of Western His­ tory Collections, Oklahoma University.) MAP

Towns and preaching places on the itinerant circuit, drawn by Evan Jones. (From the Baptist Missionary Magazine, August 1837.)

151

Tables

2.1 Valley Towns Mission Staff and Salaries, 1826

53

2.2

61

Valley Towns Staff Budget, 1828

6.1 Native Assistants, Preachers, and Exhorters of the Baptist Mission among the Cherokees, 1822-1839

146

6.2 Comparative Table of Mission Converts among the Chero­ kees, 1800-1838

147

6.3 Preaching Places on the Circuit Traveled by Evan Jones and Jesse Bushyhead, 1837-1838 152 8.1 Cherokee Baptist Churches in the Cherokee Nation West, 1832-1860

209

9.1 Cherokee Mission Expenses, 1841-1846

245

12.1 Cherokee Baptist Churches and Branch Churches in the Western Nation, 1834—1861 12.2

Northern Baptist Missionaries and Native Assistants, Mission Churches, and Preaching Stations, 1839-1861

303 305

12.3 Cherokee Contributions to the Baptist Missionary Society (ABMU), 1850-1857

308

12.4 Dollar Value of Cherokee Contributions in Food and For­ age to Protracted Meetings in 1849, as Estimated by Evan Jones

309

12.5

Buildings Erected by Members of the Churches of the BaptistMission

12.6 Salary Budgets for the Baptist Mission

311 330

14.1 Estimated Church Membership among the Cherokees, 1860 383 15.1 Northern Baptist Churches Founded or Reconstituted by John B. Jones and Cherokee Native Ministers, 1866-1872

434

Acknowledgments

IT HAS BEEN SAID that the law is an adversarial profession, medicine is a secretive profession, and scholarship is a cooperative profession. In the course of the fifteen years of research that lie behind this book, I have benefited from the cooperation of many persons. Their help was invalu­ able and essential. I wish to give special thanks to thoughtful colleagues in the field of Native American history—Mary E. Young of Rochester University (who read the whole manuscript and provided astute critical suggestions for improvement), Ray Fogelson of the University of Chicago (who helped me with insights on the Keetoowah Society), Walter S. Conser, Jr., at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (who added to my understanding of racism), and James Baird of Oklahoma State Uni­ versity (who taught me about clan relationships). I am also deeply grate­ ful to James K. Owens, Director of the Boston Branch of the National Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts (and his cooperative staff) for assis­ tance in locating important archival material. Among many people with special interest and knowledge in this area, I extend my thanks especially to Dan McPike, Sarah Erwin, and Marie Keene of the Gilcrease Institute; Mary Lee Boyle, William Welge, and Rella Looney of the Oklahoma Historical Society; John Aubrey of the Newberry Library; Donald Derwit and Nathan Binder of the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma; Sidney Huttman of the University of Tulsa; George Stevenson of the North Carolina State Ar­ chives; Mary Creech and Elizabeth Marx of the Moravian Archives, Win­ ston-Salem, North Carolina; William H. Braekney and Susan Eltscher of the Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York; Dolores Sumner of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma; and the staff of the Cherokee Library, Cherokee History Museum, Qualla, North Carolina. Finally, I owe a particular debt to the late A. D. Lester of Westville, Oklahoma, who generously loaned me data from his research on Evan Jones, and to my wife, Virginia Duffy McLoughlin, whose own interest in the Cherokees and the Joneses contributed importantly to making this venture enjoyable.

Abbreviations

ABCFM

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Papers (Congregational-Presbyterian missionaries), at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ABHS

American Baptist Historical Society Papers at the society, Rochester, New York. Most of the letters of Evan and John B. Jones and the other missionaries to the Cherokees are located here, as are the papers of the Mission Board, the Executive Committee, and the various Cor­ responding Secretaries.

ABMU

After 1845 the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions changed its name to the American Baptist Mission Un­ ion. Letters to and from the Cherokee missionaries are filed with the ABMU papers at ABHS.

AR CIA (date)

Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, published annually (the year after the reports were writ­ ten) in Washington, D.C. These reports include the re­ ports of the federal agents for each tribe.

ASP ι or π

American State Papers, Indian Affairs, vols, ι and n, ed­ ited by Walter Lowrie et al. (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832, 1834).

BCW

Baptist Christian Watchman (and other titles), Boston.

BMM

Baptist Missionary Magazine (Boston).

Gilcrease The Thomas Gilcrease Institute, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Most of the papers of Chief John Ross as well as the Grant Foreman Papers are in this collection. LDL

Latter Day Luminary (Philadelphia). Cherokee mission­ ary letters from 1818 to 1826 are printed in this maga­ zine.

Newberry The Newberry Library, Chicago. OHS

Oklahoma Historical Society and Oklahoma State Li­ brary, Oklahoma City.

xiv · Abbreviations Payne Papers

The papers of John Howard Payne, at Newberry.

Ross Papers

The papers of John Ross, at Gilcrease (unless otherwise cited as Gary Moulton, ed., The Papers of Chief John Ross [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984]).

WHC

Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. Most of the papers of Stand Watie and the Ridge and Boudinot families are located here.

GOVERNMENT MICROFILM

The government microfilm series cited most frequently in this volume fall into two groups: those from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, and those from the Office of the Secretary of War, Record Group 107. M-15 Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Letters Sent by the Sec­ retary of War Relating to Indians Affairs, 1800-1824. (Letterbooks, paginated.) M-21 Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Letters Sent by the Of­ fice of Indian Affairs, 1824-1832. (Letterbooks pagi­ nated.) M-22

Office of the Secretary of War, RG 107: Register of Let­ ters Received, Main Series, 1800-1870. (Frame numbers given as #1341, etc.)

M-208

Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Records of the Chero­ kee Indian Agency, Tennessee, 1801-1835. (Arranged by date; no pagination, no frame numbers.)

M-221

Office of the Secretary of War, RG 107: Letters Received by the Secretary of War, Main Series, 1801-1870. (Frame numbers given.)

M-222

Office of the Secretary of War, RG 107: Letters Received by the Secretary of War (Unregistered), 1789—1861. (Frame numbers given.)

M-234

Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824-1881. (Frame numbers given.)

M-271

Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Letters Received by the Secretary of War Relating to Indian Affairs, 1800-1823. (Frame numbers given.)

M-668

Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75: Ratified Indian Trea­ ties. (Frame numbers given.)

Champions of the Cherokees

Introduction I suppose you know that the fullbloods are at least three-quarters of this Nation. To prevent them from being crushed, I would make any sacrifice. —John B. Jones

IN THE nineteenth century, missionaries were heroes. In fact, most churchgoing Americans considered them far more heroic than the frontier heroes we honor today—Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, Buf­ falo Bill, and the rest. The latter were considered merely Indian killers doing perhaps a necessary but nonetheless a nasty job at the edge of American civilization. The missionaries, however, were philanthropists and servants of God, dedicated to helping the Indians improve themselves and find God. Frontier Indian hunters went West to obtain good land and get rich; missionaries, their wives and children, went West to live a life of self-sacrifice, deprivation, and loneliness. Indian fighters spent only a short part of their lives killing Indians; missionaries devoted their whole lives to uplifting them. Missionaries were honored for their lives of hard­ ship; churchgoers sent them clothes, books, and special items of food not available on the frontier; they also gave their pennies, nickels, and dimes to support the missionary societies that paid the salaries of these heroic men and women. Indian hunters were considered uncouth and more than half-savage themselves—probably as much in need of moral uplift as the Indians they killed. Today white Americans have forgotten about the peaceful heroes of the West and remember only their warriors. Perhaps in that way they are like the Indians. This book is about two extraordinary missionaries to the Indians, a father and son, who lived among the Cherokees for fifty years. In addition to evaluating their successes and failures (to assess their heroism), the book examines the Cherokees' efforts to understand the missionaries. Just what did these whitemen offer them, and what did they expect in return? Clearly they expected to make changes in the Indians' way of life, but were those changes for the better or for the worse? The Joneses were extraordinary because the Cherokees came to see them not as enemies of their way of life but as friends devoted to cham­ pioning their rights and their autonomy. In order to win their confidence,

4 · Introduction the Joneses had to risk their own lives, careers, and reputations, for it was not considered appropriate for missionaries to take the side of the Indians against the government of the United States. What seems heroic in the Joneses today would have seemed, had it been fully known then to the Baptist churchgoers who supported them, eccentric, if not misguided. Hence it required some duplicity on the part of these agents of the Lord to become heroes both to the Indians and to the pious whites in the years 1821 to 1876. One of the more tortuous issues the Joneses had to deal with was black slavery. Their careers spanned the years when the Baptist denomination became permanently divided over this issue. Furthermore, the Cherokees were "Southerners," and had adopted the institution of black chattel slav­ ery before the Joneses arrived in their land. Coming from Philadelphia (by way of Wales) Evan Jones had no sympathy for slavery, but in 1821 his denomination had not yet decided whether slavery was ordained of God or cursed by him. Missionaries were supposed to be apolitical—to save souls, not to meddle in politics. Until the abolition movement began in 1831, slavery was considered a political, not a moral, issue. After 1831, everything changed. By 1845 the Baptist denomination had split into Northern and Southern wings. Evan Jones and his son John (then just turning twenty-one) were anomalies in remaining Northern missionaries to a slaveholding people. Ultimately they had to decide whether they could permit Cherokee converts who held slaves to remain members of their mission churches. In fact, they faced even worse problems when Abraham Lincoln was elected, and the Cherokee Nation had to decide whether to side with the Union or the Confederate States of America. One measure of their heroism is that between them they were expelled from the Cherokee Nation four times. Only two of these expulsions stemmed from their anti-slavery position. Evan Jones was twice expelled by the federal government for assisting the Cherokees in their long resis­ tance to Andrew Jackson's policy of Indian removal after 1830, a policy on which the Baptist Mission Board reversed itself as drastically as it re­ versed itself on the sinfulness of slavery. In fact, the story of the Joneses dramatizes the story of America in the middle years of the nineteenth century, for in its broadest aspects "the Indian problem" was simply an­ other way of dealing with "the white American problem," namely, who was a true American and how should a true American act, think, and believe? This question lay at the heart of nineteenth-century nationalism. Indian missionaries were more than soul winners; they were interpret­ ers of American culture. Their vocation was to "Americanize" the Indi­ ans. But in order to do this, they had first to understand what it was to be an American. Because white Americans did not know how to answer this question, it is not surprising that red Americans had difficulty under-

Introduction · 5 standing what was expected of them. The missionaries, caught between two cultures, white and red (or three cultures if one divides white America into North and South; five cultures if one further divides the United States into East and West), had the most difficult time of all. They were sup­ posed to be expounding a religion that transcended race, section, and cul­ ture. But few could escape the trammels of ethnocentrism. Christian missionaries from the Northern half of the United States told the Cherokees after 1831 that slavery was a sin and that no good Chris­ tian, or good American, should support that institution. TheJoneses were ordered by their mission board to expel all slaveholding Cherokees from their mission churches. At the same time, the Southern Baptist and Southern Methodist missionaries told the Cherokees that slavery was or­ dained of God, a blessing to America, and that it was sinful to make slaveholding a test of evangelical church membership. This dilemma was com­ pounded by the fact that federal Indian agents to the Southern Indians were appointed by the War Department (and later by the Secretary of Interior) and were always men of Southern birth; they considered it their duty to expel "abolitionist" missionaries and to promote slaveholding among the Southern Indians. The Indian removal question, which raged among white Americans from 1825 to 1838, reflected similar divergences between Easterners and Westerners. Easterners believed that George Washington's Indian policy of integrating the Indians into white America by education, intermar­ riage, and Christianization, was the plan most consistent with biblical and republican ideologies. Westerners believed that the Indians could never be civilized or Christianized and wished to remove them from land predestined by God for whites because savages had not made proper use of it. The assumption underlying the "manifest destiny" of "God's New Israel" conflicted with the view that "God hath made of one blood all nations" and "all men are created equal." It had racial overtones. By tak­ ing sides against Indian removal, the Joneses again had to choose between interpretations of culture, definitions of being a good American, and the role of the red man in divine history. When Evan Jones translated into Cherokee a description of the coming of Christianity to the Welsh (his native people whose language was his native tongue), he may well have had in mind that Christianity was not the religion of one chosen people—the Anglo-Saxons—but of any people who needed a just God who would protect the weak from the strong, the oppressed from the oppressor. The God Jones described to the Cherokees was color-blind and treated all men as brothers, all women as sisters. As their old religion gradually lost its vitality and coherence in their changing circumstances, many Cherokees came to find in the religion the Joneses preached (and preached in the Cherokees' own tongue) a source of spiri-

6

·

Introduction

tual strength and refuge, a God of hope and consolation, who could be trusted to take their side in their struggle to be somebody. The Joneses reversed the process going on in American evangelicalism at that time— the "Americanizing of Christianity"—and preached instead a universal Christian theology available to any people or nation. In their view, God had no favorites—a heresy, as the century wore on, to most white Amer­ icans. Remarkable to many was the immense success of the Joneses' mission­ ary efforts. Between them they converted more Indians than any other Protestant missionaries in America; the Baptists became the denomina­ tion of the Cherokee Nation's chiefs as well as of its rank and file. At the same time, the Joneses learned, as few missionaries did, that it was not necessary to condemn or alienate those Cherokees who clung to many aspects of their old religion—their medical system, their harvest dances, their ball plays, their hospitality ethic, their view of women's rights, and their commitment to hold their land in common. These, unlike slavery, were issues on which the Joneses felt that the Bible took no stand. In fact, the Joneses accepted a syncretic form of Christianity among their con­ verts that allowed the old and the new religions to coexist in ways com­ fortable to the Cherokees. And having learned this, they painstakingly trained two generations of Cherokee preachers, ordained them, and sent them out to preach to, and be pastors over, their own converts, interpret­ ing Christianity in their own idiom and according to their own perspec­ tives. These Cherokee preachers were not educated in white seminaries; they could not speak or read English, Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, but from the Joneses' perspective, they understood the true meaning of Christianity better than many missionaries who had been so trained. Of course, there were limits to syncretism. The Joneses did not tolerate Cherokee polygamy, infanticide, or witchcraft; they discouraged loose at­ titudes toward sexual intercourse and divorce; and they expected the Cherokees to eschew the whiteman's sins of gambling, card playing, swearing, and intemperance (just as they should give up the whiteman's institution of black slavery). It is not surprising, under these circum­ stances, that the Joneses had their greatest success among the Cherokee fullbloods who constituted three-fourths of the Nation and the poorest of the tribe. Conversely, the Joneses aroused the wrath of the mixed blood Cherokee minority who had been among the first to embrace Christian­ ity, who were slaveholders, who went to mission schools to learn English, and who raised their children to be as similar to white Americans as pos­ sible. If the Joneses succeeded in uniting the fullbloods and making them masters of their own tribal structure and destiny (insofar as the whiteman allowed this in the treaties which granted them self-government), they also helped to exacerbate the conditions which pitted mixed bloods

Introduction

•

7

against fullbloods, slaveholders against non-slaveholders, English-speakers against Cherokee-speakers, and rich against poor. Baptist Christianity since the Reformation had been a religion of the poor and oppressed as well as committed to the doctrine of "the priesthood of all believers." Among the Cherokees, the Baptist persuasion provided an organizing force for the fullbloods and a populist political movement against the slaveholding (after 1865, the ex-slaveholding) minority. However, the Joneses' unusual stance led to threats against their lives from those Cher­ okees who felt political power shifting from their hands to the hands of the fullbloods. Nor did it endear the Joneses to the white slaveholders (and later the ex-slaveholders) in the states surrounding the Cherokee Na­ tion, who were committed to supporting those mixed blood Cherokees who sided with the South against the North. The Joneses were not perfect heroes. Much of what we know about them from the huge cache of letters they left behind indicates that they were all too human. Evan Jones was placed on trial in 1833 for a double murder in a bizarre incident that dogged him for the rest of his career. He quarreled often and bitterly with his fellow missionaries and his mission board, who found him domineering and disorganized. John B. Jones an­ gered his most loyal Cherokee supporters by insisting that in order to promote bilingual education, he was ready to let the federal government control Cherokee education. Although both men worked closely with John Ross (a mixed blood, English-speaking slaveholder of considerable wealth who was Principal Chief from 1828 to 1866), they angered him beyond measure by insisting after 1865 that black freedmen should be admitted as equal citizens of the Cherokee Nation. To Ross this contra­ dicted the Joneses' whole effort to sustain the Cherokee identity and her­ itage; how could black Africans be citizens in a red nation? Who ever heard of a black Cherokee? In assisting Cherokee resistance to white ex­ pansionism, the Joneses had promoted a red nationalism as intense as that of white nationalism ("This is a whiteman's country"). The Joneses recouped their leadership role after Ross's death in 1866, when they engineered a compromise between the pro-Union and proSouthern factions that brought the fullbloods to dominance in the Na­ tional Council over the strong objections of Ross's nephew and successor. They also served the nation well from 1865 to 1876 by helping the Cher­ okees to resist all Congressional efforts to detribalize them by turning "Oklahoma" into a federal territory under white dominance. At the same time, they helped to fight off the invading cattle barons from Texas, the railroad speculators, and the white intruders from Kansas, while aiding the small Cherokee farmers against the big ones in a counterpart to the populist struggle among white farmers. One of the last of many ironic turns in their careers came when President Ulysses S. Grant appointed

8

·

Introduction

John Β. Jones as federal agent to the Cherokees—a man who was a Cher­ okee citizen by adoption and who had been threatened and even expelled by former federal agents for his opposition to federal policies. Today the Joneses have been forgotten, even by most Cherokees. But it seems important to recall their unusual careers not only for what they tell us about alternatives to the policies that guided Indian and missionary affairs in the nineteenth century but for what they have to say to us today as the United States faces up at last to the fact that this is a multiracial, multiethnic nation and not a monolithic one. March 1989

CHAPTER I

Mission to the Cherokees, 1817—1821 Let the Indians, the original proprietors of the soil that sustains us, be placed under the intellectual and moral wing of the American Eagle, and they will cease to pine away before the superior arms and arts of the Whiteman, and they will become patriotic citizens, amiable and harmless. —Petition of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board to Congress,

1819 Prophecy assures us that "the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord. . . ." Never, since the first settlement of America has the condition of the Aborigines presented a prospect of melioration equal to the present. Solitary exertion is no longer employed. . . . Large societies are formed for their support, and our national government is contributing of its influence and funds to promote the glorious design. The [Baptist] convention has sought a share in this blessed charity.

—American Baptist Missionary Magazine, 1821

THE DECISION of most Indian tribes in the West to join Chief Tecumseh and the British in a war against the United States in 1812 had disastrous consequences for the Cherokees even though they were one of the few tribes that fought with the United States. After the war, the white Ameri­ cans were caught up in a tremendous upsurge of patriotic exuberance and expansionism. Having beaten the British a second time, they believed a divine destiny had opened the whole continent to them. They rushed across the Appalachians by the hundreds of thousands to take possession of the rich Mississippi Valley, previously a place of British, Spanish, and Indian intrigue unsafe for settlement. But in crossing the mountains they faced a dilemma. What were they to do about the quarter million Indians in eighty different tribes still inhabiting large tracts in the valley east of the Mississippi? Treaties had guaranteed possession of their homelands to these tribes forever, and each of the tribes claimed the right of nation­ hood and self-government. Some were tiny tribes of less than one thou­ sand inhabiting tracts of only several square miles; other tribes numbered twenty thousand and occupied thousands of square miles. Some of these large tribes, particularly in the Deep South, occupied the most fertile parts

10 · Chapter I of the valley—land coveted to grow cotton for the burgeoning textile in­ dustry in old and New England. Under George Washington's original Indian policy, adopted in 1792, the United States was committed to dealing with each tribe as an inde­ pendent nation; it made treaties with them granting them certain rights and privileges in order to persuade them to ally with the young republic rather than its enemies. One of the privileges was a guarantee of their right to self-government within their boundaries and protection from all efforts (domestic or foreign) to intrude upon them. In return, the War Department, which managed Indian affairs until 1849, expected the In­ dians to give up their hunting or fur trading economy and become farm­ ers. As farmers, the Indians would need much less land and would be expected to sell their former hunting grounds to the United States which, in turn, would sell it to the white families pouring into the valley of the West. Congress agreed to provide the Indians with free gifts of plows, hoes, axes, spinning wheels, and looms; it also provided resident Indian agents whose job was to induce the Indian men to take up agriculture. These federal agents hired white blacksmiths to mend Indian plows and scythes, shoe Indian horses, repair Indian hoes and mattoxes; they hired white women to teach Indian farm wives how to spin, weave, and sew their own clothes. Washington's Indian policy also encouraged Christian missionaries to settle among the tribes to provide schools for their chil­ dren and to inculcate Christian moral values. Self-interest combined with philanthropy in this effort to "civilize and Christianize" the "savage and heathen children of the forest."1 Washington, and the Presidents who followed him, promised the Indi­ ans that as soon as they became civilized, Christian farmers, they would be admitted to full and equal citizenship. Then they would share with all other Americans in the glorious destiny of the republic. The early Presi­ dents also encouraged intermarriage between whitemen and Indians as an important step in cementing the bonds between the two peoples and merging them into one. Underlying this policy was the prevailing philo­ sophical and scientific belief that "all men are created equal." As Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading scientists of his day, wrote, "I believe the Indian, then, to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman."2 The Bible confirmed this view, teaching that "God hath made of one blood all nations." Indians, it was believed, had failed to share in the rapid progress 1 For detailed analysis of early American Indian policies, see Francis P. Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) and Bernard Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). 2 Cited in Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 453.

MissiontotheCherokees · 11 of humankind in Europe at first because of the ocean barrier separating the two continents and later due to the repressive monarchical systems of the first invaders of the Americas. Now, under a benevolent republican system, the Indians would soon be able to improve themselves until they knew all that Europeans knew. As least, this was the prevailing view among the educated and enlightened Eastern leaders of the new nation. Westerners had a rather different perspective. Due to the unsettled political conditions west of the Appalachians prior to 1815, very few missionaries had visited the tribes located there. While most of the tribes had made some progress toward becoming horse-andplow farmers by 1815, they had not advanced much in learning English or mastering European ideas and Christian doctrines. The victory over the British in 1815 produced a new interest in missions to the Indians, but it also reinforced deep-seated antagonism toward them among frontiers­ men. By siding with the British and Chief Tecumseh in the war, as most Western tribes did, the Indians had broken their treaties and demon­ strated again their savagery by killing and scalping white settlers. That betrayal led many white Americans to call for reevaluation of Washing­ ton's Indian policy and to look for some way to remove the Indian nations from the path of white expansion and progress. In 1816, Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812 and rising spokesman for the West, said bluntly that it was high time to give up treating the Indians as inde­ pendent nations and instead allow Congress to decide what was best for them. As this tension brewed, a conflict arose between the supporters of mis­ sionary benevolence, who were trying to lift the Indians up toward full citizenship, and the frontier settlers, land speculators, cotton growers, and entrepreneurs who either could not wait for this slow process or had serious doubts as to its possibility. Thomas Jefferson had suggested an alternative to Washington's policy after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 almost doubled the size of the United States by adding the western half of the Mississippi Valley—an alternative which received increasing support after 1815. Jefferson persuaded Congress to pass a law enabling the Pres­ ident to grant to any tribes that agreed to move west of the Mississippi an equivalent tract of land in that wilderness in exchange for its land east of the Mississippi.3 Few of the tribes found this suggestion attractive. They knew that the far West was already occupied by other tribes who would oppose their intrusion; they also had a deep religious attachment to the homeland of their ancestors. Even after their defeat in 1815 and the 3 For Jefferson's proposal and other similar efforts, see Annie H. Abel, "The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi," Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1906 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908).

12 · Chapter I forced cessions of much of that homeland—extracted from them as the price of betrayal—most Indian tribes refused to make treaties of exchange and removal. They much preferred to keep what was left of their original land and utilize the continued economic aid of the government and edu­ cational assistance of missionaries to develop their skills as farmers, trad­ ers, and entrepreneurs so that they could someday share as equals in the "manifest destiny" of their conquerors. For fifteen years after the War of 1812 Indian mission enterprises flour­ ished, and the federal government continued to provide money to assist the various denominations build schools and model farms among the In­ dian nations east of the Mississippi. The notion of separation of church and state was still in its infancy. Most of the New England states in 1815 still imposed religious taxes to support the established churches of the Puritans. Chief Justice John Marshall said that the First Amendment did not apply to the states, only to Congress, but he saw no objection to Con­ gress's supporting mission schools (though no one brought a test case). Indian missionaries likewise had no qualms about using federal tax money to advance Christianity and to add Indian members to their par­ ticular denominations. To promote the rapid uplift of the Indians and prepare them for citizenship, Congress passed, in 1819, the Indian Civi­ lization Act.4 Under this act Congress provided thousands of dollars an­ nually to subsidize missionary work. Consequently, in the postwar years, all of the major Protestant denom­ inations formed extensive mission organizations. Some were interde­ nominational, but most simply absorbed or coordinated the activities of local mission societies into nationwide denominational societies. The Baptist mission society, representing one of the largest and fastest grow­ ing denominations in the country, described this new federally funded Indian mission effort in glowing terms: "Solitary exertion" by lone mis­ sionaries on horseback, "is no longer employed.. . . Large societies are formed for their support and the national government is contributing of its influence and funds to promote the glorious design."5 Committed to the belief that the United States was, in fact, "a Christian nation," few Protestants questioned the propriety of using the taxpayers' money to Christianize the heathen Indians in order to qualify them for citizenship. Auxiliary religious organizations were also formed by Christian churchgoers on a national basis to publish tracts and Bibles, to promote ministerial education, to spread Sunday schools, and to increase temper­ ance. The total Christian energy of the country was mobilized for a mas4 See Prucha, American Indian Policy, pp. 213-24, and R. Pierce Beaver, Church, State and the American Indians (Saint Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1966). 5 Baptist Missionary Magazine (Boston) 3:177 (hereafter, BMM).

Mission to the Cherokees · 13 sive moral reform movement that historians have since described as part of America's "Second Great Religious Awakening."6 It was also part of the rising nationalism of America—the attempt to describe who was a true American. In accepting federal funds for Indian missions, the missionaries gladly became agents of the government's Indian policies—trying to make "good Americans" of them. Lewis Cass, the Secretary of War who set the rules for missionary funding at the time of the Indian Civilization Act, said that missionaries who accepted government funds were under obli­ gation "to impress on the minds of the Indians, the friendly and benevo­ lent views of the government towards them and the advantage to them in yielding to the policy of [the] government and cooperating with it in such measures as it may deem necessary for their civilization and happiness."7 Neither the missionaries nor the Indians at that time recognized the com­ plications that would follow if the government's policies ever became less benevolent. As missionary efforts flourished, however, so did a countervailing force from whites on the western frontier who deeply resented aid to the Indi­ ans. Angry over Indian alliance with the British in 1812 and bitter about the many deaths caused by Indians in the war, frontiersmen were not as­ suaged by the massive land cessions exacted from the losers. Many be­ lieved that the Indians, twice conquered in their support of British impe­ rial aims, had now lost all right to the land they occupied. Western taxpayers resented a federal policy which left the Indians free of taxes and supplied them from the United States treasury with farming tools to get rich while the average frontier family had to pay taxes and struggle for success on its own self-reliance. Land speculators and entrepreneurs ar­ gued that precious national resources in timber, iron, coal, and other min­ erals needed for American industrial development (not to mention the rich soil that would provide wheat or corn for rising cities and cotton for rising factories) would remain untapped or underutilized so long as In­ dian nations claimed ownership. The Indian nations were considered stumbling blocks to American development, not potential sharers in it. As new Western states were added to the Union, state politicians argued 6 For analysis of the religious and moral reform organizations during "The Second Great Awakening," see Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers' Keepers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960), and Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). 7 Lewis Cass to Isaac McCoy, July 16,1822, M-221, roll 95, 0084. John C. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, made a similar, and slightly more ominous statement to Congress in 1822 explaining that the government paid missionaries to "impress on the minds of the Indian the friendly and benevolent views of the Government. .. as it may deem necessary for their civilization and happiness. .. . A contrary course of conduct [by a missionary] cannot fail to incur the displeasure of Government." ASP, U, 273.

14 · Chapter ί that Indian nations within state boundaries were political anomalies— nations within nations. Congressmen from every Western state from Georgia to Michigan insisted that all the soil and all the people within their state's boundaries should be under one jurisdiction. Indians, if they chose to remain where they were, would have to take their chances like other citizens and not continue in an artificial hothouse environment un­ der government support and protection. In addition, a growing skepticism was developing among whites, east and west, as to the potential improvement of the Indians. The new nation had already compromised its doctrine of human equality by sustaining African slavery in its Constitution. More and more whites came to doubt Jefferson's views of Indian equality and to suggest that the redmen, being a "colored people," were predestined by God to die out in competition with the chosen, white, Anglo-Saxon race.8 New scientific studies pro­ claimed that the whiteman constituted the human norm; "colored" peo­ ples were abnormal or subnormal.9 "Once a savage, always a savage," had always been a popular frontier cliche. As the area between the Ap­ palachians and the Mississippi River became more heavily populated af­ ter the War of 1812, several forces combined to increase pressure for Jef­ ferson's policy of "removal and exchange of land" to settle "the Indian question." First of all, the Westerners steadily increased the number of Western votes and in 1824 Andrew Jackson, the Westerners' candidate for President, had come close to winning election; by 1828 his victory marked the arrival of "Western" power to the political spectrum. Second, the discovery of the cotton gin had given a new impetus to land specula­ tion in "the black belt," that area of soil especially suitable for cotton production. Much of this area had been in the hands of the Southeastern Indian tribes prior to the war; now it seemed imperative to the growth of prosperity of the new nation that they should be removed to make way for those who could exploit the land to its fullest. Finally, a series of land cessions, beginning with those extracted by Jackson in the treaties with the defeated tribes after 1815, had whetted the appetites of land specula­ tors and prospective cotton planters for total removal.10 The impetus had started, and it gathered speed from 1815 to 1830. The rhetoric of Indian incompetence and inveterate treachery, coupled with the growing belief that the Indians had made hardly any progress under the combined efforts of federal and missionary aid to become "civilized" and "Christianized," was taken at face value by Easterners who knew 8

See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 127,131, 134, 144. ' See William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 10 See Michael Rogin, Fathers and Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), pp. 174-80.

Mission to the Cherokees · 15 little of the Western tribes. The older notion that the Indians were capable of progress gave way to the notion of "the vanishing Indian."11 James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, provided new support in the East for the economic and political policies of the West. Andrew Jackson gave voice to the new public mood when he said, in 1833, that the Indians "have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferi­ ority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance and, ere long, disappear."12 Within two years after his election, Jackson was able to push through Congress an Indian Removal Act that completely undermined George Washington's original policy of educating and acculturating the Indians in their ancient homelands. It also undermined the ability of the tribes to say "yes" or "no" to the insis­ tent demands to cede away parts or all of their homelands. (As early as 1819 the Cherokees had said they would never again sell a foot of their land.) While the Removal Act of 1830 did not specifically call for the use of force to promote removal, the surge of popular demand that removal be implemented immediately and totally gave Jackson the power to with­ draw federal promises of protection of Indian boundaries.13 The Indians' leaders realized that once federal troops were ordered to cease protecting Indian borders from white intruders, they would be at the mercy of those ruthless frontiersmen who boldly walked across those bounds and helped themselves to Indian property or settled on tracts of Indian land.14 The Indians dared not drive them off by force, and in the white courts Indians were denied the right to testify against whites who stole their cattle or abused them, so there remained no legal remedy for such intrusions. Fur­ thermore, as other states followed the example of Georgia and declared that they were entitled to assert jurisdiction over all Indian land within their borders, Jackson had the option to accede to "states' rights" in such matters and to declare them superior to the treaties which required gov­ ernment protection of Indian boundaries. Although Jackson's Indian Removal bill met with outraged criticism from anti-Jacksonians like Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, 11 See Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer­ sity Press, 1982). 12 Andrew Jackson, "Message to Congress," Congressional Serial House Documents, 23d Congress (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1833), vol. 254, document 1, p. 14. 13 See Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). 14 See Dale Van Every, Disinherited (New York: William Morrow, 1966), p. 117.

16 · Chapter I Theodore J. Frelinghuysen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Chief Justice Marshall, it had the full support of the settlers in the South and West.15 The Indian tribes tried hard to resist the implementation of this new pol­ icy (the Cherokees held out nonviolently against it until 1838; the Seminoles were still fighting against it in 1842). In the end, however, every major tribe was evicted from its homeland and forced upon its "trail of tears" to the new "Indian Territory" in "the Great American Desert" west of Missouri and Arkansas. This cruel policy, widely acclaimed by most whites at the time, left a psychic scar upon the conscience of white America that still hurts. Jackson's policy placed the missionaries to the Indians in an embar­ rassing situation. Hitherto they had worked happily as agents of the gov­ ernment in a common benevolent enterprise. After 1830, many of them believed their government was treating the Indians unfairly—perhaps even unconstitutionally.16 As Christian ministers they held the view that all humankind, regardless of color, were descendants of Adam and Eve and hence all brothers and sisters "under the skin." All human beings were equal before God and all had a potential that, with God's help, could make them worthy and useful citizens. God's miraculous gift of grace through the moral regeneration of the pagan soul could make the Indian as good as the whiteman.17 Missionaries believed they had suffi­ cient evidence for this in the changes already wrought among the Indian tribes, particularly tribes like the Cherokees who, by 1830, were known as "the most civilized tribe in America." Although some of the older In­ dians were slow to accept civilized, Christian ways, the missionaries be­ lieved that the younger generation would see the value of them. The Cherokees had welcomed mission schools as early as 1800, and hundreds of them were now converts to Christianity. By 1830 virtually all of them were tillers of their own farms, and their government had been reorganized upon the model of the surrounding states. Using the Cherokees as proof of the correctness of Washington's policy, the missionaries were overly sanguine about the willingness of the Indian to give up his Indianness. Ethnocentrism rather than racism was the besetting sin of the missionary. Knowing that the Cherokees had refused to sell any of their land since 1819, the legislators of Georgia decided to assert their state's sovereignty over all Indian land within their borders. Between 1828 and 1831 they abolished all Cherokee laws and government, surveyed the Indian lands 15 Ibid.,

pp. 104-20. W. G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 17 See Michael Coleman, "Not Race but Grace," Journal of American History 7 (June 1980): 41-60. 16 See

MissiontotheCherokees · 17 for distribution to white citizens, and told the missionaries among them to take an oath to obey the laws of Georgia or get out. The detribalized Cherokees received no help from Jackson and henceforth during the bat­ tle against removal had to live under the laws of Georgia—laws which treated them about the same as emancipated slaves, denying them the right to vote or testify in a court of law against a whiteman. In this situation the missionaries faced a dilemma. Should they enter politics and take sides or should they stick to their spiritual work of sav­ ing souls? Until 1832 many missionaries staunchly sided with the Cherokees and challenged Georgia's right to abrogate the treaties that guar­ anteed the boundaries and continuance of the Cherokee Nation under its own government. After 1832 only one missionary, the Baptist, Evan Jones, continued to help the Cherokees to resist removal. He never imag­ ined when he became a missionary in 1821 that he would find himself in such a quandary. Evan Jones was born in Brecknockshire, Wales, on May 14, 1788. Lit­ tle is known of his early life beyond the fact that his middle-class parents apprenticed him to a linen-draper at the age of fifteen. He was raised to speak English and Welsh, joined the Anglican Church, received a moder­ ate education, and was expected to raise himself from draper's assistant to an independent, small shop owner or tradesman. Working in the same store with him was a young woman named Elizabeth Lanigan, described later as "a woman of good judgment and education and possessed [of] an eminently devout and benevolent spirit."18 They were married in 1808 and moved to London. Here they became Methodists. Not caring for the draper's business, Jones improved on his education and after learning some Greek, Latin, and Hebrew either opened a school or became a tutor. He later described himself as "an experienced teacher." This evidently did not provide sufficient income for his growing family. Returning to the draper's trade, he opened a small shop of his own near Ludgate Hill in London. His fourth child, Hannah, was born at 20 Ludgate Hill in 1816. The three other children were named Elizabeth, Samuel, and Ann. Later accounts speak of Evan Jones as having been a "merchant" for thirteen years in London, but evidently with little success. He seems to have had no head for business. Early in 1821 he decided to emigrate with his family to America and enter some other line of work. He probably had some relatives among the many Welsh emigrants liv­ ing in or near Philadelphia, for the family settled in the Welsh community 18 Biographical data on the early years of EvanJones is scant and contradictory. See E. C. Routh, "Early Missionaries Among the Cherokees," Chronicles of Oklahoma 15 (Decem­ ber 1937): 449-65, and Walter N. Wyteh, Poor Lo: Early Indian Missions (Philadelphia, 1896).

18 · Chapter I of Berwyn just west of the city.19 Here he and his wife gave up Methodism and joined the Great Valley Baptist Church, led by the Reverend David Jones (perhaps a distant relative) and a young Welsh assistant pastor, Thomas Roberts. That summer the Baptist Foreign Mission Board adver­ tised in its mission journal for volunteers to become missionaries among the Cherokee Indians who lived at the place where four states joined to­ gether: Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. Jones and his whole family volunteered. He never explained why. No doubt he was caught up in the general spirit of a movement that included many others from his church. Perhaps also, since he volunteered to be a teacher, not a preacher, he thought he would find more use for his talents in that direc­ tion than in continuing as a linen draper. The volunteers left in the fall of 1821 to begin a lifetime of immense hardship and constant controversy among the Cherokees. The decision would cost Jones the lives of his wife and four of his children in the years ahead. The Baptists were not the first denomination to send missionaries to the Cherokees. The Moravians or United Brethren from Salem, North Carolina, had started a mission among them in 1801, at Springplace in the Georgia sector of the Nation. The Moravians were persistent and hardworking, but they had limited funds and personnel. Their establish­ ment, with its model farm and school, remained small. By 1821 they had educated perhaps two hundred Cherokee children and converted about twenty Cherokees to Christianity. Since the Cherokees numbered sixteen thousand and had over four thousand school-age children in any one year, the Moravians scarcely met their needs. Consequently in 1803 the Cherokees welcomed a Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend Gideon Blackburn of Maryville, Tennessee. Blackburn offered to start two schools in the Tennessee sector of the Nation. He received some support from two congregations of which he was pastor and from the Presbyte­ rian denomination; he also obtained a small grant from President Jeffer­ son. But his two schools closed in 1810, examples of the failure of "soli­ tary effort." Later experience demonstrated that it took at least $15,000 to $20,000 to establish an efficient missionary station with schools and a model farm (usually including a gristmill and sawmill) and $1,500 to $2,000 a year to sustain it. Blackburn simply could not raise that much money by himself. In 1816, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, with headquarters in Boston, received permission to start mission work among the Cherokees. This national organization was composed mostly " In later correspondence Jones mentioned that his mother, Ann Jones, lived in Philadel­ phia; Evan Jones's son, John B. Jones, spoke of his "Uncle John" as living in the United States. But whether Evan Jones's mother and a brother preceded or followed him to the United States is not known.

MissiontotheCherokees · 19 of Congregationalists from New England, but it had interdenominational support from Presbyterians and the Dutch Reformed Church. Between 1817 and 1832 the ABCFM became the most efficient, well-funded, and most extensive Indian mission agency in the nation, especially among the Cherokees. It had received firm pledges of support from President Mon­ roe even prior to the Civilization Act, and it established its first station at Brainerd, near present-day Chattanooga, in 1817.20 The Baptists of Georgia had sent some missionaries among the Chero­ kees in 1815, supported by local Baptist mission societies. These Georgia Baptists inspired the denomination to take a more active interest in Indian missions in 1817. The denomination had formed a national foreign mis­ sion board in 1814, but during its first years it devoted attention only to overseas missions, particularly in Burma.21 At its Triennial Convention in 1817, the Board of Foreign Missions decided to turn its attention to "the native tribes in the West." Seeking government support, the Board peti­ tioned Congress for grants of land among the various tribes to aid mis­ sionary work: "Your memorialists respectfully suggest the appropriation of small sections of land [among the Indians] which shall exclusively be appropriated as sites for schools and as means of providing agricultural resources for the subsistence of such pupils as shall attend them. . . . Let the Indians, the original proprietors of the soil that sustains us, be placed under the intellectual and moral wing of the American Eagle, and they will cease to pine away before the superior arms and arts of the Whiteman and they will become patriotic citizens, amiable and harmless."22 How­ ever, the federal government had no right to appropriate the land of the Indian nations for mission purposes; only the tribes themselves could grant land to mission societies. In 1817 the Corresponding Secretary of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, the Reverend William Staughton of Philadelphia, wrote to the Sarepta Mission Society in Georgia asking for information about its local efforts to send preachers among the Southern tribes. He also wrote to the Reverend Humphrey Posey of Asheville, North Carolina, who had under­ taken some preaching tours through the Cherokee Nation in the western part of his state. The Reverend Jesse Mercer of the Sarepta Mission Soci­ ety wrote back welcoming the assistance of the Baptist Board, and there­ after the two groups coordinated their efforts. The society in Georgia sup­ plied the preachers to the Creeks and Cherokees and received financial 20 For a history of the early missions of the American Board among the Cherokees see Robert S. Walker, Torchlights to the Cherokees (New York: Macmillan, 1831). 21 For Baptist missionary efforts see Robert G. Torbet, A History of the Baptists (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1963). 22 This undated memorial is among the papers of the American Baptist Mission Union, The American Baptist Historical Society, Rochester, New York (hereafter, ABMU).

20 · Chapter I assistance from the Board in Philadelphia.23 Humphrey Posey's reply in­ dicated the need for the Board itself to provide financial support for work among the Cherokees of North Carolina. He told Staughton on August 26, 1817, that he had been very well received on his recent trips to "my neighbors, the Cherokees," and said, "I have taken two journeys among the Cherokee Indians. I find them anxious that I should visit them. I have preached and had one sermon interpreted by a certain Edward Tucker, who is a native by birth, but a mulatto [i.e., the son of a white father and Cherokee mother]." He had visited several Cherokee towns and discussed with their headmen or local chiefs the possibility of starting schools: "They almost universally appeared pleased" by the suggestion. Posey was happy to discover that almost all the Cherokees "acknowledge the exis­ tence of God," but he was shocked to find that they knew nothing about the existence of the soul, its innate depravity, and their need for the re­ generating grace of God to save them from sin and damnation. He urged the Baptists to pray for "Ned Tucker and the benighted Cherokees," and said he was prepared to start several schools if the Mission Board would appoint him as its missionary and provide him with funds to hire teach­ ers.24 The Board appointed him as its first missionary to the Cherokees in October 1817, and sent him money to start four schools. His salary of $500 was to start November 1. Posey found the Cherokees in the midst of negotiating with the federal government in the second of many efforts to persuade them to sell their land in the East in exchange for an equal amount of land in what was then Arkansas Territory. Jefferson had tried to persuade them to do this in 1808, but failed. The Cherokees did not want to remove and, having been one of the few tribes who fought with the United States in the War of 1812, they saw no reason why in 1817 they should again be asked to leave. But at the request of the people of Georgia and Tennessee, President Monroe had sent AndrewJackson and GovernorJoseph McMinn of Ten­ nessee to try to persuade them that removal was in their best interest.25 The Cherokees held some fifteen thousand square miles of land, most of it mountainous but some in the fertile black belt, and the Westerners wanted it. By claiming that if the Cherokees refused, they would be de­ nationalized and placed under state jurisdiction, Jackson and McMinn 23 See Jesse Mercer, A History of the Georgia Baptist Association (Washington, Ga., 1838), and James W. Moffitt, "Early Baptist Missionary Work among the Cherokee," The East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications 12 (1940): 16-27. 24 Latter Day Luminary 1:44—47 (hereafter, LDL). This periodical, published in Phila­ delphia from 1818 to 1826, was the official organ of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board and contains most of the early letters from its missionaries to the Cherokees. 25 Charles C. Royce, The Cherokee Nation of Indians (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Com­ pany, 1975), pp. 91-100.

MissiontotheCherokees · 21 had persuaded a minority of chiefs to sign a treaty in July 1817, allowing all those who wanted to emigrate to Arkansas to do so. The government was given two years to enroll as many Cherokees as it could for emigra­ tion. The commissioners hoped that in the end all the Cherokees would give up, and the whole tribe would go to Arkansas. But the majority of chiefs rallied the people, and stern measures were taken to hold down the number who enrolled. This internal struggle made it difficult for Hum­ phrey Posey to make much headway with his Baptist mission schools. He reported on March 13, 1818, that he had difficulty finding bilingual teachers. "I have, however, employed such as are capable of teaching them the first principles of the language, and they understand some of the Cherokee language."26 The schools were located in the towns of Cowee, Tillanoocy, Eastatory, and near the home of Ned Tucker. Posey had con­ tracted to pay the teachers forty dollars each for three months' work.27 But before the end of the year, the schools had to be abandoned. The Cherokees had become so antagonistic toward whitemen, whom they suspected of being in league with the government to drive them to the west, that Posey found his work useless. Missionaries were often accused in their early years of being eager to take the Cherokees' land. Posey believed that in the end Jackson and McMinn would succeed in removing the Cherokees, so he took a trip to Arkansas in late October 1818, and spent the winter trying to scout out a likely place to establish a mission. Meanwhile in January 1819 the Cherokees managed to work out a compromise with the government that enabled them to retain most of their homeland. They agreed to exchange one-third of their land in the east for an equal amount in Arkansas to accommodate those Cherokees who had agreed to emigrate. They also agreed to divide with the Arkansas emigrants the $10,000 that they had been receiving annually from the government from the sale of their hunting grounds earlier in the century. One-third of this would henceforth go to the Western Cherokees. A treaty to this effect was signed in Washington in February 1819. Those who remained in the east were not happy about what had happened, and de­ clared that those who went west were no longer Cherokee citizens but disloyal expatriates for deserting their homeland. But they were led to believe that by this treaty they had obtained a tacit promise from the gov­ ernment that they would never again be asked to remove. In May 1819, Posey went into the Nation and talked to the Second Principal Chief, Charles Hicks, about reopening his schools. He found Hicks to be a Christian and "a man of considerable information." Hicks, he said, looked "to the religious societies for teachers, preachers, and 26

LDL 1:154.

27 Ibid.

22 · Chapter I farmers, as they [the Cherokees] have unanimously found out that Chris­ tians are their only friends whose examples they wish their rising genera­ tion to follow and whose instructions they hope will prove a lasting bless­ ing to their nation."28 Hicks told him that he must get permission from the Cherokee Council at its regular meeting in October and that the Council did not want the kind of local day schools that he had founded before. They would want a boarding school associated with a model farm, where Cherokee boys could learn how to perform the mechanical skills needed for farming while Cherokee girls could learn the domestic skills necessary to become farmers' wives. The Council would also specify where the mission was to be established and what personnel it should provide. Posey wrote to the Board, "I have pledged myself for the Board that they will see to the institution," according to the plan Hicks outlined, and Hicks then agreed to support the Baptists' application at the meeting of the Council in October 1819. Posey also remarked to the Board that he was not sure that he wanted to become the resident superintendent of such a mission establishment for the rest of his life. It appeared that it would be "too confining, as I have a natural turn for itinerancy." He would, however, help to get the mission started. When Posey appeared at the Cherokee Council in October, Charles Hicks interpreted his request for land on which to start a mission and gave his support to the request. "Without a dissenting voice," Posey re­ ported, "they gave me privilege to establish a missionary seminary in the Valley Towns [Gunahitunyi] under the patronage of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions." They also granted the Board use of a tract of eighty acres to start a mission farm and "the privilege of taking in a blacksmith, miller, and a sufficient number of persons to conduct the school and farm . . . provided it meets the approbation of the President of the United States." He also informed the Board that "As to the number of youths to be educated, I am certain, if we have sufficient funds, there will be more than one hundred."29 Immediately after the Council meeting, the Board received a letter signed by Pathkiller, the Principal Chief, and John Ross, the president of the Cherokee upper house (or National Committee) con­ firming the Council's agreement. The decision of the Cherokee Council to locate the Baptist school and farm in Valley Towns, along the Hiwassee River in southwestern North Carolina, was carefully calculated. It was not simply a desire to place the mission close to Posey's home in Asheville. The Cherokees wanted the various missionary establishments spread out through the Nation so that 28 29

Ibid., 410-52. LDL 2:28.

Mission to the Cherokees · 23 all of their people would have a school within easy access. The Moravian school was available to the Cherokees who lived in the Georgia region of the Nation; the American Board had now built schools in eastern Ten­ nessee and northeastern Alabama. As yet there were no mission schools for the six thousand Cherokees who lived in North Carolina. In some respects the Moravians and Congregationalists had taken the best loca­ tions. Their missions were located near major turnpikes; the Cherokees near them were more acculturated and prosperous; a higher proportion in those regions were of mixed ancestry and spoke English, and the mis­ sion stations were closer to white communities where they could obtain supplies. The North Carolina region of the Nation lay in the Great Smokey Mountains; it had few wagon roads; its soil was poor, and its people were mostly fullbloods who spoke no English. The Reverend Abraham Steiner of the Moravian mission said that the Cherokee Council had placed the Baptists among "the poorer class of the nation."30 They were not only poorer, but were far more conservative in their attachment to their old customs and religious ceremonies and beliefs. The Moravians and Congregationalists had consciously adopted a policy of working among the more acculturated and more influential leaders of the Nation, believing that through them they would have a more immediate impact, which would then filter down to the poorer, more traditional Cherokees. The Baptists would have to work from the bottom up in order to become influential. But the Baptists were used to this. They had worked chiefly among the poor ever since the Reformation. Furthermore, the fullbloods constituted over three-fourths of the population, and under the demo­ cratic system of government among the Cherokees they were potentially the most powerful group. The denomination that won the support of the fullbloods would, in the long run, direct the destiny of the Nation. At its annual meeting in April 1820, the Baptist Board met in Philadel­ phia and enthusiastically pushed forward with Posey's plan. "The Board had thought it proper to make liberal appropriation for a vigorous and comprehensive school and mission establishment" among the Cherokees, it reported to the readers of The Latter Day Luminary, the official organ of the Board.31 It authorized Posey to go to Valley Towns and take with him the workmen needed to commence building the school, dwellings, barn, stable, sawmill, and gristmill needed for their model farm. He was to draw upon funds from the Board's treasury. Posey's first action was to hire a school teacher. He chose Thomas Dawson, a Baptist from Lexing­ ton, Kentucky, "who is well acquainted with the Lancastrian mode of instruction"—a system developed in Lancaster, England, for educating 30 31

LDL 2:330-32. Ibid., 117.

24 · Chapter I the working class cheaply by having older children teach the young and offering rewards as incentives for learning rather than relying upon fear of the rod for discipline.32 Meanwhile the Baptist Board applied to the War Department for funds to assist in paying for the construction of the mission. By the terms of the Civilization Act of 1819, the government would pay two-thirds of the costs of the buildings, and the Mission Board, one-third. The government would thereafter give annual support on the basis of the number of pu­ pils. Posey received his first allocation from the fund through the Cherokees' resident federal agent, Colonel Return J. Meigs, in June 1820. He wrote ecstatically to Meigs about it, expressing his gratitude toward the Christian government that encouraged missions, in contrast with Catho­ lic governments or the rulers and priests of pagan countries in Asia who tried to thwart Protestant missionaries: "Instead of Romish Bulls or su­ perstitious bigotry and persecution of earthly monarchs, instead of being under the power of Juggernaut or the idolatry of Booda, I feel myself under the better than Banyan shade of the Government of the United States."33 By June, Posey's carpenters were at work erecting a frame school build­ ing for the boys and a log building for the girls, while farm workers were clearing the eighty acres of ground the Council had allotted for the farm. Early in 1821 Posey and Dawson admitted the first Cherokee pupils. The male "scholars" helped to plant the first crop of corn and the females helped Posey's wife and Dawson's to prepare the meals, mend, sew, and make butter and cheese.34 To help them he hired "a negro woman," prob­ ably a slave. That same spring the Sarepta Mission Society, with the Board's pledge of financial assistance, started a small day school at the Cherokee town of Tinsawatee, sixty miles south of Valley Towns in the Georgia region of the Nation. The Reverend Duncan O. Bryant was chosen to manage it.35 In the summer of 1821 the Baptist Board in Philadelphia advertised for a missionary staff to go to Valley Towns to join Posey and put the mission in full operation. "It is much desired," said the Board, "that a farmer, a blacksmith, a carpenter, a millwright and miller, and a shoemaker, should 32 Some accounts say that Dawson was born in England. The Lancastrian method was recommended to missionary societies by the War Department and utilized by the American Board at its Brainerd Mission. 33 Humphrey Posey to Return J. Meigs, June 23, 1820, M-208. The federal government granted $1,000 to the Baptist Foreign Mission Board in 1820 from the Civilization Fund. 34 LDL 2:400, 488. 35 Ibid., 488. Bryant signed his name D. O. Bryant, but many wrote it O'Bryant or O'Briant.

Mission to the Cherokees

·

25

be sent to the station to strengthen this mission. A female teacher is also needed. About 80 acres of land are enclosed and under cultivation. The [live]stock already purchased will afford means of subsistence and com­ fort to the mission family as well as aid in imparting agricultural knowl­ edge to the Indians."36 The Board expected some of these volunteers to be married persons who would bring their families with them. That would create a good-sized white community from which to form a Baptist church to serve as the model of a civilized Christian community in the heart of the "pagan" Cherokee Nation. To that church the Cherokee con­ verts would be added. The commitment of a missionary was presumed to be for life, and by obtaining enough volunteer workers and craftsmen to create a self-sufficient community in the Cherokee Nation, the Board's expenses would be minimized. Posey had informed the Board that hired white labor was very expensive in the wilderness, and the Indians lacked the skills to build or maintain a mission. Finally, in September 1821, Posey informed the Board that all would soon be ready and the volunteers should be sent on: Our school is doing very well; forty Cherokees are still improving very fast, and brother O'Bryant, the teacher at Tinsawattee, visited us this month. He has 28 Cherokee scholars, and his school is prosperous. I humbly hope day is broke in this wilderness. I have been enabled to undergo the fatigues of my situation entirely cheerful since I understood the dear brethren and sisters were coming this fall. Our crop looks well. We have bricks burnt and one chimney started, intending, if possible, to have comfortable buildings for the reception of the brethren. Our sawmill, I think, will cut plank tomorrow, and our gristmill is pretty well on the way.37

The Board's solicitations for volunteers had borne good fruit at the Great Valley Baptist Church, probably through the efforts of William Staughton, the Reverend David Jones, and his son, the Reverend Horatio Gates Jones. David Jones had been a missionary to the Shawnee and Delaware Indians in his youth. His son, Horatio, was one of the original members of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions in 1814; in 1821 he served with Staughton as one of its secretaries. Nine adults, three of them with fami­ lies, had volunteered, all members of the Great Valley Church. The Rev­ erend Thomas Roberts, his wife Elizabeth, and three children (one a son who had "commenced the study of medicine") led the group. Evan Jones, his wife, and his oldest daughter (also named Elizabeth) volunteered as teachers (all citing previous experience in the profession). Isaac Cleaver, a farmer and blacksmith, his wife Rachel, and five children (the three sons 36 37

Ibid., 400. Ibid., 488.

26

·

Chapter I

in their teens "brought up to farming") volunteered to manage the farm. John Farrier volunteered as a weaver and farmer. Mary Lewis volunteered as a teacher. Of the sixteen children, nine were under twelve; seven were aged thirteen to seventeen. The Board could find no volunteers to fill the need for a millwright, miller, carpenter, or shoemaker.38 The work of recruiting volunteers had gone on all summer, and the adults had met often together and with various members of the Board in Philadelphia. Among other things, they had set up a budget and discussed salaries. Thomas Roberts was tentatively assigned a salary of $300 for himself and his family; Jones accepted $240 for himself and family; Far­ rier was to receive twelve dollars a month. The board agreed to make adjustments in these figures once the group arrived and had a better knowledge of the actual cost of living there. All expected to have ade­ quate housing and food provided for them. Other necessities, such as clothing and blankets, they would bring with them or would be sent by female mission societies in the Baptist churches around the country who were ready to make donations to help the work. In preparation for their trip they gathered wagons, horses, tools, and equipment; their destination was eight hundred miles away. Among other things they brought panes of glass for windows in the schools and cabins. Jones was probably told that Thomas Dawson might be leaving soon after the party arrived; Staughton had asked Dawson to accept a position teaching at the Cherokee town of Coosewaytee.39 Roberts probably knew that Humphrey Posey would not remain long at the mission and that he would be expected to serve as pastor and superintendent. They all knew that they would need interpreters to begin with, but Jones expected that his linguistic skills would enable him to learn Cherokee quickly and trans­ pose it into roman letters in order to have translations printed for reli­ gious and educational purposes. No missionary had yet found a way to transcribe Cherokee, yet it was a common assumption that a primitive people would have such a simple language that it would not be hard to translate it. This did not prove to be the case. It took Jones many years to master Cherokee; it became an obsession with him. On September 26, 1821, the group was finally ready to depart. A crowd of well-wishers gathered for a farewell church service for them at the Sansom Street Baptist Church in Philadelphia. William Staughton, as Corresponding Secretary of the Foreign Mission Board, made a dedica­ tory address and gave them their instructions: The Board has discovered with much satisfaction your readiness to relinquish the convenience of civilized life that you may become useful to the untaught 38

Ibid., 488-89.

39

LDL 3:91. See letters from EvanJones to Thomas Dawson, August 30,1823, and from

TTiomas Dawson to the Mission Board, October 5, 1829 ( ABMU).

Mission to the Cherokees

·

27

and roving inhabitants of the forests of our country. The everlasting interests of our fellow men have an imperious claim on our prayers and our endeavours, whether they be found among the gross and miserable idolators of the east [Asia] or among the benighted aborigines of this western world.40

Staughton assured them that they would find "entrance upon your work considerably softened by the labours of brother Posey and the previous appropriations of the Board" toward the housing. "Convenient habita­ tions, it is expected, will be ready to receive you"—a promise that proved overly optimistic. "The Board is permitted to rejoice in the prosperous condition of the school at Valley Towns," which was well under way. The Board also rejoiced "in the liberal assistance offered by the national gov­ ernment for the carrying forward of the buildings and assisting in the support of the native children, in the contributions of clothing and other articles of convenience received from the Christian sisters of Baltimore and New York. . . . The prayers of thousands will rise for your prosperity." Staughton concluded by warning them to "guard against declensions in personal religion" out in the wilderness and to "familiarize yourselves with the biography of missionaries in these latter times—the studious El­ liot, the itinerating Brainerd." Living in close quarters under trying cir­ cumstances, "We beseech you to cultivate a peaceful temper" with each other. "Consider yourselves . . . as one family." They must always "Re­ member, you have solemnly devoted yourselves to the cause of God." It would be difficult at times, but it would be rewarding. They were doing a heroic work. "In the days of Solomon, 'a man was famous according as he had lifted up axes among the thick trees.' In these labors a man may be famous still." He was trying to tell them that it was not only the fron­ tier generals and Indian fighters who were popular heroes. Helping the Indian to a better life was equally heroic. Staughton also assured them that all of their actions were hastening the second coming of Christ, an event most evangelicals in that time thought was imminent. "The day assuredly cannot be distant when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord." Transforming bloodthirsty savages into peaceloving Christians was part of this last reformation, and the millennium would undoubtedly commence in the United States. The following morning the missionaries and their families climbed into four Conestoga wagons or mounted horses and headed for Wilmington, Delaware. A crowd of five hundred gathered at ten to see them off from Centre Square in Philadelphia. The journey would take two months. The first part of it, through Delaware to Virginia, was along well-traveled roads, and they spent their nights at the homes of Baptist brethren. But at 40

LDL 2:488-89.

28

·

Chapter I

Newbern, Virginia, with 330 miles yet to go, they turned westward, climbed the Appalachians, and wound along the "Wilderness Road" to Lexington, Kentucky. Then they went south to Knoxville, Tennessee. On this part of the journey they often slept in the wagons. They did not reach Knoxville until late in November when the nights were turning cold. Humphrey Posey was waiting for them there. He guided them along the last ninety miles, over the rugged Unicoi Mountains along the Wachesa or Unicoi Turnpike, eastward into North Carolina. Thomas Roberts de­ scribed this as the most difficult part of their journey: From Knoxville .. . the whole distance is almost a waste, howling wilderness. It was with great difficulty that we obtained a little food for ourselves and horses. We had to lie out two nights, and many of us had to sleep in the open air when the weather was extremely cold.. . . The mountains that we had to ascend and descend are indescribable. If you had seen us climbing the Tillico [Tellico] or the Uniquay [Unicoi] mountains, the nerves of your heart would have trembled for us. At the foot of the mountains we placed every person at his post. The women went before, carrying and conducting the little children. The men and boys were distributed to the different wagons; then all laboured as for life to help the horses and keep up[right] the wagons, for the least blunder would have been fatal.41

When at last they reached the Hiwassee Valley, they traveled along the northern bank of the river toward the spot in North Carolina called Val­ ley Towns: "The Cherokees were flocking the road to see us, and some of them shaking hands in the most affable manner saying 'Osse sanola,' " which Roberts took to mean "Welcome." None of the Indians they met spoke English. Though delighted to have made the long journey without mishap or serious illnesses, the group was surprised to find that neither their dwell­ ings nor the school buildings were finished. Only two log cabins were completed; those housing Posey's and Dawson's families. The others were partially roofed and only Posey's cabin had a chimney. The school buildings were only half done. Supplies were scarce except for salt pork and corn. In all the buildings there was only one that had a pane of glass—the boys' school. Few of the buildings had wooden floors. Roberts and his family moved into what he called his "hut," which was ten feet by nine feet and seven feet high inside; in this hut ten persons were to live.42 However, everyone agreed that it was a beautiful location. The valley was narrow here but the river was "as wide as the Schuylkill." In the summer it flowed peacefully, but in the fall and spring the rain and melt41 42

BCW, The Christian Watchman (Boston), March 9,1822, p. 51. Ibid.

Mission to the Cherokees ·

29

ing snow made the river overflow its banks and caused flooding through­ out much of the valley. This made it particularly difficult to build and maintain mills along the banks. The site was at an altitude of 1,620 feet, and by November the temperature was below freezing at night; in Janu­ ary it might be freezing for days on end. The closest white settlements were forty miles to the east or sixty miles to the west over rough wagon roads. The white communities on the edge of the Cherokee Nation were little more than crossroads junctions with a country store, a mill, and a few log cabins. There were some whitemen living within the Cherokee Nation, usually married to Cherokees. They were rough and uneducated men with little regard for missionaries; some of them made their living selling whiskey to the Indians or trading with them. The land along the river valley was fertile, and the hunting for deer, bear, wild turkey, and small game was good (as was the fishing). Al­ though the Cherokees were all farmers, Valley Towns was not a town or even a village. It was a series of cabins or homesteads strung out along the river for miles. The nearest consolidated group of Cherokee cabins was fifteen miles downstream toward Tennessee where a Cherokee Coun­ cil House was located that provided a focal point for social, political, and religious activities. A ford in the river seven miles to the west also had several cabins near it. But the closest Cherokee family lived two miles from the mission. The Baptists existed in splendid isolation. Posey and Dawson had arranged to have the mission constructed in a square three hundred yards on each side. Along one side were the male and female school buildings (with classrooms and dormitories combined) and a teacher's cabin. On the next side were three residential cabins for the missionaries; opposite the school was the blacksmith shop, and on the fourth side were a stable, lumber room, smokehouse, corncrib, kitchen, and a cabin for transient workers. Most of the buildings were built of logs stuffed with clay to keep out the wind and rain. The sawmill and gristmill were still under construction five miles away. The day after their arrival, Roberts wrote to the Board, "the mission family" held a general meeting "round our council fire for several hours." They decided how to divide up the duties and the housing facilities. At this point some were surprised to learn that Dawson was leaving very soon to teach school near the home of Judge John Martin, a prominent Cherokee who headed the district court of the Nation in Coosewaytee, ninety miles to the south. Posey also let it be known that he did not plan to stay long, for he wanted to get back to itinerant preaching. Roberts wrote to the Board on December 12,1821: The brethren agreed that I should superintend the internal concerns; that brother Posey should itinerate and collect children and visit different parts of the nation to establish local schools, etc. Brother Jones is to take charge of the

30

·

Chapter I

boys' school and sister [Mrs.] Elizabeth Jones of the girls'. Brother J. Farrier is to be the farmer and brother Cleaver to work in the shop and see that nothing be wasted at the school department. The boys and girls are to assist all.43

As the winter came on, the mission family met other disappointments. There was no regular mail service to the Valley and it took from four to eight weeks for a letter to reach them from Philadelphia. Boxes of cloth­ ing, blankets, and household goods sent by female mission groups for the Cherokee children had to be sent for by wagon. Sometimes these boxes remained for months at Knoxville or Augusta, waiting to be picked up because the mission was not notified of their arrival. Evan Jones wrote to the Mission Board that it was like living "in exile."44 Obtaining supplies and tools was equally difficult. Two men had to leave their work, hitch a team to a wagon, travel two or three days to reach the nearest store, and hope that it would chance to have what they needed. For these items they had to pay such high prices that they ulti­ mately decided that many of the manufactured goods could be sent cheaper from Philadelphia. Posey and Dawson had been able to plant a good crop of corn with the help of the students and hired hands, but a diet of corn and pork became tiresome. "It is out of the question to look for any wheat flour in this place. We cannot obtain it without going 90 miles, and there it cost[s] from eight to nine dollars, and less than six horses and two men cannot bring four barrels. Flour is here like the water brought to David from the well of Bethlehem."45 They sometimes bought melons or vegetables, turkey or venison from the Indians, and they soon started their own beehives because sugar was scarce. When the spring freshets knocked out their gristmill in 1822, they had to go twenty miles to get their corn ground into meal. Before Dawson left on December 10, he taught Evan and Elizabeth Jones how to conduct the schools on the Lancastrian system. There were twenty male students and about twenty female; they could not take any more into the school until the buildings were completed. The dormitory rooms were heated only by a fireplace. Roberts reported that these "little Indians are half naked, and when they lie down at night, we have not blankets enough to cover them. The cold disturbs their midnight sleep and drives them from their straw beds to seek the warmth of the fire­ side."46 There never seemed to be enough blankets, clothes, or shoes for all the children. 41 Ibid. 44 Evan

Jones, letter to the Mission Board, November 8, 1825 (ABMU). BCW, The Christian Watchman, March 9, 1822, p. 51. 46 LDL 3:92.

45

MissiontotheCherokees · 31 Over the next three years the buildings slowly were completed, but the missionaries struggled against heavy odds to make their farm productive, their homes habitable, and their gristmill functional. They found it diffi­ cult to keep Posey's promise to Chief Hicks and the Council that they would board and teach one hundred students. Sickness was endemic in the cold climate, and the difficult daily life drained energy; the loneliness produced profound discouragement. Of the twenty-five persons, plus Po­ sey's and Dawson's families, who occupied the mission in November 1821, only one family—the Joneses—remained by April 1825. And with every month the debts for maintaining the mission mounted. Optimistic hopes and plans met crushing disappointments in the raw wilderness. But the Cherokees remained eager for education and did what they could to assist. The only negative comments about the mission came from white settlers and traders in the vicinity.

CHAPTER II

The High Cost of Educating the Cherokees, 1821-1827 Brother Jones and myself devote as much time as we can spare from our other avocations to the acquiring of the language, be­ ing more and more impressed with the necessity of giving these people the word of God in their own tongue. —Rev. Thomas Roberts, April 25,1822 The missionary must want to know his own limits exactly, what he may do under the sanctions of his employers and what he may not do; what [funds] he may call for and what he may not. —Heman Lincoln, Treasurer, to Evan Jones, June 8,1826

EVAN JONES, his wife, and the other members of the Valley Towns mission started their work among the Cherokees with enthusiasm and high hopes despite the many difficulties they faced. During the early years they wres­ tled with two of the most intractable problems faced by all missionaries: how to overcome the language barrier and how to keep down the high cost of education. Their great desire to be useful to the Cherokees tended to outrun their need to be frugal with their funds. Their commitment to their work was matched by that of the children who came to the school and of the Cherokee parents who sent their sons and daughters to board with these white strangers. "The children far surpass our highest expec­ tation," wrote Thomas Roberts shortly after his arrival.1 "It is truly pleas­ ing to see so many young immortals taken from the abodes of vice and wretchedness, assuming habits of industry and civilization and acquiring knowledge for this life and especially the knowledge of the word of God.... There is seldom any need of corporal punishments. Rewards and forfeits have far better effects."2 The Joneses were following the Lan­ castrian method in their teaching, giving prizes or "tokens" as rewards to students who did well and demerits to those who seemed unwilling to try. The rewards were "tickets," each with a certain small monetary value; 1 LDL 2

3:22.

BMM 4:336.

Educating the Cherokees

·

33

collected over time, the tickets could be used to purchase books or cloth­ ing. "Forfeits" or demerits could also be accumulated and led to a loss of privileges or the performance of extra tasks. Only as a last resort and for the worst behavior (lying, swearing, stealing, fighting, insolence) did the teachers whip the children. Repeated bad behavior resulted in expulsion. The missionaries soon discovered that Indian parents did not like their children to be whipped and were themselves extremely lenient. They also discovered that Cherokee children were seldom given regular tasks at home and seemed trained up to "laziness" or "indolence," especially the boys. Nonetheless, they were pleased at how eager the children were to learn. The pupils are very attentive to learning and appear capable of as great im­ provement as any children in the world. They are affable, docile, amiable and mild. They already say to those who stay at home, "You will be of no account if you do not go to school." Their improvement in singing is remarkable, and their attention to worship is unremitting.3

The students were so eager to please their teachers that it was frightening: "If any of us were so hard-hearted as to ask one of the scholars to go for us two or three miles with his bare feet through the snow, he would start without hesitation. It pains my heart to see the little children without shoes or stockings; yes, many of them have nothing to put on but a thin shirt and tow trowsers."4 Cherokee children were taught to respect their elders and those in au­ thority. They also had a remarkable ability for memorization and oral recitation. But it became evident very quickly that the fullblood children, who constituted the overwhelming majority, found it very difficult to learn English and even more difficult to sit still at their lessons for hours at a time. The full breeds also learn those things in which they have equal advantages fully as fast as the others, but for want of understanding and [want of] feeling a relish for what they are attempting to learn, it is very difficult to engage their attention and to keep them regularly at school. We observe when they first come they are generally much delighted with writing, and most of them have, in a few days, learned to form all the letters of the alphabet. But we find that when the novelty of writing [the letters] is over, and they enter on the dark and tedious business of spelling and combining sounds which they cannot articulate, and which con­ vey no ideas to their minds, their path becomes rugged and uninteresting; their native habits of indolence and listlessness resume their full force; the pleasing 3 4

LDL 2:401. The Baptist Christian Watchman (Boston), March 9,1822, p. 51.

34

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Chapter II

ideas of bows and arrows, blow guns, and ball [games] take possession of their minds; and the attraction is irresistible. The consequence is that they cannot rest satisfied without frequently going home.5

It was also discouraging for the fullbloods to be in the same classes with the children of missionaries and those of mixed ancestry whose parents spoke English, for these children were soon far in advance and, even when younger, were given the task of helping the fullbloods who fell behind. Attendance was not compulsory and fullblood parents seldom forced their children to return to school if they did not want to. "The Indians exercise no authority over their children; therefore it depends entirely on the children themselves whether they come to school or not. The only means we have to secure attendance is to render our instruction interest­ ing."6 Worst of all from the missionaries' point of view, once a pupil left the Christian environment of the boarding school (where prayer, Bible reading, hymn singing, and daily worship were part of the curriculum), they reverted to barbarism—hunting birds with blowguns, engaging in ball plays, and participating in all the ancient tribal rituals and dances with their parents and older siblings. Still, the parents did want them to learn English and arithmetic, and many of the students showed remarkable perseverance despite the diffi­ culties. "Some of the boys who have been here for a long time trying to learn English without understanding what they read, became discouraged and went away and we see them no more. Others seem to hang on be­ tween hope and despair."7 Part of the difficulty lay in overoptimistic ex­ pectations by the parents and students. They had no idea that it would take four or five years to speak English with any fluency, and for students over twelve it was much harder than for the younger ones. The chief obstacles to teaching were the lack of bilingual teachers and textbooks. The teachers could not convey the basic rules of grammar, syntax, and spelling. By using the Lancastrian method, some of the mixed blood children who learned faster were able to bridge this gap somewhat by assisting the others, but they lacked the formal knowledge to explain the principles underlying what they taught. The language barrier also affected the evangelistic aspect of the mis­ sion. Roberts hired an adult interpreter at five dollars a day to help him preach on Sundays to such Cherokees as attended the mission church services, but good interpreters were hard to find and expensive to pay for. One of them, James Wafford, told Roberts that of six thousand Chero5

LDL 2:310. B M M 3:413. 7 Ibid.

6

Educating the Cherokees

·

35

kees in the mountain region, not more than five or six were efficient in­ terpreters.8 Moreover, there were simply no Cherokee words for most of the basic Christian theological terms. The Cherokees had no word for sin, grace, repentance, baptism, depravity, forgiveness, heaven, hell, soul, damnation, regeneration, or salvation. Interpreters were stumped into si­ lence when expected to translate sermons to congregations. The obvious solution for the missionaries was to learn Cherokee and find ways to express Christian terms within that language structure, just as the teachers had to learn Cherokee to teach scientific principles to stu­ dents who had no words for gravity or multiplication or the solar system. "Brother Jones and myself," Roberts wrote in April 1822, "devote as much time as we can spare from our other avocations to the acquiring of the language being more and more impressed with the necessity of giv­ ing these people the word of God in their own tongue."9 He noted, how­ ever, that even bilingual Cherokees were unable to teach them scriptural words. "Since we came here I have seen but two full Cherokees that knew English enough to understand the plainest passage in the Bible."10 Fur­ thermore, it proved far more difficult to learn to speak Cherokee than the missionaries expected. The goal of their effort was to find a way to write the language in roman letters so that it could be printed. Then they could create textbooks for the school, religious tracts, and translations of the Bible. "Perhaps it will be gratifying to yourself to know," Roberts wrote to Staughton in 1822, "what methods we pursue towards reducing the language to writ­ ing. We have collected all the sounds and then fixed characters to repre­ sent them—this being done, we divide the work. One to search for the verbs and pursue them through all their modifications, the other to collect words for a Dictionary."11 Jones took the verb forms; Roberts worked on the dictionary. To their surprise they discovered, "The construction of the language bears a striking resemblance to the Hebrew. Every modification of the verb being made by prefixes and suffixes." From the days of the Puritans there had been a persistent belief that the Indians had descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel. It gave a great incentive to missionary work to believe this, but it did not make Cherokee easier to master: The Cherokees have twelve personal pronouns, fragments of which are used as prefixes to denote the person, number, agent and object of the verb. There are also a few primitive verbs, simply expressing existence, parts of which form the 8 LDL 3:213. 'Ibid., 113. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 214.

36

·

Chapter II

tenses when suffixed to verbs.... The language has neither articles nor prepo­ sitions, and very few conjunctions. The nouns have neither cases nor genders. Notwithstanding this apparent deficiency, the verbs possess such a facility of modification as to supply every defect, and frequently to express an idea more precisely than can be done in English. The number of inflections of which a full Cherokee verb is susceptible is al­ most incredible. . . . We have discovered four modes, viz. Indicative, Impera­ tive, Potential, and Subjunctive. The first has nine tenses; the second has one, the third ten, and the fourth, five tenses. Brother Jones has just been reckoning the inflection of the verb "to bring" and found them to be twelve thousand.12

The Baptists discovered that other missionaries were at work on this same task. The Moravians, however, had given up on it. In their opinion, "their Language cannot be attained by Adults and when attained is inca­ pable of conveying any Idea beyond the sphere of the senses; there seems to be no other way left by which the Spiritual or Temporal Good of these people Can be promoted than by teaching them in our Language."13 The Congregationalists disagreed, and in their effort to find the best way to transcribe Cherokee they had even enlisted the services of a linguistics expert at Harvard College, ProfessorJohn Pickering. One of the Congre­ gational ministers most interested in this work was Daniel S. Butrick. He visited Valley Towns from Brainerd several times in 1822 and shared his research with them. Butrick and Evan Jones began a friendship that would last many years; in 1824 Jones gave Butrick's name to the son who was to become one of the leading experts on the Cherokee language in the years ahead, John Buttrick Jones. Following Butrick's third visit, Rob­ erts wrote to Staughton, "We have, in conjunction with the Rev. Butrick of Brainerd, selected from the Roman characters an alphabet which com­ prehends all the sounds in the language which I think is simple and nat­ ural."14 Using this system, they began their first translation in August 1822. They were also assisted by a bilingual Cherokee named James Wafford. Wafford had a white father and Cherokee mother; he had lived for a time in a white settlement in Georgia before moving to the Valley Towns area. At the age of twenty he was attending the Baptist mission school to improve his English. Some Cherokees who heard these early translations read by Wafford said they could understood what he read. Roberts was hopeful that "the Cherokees may, in a short time, read the word of life in their own language"—provided they learned the roman letters in which 12 Ibid. For good discussions of the difficulties of translating Cherokee see the books of Jack F. Kilpatrick, especially New Echota Letters (Dallas: Southern Methodist Press, 1968). 13 Cited in W. G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 64. 14 LDL 3:311.

Educating the Cherokees · 37 it was transcribed and mastered the way in which Roberts and Jones em­ ployed the letters to represent Cherokee sounds. "The Indians are glad to find that some attempt is made toward imparting them knowledge in their own language." It gave them a sense of pride to know that their language was capable of conveying the whiteman's knowledge, and it instilled hope that soon all Cherokees would master the secrets that gave the whitemen such technical skills and such power over nature. In one of his first letters from Valley Towns, Jones remarked that he had already started to translate the "Philadelphia Sunday school spelling book" series for use in the school.15 Roberts reported in April 1822, "We have made an humble attempt at translating some portions of the word of God. These are the first chapter of Genesis, the 2d chapter of Matthew, the 3d chapter of John, and a selection of passages prepared for the pur­ pose of containing a brief account of the creation, the fall, the coming of Christ, His life and sufferings unto death, &c." By August, with Wafford's help, these selections were completed in manuscript form and were being read to the students and mission church congregation. Roberts and Jones were "fully persuaded that all attempts to introduce the gospel amongst these benighted people in a foreign language must prove futile." They even tried reading the translations themselves, and found "that they are well understood though the subjects are new to them and our pronun­ ciation imperfect."16 Many white people, Jones told the Board, believe "the Indian lan­ guages are so circumscribed in their vocabularies that no intelligible translation can be made into them. This opinion I presume must have been formed under the impression that the language itself must be as lim­ ited as the intelligence [knowledge] of the people. This, however, is far from being the case. The Cherokee language possess a great facility of combinations by which new ideas can readily be expressed. . . . This na­ tive fertility of the language, compensates in a great measure for the pau­ city of ideas familiar to the natives of the forest. We have met with several instances in which the Cherokee languages expresses passages of scripture with peculiar force and beauty."17 Jones argued strongly against the views of the Moravians and other missionaries that it was useless to try to learn Cherokee or to teach in a dying Indian language; he denied that "translations into these lan­ guages . . . could be prejudicial to civilization [of the Indian] as it would have a tendency to perpetuate the Indian languages with which these ob­ jectors consider barbarism to be identified."18 Civilization, he said, had 15

Ibid., 310. Ibid., 214. 17 Ibid., 311-13. 18 Ibid., 311-12. 16

38 · ChapterII always advanced by translating the ideas of one people into the language of another so that each nation or culture could learn from the experience and arts of the other. He disliked the paternalism and ethnocentrism that considered that white Americans knew everything worth knowing. Far from sustaining barbarism, translations of spiritual and scientific truth would have just the opposite effect. Certainly translating the doctrines of the Bible into native languages has "exalted and ennobled and refined every people among whom they have been generally circulated." Jones wrote to the Board that "I think it would be a great improvement in our system if those who don't understand English were taught to read first in Cherokee," and he requested the Board to provide funds to print a vocab­ ulary book with English and Cherokee words and phrases in parallel col­ umns. "To condemn them to the hard fate of acquiring every idea of God and his salvation, as well as the art of civilization, through the medium of an unknown tongue, and that too without a Grammar or vocabulary to assist them, appears to be at variance with reason."19 Throughout his life Jones promoted the practice of educating and evangelizing the Cherokees in their own language; only in that way could they truly comprehend, through their own patterns of thought and feeling, the experiential mean­ ing of Christianity. In English, Christianity would always remain foreign. "One great advantage" of discovering a way to write Cherokee, Jones told the Board, "would be the diminution of expense, as on that plan, 1,000 could be educated for the same sum that would be required to ed­ ucate 100 through the medium of English." Experience had taught him that "Five years is as short a period as a full Indian ten years old would take to acquire an English education that would be of benefit," and "not one in fifty of those who commence have the resolution to go through. . .. whereas, if they were taught in their own language, one year would, in general, be sufficient. . .. This plan would bring education within the reach of thousands who would otherwise be entirely debarred from that invaluable privilege" and "would be the most likely to secure the attraction of the children, as all their exercises would be rendered pleasing." Moreover, "it would also have a tendency to disarm the jeal­ ousy [suspicion] with which the missionary schools are viewed by some of the chiefs" who disliked having the younger generation grow up learn­ ing a language the chiefs could not understand and that would fail to perpetuate their old ways and beliefs.20 Teaching only in English was di­ visive and unsettling to the older generation; they feared that the young were being taught an alien ideology along with the unknown language— as, of course, they were, although the missionaries believed it was for the 19 Jones

letters, ABMU, September 23, 1826. Evan Jones to the Baptist Foreign Mission Board, September 23, 1826 and March 27, 1827, papers of the American Baptist Mission Union, American Baptist Historical Society, Rochester, New York (hereafter cited as ABMU). 20

Educating the Cherokees · 39 Indians' own good. Teaching in Cherokee, Jones argued, would enable the older generation to see how valuable and helpful the new ways could be. Furthermore, in the oral culture of the Cherokees, the elders of the nation were traditionally looked up to as the wisest and those to whom deference was due. If the young learned English, they might assume they knew more or better than their elders. Maintaining respect for the wis­ dom of the aged was difficult in a period of rapid change when the expe­ rience of the past seemed to have little relevance to the problems and needs of the present. Breaking down the language barrier would dispel much of the antagonism between the Cherokee leaders and the mission­ aries, the old and the young. Too many missionaries, Jones believed, through cultural and spiritual pride only widened the gap they should be trying to bridge. Fortunately, the Baptist Foreign Mission Board agreed with Jones and Roberts and encouraged their efforts to learn the language and to prepare translations of the Bible and textbooks in Cherokee for their school. Ironically, at the very time Roberts, Jones, Butrick, and Pickering were struggling to find a way to transcribe Cherokee into roman letters, a na­ tive Cherokee named Sequoyah (or George Guess) had already found a simple and easy method to transcribe his language. Though of mixed an­ cestry, Sequoyah could not speak, read, or write English. Yet in 1821, after eight years of trial and error, he devised a syllabary by means of which anyone who could speak Cherokee could easily write it; a person had only to memorize the eighty-six characters that Sequoyah designed, one for each syllable in the language. Within a few years after Jones and Roberts reached the Cherokee Nation, knowledge of Sequoyah's sylla­ bary swept through the Nation and Cherokees were teaching themselves to write and read their own language. Jones did not learn of this invention until 1826, but he immediately approved of it and abandoned his own system of utilizing roman letters for Sequoyah's syllabary. The Congregationalists did the same. By this stroke of genius, Sequoyah reversed the process of translation. Instead of the Cherokees having to learn the whiteman's way of writing Cherokee, the whiteman had to learn their way. While the missionaries still had to learn Cherokee, the Cherokees could now read and write without learning English. Sequoyah's aim was to per­ petuate Cherokee culture; it was up to the missionaries then to utilize his invention for their purposes. It meant that fonts of type would have to be manufactured with Sequoyah's characters on them in order to print texts the Cherokees could read. In ways it increased the gaps between the cul­ tures and within Cherokee society, for by the 1820s twenty to twenty-five percent of the Cherokees were of mixed ancestry and spoke only English. Most of them took pride in this and did not want to learn Cherokee nor to have their children learn it. The gap between English-speaking mixed bloods and Cherokee-speaking fullbloods was already growing, and as

40 · Chapter II

resistance to acculturation grew among some of the traditionalists, Se­ quoyah's syllabary became a symbol of Cherokee national resistance to rapid change and assimilation. Those who did not speak and write in Cherokee, were not considered true Cherokees. The Mission Boards were reluctant to yield to a system devised by In­ dians. Printing in Sequoyan type would be expensive and difficult. But most missionaries among the Congregationalists and Baptists agreed that translations in any other form would be useless. The Cherokees wanted to read their own language in the form devised by their own linguist; it made the whiteman meet them on their own terms. While Jones and Roberts struggled to learn the language and transcribe it, life at the mission station gradually settled into a routine. The school buildings and dwellings were completed. The mills were rebuilt after a flood destroyed them in the spring of 1822. Farrier and his farming sons cleared the land and got it fenced in time for expanded planting that spring. Cleaver set up his blacksmith shop to keep the horses shod and the tools repaired. The school program settled into a fixed schedule: In the morning, at sunrise, the horn is blown for worship when all the children with as many of the mission family as can conveniently, assemble at the school house. A portion of the word of God is read and a hymn is sung in which the greater part of the children join. One of the brethren addresses the throne, and the meeting is dismissed. Every child that can read commits to memory six verses every morning which are recited at the opening of the school; and all that is thus committed through the week is said over again at Sunday school, and various questions asked from the chapter, which, in general, are answered by the children with understand­ ing; so much so that strangers who occasionally visit the place are astonished at the scriptural knowledge which these children of the woods have acquired. The conduct of the scholars is mild and respectful and their progress in learn­ ing exceeds the most sanguine expectations of their friends. There are now at the school from 40 to 50 who can read the word of God with facility. Many of them write well and have made considerable advance in figures. The evening worship is conducted in the following manner. First a chapter is read from the Old Testament and explained to the understanding of the chil­ dren, by referring them to the fulfilment of the types and prophecies in the person, life and death of our blessed Saviour. This method of instruction has had a very good effect in exciting their attention to the word of Truth. They search the scriptures as under the full conviction that they indeed are words of eternal life. When prayer and praise are offered, a chapter of Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul is read and suitable explanation given.21 LDL 4:185.

Educating the Cherokees

·

41

In this letter for The Latter Day Luminary, the official organ of the Bap­ tist Foreign Mission Board, Roberts stressed the strictly evangelical tone of the school. However, he also pointed out that the missionaries were just as concerned about the "civilization" of the children: "They are trained not only to books, pencils, and pens, but also to the hoe, the mat­ tock, the plough, the scythe, and the sickle. These useful instruments rise in value among them, and one of their greatest cares is to keep them sharp and bright." In 1824, Roberts decided to limit the school to fifty students to save expenses and make it more manageable for the staff. He wanted twentyfive male and twenty-five female students, but the Cherokees always sent more males than females. To improve attendance, parents or guardians (usually a maternal uncle) were required to agree that they would not permit the child to drop out at will. All parents and guardians were also told that they must furnish their children with shoes, a blanket, and, if possible, suitable clothing, for the mission societies could not keep sup­ plying enough to do this. In order to equalize the disparity between English-speaking and non-English-speaking pupils, no child who spoke English would be admitted until at least ten years old; no non-Englishspeaking child would be admitted under six, and no English-speaking child could remain for more than four years. In addition, a set of rules was adopted to govern student behavior: Every pupil shall continue at school till he has attained at least a plain English education. . . . Any pupil who shall attend any ball play or dance or be guilty of getting drunk shall be expelled.... Any pupil convicted of stealing shall be excluded.. . . No scholars shall be allowed to keep a horse, dog, gun, or dirk at the establish­ ment. .. .22

There were to be two weeks of vacation in every quarter session, but no absences would be allowed at other times. Two weeks unexcused absence led to expulsion, and those expelled "shall forfeit all clothes received from the mission." These new rules did not seem to offend the Cherokees and the school continued to fill its quota of fifty students. Conversion of Indian souls proceeded with much less success. The Board began to wonder whether this aspect of the mission was being ne­ glected. Baptists did not baptize infants; only persons old enough to pro­ fess their faith and convince the pastor and other church members that they had indeed experienced a miraculous, divine regeneration of their souls through the action of the Holy Spirit through the grace of God (a 22

Ibid., 167-68.

42 · Chapter II direct spiritual contact with God) could be baptized. Baptism was by total immersion. Full membership (the right to participate in communion and to vote in church affairs) required a period of six months to a year of probation to make certain that the soul had indeed been spiritually reborn (cleansed of depravity) and was capable (with God's help) of resisting all sinful temptations. Then, by a vote of the church members, a convert was admitted to the church. Full members made all decisions democratically, including the choice and dismission of other members and (except in mis­ sion situations) of the pastor or elder. (In most evangelical churches, how­ ever, women members did not vote.) An effective mission church was ex­ pected to make conversions regularly and to grow rapidly, but during its early years the white members of the Valley Towns Baptist Church (those who had come from Philadelphia) outnumbered the Cherokee members. The first Cherokee to experience conversion was a mixed blood named John Timson. Timson and his wife lived two miles from the mission. Because he was bilingual, Timson was often asked to serve as interpreter for the missionaries. He also assisted with the teaching and in helping Roberts and Jones to learn Cherokee. Early in 1823 the missionaries no­ ticed that Timson was asking more pressing and earnest questions about the meaning of sin, the possibilities of forgiveness, and the nature of con­ version and eternal life. In evangelical terms this indicated that his soul was "awakened" or "under conviction" as the result of the influence of the Holy Spirit. To "become serious" about the state of one's soul or "anxious" about possible damnation was the first sign that a sinner (or unregenerate person) was approaching the point of a direct experience with God that would totally transform him or her from a servant of Satan (or selfishness) to a servant of God (unselfish concern to do God's will). This "serious concern" brought intensified prayers for Timson's salvation by all the missionaries and concerted efforts to bring him to confess his sins and turn to God for help. After many long conversations with Rob­ erts and Jones, Timson confessed himself to be a sinner in September 1823, threw himself upon God's mercy, and experienced spiritual rebirth. He then publicly professed his faith in Jesus as his savior, and said he felt a great release from guilt and anxiety and a sincere desire to follow and serve the God of Christianity. The church, which was Calvinist in theol­ ogy, voted that he was among the predestined elect (a chosen saint of God on earth) at least so far as human judgment could tell, and admitted him to baptism. Roberts described him as "the first fruit of our mission." A throng of curious Cherokees watched as Roberts led Timson into the Hiwassee River and dipped him under the water ("in the Savior's liquid grave") to symbolize his cleansing from sin and his rebirth as a child of God. The mission family and school children sang hymns and rejoiced as

Educating the Cherokees · 43 another brand was saved from the flames of hell. He was soon admitted to full communion.23 Timson was so dedicated to his new faith that he began preaching (called "exhorting") to his fellow Cherokees about his experience. Timson's wife was converted soon after. In February 1824, an eighteen-year-old Cherokee who, though a fullblood, spoke broken English, became the second convert. The Baptists called him Arch Skit or John Arch from his native name "At-si." Atsi had attended the Baptist school for several months, and in describing his transformation Roberts said, "This young man, a few months ago, knew nothing of Jesus Christ and his salvation. At first he seemed rather more careless [about his soul] than common," and he displayed no apparent reaction "to any religious instruction, as if that were a subject belonging only to white people. I said to him one evening, 'Well, Arch, what do you think about Jesus Christ, death and eternity?' He replied with a careless laugh, Ί think nothing about them.' I said, with some emotion, 'The time will come when you will consider these things, but beware lest it should be too late!' " Not long after, Atsi became seriously ill and thought he was going to die. When Atsi recovered, "He appeared more attentive and serious" about Christian teachings. "Those extracts" from the Bible which Roberts and Jones had translated into their form of Cherokee were "of great service to him." He too confessed his sins, repented, expressed his faith in Jesus. He said that "What grieved him most was that he had been so bad. That now Jesus is his only refuge, and that he could find no comfort to his soul until he gave himself up to God."24 The third male convert was a prominent fullblood chief named Wasadi, who attended the school although he was thirty years old. Roberts re­ ported that he was "a full breed and a member of the National Council," elected by the mountain Cherokees as their representative. Because "he is totally ignorant of the English language," Roberts said, it was difficult for the missionaries to reach a decision about how well he understood the spiritual experiences he had undergone. They could converse with him only through an interpreter, but it was clear that he wanted to join the church. After they read him their biblical translation, he seemed to assent to all they said. In September 1823, Roberts described him as a "hopeful convert," but not until 1825 did the missionaries agree to baptize him. Roberts reported, "He feels a great concern for his people and thinks if they only knew the Saviour, all would believe. He asked whether the un­ godly white people ever heard the gospel. When answered that they did, 23 Ibid., 369. Timson's wife was the second convert at the mission. See Jones's letters, ABMU, February 1, 1828. 24 LDL 5:112.

44 · Chapter II he was astonished that they could continue in sin and unbelief." Like Timson, Wasadi was so elated over his new religious feelings that he be­ gan to preach and exhort in his village, some fifteen miles west of the mission.25 The missionaries were also anxious to convert their own teenage chil­ dren, and in 1824 two other white girls living at the mission were added to the church after baptism. One was Lucy Smith, evidently the daughter of a hired hand. The other was Cynthia Cunningham, a girl from Ten­ nessee who had come to take the place, temporarily, of her sister Pauline, who worked for a dollar a week assisting Mrs. Jones with housework and cooking.26 Their services had been obtained through their brother, Miles C. Cunningham, a wagoner along the Unicoi Turnpike who often did carting and hauling for the mission between Knoxville and Augusta. The Cunninghams were to play a large part iii Jones's life in the years ahead. Half a dozen conversions in four years, only four of them Cherokees, were hardly a cause for jubilation, especially considering the heavy ex­ pense involved. There were growing signs of discouragement at the mis­ sion. The work load was heavy; expenses were continually mounting. In 1823 the Mission Board in Philadelphia asked Roberts and Posey to come to their annual meeting to report in person about the slow progress and high costs of the mission. Posey was accused of mismanaging the large amounts of money he had been given by the Board and by the federal government; he was unable to provide satisfactory vouchers for his ex­ penses.27 Roberts was also blamed, and the Board instructed him to find some way to cut expenses. Posey was cleared of any actual malfeasance, but he dropped out of mission work at this time and looked for a position as a pastor in a white community. When Roberts returned to Valley Towns in May 1823, he made the decision to cut the school to fifty students and to require some contribu­ tions in terms of blankets and clothing from their parents.28 He also de­ cided to rent out the mission farm on shares to a farmer from Tennessee named Cobb. Cobb agreed to give twenty percent of his crop to support the mission, keeping the rest for himself and his family. Thereafter he was to bear all the expense of the farm. Ten acres were reserved "for recrea­ tion" for the students and to give the boys some farm training. The most expensive part of the enterprise had been the repair of the mills, which suffered every spring from floods. Roberts decided to rent these to a miller 25

LDL 4:333; BMM 4:264; LDL 6:147-48. LDL 4:145—46. In 1825 Evan Jones reported that his twelve-and-one-half-year-old daughter was baptized but he did not mention her name. LDL 5:341. 27 Proceedings of the Baptist General Convention, 1823, p. 432. 28 Jones reported school attendance for 1822 at 48 boys, 22 girls. LDL 3:310. 26

Educating the Cherokees · 45 for five years; the miller was to pay one hundred dollars a year to the mission in the form of cutting planks and grinding corn up to that amount. The miller was given ten acres of land for a farm for his family and allowed to keep any money he made from the mills.29 Money was also saved by the gradual departure of most of the original personnel. It is not clear whether they became discouraged or were asked to leave to assist in the general retrenchment. John Farrier, the farmer, was the first to go; he took his sons with him. Once the farm was rented out, there was no need for him. Then Isaac Cleaver, the blacksmith, left, for there was not enough repair work and horse-shoeing to do. For some reason one of Jones's daughters went with him, perhaps to attend school in Philadelphia. Then Roberts himself decided to leave with his family. The Board had asked him to help raise funds by traveling around the country, speaking at Baptist churches, and explaining the work of the mission. Jones realized that the burden of running the mission would soon fall upon him, leaving him little time to pursue his interest in learn­ ing Cherokee and translating. He had also felt a call to become a preacher, and he wanted to itinerate through the mountain areas, found­ ing local schools and evangelizing. On August 20, 1823, he wrote to Thomas Dawson, at Coosewaytee, explaining the imminent departures and his need for assistance: "On Tuesday next, Mr. Cleaver's family and Miss [Elizabeth] Jones are going to leave this place, and as soon as possible afterwards, Mr. Roberts and his family and brother John Farrier are going. Eliza [Mrs. Jones] and self will then be the only persons left to carry on the whole concern."30 If Jones were to be responsible for the whole mission, Dawson would have to teach the boys' school. Jones suggested that he explain this to Judge Martin and bring the students he was teaching in Coosewaytee back to board at Valley Towns. Dawson agreed to help and returned to Valley Towns in December 1823. On the eve of his departure in March 1824, Thomas Roberts reported that Dawson had agreed to act as superintendent of the mission as well as school teacher so that Evan Jones could devote more time to evange­ lizing. "It is pleasant here," Roberts said. "Peace and love seem to pervade every heart. ... If I had none but myself to consult, I would in all proba­ bility end my days among the Indians." But he had agreed to serve the Board in the capacity of "agent," and to devote the next year to traveling around the country raising funds for Indian mission work.31 John Tim25

LDL 5:112-13. letter is among the Dawson Papers, ABMU, dated August 20,1843. 31 LDL 5:112-13; LDL 5:162. As a missionary agent for 1824—1825, Roberts collected $1,910.14 for the Foreign Mission Board (LDL 6:155). 30 Jones's

46 · Chapter II son, now regularly employed as interpreter for the mission, said, "Mr. Jones has undertaken to go all about to preach to the people," although this work annoyed some of the Cherokees. They had welcomed schools but had not expected itinerant evangelists roaming the countryside, in­ vading their towns with the whiteman's religion.32 This decision marked a dramatic change in Jones's approach to helping the Indians. According to a letter from Dawson, Jones had felt "a call to the ministry" shortly before Roberts left. This probably led him to give some sermons at the mission church, which then ratified his "calling" by licensing him to preach. Timson served as his interpreter when he traveled through the valley, and no doubt the experience helped him in his great desire to learn to speak Cherokee. He enjoyed preaching so much that he decided to become an ordained minister. The Baptists did not believe in "a learned ministry" so much as a "spirit-filled" ministry. Ordination did not require theological training, only a clear demonstration that God had given him "the gift." During the summer Jones visited Tennessee and spoke to the ministers of the Hiwassee Baptist Association, a group of affiliated Baptist churches in the white settlements of McMinn County in eastern Tennessee. He probably preached at some of their churches to "prove" his gift. They were satisfied, and in August several ministers were appointed by the association to travel to Valley Towns to participate in Jones's ordination. The event took place on August 21, 1824.33 His call to preach was fortuitous, for when Roberts left the Valley Towns had no minister. That winter, Thomas Dawson became very ill, and in the spring of 1825 he resigned as superintendent and school teacher.Jones and his fam­ ily were now the only missionaries at Valley Towns. Elizabeth Jones had given birth to another son, John Buttrick Jones, in December. She had five other children to care for. The Board had hired Pauline Cunningham, a white woman aged twenty-two, to assist her in household chores, which included feeding and washing the clothes for the school children. Pauline received a dollar a week for this. Evan Jones now had to assume the superintendency of the mission, which meant that he had to manage the funds and direct the work of the mission. He hired a teacher from Ten­ nessee, Alfred D. Melton, to take Dawson's place; Mrs. Jones and her daughter Elizabeth (now returned to the mission) continued to manage the girls' school. Jones hired a blacksmith to replace Cleaver in order to keep the wagons and tools in repair and the horses shod that he and Timson used for itinerating. He also saw to it that the miller and farmer at" LDL 5:281. 33

Ibid. The ministers who presided were named Courtney and Wood.

Educating the Cherokees · 47 tended to their duties. He considered it his duty to carry out the original program of the mission and also to expand its range of activities. But he was not a good business manager, and his efforts to make the mission self-sufficient failed. The mission's budget simply would not cover the operating expenses and salaries. Finding that Cobb was an inefficient farmer, Jones took back the eighty acres and hired John A. Miller to man­ age it on salary. The entire crop would thus be available to feed the mis­ sionaries and students. When another flood washed out the mills again in the spring of 1826, he hired a millwright to rebuild them; he was advised to build a dam to create a storage pond for the mill. His oldest son as­ sisted the farmer, but the two of them could not manage it, even with the volunteer help of the male students. The farm at the time had forty-two cattle and sixty hogs that provided meat and milk. Jones hired extra farm­ hands. His wife and Pauline Cunningham were overworked caring for fifty students, so he hired another woman for household chores. When buildings needed new roofs, he hired carpenters. Meanwhile he had the spiritual care of the mission. The Valley Towns mission was not the only problem creating a finan­ cial crisis for the Foreign Mission Board. Luther Rice, the general man­ ager of the Board's work, proved to be as ready as Evan Jones to expand expenses and activities without much regard to mounting costs and in­ adequate income. Rice was responsible for all the funds raised and dis­ tributed by the Board. At the same meeting of the Board, in 1824, at which Roberts was asked to devote himself to fund-raising, the Board asked Luther Rice to explain what had happened to all the money raised for mission work. He was suspected of having misappropriated some of it to pay for the publication of The Latter Day Luminary and to found Columbian College, a Baptist institution, in Washington, D.C. Although Rice was exonerated of malfeasance, the Board decided to place control of its funds thereafter in the hands of a committee of businessmen known as "The Committee of Outfit."34 This committee was authorized to hire mission agents (fund-raisers), to "outfit" missionaries to be sent into the field at home and abroad, to set strict budgetary limits and to assume fiscal responsibility for all the Board's activities. Foreign missions had be­ come too complex to be entrusted to a single manager with no business experience. The businessmen who took over the Board in 1824 were mostly residents of New England, and from 1824 to 1826 the "Commit­ tee of Outfit" met in Boston. Rice was allowed to continue as manager under their direction, but the process proved cumbersome, for the head34 See

71.

Winthrop S. Hudson, "Stumbling into Disorder," Foundations 1 (April 1958): 45-

48 · Chapter II quarters of the mission (called "The Mission Rooms") were still in Phil­ adelphia. In 1826 a major shake-up occurred in the Board itself. Luther Rice was censured and replaced as executive officer by Lucius Bolles of Salem, Massachusetts. The Reverend Heman Lincoln of Boston became Treasurer, and the offices of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board were moved from Philadelphia to Boston. The Latter Day Luminary was closed and the American Baptist Missionary Magazine, edited by Francis Wayland in Boston, became the official organ of the agency. All connec­ tions between the Foreign Mission Board and Columbian College were dissolved. The Baptist Board was not the only mission organization to go through a critical restructuring in the mid-1820s. The whole process of mission activities, especially among the American Indians, was being reconsid­ ered. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM)—which governed Congregational and Presbyterian missions— though far wealthier and more efficient than the Baptist Board, also dis­ covered that Indian missions were more expensive to maintain than they had expected. Hopes of federal subsidies through the Civilization Act had been overoptimistic. The act never provided more than $10,000 a year, which had to be divided among all missions to all tribes. Philanthropists discovered that maintaining large schools, model farms, and extensive staffs cost more than the mission agents and mission societies could raise each year. Enthusiasm had outrun efficiency and a drastic reexamination of the whole nature of uplifting the Indians took place. Goaded in part by the dramatic success of the Methodist churches among the Indians, the Baptists and the Congregationalists of the ABCFM decided to shift their emphasis from education to evangelism, from "civilization" to "Christianization."35 Evangelical Christians believed that the true test of mis­ sionary success lay in the number of conversions to Christianity; schools to teach English or farming or the domestic arts were always simply a means to saving souls. It was difficult to demonstrate how teaching an Indian child to read could advance the spread of the gospel. Those who argued that teaching the Indians to read the Scriptures in English was the logical first step were told that they had underestimated the power of the Holy Spirit to work upon the Indian soul through the preaching of the Word (even if that had to be through interpreters at first). Some evangel­ icals argued that until the Indian was imbued with the spiritual power of regeneration, he would never have the moral strength and self-discipline 35 For the controversy over the precedence to be given "civilization" or "Christianization" of the Indians, see Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Salvation and the Savage (New York: Atheneum, 1976). For the Methodist challenge to the "civilization" approach, see McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, pp. 163-79.

Educating the Cherokees

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49

to better himself. Educated Indians might revert to barbarism once they left the Christian environment of the mission school, but a converted In­ dian would remain a Christian under all circumstances, for God would give him the strength to resist temptations. As the new business leaders of the Baptist Foreign Mission Board looked at the particularly troublesome situation among the Cherokees, they came to see this shift in emphasis as the solution to their problems. Paying a small salary to an itinerating missionary and an interpreter could result in immediate conversions, which in turn would stimulate more do­ nations; converts would become native preachers, and the evangelization process would grow geometrically. But supporting large boarding schools and mission farms and sawmills and gristmills was to sink money into a bottomless pit with only the most meager returns in Christianization. With the perennial American demand for quick returns measured in an­ nual statistics of growth, all the mission boards (except the Moravians) adopted the new emphasis on itinerant proselytizing. Part of the fiscal difficulty at the Valley Towns mission resulted from the failure of Luther Rice, Humphrey Posey, Thomas Roberts, and Evan Jones to understand the regulations governing the Indian Civilization Fund. The rules clearly stated that the government would give money only to cover two-thirds of the original cost of school buildings and a certain amount per pupil thereafter. The ambiguity arose over the as­ sumption that all aspects of the model farm were covered because voca­ tional training was part of schooling. Yet when Thomas Roberts sent a bill to the War Department in 1822 asking for funds to cover the cost of repairing the mills, he received no response. When Evan Jones renewed this request in 1824, he was informed that the government would not pay for the repair of mills or other non-school buildings.36 The Board was forced to pay several thousand dollars it had never anticipated paying. A second problem arose from the freedom with which Posey, and sub­ sequent superintendents of the mission, had hired teachers, carpenters, millwrights, blacksmiths, farmers, and other hired hands whenever main­ tenance of the farm, school, or facilities seemed to require it. The new Board of managers in 1826 discovered that no records had been kept of the personnel at its various missions among the Cherokees, Creeks, Delawares, Potowatomies, Menemonees, Miamis, Otoes, and Shawnees (or Shawanoes). This made it impossible to estimate a budget or to meet an­ nual expenses. Drafts (bills) kept arriving at the headquarters for pay­ ments that no one had authorized and that were not budgeted for. Yet the work had seemed essential and the superintendents at each mission sta36 Thomas

L. McKenney to Joseph McMinn, August 26, 1824, M-21.

50 · Chapter II tion had assumed that it was their duty to keep the mission station func­ tioning in good order. Despite all of these expenses, the missionaries constantly wrote that the buildings were dilapidated; the Indian children had no shoes, clothes, or blankets; the schools had no books or paper, and the dining rooms lacked chinaware and tableware. One visitor to Valley Towns discovered that some children ate with only a knife, others had only a fork, and some had to eat with their fingers (the most common way among the Indian fullbloods in the mountains). Jones wrote once that "I was compelled to lay out $17.25" of his own money "for homespun or send the children home," for they had only the most ragged clothes.37 The new Executive Secretary of the Board, Lucius Bolles, when he fi­ nally obtained what records there were from the Philadelphia office, discovered that Luther Rice had taken $1,300 sent by the War Depart­ ment from the Civilization Fund and appropriated it to pay off his private debts.38 He found that the Reverend Isaac McCoy, superintendent of the mission to the Potowatomies, had asked for, and received from the old Board, seven hundred dollars of mission donations to have his son edu­ cated at Columbian College. Upon receiving some bills from Jones, Lu­ cius Bolles wrote in 1826, "We are now $2,000 in advance of our re­ ceipts."39 After explaining the terrible confusion in mission accounts that had necessitated the reorganization of the Board, Bolles said, "the spirit of missions has been destroyed by destroying all confidence in those that managed them." He was not rebuking Jones in particular but simply noted that this "has rendered the burden of the present Board a heavy one." "The springs of benevolence have been dried up by unsatisfactory accounts of the application of funds furnished." Bolles, Lincoln, and the new Board worked vigorously to regain public confidence and "to keep the [mission] stations from sinking" into bankruptcy.40 Jones had no written records for the debts that his predecessors had run up and never explained clearly how many expenses he himself au­ thorized. He simply kept sending "drafts" on the mission treasury as bills came due, expecting the treasurer to pay them. Early in 1826 he was warned that the Board would not pay for expenses which it had not au­ thorized, but Boston was far from the scene, the needs were real, and correspondence back and forth was very slow. Jones felt he had no choice but to act on his own initiative. This resulted in growing tension and mis­ trust. 37

Jones letters, ABMU, October 15,1828. Lucius Bolles to Jesse Mercer, ABMU, March 16, 1827. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 38

Educating the Cherokees · 51 In June 1826, Lucius Bolles wrote to Jones informing him that "As far as we have yet ascertained, we find the Indian stations have been kept up at a very great expense considering the small number of persons who are instructed" in the schools.41 He requested "the names of all the persons employed in the mission" because "There is some want of data upon which a fair calculation may be made by the Board as to what ought to be the expense of supporting the teaching of the single child." Clearly, the Board was moving toward strict cost-accounting, measuring the number and pay of personnel against the number of children receiving instruction and the expense of their board. Eventually, the Board expected to set a figure of so-much-per-child as the basic cost of mission schools and hold the mission stations to that amount. "There seems not to have been so much of plan[ning] in the business as desirable," Bolles said. "Fair calcu­ lation" would let everyone know exactly where he stood costwise and budgetwise. "The missionary must want to know his own limits exactly, what he may do under the sanctions of his employers and what he may not do; what money he may call for and what he may not." Missions were to be run as a business enterprise; missionaries were to be treated as man­ agers and employees. No longer could Christian philanthropy operate on the expectation that "God will provide." If Evan Jones thought he had left the world of profit and loss for one more charitably ordered, he was mistaken. Bolles went on to say, in June 1826, that the new Board was now "forming a plan of systematic operations," which would provide for "the most prudent and economic . . . and efficient" operation of its work. The first step would be to cut back on personnel and school enrollments; the second, to increase productivity in terms of saving souls. Jones was to consider "whether the number of persons employed as teachers, or oth­ erwise, cannot be immediately reduced; whether the lands under im­ provement cannot be made more fully to furnish the support of the sta­ tion," and whether enough was being done to preach the gospel to the heathens?42 Jones tried to be understanding of the Board's predicament, but he did not feel that he was personally responsible for the large debts incurred by his predecessors; they were built into the whole design of the mission. "I entirely agree with you," he responded to Bolles's injunctions, "as to the necessity of a clear understanding between the Board and the station" as to expenses. "The want of it has occasioned much embarrassment to my 41 42

Lucius Bolles letters, ABMU, June 8,1826. Ibid.

52 · Chapter II mind."43 Nevertheless, there were certain basic needs to be met. "It will be absolutely necessary for me to draw for $500 on or about the first of August to procure Bacon, Beef, and Corn and to pay the wages due to the mechanics for work at the mills and some laborers who were employed in grubbing and clearing about twenty acres of upland which I design for turnips and wheat." The purchase of beef, bacon, and corn was necessi­ tated by a mistake that Roberts had made in hiring Cobb to run the farm on shares. Cobb had immediately cut back the size of the farm (letting the fences rot and the fields go to weeds). Cobb's harvests provided enough for his family but left the mission's share too small to feed its students and staff. Cobb had been fired and the mission was again running its own farm and would soon become self-subsistent, Jones promised, but that would not be until the next harvest. "It is very expensive to buy so much corn and meat," but there was no alternative. "We have now a promising crop on hand which, by the blessing of the Lord, will repay all our toil and expense." In addition to hiring workers, he had had to hire carpenters to preserve some of their buildings: "The old buildings are much decayed, particularly the log cabins; the roofs and chimneys of which are becoming useless and dangerous and must be renewed before winter." Currently the workers were making bricks for new chimneys.44 Bolles and Lincoln were not pleased, but they agreed to honor his draft for five hundred dollars. They reminded him, however, "You have failed to say who composed the mission family. What is the salary of yourself and of any other person or persons employed?" The Board even insinu­ ated that perhaps the missionaries were spending too much money on themselves. "We wish to be informed of your manner of living at the Sta­ tion. How or with what are the Indians fed, and what are the breakfasts, suppers, etc.? Do you all sit at one table and partake of similar food?" or did the missionaries dine better than the Indian students and hired help? For example, did the missionaries use tea and coffee? "We find the Indian Stations have become very expensive, quite too much for continuance. Some alternatives and retrenchments must be made." Jones was in­ structed to cut the Valley Towns budget by sixty percent. Unaware that the government had already stated that it would not pay for the upkeep on the model farm, Bolles instructed Jones to write to the Secretary of War for reimbursement for the $2,864.13 he had expended on the farm and mills. The request was "disallowed."45 Upset by the prospective cut in his budget, Jones replied, "When our 43

Jones letters, ABMU, July 5,1826. Ibid. 45 Bolles letters, ABMU, March 3, 1832. Jones's letter, dated November 15, 1826, and addressed to Secretary of War James Barbour, is in the Tennessee State Archives, Nashville, Tennessee, "Cherokee Collection," Box 1. See also Jones letter, ABMU, May 12, 1826. 44

Educating the Cherokees

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53

farm is brought into full operation, I trust the expenditure of the Station will be greatly diminished, but it will require much industry and attention this and next year to bring it [back] into a proper state."46 He then pro­ vided the list of his staff that the Board had requested, omitting mention of his own salary and his wife's: TABLE 2.1

Valley Towns Mission Staff and Salaries, 1826 Evan Jones, Superintendent

[not specified]

Elizabeth Jones, Teacher and Superintendent of the Clothing and Domestic Affairs

[not specified]

Miss Pauline Cunningham, Assistant to Mrs. Jones

$ 52 per year

Two hired females Mr. Alfred D. Melton, Teacher of the Boys' School Two farmhands and a number of others to split rails for fencing

52 each per year 160 per year [no salary listed; probably covered by the $500 draft]

Mr. John A. Miller, Farm Manager

170 per year

Mr. William Dunlap, Assistant Farm Manager

120 per year

Ox driver

100 per year

Three farm laborers

100 each

One gardener, who also cares for livestock

100 per year

Mr. M. O'Kelley, blacksmith

23.50 per month

Source: Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , November 1,1826.

All of these persons Jones considered essential, and he had gone to great trouble to find competent workers in the white settlements. Nonetheless, the budget for this staff was more than four times what the Board pro­ posed for the mission. He needed $2,000; the Board offered $500. In addition, Jones was devoting much of his time to preaching among the Cherokee fullbloods, and it was "absolutely necessary," he wrote, to hire an interpreter (not included in the staff budget) at thirteen dollars per month. In November, Jones turned in his estimate for the following year's budget. It was $2,000. "We shall be obliged to purchase our pork this 46

Jones letters, ABMU , September 23,1826.

54

·

Chapter II

year, our stock of hogs being too young to kill." He added hopefully, "I think the farm is now on a train to supply all our provisions." With regard to the kinds of meals served at the mission and the insinuations that he and his family dined on better food than the students or hired help, he reported that the food at meals "consists chiefly of cornbread and bacon or beef, according to the season. . . . The children's breakfast is corn­ bread and milk in summer. . . . At other times, sassafras, spice wood, or some herb tea is used as a substitute. If they have been at hard work, a small portion of meat is added. Dinner—meat with vegetables if possible. Supper—cornbread or mush and milk, thin hominy, called by the Indians 'conohany,' or soup, according to season. Our own fare is much the same as the children. . . . We eat with the children.47 Jones displayed some irritation with regard to the Board's query about the use of tea and coffee as an unnecessary luxury for missionaries: "Our situation is very different to an old, settled country. I assure you, sir, we are subjected to many hardships and privations of which you are little aware. . . . We are not in the habit of using luxuries in the place. We think ourselves well off if we can procure a scanty supply of the plainest kind of food."48 However, he had come to share the Board's view that a station built upon the original plan was not wise. "I certainly do not think the plan of missionary operation adopted by the Presbyterians [at Brainerd] and the Baptists is the most economical one or the best calculated to dis­ seminate the light of the Gospel among the heathen. Smaller establish­ ments would be much better and local schools [day schools] would be much cheaper, and stationary religious families in several places would constitute so many rallying points for the redeemer's cause and so many standards against the torrents of prevailing vice. I wrote to the late Board on this subject several times."49 He disliked being accused of wasting the Board's money when he had never thought the plan was a good one. "I cannot but regard the dissatisfaction expressed by the Board with respect to this station," he wrote in November 1826, "as a personal affront." He would have preferred to spend all of his time preaching and learning Cherokee. Instead, he had persevered in managing the schools and farm. The new Board was correct: "On the present plan the missionary's time and attention is far too much occupied by secular business" and too little with soul winning.50 But this was not his fault: I must confess I feel exceedingly mortified to receive such repeated expressions of the displeasure of the Board, especially when I consider that by incessant 47Jones

letters, ABMU , November 1,1826. letters, ABMU , December 7, 1826. 49 Jones letters, ABMU , November 1, 1826. The earlier letters are not extant. 50 Ibid. 48 Jones

Educating the Cherokees

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55

labour, night and day, in cold and heat, without proper nourishment and de­ prived of almost every convenience to which we have been accustomed, my wife and myself have for above five years sacrificed health, ease, and all the comforts and socialities of life to toil in this secluded wilderness. And have, moreover, expended in this service almost the whole of the little property we had. The plan of the establishment was fixed before we came, and I have no authority to alter it.51

One of the complaints the Board had made was that Jones did not seem to be getting enough work out of the school children. Perhaps if he worked them harder on the farm, he would not have to hire so many extra laborers at high wages. Jones replied, in December 1826, that there were now fifty male Cherokees, aged six to eighteen, in the school and about twenty females. However, "the large boys go home in crop time to work with their parents," and this was just when the mission farm needed them most. "And though we put the little ones (and big ones too, when they are here) to work from sunrise to 9 o'clock and from five till night[fall], at whatever business there is to do, and in planting time [they work at] corn and fodder pulling and husking, taking them sometimes by turns and sometimes altogether, according to the circumstances, the profit of their work is more a matter of description than of arithmetical calculation."52 The female children were also put to work "to assist in cooking, milk­ ing, housework, and sewing. All who have finished their education can also spin and weave.. . . I assure you, sir, our females eat no idle bread. We have but one [female employee, Pauline Cunningham] besides my wife, who is conscientiously interested in the object of the mission, and they both have, by excessive labour, almost destroyed their constitutions. To cook and serve for nearly 70 persons [daily], make and mend for 60, attend to cows, cleaning houses and utensils, to instruct the girls and to assist in the religious instruction of the boys, conduct a Sunday school and Bible class, requires something more than fireside zeal or the reveries of an undisciplined imagination." In addition to caring for the children, these two women had to accommodate a constant stream of Indian and white visitors who had to be fed. Cherokee visitors expected hospitality and gave it generously when they had visitors. "Considerable time is also taken up in preparing medicine for sick Indians who come from all parts for our advice."53 The services of their medicine men were not considered effective against whitemen's diseases like measles and smallpox. Jones himself often worked alongside the farmhands in planting and harvest time, and so did his eighteen-year-old son, Sam. 51 Jones 52

Ibid. 53 Ibid.

letters, ABMU, December 22, 1826.

56 · ChapterII If the Board wanted to save money, Jones said flatly in this letter, it would have to come up with a new kind of missionary plan. Drastic re­ trenchment under the present plan would only make matters worse. Jones then proceeded to tell them, as he had told the preceding Board, how he thought the mission should be operated. To begin with, the model farm should be given up. "The situation in this Nation at present is such as not to require missionaries to instruct them in farming; some of them being better farmers than the missionaries themselves. The boys are all taught the use of the mattock, the plough, and the hoe by their parent. There is no [Cherokee] family which does not cultivate the soil." Except for pro­ viding food for the mission family and the school children, the farm was not important. However, if the farm were eliminated, there could not be a large boarding school, and if there were no school, there would be no subsidy from the federal government. Jones's plan for a new approach to mission work had five parts: (a) abandon the farm except for a few acres to grow food for the mission family; (b) abandon the boarding school for boys and replace it with a series of day schools scattered throughout the region; (c) require Chero­ kee parents to contribute to the support of these day schools; (d) sustain a small boarding school for girls only ("It is but a short time since the full Indians have been induced to send their girls to school at all," and these were somewhat behind the males in acculturation); (e) devote the time of the missionaries to preaching the gospel through interpreters until native preachers could be trained: "It is the Gospel they chiefly want [lack]. They are rapidly acquiring worldly wisdom." Furthermore, "the tempo­ ral affairs of the mission on the present plan are so cumbersome as to render itinerating impractical"; the missionary had no time for it. "I la­ ment with you, sir, the omission of the spiritual concerns of the mis­ sion."54 Another important aspect of this proposal was that the missionaries should encourage the use of the plan newly devised by Sequoyah for the writing of Cherokee. Jones had now become familiar with Sequoyah's syllabary and found it infinitely superior to the system he and Roberts and Butrick had devised. "Let a missionary with an interpreter be em­ ployed in teaching the new characters [the Sequoyan syllabary] and com­ municating religion and other useful knowledge" through the works translated into these characters. The Cherokees could rapidly pick up reading and writing in their own language and the main task of the mis­ sionary would be to provide translations that were appropriate. Thus the children in Sequoyan day schools would avoid the burden of learning English and much more rapidly imbibe Christianity and progress through 54

Ibid.

Educating the Cherokees

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57

their own language. "One, two, or three months in each town would be sufficient to teach the whole population . .. to read and write the new characters and then whatever might be written or printed [by the mission­ aries] in the language could be communicated with great facility." If the Cherokees were taught the basic doctrines of Christianity as they learned to read, it would be far easier for the itinerant missionary preacher to effect their religious conversion.55 In suggesting what he called these "radical changes" in the mission plan, Jones admitted that he much preferred preaching and translating to teaching and farm management. He had at last discovered his true voca­ tion. Under this plan, "I should be able to devote some time to the study of the Language, in which I have made some progress." Then, having mastered the language, he could translate into Cherokee the Christian lessons for use in the day school and, once these schools were under way, he would have time to reap the much desired harvest of Christian con­ verts. His ultimate ambition, though he did not say so explicitly, was to translate the Bible into Cherokee. "That the Lord may direct the deter­ mination of the Board to the plan that may effectively promote the glory of Christ in the salvation of these precious souls, is the earnest prayer, Dear Sir, of your Obedient Servant in the Gospel."56 The Board was impressed by Jones's suggestions. He had anticipated the direction in which the Board was already moving. We are by no means satisfied that the course which has been pursued of board­ ing the children is the best. It has appeared to us that for a missionary to reside among the Indians more in a pastoral character, to visit from house to house, converse and pray with them when found at home, [to] school their children four half days in the week, and preach on the Lord's Day, speak to them when suitable, and teach them respecting their habits and proper manner of cultivat­ ing the soul, can be productive of more good than the present plan and far less expensive.57

No one, of course, asked the Cherokees whether this new plan met their needs or approval. It certainly was not the one they had agreed to en­ courage in 1819. Meanwhile, the accumulated debts of the Valley Towns mission had to be taken care of. The Board instructed Jones to sink no more money into the two mills and to try to sell them. Jones believed this to be a mistake. The rebuilding of the mills was now almost complete. They were of great use not only to the mission but to all the Cherokee farmers for miles 55

Ibid. Jones letters, ABMU, March 27, 1827. 57 Bolles letters, ABMU, March 16,1827. 56

58 · Chapter II around. It would be more costly to pay others for milling than to mill their corn or cut their planks in their own mills. Consequently, when two Baptist ministers from the Hiwassee Association in Tennessee visited the mission in December 1826, Jones asked them to write to the Board about this. "The mills," the Hiwassee Baptists (George Snider and William Morrison) wrote, "are a very valuable acquisition to the country; indeed, it would be next to impossible for a Mission to exist without them, and the improvement of the country would be greatly retarded."58 Jones, counting on the delay in the mails, moved full speed ahead on completing the mills while asking the Board to reconsider its decision to abandon them. The Board held to its position. Jones said, six months later, that the mills were completed and would soon be turning a profit for the mission. But meanwhile he had run up another $1,000 in expenses. Throughout his career Jones was to follow the practice of doing what he thought was best and then hoping he could persuade the Board to cough up the money to pay for it. Such "sharp practices" aroused considerable antagonism. Jones was shocked, therefore, when he received a letter from the Treas­ urer of the Board, Heman Lincoln, in April 1827, stating that his recent draft upon the Board to pay for repair of the mills would not be honored because the expense had not been authorized. Thomas Dawson happened to be visiting Jones when the letter arrived, and Jones showed it to him. Dawson was as astonished as he and agreed to write a letter explaining the disastrous consequences that would follow the Board's decision to repudiate a debt contracted by its missionary. Has the Board, Dawson asked, "any idea of the situation of a Missionary—a stranger in a strange land, with a burden of cares and anxieties that can be but faintly appre­ ciated by our brethren who dwell among their friends in old, settled and established countries? . . . I fear the dishonoring of it [Jones's draft] will prove a heavy blow to the credit of the establishment. Brother Jones's situation is exceedingly distressing, especially considering the weight of care devolving on him. . . . I anxiously trust, therefore, that the matter will be reconsidered, as otherwise, I fear, it will prove the ruin of the temporal concerns of the Mission and, of course, will also have a very pernicious influence on its spiritual concerns."59 But the Board was not moved by this plea, and to Jones's great chagrin, the Treasurer wrote back in May that he still would not honor the draft. This meant that the mission's creditor, David Thompson, a merchant in North Carolina from whom Jones had borrowed the money to pay the 58 George Snider and William Morrison to Bolles, Bolles letters, ABMU, December 29, 1826. 59 Dawson letters, ABMU, May 8, 1827.

EducatingtheCherokees

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59

millwrights, would have to resort to law to settle his debt: a sheriff would come to the mission, seize livestock, tools, and other property to sell at auction. Apart from the loss and embarrassment, Jones believed the mis­ sion would be ruined; other creditors would resort to the same tactic. David Thompson obtained a summons against Jones, and the sheriff came to get him. "On the way to court," Jones later wrote to the Board, "I asked him [Thompson] if he intended to prosecute the suit." Thompson replied that he must get his payment. However, "Just as the suit was going to be called, he took me aside and said he would dismiss it on condition of my writing to the Board on the subject by next post, which I agreed to do."60 In this same letter, Jones added that two other creditors, Mr. Ware in Tennessee, and Jesse Clements, a wagoner, were also expecting pay­ ment at once on his drafts. The Board, not wanting the embarrassment of having its missionary taken to court and its valuable property sold, had little choice but to comply. After its annual meeting in May 1827, the Board wrote to Jones that it had voted to curtail the large boarding school and the farm at Valley Towns.61 Instead, he was to keep a day school four days a week, "reserv­ ing the other two to be improved . . . in some attention to domestick con­ cerns, study, and visiting the Indians at their villages and houses for pas­ toral purposes." The Board also voted to fix precise salaries for each member of the mission staff and a strict annual budget. The budget for Valley Towns was not to exceed five hundred dollars. Jones was informed that the Board was sending some trusted ministers to visit Valley Towns "twice or thrice a year to inspect and report to us the actual state of things." Apparently it doubted that Jones would provide them with an accurate picture. As a final concession, the Board had appropriated $2,000 to clear up all the outstanding debts at the mission. The first persons delegated to inspect the Valley Towns mission for the Board were the Reverend Jesse Mercer and the Reverend Adiel Sherwood of the Sarepta Mission Society of Georgia. But when they were asked, it turned out that neither was able to accept the task; it was then delegated to the Reverend Iverson L. Brooks of Georgia. Jones looked forward to Brooks's visit because he was confident he could defend all of his expen­ ditures and demonstrate that five hundred dollars was an insufficient budget. Brooks arrived in September 1827, and Jones gave him all the information he requested. Then the two of them sat down and worked out an estimate of the total debts of the mission and a feasible staff and 60

Jones letters, ABMU , April 12, 1827, May 16, 1827, and September 4, 1828. letters, ABMU , May 12, 1827. In a letter to Jesse Mercer on March 16, 1827, Bolles told him that the federal government had reduced assistance to Valley Towns from $500 a year to $175. 61 Bolles

60 · Chapter II budget for its future. Jones agreed that he could greatly decrease his staff with a smaller school and farm, but he persuaded Brooks that even so he would need a larger budget. Brooks told the Board, "I concur in the sen­ timent of your Board that it is unnecessary to keep up a farm at this place for the purpose of teaching the Indians husbandry, for they seem to stand more in need of literary and religious information."62 However, he did not think the Board's plan for a day school at Valley Towns was feasible because the Cherokees lived too far from the mission; they were scattered "from seven to thirty miles distant from this point." The best location for a day school, Brooks said, would be at the Cherokee village called Notley (or Notelly), sixteen miles to the south. Thomas Roberts had helped to start a school here in 1822 and Jones had been trying to revive it. The Cherokees there had expressed strong interest in it and had agreed to erect a building for it. They had also pledged to help support a missionary teacher by donating 120 bushels of corn and 500 pounds of pork each year for him and his family. But even there, Brooks noted, a day school would be difficult to sustain: "You are also under a wrong impression as regards the structure and relative situations of Indian towns," Brooks told the Board. "An Indian town thus consists of a settlement of people whose nearest houses may not be less than the fourth of a mile apart and whose extreme habitations are separated by various distances from ten to fifteen miles, and most of the houses in such settlements are several miles apart. I simply mention this that you may perceive the business of exercising the pastoral office among Indians from their more local situation is more ar­ duous than you have probably been accustomed to suppose it."63 He therefore favored Jones's proposal of a series of day schools in the most closely compacted Cherokee settlements, with local teachers over whom the missionary would act as superintendent and make regular visits to each in turn, preaching as he made his rounds. Notley might be the start­ ing point for this circuit, for thanks to Jones's recent visits, the people were eager for "spiritual instruction" and "attentive to the preaching of the gospel." This was a return to Posey's original plan for local day schools, which the Cherokees had objected to. Brooks also agreed with Jones that the mills should not be disposed of because they could not be sold or leased "for anything like a fair valua­ tion." He thought the Valley Towns mission, though not at a compact settlement, should remain the headquarters of the Baptist work in the mountain region and that a boarding school should be sustained there for fifteen to twenty students under "the instruction of Mrs. Jones." The 62 Iverson 63 Ibid.

L. Brooks letters, September 5, 1827, in among the Bolles letters, ABMU.

EducatingtheCherokees

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61

Board should also employ a teacher at Notley "and let the Rev. Mr. Jones have an interpreter and devote the chief of his time to preaching among the Indians." Brooks estimated that "this arrangement would cost the Board about $700 per Annum," divided in the following way: TABLE 2.2 Valley Towns Staff Budget, 1828 Salary for Mr. Jones and family Interpreter for Mr. Jones Female assistant for Mrs. Jones

$300 120 65

Hired man for the farm

100

School teacher at Notley

120

Source·. Evan Jones, letters, ABMU1January 28,1829.

Brooks agreed with Jones that profits from the two mills would help to defray these expenses. The farm could be let out on shares to provide enough food for support of the mission family and twenty female stu­ dents. Jones was later to point out that he and Brooks had neglected to allow anything for incidental expenses such as medicines, blankets, and homespun clothing for the students, utensils, smithwork, and the cost of wagon hauling.64 After Brooks had gone, Jones rented the gristmill to a man who agreed to take half the profits of grinding corn or wheat and give half to the mission. He hired William Morrison of Tennessee to teach at Notley, and he leased part of the mission farm out on shares.6S Brooks also supported Jones's claim that the Board owed him and his wife $799.41 in back pay. As Jones explained, "When we met with the [old] Board in Philadelphia in 1821, no stated sum was fixed on for the support of the families. . .. A rough estimate was made according to which the proportion for my fam­ ily would be $240 per annum. . . . [This proved so low] that we have been obliged to draw on our private funds for the principal part since we have been here."66 The Board agreed to pay it,. Generally speaking, the Board was pleased with Brooks's report, ac­ cepted his estimates, and wrote to Jones to institute the new plan. As the year 1828 opened, the mission seemed to be on a much better footing. "I have been making every exertion in my power," Jones wrote in February 1828, "to circumscribe the temporal business of the mission and to ar64

Jones letters, ABMU, January 28, 1829. Jones letters, ABMU, October 22,1827. 66 Jones letters, ABMU, March 5, 1828. 65

62 · Chapter II range matters so that I may be able to devote nearly all my time to the spiritual concerns of the people and to give as much attention as possible to the acquisition of the language."67 WithJohn Timson as his interpreter, he began a regular schedule of itineration through the Cherokee moun­ tain towns, preaching and trying to arrange the establishment of day schools to be supported mostly by the Cherokees' own efforts. Nevertheless, matters were not entirely smooth. Jones had not made it entirely clear to Brooks just how many previous debts remained unpaid. He continued to send bills to the Board that the Board said it had no knowledge of and was unwilling to pay without more precise informa­ tion.68 "The arrearages have been most burdensome to our spirits," wrote Lucius Bolles in October 1828. "It has been with much mortification and regret that we have contemplated those obligations, since they disparage the credit of the Mission, and, as we think, should never have been suf­ fered to accumulate." Jones never did become a very accurate bookkeeper. In 1828, when he turned in his expenses for the first year under the new plan, he had ex­ ceeded the budget set with Brooks. "We regret to find," Bolles wrote, "that in making up the accounts you represent the expenditure of a larger sum than authorized by nearly eighty dollars. . . . It seems to defeat us in our expectation of being able to make an arrangement with you upon which we can rely."69 But Jones always had an answer. Something unexpected had always come up. The mill dam needed further repairs. The cost of food had risen due to a bad harvest. The children lacked sufficient clothing. The roof of a cabin had decayed. A man hired to take in the crop had demanded higher pay and, when Jones refused to pay it, the man quit; Jones then had to hire someone else quickly and that man charged even more. The Board was never satisfied with Jones's explanations: "Disappointment chills the ardour of enterprise," Bolles said.70 The Board begged Jones to "guard against future misapprehensions" and to stay within the budget. He never did. For 1829 there was "an excess of $202," the Treasurer reported. "After the pains taken to have a definite and binding engage­ ment, [we] are sorry that it should go for nothing." There was also a debt of $272.64 that year that Jones failed to explain or provide vouchers for.71 Despite these financial problems, the Board did have cause for rejoicing in the years after 1827, for the Cherokees seemed at last to be responding 67

Jones letters, ABMU , February 1, 1828. Bolles letters, ABMU , October 22, 1827, and June 16, 1828. 69 Bolles letters, ABMU , December 21, 1828. 70 Bolles letters, ABMU , June 5, 1829. 71 Heman Lincoln letters, ABMU , June 19, 1830. 68

Educating the Cherokees · 63 to the gospel. Whatever his shortcomings as a business manager, Jones proved to be enormously successful as an evangelist. He kept a daily jour­ nal of his preaching tours, and its accounts of conversions were printed regularly in the Baptist Missionary Magazine. "We rejoice exceedingly," the Board said, "in all the mercy God is showing you."72 He had begun to make a success of what had seemed a failing mission. 72

Ibid.

CHAPTER III

Competing with Methodists and Medicine Men, 1827—1833 . . . the conjurors were very mad about our doctrines being spread so much about as it condemns their way. —Evan Jones, February 2,1829 We had but a small meeting today. The crowd are gone off with the conjurors to profane the Sabbath and thus atone for their offence in paying any attention to the Gospel. —Evan Jones, May 1,1830 The Doctors and conjurors are joining together against the Gos­ pel. The Doctors threatened to withhold their medical aid from all the followers of the Gospel. —Evan Jones, April 17, 1830 The Methodists' receiving members in these parts is no evidence of their conversion. —Evan Jones, October 26,1827 Some of the Gospel doctrines . . . are grossly perverted by our Methodist brethren in these parts. —Evan Jones, September 2,1830 I thought it my duty openly and plainly to oppose the first at­ tempts [of the Methodists] to pervert the word of God among our uninformed people. —Evan Jones, April 30,1830

WHILE EVAN JONES'S reorganization plan failed to solve the financial dif­

ficulties at Valley Towns,1 the new policy did free him from most of the day-to-day problems—managing the farm, supervising the mills, and teaching the schools. He could now devote his restless energy to itinerant preaching, learning Cherokee, and teaching the mountain Cherokees how to read and write their language in the Sequoyan characters. His wife and 1 In 1830 Jones went $202 over his $700 budget; in 1831, $900 over. See Heman Lin­ coln's letter to Jones, ABMU, June 19, 1831, and Lucius Bolles to Jones, ABMU, April 3, 1832.

Methodists and Medicine Men · 65 eldest daughter took care of the girls' school, now limited to twenty. Wil­ liam Morrison taught the school at Notley. Jones and Timson mounted their horses and began their travels into the mountains early in 1828. In some ways the timing of this new program was propitious, for the other mission agencies were also sending out itinerants on horseback at this time to preach "the Word" from village to village. Not long after he began itinerating, Jones found that Methodist circuit riders were traveling through North Carolina competing for Indian souls in territory he thought had been assigned to the Baptists alone. He was glad to be able to confront their "errors." But in other respects the timing of the new itinerant program was inauspicious, for the Cherokees had recently gone through a bitter internal division known as "White Path's Rebellion."2 In this struggle for control over the Nation's policies, the traditionalists had tried to halt the rapid acculturation that the mixed-blood leaders were promoting. Because suspicions were rife at this time about Indian re­ moval, many traditionalists believed that the missionaries were advance agents for this program. Among the mountain Cherokees who supported White Path, the shamans (medicine men, conjurors, or adonisgi) were de­ termined to halt the advance of Christian proselytizing, which would weaken the tribe's resistance to removal. Consequently, as Jones traveled through the villages he found himself engaged in constant spiritual war­ fare on two fronts—against the Methodists and the traditionalists. Prior to 1827 Jones seems to have been too isolated at Valley Towns and too overwhelmed by mission affairs to have taken much interest in Cherokee politics. He made no mention of White Path's Rebellion in his correspondence. The center of that movement was in northeastern Geor­ gia, seventy-five miles south of Valley Towns in the village of Ellijay. Here the traditionalists had formed an alternative government—"a rebellious council," according to the lawfully chosen chiefs. Jones had little interest in this area, but the missionaries of the Moravian Board and the Ameri­ can Board wrote much about it, some even fearing that the rebellion would drive all Christians from the Nation. In fact, the rebellion was di­ rected less against mission stations than against the scores of modernizing laws that the Cherokee Council passed between 1823 and 1827. The re­ bellion reached a peak in January 1827, when the traditionalists refused to cooperate in the effort of the mixed-blood leaders to form a written constitution modeled on that of the United States. To the mixed bloods a constitution was necessary to demonstrate to white Americans that the Cherokees were sufficiently "civilized" to live according to democratic political principles; they hoped this would head off the effort to remove 2 For White Path's Rebellion, see W. G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 388-96.

66 · Chapter III them to the West. To the fullbloods, the constitution seemed to mark the abandonment of all that was distinctively "Cherokee"—the uprooting of their way of life. During the rebellion, the conservatives, led by White Path and other venerable Cherokee chiefs, demonstrated their attachment to their own way of life by reviving their traditional rituals, dances, and ceremonies at which the adonisgi demanded rejection of the whiteman's religion and adherence to the ways of their fathers. White Path's Rebellion officially ended in a compromise in June 1827, when the traditionalists were persuaded that a divided nation would only make it easier for Andrew Jackson and his supporters to force Cherokee removal. They agreed that a new constitution would demonstrate the kind of progress that, under George Washington's Indian policy, would lead to the full acceptance of the Cherokees as equals and allow them to remain in their homeland. The Cherokee constitution was written in July 1827, as much to impress the whiteman as to alter the Cherokee political system. The fullbloods were assured by the mixed-blood leaders that they had no intention of enforcing the constitution to the detriment of the full­ bloods. Nevertheless, the rebellion had stirred a new sense of nationalism among the Cherokees. The conservatives were convinced that their nation had reached a critical cultural turning point. The question still troubled many in and around Valley Towns as Jones took to the road: Did not the need for political unity in order to sustain national independence also require unity in religion? Could the Cherokees be a nation without sus­ taining their own religious traditions? Evan Jones, at this point in his career, was very much in favor of rapid acculturation for the Cherokees. He was a postmillennial optimist about human history and progress, firmly convinced that the well-being of the Cherokees lay in adapting the whiteman's ways. Their old way of life was gone. Instead of adapting themselves to the cyclical rhythms of nature, they must now accept a linear view of progress; to him, change was im­ provement. God meant man to subdue nature and utilize its resources to improve his condition. This meant adopting new values—individualistic self-reliance in place of communal cooperation—hard work, self-disci­ pline, thrift, enterprise, and accumulation of private property for the ben­ efit of each man's family. Christianity would assist them in adopting and sustaining this new ethic attuned to the market economy of the United States. To adhere to the old religion under their new circumstances would be to fly in the face of history and God's will; their shamans or adonisgi could only lead them to expect an apocalyptic miracle—a divine interven­ tion to reverse the course of human progress. In the face of these unresolved cultural tensions, the aggressive itinerant evangelism of the various missionaries after 1827 was bound to arouse antagonism and resistance from adherents of the old religion. Looked at

Methodists and Medicine Men

·

67

from Jones's perspective and the reports he made to his Board, his itiner­ ant mission became a determined effort to wrest spiritual power and au­ thority from the Cherokee adonisgi and their followers, and place it in the hands of Christian preachers and their converts. Furthermore, he was convinced that under the guidance of the God of Christianity, a God of love, mercy, and justice, the Cherokees would have a far better chance of sustaining their national independence as a people, for only He could pro­ vide the spiritual strength they so desperately needed. Following their defeat in the American Revolution, the Cherokees had made a series of treaties which ceded away enormous quantities of land; their hunting was curtailed by the surrounding white settlements, thus ending the fur trade economy upon which they had relied for almost a century. Accepting from the federal government the free gifts of ploughs, spinning wheels, axes, looms, and the other necessities for more intensive farming, the Cherokees left their old, stockaded, communal villages and moved with their families onto separate plots of land. Here they cleared the trees, erected log cabins, plowed up the ground, built stables for cows and pens for hogs, and tried to grow enough to feed their families and trade a small surplus for the manufactured goods they needed. Living as nuclear families, they began to adopt a patriarchal structure for family life: the husband worked in the fields, and the wife moved into the kitchen. Even their diet changed as the whiteman's livestock and varieties of grain became their staples. Between 1794, when the last Cherokee war­ riors made peace with the frontiersmen, and 1827, a new way of life had evolved. Yet old customs and beliefs lingered. The traditional dances, rit­ uals, ball plays, and sacred stories continued to be part of their lives, es­ pecially in the areas more remote from white settlements. Nonetheless, the old religion and worldview could not answer the new questions they faced. Nor could the wisdom of the elders solve the problems of the young. The old clan relationships, clan retaliation for murder, and exogamous clan-controlled marriage gradually withered. Leadership by lo­ cally chosen village chiefs or headmen had to yield to an elected national council to provide centralized authority in confronting white efforts to take their lands. A national police force had to take change of criminal problems arising from the breakdown of old customs and social restraints (violent behavior was exacerbated by continual friction with white in­ truders and by the use of alcohol). By 1827 the national council had en­ acted a wide range of new laws under new political institutions, including district courts and a national supreme court that operated under forms taken from the whiteman's legal system. While some of the newly written laws sustained old traditions (such as those protecting a woman's right to property and her rights over her children), others (such as the poll taxes

68

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Chapter III

and the codes governing business contracts and black chattel slavery) en­ forced new patterns of behavior. The new Cherokee constitution, which went into effect in 1828, guar­ anteed religious liberty (though it prohibited office to anyone "who de­ nies the being of a God" or "of a future state of rewards and punish­ ment"). The new structure separated church and state, making religion a private rather than national commitment. The new religion of the mis­ sionaries emphasized a divine power that worked directly upon individ­ uals and substituted inner self-control for the power of custom and un­ written tradition. By abolishing the practice of polygamy in 1825, the council strengthened the nuclear family; by preventing the killing of witches, the council denied older explanations and remedies for mysteri­ ous deaths and accidents; by prohibiting infanticide (or abortion) the council prevented limitation of the family, forced the care of handicapped children, and made the child as important as the parent. The new eco­ nomic order placed a premium upon the acquisitive virtues and promoted social distinctions based upon wealth; in the past relatives had burned all of a deceased person's effects or buried them with him, but now the de­ scendants coveted a dead man's horses, cattle, plough, axes, hoes, and black slaves. Evan Jones was shocked upon visiting a remote town in the mountains in 1828 to find the old funeral practices still being honored: "They had burnt the home to the ground. This absurd custom is getting into disuse. Some years ago they used to burn or bury all the property of the dead."3 The old ways and new ways still came into conflict, and laws could not always provide remedies. The use of alcohol (for some a means of protest as much as a solace for despair) caused constant friction. The Cherokees had never used a fermented drink, but recently many of them had devel­ oped a fondness for rum, brandy, and whiskey. The laws governing trade and intercourse with the Indians prohibited whitemen from bringing al­ coholic beverages into Indian nations, but the law was easily evaded. Evangelical missionaries of all denominations cooperated in a temperance movement, linking total abstinence with Christian virtue. Christians had the power of God to sustain them in their pledges of abstinence. "I daily hear," Jones wrote in 1829, "of circumstances tending to prove the sin­ cerity and stability of the [Christian] inquirers. A whiteman with an In­ dian was lately passing one of their houses on a Sabbath day. A number were assembled reading [the Bible] and singing [hymns]. The Indian pulled out a bottle of whiskey and pressed them to drink. They refused to use it, saying the Word of God forbid it, especially on this day. These are all full Cherokees and can speak no English."4 3 Evan 4

Jones, journal, ABMU, April 9,1828. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, December 5, 1829.

Methodists and Medicine Men

69

Similarly, while the law now prohibited polygamy, it could not prevent the sexual freedom that Cherokee custom always condoned once puberty was reached nor eradicate the simple form of traditional divorce when either spouse wished to end a marriage. But the Christian ceremony of marriage, the Christian insistence on chastity, the Christian opposition to divorce, all challenged the older customs. At the same time, since nuclear family households were now the norm and maternal relatives less anx­ ious, or able, to take in divorced women and their children, the Christian way offered more stability to marriage and more security for women and children. Women also found comfort in the Christian belief in the reunion of families after death. Jones wrote in 1829 of a Cherokee woman who had seemed particularly affected by one of his sermons and had broken into sobs. The next day, he "spoke to the woman who seemed so much affected last night. She said she had heard about the future state of man, that she had thought much about it since the death of her little daughter." She wanted to know more about the Christian way.5 The mortality rate among children was high; some missionaries whose denominations (un­ like the Baptists) practiced infant baptism were criticized by Jones be­ cause they indicated to mothers that baptism of their children was an assurance that they would be reunited after death.6 He noted that it was native Cherokee preachers among the Methodists who particularly stressed this. As familiarity with Christianity increased by the more pervasive preaching of missionary itinerants, by the distribution of Christian liter­ ature and biblical translations in Sequoyan, and through the licensing and ordination of native Cherokee preachers among the various denomina­ tions, many Cherokees began to take its message more seriously and to find in it many features that would assist them in coping with their new way of life. For example, Christianity gave them a broader perspective on the history of man and the relations among different nationalities and ethnic groups. Indian religions all had their creation myths, but they had not included accounts of the different colors of mankind until the whiteman and African reached America. Soon after this, creation stories began to circulate that said that the Great Spirit has originally created three kinds of humans—a red man, a white man, and a black man; he ex­ pressed his preference for the red man, but he placed the descendants of each color on separate continents and gave them different occupations. To the whiteman he gave books and the skill to invent things; to the Af­ ricans he gave the skill of cultivation and the care of livestock; to the red 5 Evan

Jones, journal, ABMU, January 19, 1829. his criticism of the Methodist interpreter, Turtle Fields, Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, September 5, 1830. 6 See

70 · Chapter III man he gave bows and arrows because he was to be a hunter. The story was meant to show that the three races should remain separated and to blame the white European race for disrupting the divine scheme of things. It was the whiteman who left his continent, went to Africa to seize slaves, and came to the American continent to steal the red man's land. Tradi­ tionalists among the Indians insisted that because the Great Spirit had given the Indians their own customs, language, religion—even their own illnesses and medicines—he did not mean for them to amalgamate or as­ similate.7 Jones, of course, preached the opposite. Certain Cherokee priests and medicine men held strongly to the old ways, and yet this was self-defeating. There was no way now to rid Amer­ ica of the whiteman and, having been overwhelmed by numbers, fire­ power, and European diseases, the Cherokees had to learn to cope with them. Some had accepted black slavery to ease their transition to an ag­ ricultural economy and tried to disprove the new scientific racism by proving that they were far superior to black people. Yet a polygenetic theory of human creation played into the hands of those whites who fa­ vored removal of the Indians to the wild West and who said they could never become equal citizens. The Christian creation myth was much more helpful in dealing with whitemen, and Christian missionaries (most of whom prior to 1832 opposed Jackson's policy of forced removal) were much more willing to treat Indians as equals than other whites they met. As the removal crisis mounted from 1828 to 1832, some Cherokees made a concerted effort to link arms with the Christian missionaries: "Join the church and save the nation," was a slogan adopted by many anti-removal leaders. Whites would not remove Christians from their homeland to the Western wilderness. Their chief, John Ross, joined the Methodists in 1829, and so did many other influential Cherokee leaders. Two of these pro-Christian leaders, Major Ridge and George Lowrey, visited the mountain district where Jones preached in January 1830; they tried to rally the Cherokees there against yielding to federal appeals to emigrate to the West. While these chiefs were there, Jones reported, both of them "urged" the people "to pay attention to the preaching of the missionaries and said those who sent them were the real friends of the Indians"—a reference to the lobbying against Jackson's policy by some of the mission agencies.8 Six months later Chief Ross proclaimed a na­ tional day of prayer to beseech the support of God for the Cherokees. His printed proclamation was circulated in English, and Jones read it in Cher­ okee to those in his region: "Read the Chief's letter to those who staid all 7 For a discussion of Indian creation myths, see W. G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Ghost Dance (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), pp. 253-61. 8 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, January 26, 1830.

Methodists and Medicine Men · 71 night" at Valley Towns on June 28,1830, where Jones joined in honoring the day. Jones said the chief was "urging their attention to Education and [the Christian] religion as the best means to promote the welfare of the country."9 The Jacksonian majority in Congress had just passed the Re­ moval Act, and the Chief's message called attention to the miraculous power of God to aid his believers when they were oppressed. "Let us not forget the circumstances related in Holy writ of the safe passage of the children of Israel through the crystal walls of the Red Sea," he said. Let the Cherokees have faith in divine Providence.10 Missionaries who linked the Cherokees to the lost tribes of Israel had told them that this made them God's chosen people, and hence under His special protection. This is not to say that Jones presented the gospel to the Cherokees in terms of political self-interest or cultural adjustment. He believed in an ontological, not a utilitarian God, and had no doubt that the Bible was a divine revelation to which all humanity must give faith. To him, the Cher­ okee adonisgi or conjurors were enemies of the true religion, leading their people to damnation. Jones relished the opportunities he found to con­ front and discredit these false prophets. The readers of his journals in the Baptist missionary magazines in these years saw his battles against hea­ thenism in heroic terms, especially when he reported that his pagan op­ ponents often threatened him with bodily harm. He also learned that the best way to avert the criticism of his Mission Board for his failure to keep within his budget was to provide glowing reports of the rapid conversion of the Cherokees and the growth of the Baptist mission churches. The fact that he became increasingly involved in the political affairs of the Chero­ kee resistance to removal, he generally kept secret from the Board. For a missionary to combat shamans was one thing; fighting against Andrew Jackson was quite another. Missionaries were not supposed to meddle in politics. Jones had met some opposition from Cherokee adonisgi and their ad­ herents from his first ventures into itinerant evangelism in 1824 when John Timson had told the Board that at one place where Jones went to preach "there was a man who offered two gallons of whiskey to any man who would put the interpreter out of the house."11 Significantly, the ani­ mosity was vented upon Timson, the interpreter and betrayer of his peo­ ple. Christian converts, however, felt strong in the new faith: "Their threatening did not scare anybody," Timson wrote. Jones too demon­ strated his courage. "The[ir] Priests are everywhere violently opposed to 9

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, June 28, 1830. Ross's sermon was printed at New Echota on the national printing press; a copy is among the John Howard Payne Papers, vn, 115, Newberry Library, Chicago. Many Chris­ tian Cherokees used biblical quotations to strengthen national resolve in the crisis. 11 LDL 5:145. This occurred in the town of Notley. 10

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the progress of the Gospel," he wrote in April 1830; "some of the sons of Belial threatened to throw me in the river," but they could not frighten him.12 Threats also came from local headmen, old chiefs, the husbands, brothers, or relatives of those whom he tried to persuade to leave the old faith. In fact, the violence occurred more often against the converts or "awakened inquirers" than against the missionary. Jones reported that the stepfather of a woman who set out to hear him preach, "ran after her and turned her back by force."13 Another women, who came to see Jones in 1829, told him that "Some people tried to persuade her that the God of the whites and the Indians is not the same and therefore she ought not to receive the Christian religion."14 Jones said, "I endeavoured to show her the absurdity of the notion, and she seemed satisfied." Once, when a Cherokee woman decided to unite with the mission church, "her husband tried to prevent her."15 Whether physical force was used on such occa­ sions Jones did not say, but it seems likely. He did not want to make villains out of the Cherokees; he simply disliked the adonisgi. In 1829 Jones obtained some Christian hymnbooks printed in Chero­ kee by the American Board press at New Echota using the Sequoyan char­ acters. He began distributing these in various preaching stations and vil­ lages as he itinerated. After he had done this, the most important chief in the north part of the mountain district, named Seequa, who was himself an adonisgi, ordered the headmen in each town in his area to collect the books and burn them. He wanted no Christianity among his people.16 Seequa was an ardent Cherokee nationalist, and he had received word from Cherokees in the southern part of the Nation that the Baptists had expressed support of Jackson's removal policy. The report was true of some of the Georgia Baptists of the Sarepta Mission Society and of their missionary at Tinsawattee, the Reverend Duncan O. Bryant, but of course it was not true of Jones, who was firmly opposed to Jackson's plan.17 Occasionally Jones converted an adonisgi. Whenever he did so, he made a great point of it in his reports.18 For example, in January 1830 he 12 Evan

Jones, journal, ABMU, April 11, 1830, and August 11, 1829. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, December 11,1830. 14 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, February 27, 1829. 15 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, January 23, 1830. 16 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 18,1829. 17 See W. G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 279-93. In addition, Chief Seequa may have heard that Rev. Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary to the Potawatomies, had published a book advocating Indian removal and had persuaded the Baptist General Convention to petition Congress in support of the plan. See ibid., pp. 267-84. 18 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, January 4, January 10, and January 17, 1830. Also, one of his most faithful native preachers, Kaneeda, had been apprenticed to an adonisgi when he 13

Methodists and Medicine Men • 73 described the conversion of "a sorceress or female physician" and said that she had agreed to give up her idolatrous "incantations."19 In the town of Asseela Galohee, "The Priest of the Fire" was converted in 1829.20 ButJones was not always victorious in these confrontations. "We had the mortification," he said a few months after the conversion of the "sorceress," "to have before us [at a church meeting] accusation against three members who went off to the conjurors last Sabbath."21 The church immediately voted to suspend the three apostates, but in this period there was considerable ebb and flow between the two conflicting forces. Most of the time Jones spoke out forcefully against the adonisgi, at­ tacking "the idolatrous system . . . which set up a number of imaginary beings as objects of confidence in times of trouble."22 Sickness in Chero­ kee medical theory was a supernatural disruption of the harmony be­ tween man and nature, the invasion of a powerful spirit into a human body to take revenge for some infraction of the carefully defined rules that governed interaction between the human and animal world. This oc­ curred, for example, when a hunter failed to thank the guardian spirit of the deer when he killed one of its clan for food. Sickness could also be caused by the spirit of a dead person who had not been buried by the proper rituals, or by a witch. The offended spirit would usually insert a small, sharp stick or stone inside the offender in revenge to cause him constant pain. The work of the adonisgi involved first a diagnosis of the cause of the pain and then preparation of an herbal remedy, and finally an elaborate ritual involving prayers to a stronger spirit to remove the cause. At the conclusion of the ceremony, which usually involved draw­ ing or sucking out the cause of the pain from the patient's body, the ado­ nisgi would then display in his hand, for all to see, a sharp stone or stick (hence the name "conjuror" given by whites to sleight-of-hand artists).23 What Jones and other missionaries called "idolatry" was the prayer to the spirit of the white deer, or the spirit of the white bear, or to various other supernatural beings that accompanied these rituals. SometimesJones tried to engage the adonisgi in discussions to persuade was converted by Jones. When Kaneeda was converted Jones wrote that he was "well in­ formed about the superstitions and idolatry of his people. He was himself a Doctor, but as soon as he discovered his sinfulness, he renounced it at once." Journal, ABMU, May 30, 1829. For other conversions of adonisgi see below. 19 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, January 17,1830. 20 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, November 28,1830. 21 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, May 8,1830. 22 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, November 28,1829. 23 For expert, detailed discussions of Cherokee adonisgi, medicine, and rituals, see James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokees and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (Nashville: Cher­ okee Heritage Books, C. and R. Elders, Publishers, 1982), and Charles Hudson, The South­ eastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1976).

74 · Chapter III them of the falsity of their system. At the town of Kanatseloee, in 1830, he wrote that he "conversed with a female Doctor. She said our way was very different from theirs, but she thought there was more dependence to be placed on the Gospel than in the system of conjurors. She wished to know if the word of God condemned the practice of medicine alto­ gether. I told her all medical substances were free to be used with thank­ fulness to God . . . but that all incantations [to false spirits] were utterly sinful. She wished to know why Jesus, the Son of God, died. [I] gave her a short outline of the primitive state of man, the fall, the plan of redemption. . . ."24 Because the Cherokee priests were also medicine men and provided the ceremonies and cures that restored health, they sometimes refused to as­ sist Cherokees who departed from that faith and attended Christian meet­ ings, just as Jones expelled from his church any who attended the cere­ monies of adonisgi. "The doctors and conjurors are joining together against the Gospel," he reported in April 1830. "The Doctors threatened to withhold their medical treatment from all the followers of the Gospel and tell them they must go to their [Christian] preachers for help."25 The adonisgi assumed that missionaries were also healers, and, in fact, Jones and other missionaries sometimes did perform medical services. But Christianity kept the two spheres separated while most Cherokees be­ lieved they were one and the same. "Some fear," Jones said of inquirers, "if they become Christians they will have to give up medicine."26 There were adonisgi readily available for help in every Cherokee community, but few licensed Christian physicians in the whole Nation. The separation between Christian worship and the science of medicine was as difficult for the Cherokees to comprehend as the separation of church and state. Jones, however, saw benefits in the decision of adonisgi to refuse treat­ ment to Christians: "If they stick to this resolution, I have no doubt it will prolong many lives."27 He was not generally so caustic, especially when trying to persuade adonisgi to become Christians. He tried to learn all he could about Cher­ okee medicine and then sought to reason with them about the differences between the medical theories of Christians and Cherokees. He reported one such conversation with a medicine man: I told him that God has given us all herbs, rocks, and other substances possess­ ing medical properties to be used in any way we know to be beneficial, but that, 24 Evan

Jones, journal, ABMU, April 17, 1830.

25 Ibid. 16

Ibid. Ibid. Anthropologists who have studied Cherokee herbal remedies have found that about one-third of them were helpful, one-third were harmless, and one-third were harmful. 27

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as God himself has given them the qualities they possess and in all cases con­ trolled the operation, He alone was the proper object to be addressed in admin­ istering medicine. Therefore the praying to rivers, herbs, deceased and imagi­ nary beings was entirely wrong inasmuch as they had no agency in the affairs of men and that all such idolatrous addresses were highly offensive to God and strictly forbidden in his word.28

Over time the Cherokee Christians worked out a compromise in their effort to reconcile their faith in Cherokee medicine and in the Christian religion; most converts continued to turn to adonisgi for certain kinds of medical or other help, but in these early years the demand for sharp and rigid distinctions made the choice very difficult. Because Christians placed so much importance on reading the Word of God in their "Great Book," and because most mission schools insisted that the student learn English in order to do this, some Cherokees con­ cluded that to become a Christian they had to learn English. Missionaries also placed great emphasis on learning to sing Christian hymns; they found that the Cherokees enjoyed singing and were good at it. Some adonisgi tried to be tolerant about this and suggested equal respect for both religions. "They said," Jones noted, "they would not object to the people's learning to read and sing, if we did not prevent their attending the dances."29 Unlike medical rituals, which were private, dances tended to be community ceremonies that provided a sense of solidarity, har­ mony, and good feeling. They were as much civic affairs as religious. Cherokee dances occurred at different seasons throughout the year and had many different functions. There were dances of thanksgiving at har­ vest time, dances related to ball plays, dances at funerals and marriages, and dances to celebrate the warding off of droughts, floods, or other ca­ tastrophes of nature. Christians condemned them all because they in­ voked the spirit world of Cherokee theology. No Christian Cherokee was to participate in any of them. This in effect cut them off from participa­ tion in most important tribal activities. Even town council meetings be­ gan with religious ceremonies. Those elements in Christianity that ap­ pealed to Cherokee needs were at war with other equally important needs provided by their own religion, especially the need for national unity. In the town of Dseyohee, where Jones often preached, he reported in March 1830 that he had finally broken the hold of the local adonisgi over the people. "One of the conjurors present was greatly disturbed," after Jones preached, "to witness an almost general defection from his system. He spoke in defense of his cause. He asked with some warmth if all their knowledge was to come to nothing? . . . The people listened with great 28

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 28, 1830. Jones, journal, ABMU, April 18, 1830, and November 28, 1829.

29 Evan

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attention to hear the argument of the Adoniskee in support of his sys­ tem," but seemed inclined to accept Jones's arguments instead.30 Yet when Jones returned to the town a month later, the adonisgi spoke again, and at the end of his talk he announced that there would be a dance that evening to seek harmony with the Great Spirit. Jones took it as a signal defeat when he discovered that many whom he thought he had converted attended the dance and participated in it.31 The interaction between the two faith systems required the adonisgi to provide answers for questions that hitherto had not been part of their sacred history. Cherokees wanted to know how their priests explained the origin of good and evil, the existence of so many different races and nations, the different roles of men and women, how the whiteman came to have books that told them so much, whether people had souls, and whether there would be rewards and punishments after death. Gradually the adonisgi worked out explanations, usually by borrowing some ideas from Christianity and adapting them to their own sacred myths. Jones was amused by the theories they offered in attempting to form a syncretic theology, cosmogony, and history of man that would integrate all the new knowledge and answer the new questions that acculturation raised. He considered their theology pathetically inadequate. Because there was no priestly caste to integrate Cherokee philosophy and religion and no sa­ cred text to provide an overall theology, each adonisgi was free to con­ struct his or her own answers: Several Indians called today, among whom was a celebrated Addoniskee, Priest or conjuror, who some years ago had great influence among the people. His popularity is now declining. Had a long friendly conversation with him in which he displayed all his theological knowledge and, as an apology for its scantiness, said the people ... in former times, possessed a great deal of knowl­ edge of which the moderns were destitute. He said that the book possessed by the whites [the Bible] was first offered to the Indians by the Creator, but they, not being able to read, did not understand it; consequently it was taken away and given to the Whites far to the East, beyond the Great Waters. The whites at first understood but little, but they studied and learned. And having the Book in their possession, were not liable to forget as the Indians were. On the origin of man, he said Man was created good and the Creator set the good way before him. Evil was afterwards created and men had now their choice. Those who were bad, chose evil and were plunged into error and dark­ ness and driven headlong with sin and misery. His system affords no remedy for evil. He makes the future state to consist of Four Divisions: 1st, the Good; 30 31

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 28, 1830. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, April 28,1830.

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2nd, those who die in war; 3rd, the wicked; and 4th, wicked and lewd women. All these were treated [after life] according to their deeds.32

By 1830 the very terms in which the spiritual problems were formulated and answered by the adonisgi were Christian, not Cherokee. Having con­ ceded so much to the whiteman's ideology, the adonisgi were unable to proceed much further without admitting that the missionaries had better answers to these questions than they. A self-conscious, syncretic theology would not work, and the wiser adonisgi adopted an all-or-nothing re­ sponse, just as the Christians did. A militant adherence to the fundamen­ tals of the old way was the only logical response. At Tusquitty Town in May 1830, Jones found that "the conjurors had mustered up all their forces to turn away the people from the truth. ... They have succeeded in scaring a multitude in this neighborhood from attending our meet­ ings."33 They told the people that once they began to doubt any of the old truths, they would lose all sense of who they were, what it meant to be a Cherokee, all their protection from the spirit world, and, in the end, they would lose their country, their children, and their future to the whiteman. In other towns, however, the adonisgi seems to have given up or preached more secretly. "The conjurors are still opposed to the Gospel," Jones wrote in December 1830, "but their violence is abating. A few days ago an orator came fifty miles to urge the people to hold on in their old ways. He was to have made a great speech at a town meeting. All the people assembled to hear what he had to say, but unfortunately the old man met with some spirits, got drunk, and failed to make his appearance, and his adherents were a good deal disconcerted."34 Jones never succeeded in overthrowing the old religion. The adonisgi, after 1830, avoided confrontations with him and other missionaries, but continued their activities, leaving the people to make their own choices. Jones's day-by-day accounts of conversions in his reports to the Board seemed to portray a steady march toward total victory for the forces of Christianity, but the statistics did not bear him out. Of the 5,000 to 6,000 Cherokees in the mountain region in 1832, Jones could count no more than two hundred adherents to his denomination and the Methodists (the only other denomination active in this region) scarcely as many (though the Methodists were far more successful in other parts of the Nation). The majority of the Cherokees preferred to take what they found useful from the old ways and the new, enjoying their dances, ceremonies, and ball plays and seeking medical help from their own doctors, but some­ times finding more consolation and hope in Christian worship and 32

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, April 1,1828. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, May 1,1830. 34 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, December 11,1830.

33

78 · Chapter III hymns. Later, in the critical stage of white persecution, when the United States Army arrived to drive them west, the ancient Cherokee religion experienced a great resurgence. Christianity had, however, become a live option among the fullbloods in the mountain region by 1830. Jones's two hundred converts continued to increase. He gave the real credit for his success to a number of remark­ able Cherokee Christians who became exhorters and preachers among their people—men like John Timson, Wasadi, Kaneeda, Dsulawee, Tanenolee, and Oganaya, fullbloods who preached the gospel in Cherokee and provided the power of their own experience, conviction, and elo­ quence (good orators being highly esteemed by the Cherokees). Their in­ fluence far outweighed that of any whiteman among their people. Next to the personal appeal of native preachers, the most powerful means of Christianization was the dissemination of texts and tracts printed in the Sequoyan syllabary that became available through the American Board's press at New Echota after 1828. Despite repeated pleading with his own Mission Board, Jones was not able to persuade them to provide him with a press at Valley Towns.35 The Board could not bear the extra expense and insisted that Jones rely upon the publications of the Reverend Samuel Worcester's press at New Echota. The Board had provided him with small grants to pay Worcester for copies of his publications. Worcester and his translator, Elias Boudinot (a mixed blood Christian convert educated by the Congregational missionaries and married to a white woman), were friends of Jones. He visited them regularly at New Echota in order to compare his translations with theirs and to discuss the kinds of tracts he hoped to have published (a spelling book, a grammar, a hymnbook, and especially key parts of the Bible). The American Board had arranged to send the press and its roman and Sequoyan type to the Nation from Boston when the Cherokee Coun­ cil decided to publish a weekly bilingual newspaper. The Cherokees paid for the press and type but permitted Worcester and Boudinot to use it when it was not needed for their newspaper. The paper, The Cherokee Phoenix, began publication on February 21,1828, and quickly became an effective means of rallying the people against Jackson's removal policy. Elias Boudinot served as its editor. Jones first discussed with Worcester their joint publication of a Chero­ kee grammar in March 1828.36 Worcester proved to be as dedicated to mastering Cherokee and translating the Bible into Sequoyan as Jones. One of the first publications of the press was a single sheet containing the 35 See,

for examples, his letters of September 23, 1826, and May 1, 1832, ABMU. Jones's discussion with Worcester about their jointly publishing a Cherokee gram­ mar, see his letter, ABMU, March 25, 1828. 36 For

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Sequoyan characters and the sounds they represented, which Jones widely distributed as a way of interesting the mountain Cherokees to form schools that would teach them to read and write their own language. At one point he went to New Echota to look at the draft of a Cherokee grammar that Worcester and Boudinot had drawn up, but found it inad­ equate: "Examined some manuscripts on the subject of Grammar, but found nothing new. Their arrangement is far from natural. All the stu­ dents of Cherokee grammar appear to be too much disposed to bend it to preconceived plans. . . . I find that we must study its native principles instead of labouring it into a foreign mold."37 During this same visit he "Read with Mr. Boudinot and Mr. Worcester the first two chapters of Genesis, comparing it occasionally with our translation [at Valley Towns] and the Hebrew."38 Worcester and Boudinot had great respect for Jones's mastery of the difficult language; they regularly exchanged manuscripts and ideas with him about translating in the years 1828—1832. Worcester, however, was a better-educated scholar, having attended a leading theo­ logical school in New England; he insisted upon a precision of translation that Jones found stilted. Jones preferred a more free-flowing and vernac­ ular style that captured the spirit of the Cherokee language; Worcester was concerned for accurate rendition of the Hebrew and Greek revela­ tion. Jones translated to teach and persuade; Worcester to provide au­ thenticity. In later years they drifted apart, partly over these differences and partly over differences on political issues. But in February 1832, when Worcester was in the Georgia penitentiary, making his heroic effort to bring a test case to the United States Supreme Court to thwart Jack­ son's removal act, the two men were united. From his prison cell, Worces­ ter sent Jones a sheet of Cherokee verb forms for Jones to correct.39 Jones continued to make his own translations of the Bible in manu­ script for the use of his Cherokee preachers and converts. He also per­ fected his own speaking ability in Cherokee and prepared a manuscript for a Cherokee grammar book. He begged his Board at least to print a small vocabulary book.40 Among the most useful translations Jones com­ pleted in these years (though it existed only in manuscript) was a cate­ chism of twenty-two questions that he used to examine the children at the Notley school. Because it was phrased in simple terms, Jones was able in 1829 to speak Cherokee when catechizing, but he still used an interpreter when preaching.41 In addition to discussing the language with Worcester and Boudinot, he also worked closely with George Lowrey, a major chief 37

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 22, 1828. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 24,1828. 35 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, February 2, 1832. 40 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, September 29, 1826. 41 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, November 27,1829. 38

80 · Chapter III of considerable bilingual ability who had, in 1825, helped David Brown to make the first rough translation of the whole New Testament in Sequoyan characters. Lowrey assisted Jones in his effort to translate the book of John in 1830.42 Nonetheless, Jones had to rely chiefly upon the translations of hymns, tracts, and books of the Bible that Worcester and Boudinot printed at New Echota and sold at cost to the missionaries of all denominations. While Worcester was allowed by his denomination to devote full time to his work of translation, Jones had a myriad of duties thrust upon him as the superintendent of the Baptist mission and evangelist for the whole mountain region. The Board, reluctant to continue paying for an inter­ preter, kept inquiring when he would be able to preach in Cherokee. In November 1829 Jones wrote, "I have commenced the use of the Cherokee language (so difficult to acquire) on a small scale; viz., catechizing the children and reading portions of the scripture with short observations. In two or three weeks I expect to commence reading short sermons. .. . I hope to cultivate a familiarity with the almost innumerable inflexions of the Cherokee verbs in which resides the great difficulty of acquiring the language."43 The more he studied Cherokee, the more he was impressed with its versatility. "It is amazing what a multitude of nice distinctions they have denoting voices, moods, tenses, sub-tenses, qualities, place, mo­ tion, person, number and transition with some other notations which have never yet been explained in English. The verbs, once thoroughly mastered, the rest is not difficult."44 Jones also became more impressed with the Sequoyan syllabary as he worked with it. Once, while he was teaching the son of Chief Situagi, a Cherokee district judge, how to use the syllabary, in February 1828, Si­ tuagi "asked to know if I thought highly of the invention. I told him it would be more beneficial to his people than a gift of ten thousand dollars. He is much pleased to think his people are making such rapid improve­ ments."45 Situagi was a fullblood who spoke no English. Two years later, Jones wrote, "The syllabic writing, which has frequently been learned in a day, is exerting an influence almost miraculous, and if this instrument were wisely and vigorously directed, its effects [would]. . . exceed all cal­ culation."46 Jones himself soon became adept at writing and reading Sequoyan. He was also convinced that once the Cherokees learned to read 42 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, January 22, 1830. See also his letter of October 27, 1827. Jones reported that he had translated the Book of Genesis with Timson and the Gospel of Luke. Letters, ABMU, December 8, and December 30,1828. 43 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, November 27 and 28,1829; see also July 8, 1828. 44 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, May 15,1828. 45 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, February 29, 1828. 46 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, March 3, 1830.

MethodistsandMedicineMen · 81 and write their own language they would have more incentive, not less, to master English. He said in 1828, "This invaluable invention is likely to be productive of the most important advantages to this people. Vast num­ bers can now form the characters in an awkward manner and read slowly by syllable, but in order to give full effect to the system, some plan must be adopted to teach them to read with fluency and to write with felic­ ity."47 He not only distributed printed copies of the syllabary but cut out of the Cherokee Phoenix those columns written in Sequoyan so that they could be used for teaching purposes: "If a few of the steadiest young men were taught to write with freedom and expedition, and to read well [in Sequoyan], schools might be commenced in several places with great ad­ vantage and at very trifling cost. These schools might be so organized that the leading facts of Sacred History and the plainest doctrines of the Gos­ pel might be made familiar to the pupils."48 Jones was the only missionary of any denomination to try to organize schools among the Cherokees where they would be taught by their own people to read and write their own language. With the consent of his Board, he inaugurated the bilingual plan at the town of Notley in June 1828, although he had to hire a white teacher because no bilingual Cherokee was available, and because the parents also wanted some instruction in English. The parents built the schoolhouse and supplied Morrison with corn and meat; the children lived in their own homes, some of them several miles from the school. Morrison taught them English; Jones taught them Sequoyan. "The learners make very rapid progress," he reported in July 1828. "One middle-aged man came 16 miles for the opportunity of reading [in Cherokee].. . . To supply the want of books, I wrote the [eighty-six Sequoyan] characters in large size and pasted them on a board, like the Lancastrian lessons, and cut out pieces of newspaper [from the Cherokee Phoenix] for reading. If we were provided with proper apparatus, it is hardly credible how rapid the art of reading, and through it all other knowledge, could be taught."49 Unfor­ tunately, this effort in bilingual education at Notley did not have time to mature. A year later many of the Cherokee families moved away from Notley, taking their children with them (Jones did not explain why). That year, Jones exceeded his budget again and the Board voted to discontinue the Notley school, thus saving the hundred dollars of a teacher's salary. Jones nevertheless hoped to find Cherokees capable of teaching Sequoyan schools in other towns. One such place, for which he had high hopes, was the town of Gatu47

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, February 18, 1828. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, February 18, 1828. 49 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, July 19, 1828. 48

82 · Chapter III gidsee, twenty-five miles southeast of Valley Towns. He had visited there in 1827 and found it "a dissipated place" and "the seat of every abomi­ nation." The people regularly practiced their old dances and ball plays and seemed to have no interest in Christianity. "My [first] appointment to preach there seemed like carrying hostilities into an enemy's camp," he said.50 Once when he arrived at the town, he found it crowded with "white people who had come from Georgia on purpose to [attend] an Indian Dance tonight with a Ball Play tomorrow. I considered it my duty to bear a faithful testimony against this abominable practice. . . . and I afterwards found that some of their feelings were grated by so much plainness of speech."51 Ball plays seemed abominable to all the mission­ aries, in part because they were originally a surrogate for war and accom­ panied by religious ceremonies, and in part because they had become scenes of gambling, whiskey drinking, and brawls. Furthermore, in front of male and female audiences, the players wore only a g-string. Jones persisted in his efforts to persuade the people of Gatugidsee to give up these ancient practices and start a Sequoyan school. After a year of visits, he gained some support. By May 1828 he reported happily, "The people are now eager to hear the word" of God. He thought the town had reformed: "Swearing is entirely abandoned. . . . Some of the more alarming truths [about sin, damnation, and hellfire] seem to have arrested their attention.. . . They have suddenly left off drinking whiskey with one consent [and some] have been brought to feel the plague of their own heart and to see the necessity at last of fleeing to the sinner's only ref­ uge."52 Jones provided those interested with copies of the syllabary, some hymnbooks, and a few tracts. Several months later he reported, "At Gatugidsee the people have hired a teacher themselves, and I examine a se­ lect number of pupils once a month and give them religious instructions, and to those who excell, I present a small reward."53 The children were required to read from the Sequoyan versions of the Bible, to recite Bible verses from memory, and to answer questions about what they had read. Jones gave the credit for the successful transformation of the town to the native exhorter and early Baptist convert, Wasadi. Wasadi had been preaching in the town since 1824, so it cannot have been such a sudden or miraculous transformation as Jones implied. To his regret, the school lasted only a year. The people did not revert to bar­ barism, but having learned to read and write in Cherokee, they lost inter­ est in school. Wasadi and Jones continued to preach there and to make new converts, but their efforts to revive the school failed. 50

Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, May 1, 1828. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, June 22, 1828. 52 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, May 1,1828. 53 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, August 6 , 1828.

51

Methodists and Medicine Men · 83 Jones's efforts to persuade other communities to start day schools taught in Cherokee by native teachers were equally unsuccessful. Apart from reading the scriptures he provided, or the Cherokee Phoenix, they had little use for a school, and it was not hard for one who knew Sequoyan to teach another. Jones blamed the failure on the lack of sufficient books and the unwillingness of the Board to pay for teachers. As the number of Cherokee exhorters and preachers increased, Jones began to give them regular lessons in theology and exegesis. In effect, he inaugurated the first seminary to train Cherokee ministers. All of his as­ sistants were fullbloods and only one or two knew any English, so Jones had to do the teaching mostly in Cherokee or utilize Timson to interpret. Timson did not feel competent to be a preacher. "Brother Timson is nat­ urally diffident," Jones said, "and will seldom venture to speak except as interpreter. But if the Lord should call him to be a herald of the cross to his people, it would greatly strengthen our hand."54 On the other hand, "Our brother Wasadi is peculiarly fitted for this work." A third convert, Kaneeda, began exhorting in his community shortly after his conversion in 1829. In January 1830, the Valley Towns church elected Kaneeda a deacon and licensed him to preach.55 At this time Kaneeda was rechristened "John Wickliffe." Two weeks later Jones wrote to the Board, "There are prospects of a glorious [spiritual] harvest in this region," if only the Board would agree to pay salaries to native preachers to assist him. "Three preachers could be employed with immediate advantage."56 He had explained before to the Board "the expedience of employing these brethren," who would require only ten dollars a month to support their families. Their task would be "to make tours through the country . . . talking to families," evangelizing, teaching them to read the Sequoyan syllabary, and giving them Scripture in translation.57 The Cherokees "seem to take great interest in reading and give serious attention to rela­ tions [of Bible stories] which a few years ago, would have been treated as mere romance... . The Scripture in their own language seems to promote the exercise of their intellect and instead of retarding their progress in the knowledge of English, as was feared by some, seems to facilitate it."58 Jones sometimes tried to frighten his Board into paying salaries to na­ tive ministers by suggesting that if the Baptists did not have more preach­ ers, then preachers from other denominations would soon gather in the 54 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, August 29, 1829. However, in a letter written September 7, 1830, Jones said that Timson was now having great success as an exhorter. BMM 10:348. 55 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, January 4, 1830. 56 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, March 3,1830. 57 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, November 13, 1829. 58 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, November 22, 1829.

84 · Chapter III spiritual harvest.59 His prediction came true in 1830, when the Method­ ists began to establish circuits through the mountain region. The Meth­ odists were the first competitors Jones had faced in this region. They had begun work in the Cherokee Nation in 1822 by designating circuit riders to travel through that part of the Nation located in Tennessee and Ala­ bama. That denomination did not have a national mission board but left Indian missions in the hands of state Methodist conferences. The Tennes­ see Conference assumed responsibility for evangelistic work among the Cherokees in that year.60 With each succeeding year the conference in­ creased the number of circuits and circuit riders; by 1830 the Methodists had seven circuits, seven circuit riders, five interpreters, and seven native preachers or exhorters. In 1829 the rivalry with Methodism was intensi­ fied when the Methodist John B. McFerrin persuaded Chief John Ross to join a Methodist society. The Methodists did not found permanent mission stations with schools and model farms. They consequently received no government support and operated on a tiny budget. Most of their circuit riders were young, single men, recent converts without ministerial education but zealous in their efforts to spread the faith. During the 1820s three of these young men married Cherokees, which increased their commitment to convert the Nation. Unlike the other missionaries, the Methodists preached an Arminian rather than a Calvinist theology, and unlike them they put their major emphasis upon large mass meetings (called camp meetings) that sometimes lasted for three or four days. At these meetings the preaching went on for many hours all day and into the night; these highly emotional sermons were interspersed with singing and shouting by the aroused con­ gregations. Sometimes these camp meetings or "protracted meetings" drew 3,000 to 5,000 auditors. The Cherokees enjoyed them not only be­ cause they provided opportunities to meet many relatives and friends, but because they resembled their own highly emotional—almost ecstatic— all-night dances at which large crowds gathered around a campfire, under the trees, singing and shouting for hours on end. Methodist meetings had a fervent, tension-building and tension-releasing excitement entirely ab­ sent from the meetings of the Moravians, Congregationalists, Presbyteri­ ans, and Baptists. In the years 1827—1832 the Methodist denomination grew by leaps and bounds in the Cherokee Nation. During their camp meetings they admitted to Methodist "societies" any persons (red, white, or black) who stated that they felt a moving of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and wished 59 Evan

Jones, letters, ABMU, August 6, 1828. the Methodist missionary work among the Cherokees at this time see McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, pp. 163-79. 60 For

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to join with others to learn how to "grow in grace" until they were qual­ ified for baptism and church membership. "Societies" were also known as "Methodist classes"; the circuit rider divided the converts into small groups according to their place of habitation, and placed a "class leader" over them—usually one of the more serious and zealous among the group. Though listed in Methodist statistics as members or converts, those in the classes or societies were really not church members but "seek­ ers." They met regularly with their class leaders to learn the Methodist catechism, to read and study the Bible, to pray and exhort among them­ selves, and to strengthen each other in spiritual faith and moral self-dis­ cipline. As the ordained circuit riders made their rounds, they examined these seekers, and perhaps after several months or more the circuit riders might declare them ready for baptism and church membership. When a sufficient number were baptized in any one place, they were organized into a church and a pastor was assigned to them by the conference of Tennessee. Missionaries in the other denominations considered the Methodist ap­ proach to saving souls to be hyper-emotional and their converts exceed­ ingly unstable. Critics asserted that as many members of their "classes" lapsed back into heathenism as ever became steady church members be­ cause their decision to join was based upon the momentary excitement whipped up at the protracted meetings; it was not the result of a deep and enduring spiritual encounter with the Holy Spirit. One Congregationalist said of the Methodists: "As it was their practice to admit into the society as 'seekers,' any who professed a serious desire for salvation, though con­ fessedly unregenerate at the time, considerable numbers were enrolled" who never became regenerate but "relapsed into a state of [spiritual] care­ lessness and vice."61 Nonetheless the Methodists for a time became the most popular of all denominations among the Cherokees, and by 1832 they claimed over a thousand "members" of societies, five times more than any other denomination and twice as many as the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Moravians combined. Evan Jones had heard of the Methodist circuit riders long before they "invaded" the mountain region in 1827. He was appalled when he dis­ covered what havoc they could wreck among his carefully nurtured groups of "awakened" or "hopeful" Cherokees. Although they were ac­ cused of "sheep-stealing" (taking members away from other denomina­ tions), the fact was that the Methodists offered a more comfortable, in­ formal, and sympathetic passage from the old ways to the new. Their classes were, in effect, halfway houses, in which Cherokees who were cu61 Joseph Tracy, History of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1842), p. 165.

86 · Chapter III rious about Christianity could learn more about it without making a total commitment; they could leave a society without disgrace or censure if they did not find it helpful. The Methodists understood that sometimes the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak, and they were as ready to welcome backsliders into the fold again as they had been to admit them in the first place. The class leaders were themselves laymen, often Cherokees as unsure of themselves as those they led. There was a populist, dem­ ocratic spirit to the Methodist missionary movement lacking among the more austere, rigid, formal, and doctrinaire Moravians and Congregationalists. Evan Jones liked to think of himself as a democrat and egali­ tarian, but he had much to learn from the Methodists. In July 1827, Jones reported to the Board that "two of our pupils have joined the Methodists."62 Two months later he said, "That Methodists are receiving members in these parts is no evidence of their conversion," yet their numbers were growing.63 In 1829 he allowed a Methodist circuit rider, Nicholas Trott, to preach at Valley Towns, but not until 1830 was a regular Methodist circuit rider assigned by the Tennessee Conference to the North Carolina area of the Nation. By this time Jones and his assis­ tants already had established a two-hundred-mile circuit of their own through the Nation, and they resented the implication that the area needed more preaching. He was shocked to discover that the first Methodist circuit rider to come, Greenberry Garrett, was informing the Cherokees that baptism by sprinkling was the proper scriptural form of baptism, and not immersion as Evan Jones had taught. When Jones learned of this in April 1830, he mounted his horse and went out to meet Garrett. Garrett had with him a Cherokee interpreter from the Tennessee area of the Nation, Turtle Fields, who was a recent convert to Methodism. Jones frankly told Gar­ rett that it was wrong for Methodists to enter into an area under his pas­ toral care to compete for members and to criticize his theology and reli­ gious ordinances. Garrett replied equally frankly that he did "not like the notion of the Baptists' refusing to admit the validity of Sprinkling or pouring" as a legitimate form of baptism and that he had a right to preach the gospel wherever he chose. When Jones reported this to his Board, he said there would be difficulties reconciling Baptist and Methodist teach­ ing on this important ordinance: "I should be glad to see some Books on the subject" to prepare himself for the inevitable questions from his con­ verts.64 It was hard enough to debate with pagan "conjurors"; now he 62

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, July 7, 1827. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, October 26,1827. 64 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, April 15, 1830. 63

Methodists and Medicine Men · 87 would also have to do battle with professed Christians who "perverted" the true teaching of God. At this first meeting with Garrett, Jones tried to be civil toward him and invited him, as a fellow missionary, to give a sermon at the home of Kaneeda nearby. Garrett agreed, evidently unaware that Jones under­ stood Cherokee. Jones said, "The interpreter gave a wrong translation [of the word 'baptism']. . . rendering [ it by a Cherokee word] which signifies 'sprinkled.' After meeting, I mentioned it to Mr. Garrett and requested him to have it corrected. He excused himself by pleading his ignorance of the language, and [when asked] the interpreter said that was the way he always interpreted it. They refused to correct the interpretation.. . . I ex­ pect we shall be drawn into controversy on this subject unless we can tamely yield to the perversion of the word and ordinances of our Blessed redeemer. . . . I thought it my duty openly and plainly to oppose the first attempts [in this region] to pervert the word of God among our unin­ formed people.65 So the gauntlet was thrown down and the battle lines drawn. A few weeks after this encounter, Jones went to his preaching station at Dseyohee, where he had for three years been trying to build up the spiritual knowledge of a group of Cherokees in order to lead them to baptism. He had many there who were on the verge of making a profes­ sion of their faith. When he arrived, he discovered that Garrett had just been preaching there, had persuaded most of Jones's inquirers to be bap­ tized, and had formed a Methodist class in the town. Jones was furious. "The Methodist preachers were here a few days ago," he told his Board, "and took 17 of the inquirers [whom I had been preaching to] into their Society. Some of them made objections to joining them on the ground that they were under the instruction of this Mission. The [Methodist] preacher removed their scruples and received them into the church."66 Garrett had removed their scruples by telling them that all Christian de­ nominations were brethren in Christ and that these inquirers need not wait to be baptized by immersion. When some said they preferred that mode of baptism, "the minister agreed to immerse them rather than let them join the Baptist church." This added insult to injury. Had the Meth­ odists no scruples? Jones asked the Cherokees who had resisted why their friends had yielded to Garrett. One of them said he thought his friends "had been deceived about the nature of church membership. The Meth­ odists, having first represented it as a matter of perfect indifference what church they should join,. .. afterwards endeavoured to extort a promise 65 66

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , April 30, 1830. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , May 9, 1830.

88 · Chapter III from them that they should not change" to the Baptist church when Jones returned.67 Jones gathered his native preachers together and began to instruct them "in some of the Gospel doctrines which are grossly perverted by our Methodist brethren in these parts."68 His converts had always been taught to translate "baptism" by the Cherokee word for total immersion (going under water). Jones now took special pains to preach "with regard to the Modes" of baptism and to point out to the unsuspecting Cherokees that "those among the Cherokees who practice any of them besides im­ mersion for baptism, act in direct violation of the plain Scripture words which none can misunderstand as the language will not admit of untrans­ lated words being introduced into it."69 Distortion of God's Word was the most heinous of religious offenses to evangelicals. The Methodists had established three preaching circuits through the mountain area by 1832, covering most of the same places Jones preached at. Much as he resented their intrusion, he was ready to learn from them. He too began to hold camp meetings or protracted meetings after 1830. He also adopted the use of "the anxious bench," another Methodist in­ vention, a special spot (usually the front benches) where, after a sermon, those who felt "anxious," "awakened," or "serious" about the state of their sinfulness, might be gathered to receive special exhortation and prayer by the missionaries. Like the Methodists, Jones had found that both of these practices were very effective. In the continuing debate over the proper form of baptism, the Baptists had one advantage over the Methodists. The Cherokees had long prac­ ticed an annual rite of purification that they called "going to water." It was part of their celebration of the beginning of the new year, along with lighting a new fire in each Cherokee home. Conducted by the adonisgi or a "Priest of the Fire," the purification ceremony included prayers and chants followed by a mass entry of the community into the flowing waters of a river. Here they all dipped under the water four times, facing each of the cardinal points of the compass. In former times they had taken off their old clothes and allowed them to float down the river. Upon emerging from the water, they donned new clothes, then went to the sacred fire kept by their priest and, after another ceremony, carried home a faggot from it to rekindle their family fires (extinguished prior to the ceremony).70 The purpose of "going to water"—and what gave it the name of "Purification ceremony"—was to restore harmony and good feeling among all the members of the community by washing away bad relations. Cherokees 67

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, August 29, 1830. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, September 2 and 3, 1830. 69 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, May 17, 1830. 70 See Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, pp. 365-75. 68

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who were attracted to the Baptists found baptism by immersion a kindred ritual, one which wiped away the sins or bad deeds of the past and placed the individual once again in harmony with the spiritual world. Baptism was a rebirth, the symbol of wiping the old slate clean and starting afresh, a solemn and uplifting occasion. Jones was fully aware of this. He had taken a great interest in learning all he could about this ritual. He provided his own account of "this pagan practice" or "heathen ablution," though he did not place it in its cultural context. Went to the Town meeting for the early spring ablution. The Adoneeskee, or priest, allowed me to accompany them, but when we came near the water, he directed me to take another path. Coming to the place, a stool was set down with a deerskin on it and some beads on the skin. The Adoneeskee or priest muttered something which nobody could hear for about twenty minutes, the people all standing with their faces to the water. Then, with great solemnity, he walked into the water and scattered the sacred beads into the stream in all directions; the women then commenced plunging the children into the water; those [children] who were large enough, plunged themselves. The men went a little distance and dipped themselves. And the women went to a separate place and did likewise. This done, all retired to the house of the Adoneeskee and, after listening to a long speech from the old man, they commenced eating cold venison which was prepared for the occasion.71

Jones did not stay to see the ceremony of the relighting of the sacred fire.72 In addition to contending with medicine men and Methodists in these years, Jones also had to contend with strong opposition from whitemen in the surrounding settlements or within the Nation who disliked mis­ sionaries. White anti-mission sentiment derived in part from fear that the missionaries might really reform the Indians and in part from their de­ fense of Indian rights. "There are a number of people in the adjoining settlements" of North Carolina, Jones wrote, "and some in the Nation who are very assiduous in endeavours to vilify the character of missions by fabricating all manner of calumnious reports."73 Many of these whites traded with and cheated the Indians; some were renegades and outlaws. "Many white men," Jones said, "when they come into the nation seem to consider themselves free from all the restraints of morality and reli­ gion."74 It was as though crossing that border between civilization and Indian territory liberated the white man from all law and placed him in a 71

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , March 18,1828. Jones mentions the "Adseela Galohee, Priest of the Fire" (whom he converted) in his journal, ABMU, January 4, 1830, and in a letter, ABMU, April 28,1830. 73 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , July 7, 1827. 74 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , July 20,1828. 72

90 · Chapter III moral free zone to act as he wished. Whites of this character seldom pro­ fessed any faith in Christianity. Jones called them "enemies of the gospel" and enemies to the Cherokees. "The white people are constantly oppos­ ing every effort to instruct the poor, benighted Indians," for fear that they might learn enough to stand up to white chicanery and fraud.75 "The great objection urged by most [white] people in these parts is the enmity of the old wars in which some of their friends have been killed by them, not considering that the Gospel neutralizes every malignant principle in red and white men, and that when ignorance and vice are chased away by its truth, the very savage becomes a meek and lowly child of God, a friend of man and an heir of heaven."76 Frontier Indian-haters did not want to hear about how the Cherokees might someday be as good as they were and then be entitled to the same rights and respect. Degraded themselves by respectable whites, the renegades needed to feel at least superior to Indians. Jones described a typical encounter with such frontiersmen when he came to preach at a town near the border called Gunnhee or Long Bullet. He arrived to find that many of the Cherokees there were drunk, "a sup­ ply of whiskey having just arrived from the white settlement." Just before his arrival, a fight had broken out and one Cherokee had killed another. "It seems," Jones commented, "the white people are determined to ruin these poor ignorant creatures, if they can, by this pernicious liquor."77 He did just what the whites feared most; he formed a temperance society in the mountain region and obtained pledges of total abstinence, thereby cutting into the easy profits of the whiskey traders. Only slightly more respectable were whitemen who came into the Na­ tion to find a good plot of land to settle on, expecting that the Cherokees would soon be forced to move west. Unless they married a Cherokee, obtained a trader's license, or worked for the missionaries, they were technically intruders and could be removed. In 1829 Jones almost rented the mission farm to one of these landsharks. "A Gentleman from Tennes­ see, who is a preacher, called and wished to rent the mission farm. I showed him the land and he said he liked the country well. But in conver­ sation, I found out he was one of those good people who do all their business by means of Negro slaves, and that his object was to fix himself here till the Cherokees should be driven off their lands. I concluded there­ fore it would not do to let him have it at any time as it would counteract all our efforts among the Cherokees, besides the injustice of introducing their enemies into the hearts of their country."78 75

Ibid. Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , February 26,1827. 77 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , February 28, 1827. 78 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , February 7, 1829.

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Despite all his difficulties, Jones managed to increase steadily the Bap­ tist influence and church membership through patient, persistent effort. He could not persuade his Board to hire all the native assistants he wanted, but they did agree, as the Methodist threat grew, to hire four. "Now I would beg leave to suggest," Jones wrote to urge this course, "that as the Baptists have laboured here long, in the dark and inauspi­ cious season past, whether it would not be well for them to occupy as much of the field as possible?"79 In June 1830, the Board agreed to pay ten dollars a month to support Kaneeda, and a year later it hired Dsulawee (rechristened Andrew Fuller), whom Jones had reported to be so effective that after one of his sermons, a stream of Cherokees "came for­ ward with tears to occupy the anxious seat." The year after that Jones persuaded the Board to hire a convert rechristened Alexander McGrey. To obtain more "native assistants" from his Board, Jones mentioned the ad­ vantages the competing denominations attained from them: "The Pres­ byterians and Methodist brethren are availing themselves extensively of the aid of native converts, and the results are encouraging."80 In the long run, the most important native preacher Jones hired in these years was Jesse Bushyhead (Tastheghetehee). Jones did not convert him. He lived in the Tennessee region of the Nation at a place called Achaia, seventy-five miles west of Valley Towns in the Hiwassee Valley. His par­ ents were Cherokees but his grandfather was a British army captain. Born in 1804, he grew up speaking both Cherokee and English fluently and attended the American Board mission school at Candy Creek. He was for a time a school teacher. At the age of twenty-five he began to have doubts about the practice of infant baptism (an ordinance practiced by the mis­ sionaries of the American Board) and, after reading the Bible carefully, concluded that the Baptists were correct. Only adult believers should be baptized. He traveled in 1830 to the closest Baptist church he knew of, in the town of Cleveland, Tennessee. Here he was baptized by immersion by the Reverend Burrow Buckner. Buckner began to visit Achaia after this to evangelize and in 1831 gathered a small church there consisting of nine­ teen Cherokees, eleven whites, and five black slaves. Bushyhead joined this church in June 1831. (By September 1832, five more whites and thirty-three more blacks had joined it.) Bushyhead felt called to preach and was licensed by this church. He traveled to Valley Towns in January 1832 to meet Jones. Jones was very much impressed by his intelligence and strength of character, and after much effort finally persuaded his Board to employ him in 1833. Jones ordained him to the ministry that same year, and Bushyhead apparently served the Achaia church as co79 Evan 80

Jones, letters, ABMU , August 6,1828. BMM 11:91; BMM 13:210. Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, November 13, 1829.

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pastor with Buckner until August 1835. Then he formed a new church, composed mostly of Cherokees, at Amohee, not far from Achaia. Bushyhead was the first Cherokee to be pastor of his own church in the Nation. He and Jones became very close friends, and because Bushyhead was a better linguist than Timson, he became Jones's chief collaborator in trans­ lating the Bible. Bushyhead, like Wasadi, Timson, and Kaneeda, was committed to assisting his nation in its struggle against removal; he was elected to the Council in 1835, and divided his time between preaching and politics for the rest of his life. The Cherokees never made the rigid separation between religious and political vocations that characterized Protestants in the United States. Ultimately Bushyhead became Chief Justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court, though he continued to serve as pastor of his church.81 In explaining the growing success of the Baptist mission to his Board, Jones gave full credit to these four Cherokee assistants as well as to other Cherokee exhorters whom he encouraged. He also devoted much time and effort to giving these Cherokee preachers as much theological train­ ing as he could. "I have to express much satisfaction with the help af­ forded by brethren Wickliffe and Dsulawee. It would indeed be very de­ sirable that they were better acquainted with the doctrines contained in the holy scriptures. To remedy this defect in a small degree, we have adopted the plan of devoting part of two days in the week to instructing the preachers and exhorters who can conveniently attend. On these oc­ casions, they point out any passages in the Gospel or scripture tract which they do not understand and receive in some cases a full explanation of the passage and in others as much information as their other attainments will enable them to understand."82 Jones himself had no theological training, but he had acquired a large library of theological works from which he drew information. "We then examine any passage they have selected for a text [sermon text] and if it appears suitable to the purposes, we first compare it with parallel and other passages which may illustrate the sub­ ject and show the meaning of the text, and then point out some simple plan for opening and impressing the truths contained in it on the minds of the people. By this little aid (and very imperfect it is) they often deliver useful and impressive discourses, and by powerful appeals to the con­ science, are, in the hands of the spirit, instrumental in producing very happy results." In 1828 Jones believed that a remarkable revival of religion would soon take place among the Cherokees. He saw signs that they were at last be81 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, January 7, 1832, September 7, 1832, and September 10, 1832; BMM 12:394. See also Walter N. Wyteh, Poor Lo (Philadelphia, 1896), pp. 60-61, and E. C. Routh, "Early Missionaries to the Cherokees," Chronicles of Oklahoma 15 (De­ cember 1937): 450-60. 82 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, February 2,1832.

Methodists and Medicine Men · 93 ginning to appreciate the message and power of Christianity. "The divine influence is producing powerful and radical effects," he reported.83 At a baptismal ceremony in Valley Towns in December 1829, he said that many white persons were in attendance and were astonished by what they saw: "In the congregation, which amounted to several hundred, were a number of professors [adherents] of religion of different denominations from the white settlements. The sight of so many Cherokees joining with zeal and devotion in the worship of a crucified Saviour, excited in them sensations of wonder and joy. Some of them told me that they had ex­ pected improvement, but nothing like this. Let God have all the glory."84 His growing success convinced him, and the Board, that the decision to give priority to Christianization rather than education was correct. "A few years ago," Jones wrote in 1830, "it was thought that only children of the Cherokees were within the range of hopeful effort. But now the par­ ents, grandparents, and even great grandparents are being converted."85 "The poor, despised Cherokees, who were not a people, are becoming a people of God." "We have now forty-six anxious inquirers who have placed themselves under the special care and instruction of the Mission, and there are perhaps as many more who are under serious impressions but have not as yet boldness sufficient to declare it. Not one of these can understand English."86 "Brother Wickliffe is diffusing the glad tiding of Salvation" throughout the Nation. "Oh, Christians, pray for the Chero­ kees. Oppression scowls about their borders, but the light of truth is dif­ fusing its benign influence in the midst of them at a ratio altogether un­ known before."87 In 1830 Jones reported thirty-eight baptisms, almost twice as many as in any of the preceding nine years. At Tinsawatee, the Baptist church in the Georgia region of the Nation, the Reverend Duncan O. Bryant was having equal success. Between them both, there were ninety Baptist con­ verts in 1830, compared to only forty-five in 1827. True, this was fewer than the Congregationalists, who had a total of 219 converts in 1830, but they had a staff of thirty-five persons in eight different mission stations. The Moravians, who had two mission stations and who had been at work among the Cherokees since 1801, had only forty-five members in 1830. But the Methodists were far ahead of them all; with seven mission circuits in 1830 they reported 736 members in their classes (though this included some whites and some black slaves).88 The revival continued into 1831. "I believe the Lord is deepening as 83

Evan Jones, journal, ABMU, August 17,1829. Μ BMM 10:53. 8 S BMM 10:91. BMM 10:182. 8 7 BMM 10:348. 88 See Cherokee Phoenix, January 1, 1831, and BMM 11:127.

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well as widening his work among the Cherokees," Jones reported that year.89 "The numbers of the church who live at a distance are become so numerous that it is scarcely possible for all to attend at one place at com­ munion occasions. For the accommodation of those who were thus cir­ cumstanced, we appointed a sacramental meeting for last Sabbath and the Saturday before at Deesehodee, about 18 or 20 miles from hence. . . . Our brethren erected a convenient shelter for the occasion covered with boards and railed except for two doorways. They also cleared a place at the side of Valley River to go down to baptism. . . . Preaching was done by John Wickliffe and E. Jones. . . . A friend who stood by the riverside, viewing the procession, remarked that so large a company of Indians, all clean and neatly clothed, moving solemnly along, singing with joyful lips the high praises of Jehovah, was a most delightful sight." After the ser­ mon, On invitation, a great number came to the anxious seat, manifesting the bitter­ ness of their souls by sobs and tears and groanings which could not be uttered. . . . Among the mourners there were a few of the white people of the most stubborn and abandoned character.. . . Many who did not come forward man­ ifested the most heart-rending anguish. One female in particular seemed ex­ tremely desirous to join the anxious ones and tried in vain to gain an approving look from her husband, without which she was afraid to come.90

Between March and September 1832, forty-six Cherokees were baptized, bringing the total to 137 in that church and thirty-four at Tinsawatee. "The gospel has become more than usually successful in the conversion of sinners," reported the Baptist Missionary Magazine that year. "Among the remnants of the first inhabitants of America, God is raising up a gen­ eration for his praise." When Jesse Bushyhead became a missionary assis­ tant, his church added another thirty-five Baptists to the total. In September 1832, Jones went to Oodeluhee to hold a sacramental meeting for those who did not usually get to the Valley Towns meetings because of the distance. To his great surprise, he "found the brethren had erected a log meetinghouse, filled with seats, and a platform for a pulpit. This is the first house erected in these mountains for the exclusive purpose of the worship of Jehovah. No white man nor any who can speak English had any hand in the project or in the execution of the work. Twelve months ago, all concerned in it were in the darkness of heathenism."91 The Baptist Board of Foreign Missions, in its annual report in 1832, acknowledged that Jones had become its most successful missionary to 89 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , May 30, 1831. '0BMM 11:282. 91 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , October 14, 1832; B M M 12:395.

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the Indians. "This Station," at Valley Towns, "is the most encouraging of all under the charge of the Board among the Indians. From the close of the year 1829, there has been a continued sense of religious revival." Hitherto highly critical of Jones, the Board was now full of praise. Heman Lincoln, the Treasurer, wrote to him in July 1832, "Our hearts have been greatly cheered and comforted by your communications. . .. Your last [letter] . . . almost electrified us. That you should have enjoyed the hap­ piness to baptize on one occasion thirty-six Cherokees, principally male, is wonderful indeed. It must have been a Pentecost season."92 Six months later, he wrote again, "You have been most signally blest of Heaven and it is our hearts desire and prayer that the copious shower of divine influ­ ence may continue to descend upon your own beloved family as well as on the sons of the forest around you among whom you have labored with so much success."93 Lucius Bolles too waxed lyrical over "the number brought into the kingdom of Christ from among the Cherokees," and the "glorious work of divine grace" in that nation.94 In speaking of this revival, Jones said it was taking place "despite the political excitement" that was plaguing the Nation.95 It might be argued that the revival came because of the political crisis. In 1828 the Cherokees could not really believe that they would lose their homeland and be forced to move hundreds of miles to start over again in the far West. With the passage of the Removal Act in 1830 and Jackson's refusal to obey the Supreme Court's ruling in 1832 against Georgia's assumption of jurisdic­ tion over Cherokees' land, the nightmare began to approach reality. In des­ peration the Cherokees reached out to find some sense of right, justice, and order in a world gone topsy turvy. Jones noted that "They are deter­ mined not to yield up their lands, and they consider the acts which are employed to persuade them as vexatious and unjust. It is well that the Lord Reigns, and that he certainly will do right."96 To believe in that kind of God, to know that their best friends, like Evan Jones, and that their chief, John Ross, believed in that God, was enough for some Cherokees to make the leap of faith.97 However, the conversions to Christianity in all denominations between 92

Heman Lincoln, letters, ABMU , July 5,1832. Heman Lincoln, letters, ABMU , October 20, 1832. 94 Lucius Bolles, letters, ABMU , April 21, 1831 and June 20,1831. 95 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , June 19,1829. 96 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , March 31, 1829. 97 The best discussion of the various ways in which the Cherokees blended the sacred symbols, rituals, and values of their old religion with the symbols, rituals, and values of Christianity is Catherine L. Albanese's article, "Exploring Regional Religion: A Case Study of the Eastern Cherokees," History of Religion 23 (May 1984): 344-71. It is worth noting that Albanese confirms the fact that the Baptists were by far the most successful of all the denominations among the Cherokees. 93

96 · Chapter III 1828 and 1832, while large when measured against the handful of con­ verts prior to 1828, was small in terms of the total population. At most they represented only ten percent of the Nation. There was no general stampede into the mission churches, and after 1832, when all of the mis­ sion agencies except the Baptists deserted their struggle to resist Jackson, there was a major revival of the old religion. It seems more likely that the appeal of Christianity was a cumulative response to acculturation arising from a better understanding of its richness of meaning among those Cherokees who had come to understand it, and not simply a reaction to polit­ ical tensions. Jones's success, however, was sharply interrupted in 1833 by an incident of tragic proportions. A death in the family led him and his wife to be placed on trial for murder.

CHAPTER IV

Trial for Murder, 1833 E. Jones came before the Church and complained that he had been treated wrong and aggrieved by a malicious, cruel charge of murder against himself and his wife. Also a charge of fornica­ tion. .. . And also a charge of adultery.... —Charges at a Church Council held at Galaneeye, near Valley Towns mission, March 31,1833

ONCE EVAN JONES became an itinerant evangelist, he had little time for his large family. He spent most of each year on horseback, riding around his circuit or visiting other missionaries in distant parts of the Nation. His wife, Elizabeth, whom he called "Eliza," bore the burden of managing the affairs of the mission during his absence. This entailed not only conduct­ ing the boarding school for twenty Cherokee children from six to sixteen years old, but conducting a Sunday School class, overseeing the cooking and mending, attending to the sick, and housing a constant stream of Cherokee and white visitors. She had four children when she arrived at Valley Towns in 1821, and three others were born by 1830. Her daughter Elizabeth, who was eighteen in 1827, assisted her at the school; her son Samuel, who was sixteen in 1827, managed that part of the farm which fed the mission family. Hannah was fifteen and Ann eleven; they attended school with the Cherokees and under the Lancastrian system did much of the teaching of the youngest students. Living among Cherokees who spoke only Cherokee, they had themselves probably picked up some of the language. Jones wrote in 1826 that he had six children, but he never mentioned the name of the fifth, who was born a year after their arrival in Valley Towns. (He tended in official correspondence to speak of "my second daughter" or "my oldest son" rather then referring to them by name.) The sixth child was John Buttrick Jones, born December 24,1824. Elizabeth Lanigan Jones was a dedicated missionary wife and teacher who never complained of her heavy burden. In fact, she seems to have taken on much more than she could bear. In February 1827, she added four small Cherokee children to her household, the youngest only three weeks old, when a Cherokee mother who had seven small children died. ("A sage old [Cherokee] doctor who attended the deceased says she died

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through the influence of witchcraft," Jones told his Board.)1 Eliza was seven months pregnant with her seventh child at this time. In May, Jones reported that his wife was unwell. On June 17, "My wife was so sick I could not fulfil my appointment at Notley. About 11 o'clock she was delivered of a little boy and afterwards, though very weak from preceding sickness, appeared as well as we could, under the circumstances, expect." Two days later, "about two o'clock, the infant died, being the first child we ever lost. . . . The Lord gaveth and the Lord hath taken away." Two days after this Jones noted in his journal, "my wife is alarmingly sick. Every symptom seems to forebode a melancholy issue. My mind is nearly overwhelmed.. . . My dear wife has ever evinced the most lively concern for the prosperity of the cause of God and has acted a zealous and inde­ fatigable part in the temporal and spiritual business of the mission." The sickness continued, and on June 25, Jones wrote, "Eliza continues very bad. I feel very unwell myself and full of anxiety." But he did not mention calling in a doctor; the nearest one was forty miles away. Fortunately, by July 1 she had improved.2 He was soon able to return to his round of preaching appointments, but Eliza never again was in good health. A year later, in May 1828, Eliza was so ill that her son Sam had to take her place teaching at the school; she remained ill through July. A year after that, in March 1829, she was so sick that the school was closed for three weeks and the children sent home (Sam was evidently too busy planting crops to replace her as teacher). "Mrs. Jones has been apparently on the borders of the grave," EvanJones told the Board after her recovery in May.3 During this sickness Pauline Cunningham, the woman hired to help Eliza with the household chores, asked her sister, Eliza, to come to the mission to lend a hand. From time to time a third Cunningham sister, Cynthia, also came to help out. Jones had to pay them out of his own pocket, for there was nothing in the budget to cover such expenses, and the Board did not offer to pay. Eliza entered her final sickness in January 1831 and died on February 5. Jones wrote the Board of his grief and said, in the formal style appro­ priate to such letters (and aware that this might be printed), "She always cherished an ardent desire for the conversion of the Indians and watched and encouraged, with the most tender concern, every symptom of turning to God among those who were placed in her care or who came under her notice. She was also a diligent and qualified teacher of youth."4 The Board 1 Evan

Jones, journal, ABMU , February 26, 1827. Jones, journal, ABMU , May 23, 1827; June 17, 1827; June 19, 1827; June 21, 1827; June 25, 1827; July 1, 1827. 3 Evan Jones, journal, ABMU , May 22, 1829. 4 BMM 11:150. If Jones's private letters to his mother and other close relatives in Phila2 Evan

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did print this and also its own small obituary in the Baptist Missionary Magazine·. "Mrs Jones was happily qualified for the situation. To a cul­ tivated mind, she united the graces of ardent, self-devoted piety. The du­ ties of the place were . . . toilsome and her health frequently suffered, but she was enabled to sustain in them with short interruptions till the last fall when her complaints assumed an alarming character. Medical advice was of little avail. She gradually sunk till on the 5th of February her spirit took its flight, winged with faith and love."5 So ended a decade of dedi­ cated missionary service. Jones received a similar emotional blow a year later when his oldest son died. "I have scarcely power to hold the pen to tell you of the death of my dear boy, my eldest son, who was become my friend, my compan­ ion, my helper. But he is gone . .. in the twenty-first year of his life."6 After his wife died, Jones did not think his daughter Elizabeth could manage the school by herself, and he asked the Board to send a school teacher. The Board sent two new missionaries to Valley Towns in 1832, perhaps from a feeling that Eliza might have died of overwork. The new school teacher was Miss Sarah Rayner; the new administrative assistant and his wife were Leonard and Susan Butterfield. "The man in view," the Board wrote, "is not a preacher, though intelligent and capable of taking charge of the school department. He was bred a farmer and carpenter, but has been under a course of instruction at Newton [Theological Insti­ tution in Massachusetts] and elsewhere for the last two years. His wife, it is thought, is well fitted to be useful," though in what capacity the Board did not say.7 The Butterfields had only recently been married. Sarah Ray­ ner had had some experience as a school teacher, but she was young and the Board did not feel she was capable of managing the mission alone in Jones's long absences. There may also have been some hidden hope that she might be suitable as a second wife for Jones; at any rate, she could not have traveled without a chaperon from Boston to Valley Towns. The Board was also planning to send its Treasurer, Heman Lincoln, to visit the mission and report on the reasons for its consistent deficits, but at the last minute Lincoln wrote that he probably could not make it. Rayner and the Butterfields left by boat from Boston on October 20 and were to travel by way of Savannah and Augusta, Georgia. Butterfield reported that they had reached Savannah on October 29, traveled to Greensville by carriage, and there, "After much anxiety, we succeeded in getting a man, two horses, and a lumber wagon to carry us on to the delphia had survived, there would be much more intimate information about his wife and children. 5 B M M 11:179. 6 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU , January 13, 1832. 7 Lucius Bolles, letters, ABMU , July 5, 1832.

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Valley Towns, a distance of about seventy-five miles. It took three days. The roads were extremely rough and uneven." They arrived after dark on November 16, "and the school children came forth with lanterns and torches to meet us." Jones had not received the letter saying Heman Lin­ coln would not be with them and was putting on a special welcome for the Treasurer who had so often chided him. "I am very glad we brought a few articles to cook in with us," Butterfield wrote a few days later. "Had we not, when Br. Jones moved into his new cabin, we should have been entirely destitute, and when that takes place, we shall want many things which we have not now got." There was no stove in their cabin, and "there is but one bed belonging to the mission, and that quite an old one."8 The Butterfields were shocked to see the dire poverty and primitive con­ ditions under which the Jones family had lived for so long. The boarding school was in pitiful shape: "The children's beds deserve not the name. They had no ticken [ticking] filled with straw, no sheets or blankets, and a few old quilts and them upon the floor. All their wearing apparel quite unfit for the sudden change of our winter."9 It must have bothered the Board that their penny-pinching had resulted in such wretched condi­ tions. Furthermore, though Jones had not mentioned it, a flood the pre­ vious fall had "entirely demolished" the sawmill for the third time, and the waterwheel in the gristmill was no longer working. The Butterfields wrote that "both are much needed." Previous to our coming the school was taught by Br. Jones' oldest daughter, but since [arriving] Sister Rayner has been engaged most of the time and will be until Br. Jones moves into his new cabin. When this takes place, I shall take it [the school] myself and Sister R. will assist Mrs. Butterfield in domestic affairs. We could then employ another female to very good advantage. ... Miss Eliza Cunningham is now engaged to do the washing for the children till next spring. She receives for her services one dollar per week. I have written to one of my sisters to come.10

Evidently the Board did not agree to pay for Butterfield's sister to join the mission, for in a later letter he referred to "the coloured girl who lives in our family." She may have been a hired slave. He asked that some articles of clothing be sent for her; "I think she is entitled to more than her liv­ ing."11 There were nineteen Cherokees in the boarding school, eleven girls and 8 Leonard

Butterfield, letters, ABMU, January 3, 1833. Ibid. 10 Ibid. Evidently, as a carpenter, Butterfield was assisting Jones in building the new cabin. Those built in Posey's day had pretty well deteriorated. 11 Leonard Butterfield, letters, ABMU, December 10, 1833. 9

Trial for Murder · 101 eight boys (although the Board had specified that it be for girls only). Butterfield taught them "English Grammar," geography, "Cobburn's Arithmetic," "Emerson's Arithmetic," spelling, and reading. Between classes "the girls attend to sewing, marking, and other kinds of work. I find it difficult to keep all the boys employed on account of not having Axes, Hoes, Shovels sufficient" for them.12 The mission still required farm work for boys and housework for girls. In October, just prior to the Butterfields' arrival at Valley Towns, Cyn­ thia Cunningham had arrived at the mission from Cleveland, Tennessee, to visit her sisters. She told the Butterfields that she was waiting for her brother, Miles, to arrive with his wagon from Augusta to take her home again, but there seemed no urgency about it. Cynthia had been at Valley Towns many times since the early 1820s and had been baptized there as a young girl by Thomas Roberts. The Cunninghams had been closely as­ sociated with the mission for a decade as "domestic" help. However, Rayner and the Butterfields were very surprised to discover upon their arrival that Evan Jones had married Pauline Cunningham (sometimes called "Paulina") and that they already had a child, born in August 1832. The Board appears to have known nothing about this. At forty-four, Jones was fourteen years older than Pauline. An unpleasant rumor had circulated about his remarriage, to the effect that it was necessitated by her pregnancy. Pauline had little education. She had worked for the mis­ sion for at least six years and had nursed Eliza Jones through her final illness. She and her sisters were all baptized members of the Valley Towns church, and Jones knew their parents, who lived in Cleveland, Tennessee. Still, it was strange that he had never mentioned the marriage or the birth of their child to the Board. She was not the usual missionary wife and seemed content to remain in the background, tending to the children and managing her own household. But there was something about the Cun­ ninghams that Rayner and the Butterfields did not like; personal relation­ ships at the mission were rather strained, though Jones himself seemed cordial and grateful toward his new co-workers. Six weeks after their arrival at Valley Towns, the new missionaries wit­ nessed an event that totally shook their faith in Evan Jones and the Cun­ ninghams and caused a major scandal at the mission. It began on the night of January 7, 1833, when Cynthia Cunningham became suddenly ill and took to her bed. She and Sarah Rayner shared a small cabin near the school, but they had separate rooms. Pauline and Elizabeth Cunning­ ham took care of her and informed Rayner that Cynthia was merely suf­ fering "in the customary way of females" (from menstrual cramps) "ag­ gravated by a cold." However, in the middle of the night of January 7, 12

Ibid.

102 · Chapter IV Rayner heard Cynthia moaning loudly and crying out as if she were in great pain. She entered Cynthia's room, spoke with her, and gave her some medicine appropriate for her condition. The rest of the night passed quietly, and in the morning Rayner went off to teach school. Elizabeth and Pauline looked after their sister during the day. At two that afternoon Cynthia told her sister Eliza that she felt much better, so they all went about their business as usual. Evan Jones had arranged for a butcher to come to the mission on Jan­ uary 8, to kill hogs. He and most of the family were at the hogpens near the spring most of the day, about half a mile from the school. Rayner and Butterfield conducted the school, and Eli Sanderson, the miller at the mis­ sion, assisted with the butchering. Pauline CunninghamJones spent much of her time rendering lard near the spring, cutting up and salting the fresh pork. She was assisted by Sarah Sanderson, the miller's wife. Periodically Eliza and others dropped in to see how Cynthia was doing and reported no particular problems. At about 7 P.M., after everyone had eaten supper, Cynthia's pains be­ came much worse. Jones and others came to talk to her, and someone suggested calling a doctor or bleeding her. Jones consulted a book of home remedies, gave the sick woman some wine and a tablespoonful of some medicine (calomel according to some, laudanum according to oth­ ers). Leonard Butterfield had favored bleeding, but the spring lancet was broken, and Jones hesitated about cutting her with a knife and cupping. Despite all that could be done, Cynthia Cunningham died at 10 P.M. on January 8, in great agony. Pauline and Eliza were distraught, and Jones comforted them in his cabin while Sarah Rayner, Susan Butterfield, and Sarah Sanderson went into the bedroom to wash and dress the corpse for burial. When they pulled back the bedclothes, they discovered a dead infant at the feet of the dead woman. Skin was scraped from its back and neck, and blood was on its mouth and nose. It appeared to have been born alive. None of them, apparently, had been aware that Cynthia was pregnant (though later Mrs. Sanderson said she suspected it). Cynthia was unmarried and the dead infant posed a serious problem. One of the women went to get Jones, but did not explain why he was being called. When he saw the dead child, he appeared stunned. Then he said that this would be a great shock to his wife and her sister and urged those present not to mention the dead infant to them. He wanted to bury both bodies immediately. The others did not. After much discussion, Jones and the three women agreed to hold a burial service the next day but to hide the dead body of the infant under the mother's long burial dress. Leonard Butterfield helped Evan Jones make a coffin the next morning. The burial took place that afternoon, January 9, amidst a large group of mourners including the Cherokee school children and other

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Cherokees in the vicinity. Jones said the appropriate prayers, hymns were sung, and the coffin was lowered and covered. Evidently, so far as Jones was concerned, that was the end of the mat­ ter. He wrote a letter to the mission Board later that month, but he made no mention of the incident. In fact, he said that everything at Valley Towns was going on "as usual." The few who knew about the dead child assumed that the mother had killed it either by suffocating or strangling it. No one wanted to talk about it. However, some of the Cherokee women expressed surprise that there had been no coffin for the infant. They had noticed that Cynthia had been pregnant and were uneasy when they heard nothing about the child. A fortnight went by, and the Cherokees became so upset about the mystery that they came to Jones and asked to have the coffin dug up. He refused. At this point, Sarah Sanderson decided to tell her husband about the dead infant. He in turn told his friends, William and David England, who lived nearby. Both the Englands were whitemen married to Cherokees; they may already have heard the rumors. The three men seem to have concluded that Jones was the father of the infant and that he had mur­ dered Cynthia and her child in order to cover up his adultery. They de­ cided to bring charges against Jones. David England got on his horse on February 7 and rode forty miles eastward to the nearest white settlement in Macon County, North Carolina. Here he swore out a complaint for the arrest of Jones and his wife before J. R. Siler, a justice of the peace. Siler sent a warrant to the local sheriff, and on February 14, a sheriff and six armed men arrived in Valley Towns. Evan and Pauline Jones were arrested for the willful murder of Cynthia Cunningham and her child. The deputy also had orders to bring in a number of witnesses, whom Sanderson had identified, for the arraignment.13 The whole group was supposed to appear before John Moore, another justice of the peace in Macon County, for arraignment, but after proceed­ ing twelve miles and while still within the limits of the Cherokee Nation, Pauline Jones became very ill and could go no farther. The Joneses were kept under guard by the deputies at Hyatt's Store while the sheriff rode back to Macon County to ask Judge Moore what to do next. Moore was unable to go to Hyatt's Store, so he asked Robert Huggins, another jus­ tice, to go in his place. Huggins began his inquiry at Hyatt's Store on February 20. First he heard the witnesses for the defense—Jones, his wife, two of Jones's daughters by his first wife, Eliza Cunningham, and Elizabeth Calvard (per13 For an earlier version of this account, see W. G. McLoughlin, "The Murder Trial of Evan Jones," The North Carolina Historical Review 62 (April 1985): 157-78. It is possible that Jones was the first minister ever tried for murder in the United States.

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haps the black servant at the mission). Then he listened to those subpoe­ naed as witnesses for the State of North Carolina—Sarah Sanderson, Robert K. Simons (a handyman employed at the mission), Jesse Watkins (the hog butcher), Leonard and Susan Butterfield, and Sarah Rayner. Why the Butterfields and Rayner testified for the State is not clear. Evidently Sanderson had indicated that their evidence, if honestly given, would surely be sufficient to indict Jones. After hearing all the evidence, Huggins was not convinced that a crime had been committed. He wrote on the back of the warrant, "The partys met and after the evidence being heard, the suit dismissed at cost of the prosecutor." Sanderson was irate and so were the Englands. They had accompanied the group, and they now ar­ gued at great length with Huggins in Hyatt's Store. Somehow they per­ suaded him to reopen the case the next morning. Perhaps they knew, as Huggins apparently did not, that in a hearing for murder the justice of the peace did not have the legal right to dismiss the complaint. It had to go before a grand jury and then to the Superior Court. In any case, Huggins made everyone testify again and this time he took the testimony under oath and had someone write it down. Afterward, he crossed off his original "verdict" and wrote instead, "February 21st, 1833, the case fairly Examined theoraly [thoroughly], the Defendents, Evin Jones and his Wife, Pa[u]line Jones is gui[l]ty as is Charged in the Within Warrant." He then signed his name and bound them over for trial before the Superior Court of North Carolina in the second week of April. Again Huggins had made a mistake, for he was not entitled to declare them "guilty" on the basis of such a hearing. Justice Huggins, it would appear, was not well-versed in the law. He should simply have arraigned them and left the decision up to the grand jury.14 The grand jury of Macon County indicted not only Evan and Pauline Jones but also Cynthia and Eliza Cunningham. Perhaps they meant to say they thought Cynthia was, in their opinion, likely to have murdered her infant. Eliza Cunningham was apparently considered an accessory, but she never stood trial. Only Jones and his wife were put on trial in April 1833. The indictment reads, in the quaint language of the common law: The jurors for the State, upon oath, present that Cynthia Cunningham, Evan Jones, Paulina Jones, and Eliza Cunningham, all late of the county of Macon aforesaid, not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil, on the eighth day of January,. . . with force and arms. ... Upon an infant male child. .. .did make an assault, and that said Cynthia Cunningham ... did then and there take [the child] into both 14 The testimony before Huggins and other documents in the case are among the Macon County Criminal Action Papers, 1829-1833, State vs. Cynthia Cunningham, in the Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

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hands and ... fixed [them] about the neck of the said infant male child ... [and] did choak and strangel [it], . . . and that the said Evan Jones, Pauline Jones and Eliza Cunningham, feloniously, willfully, and of their malice afore­ thought, were there and then present, aiding, helping, abetting, comforting, assisting, and maintaining the said Cynthia Cunningham.

This indictment did not charge any of the defendants with killing Cynthia Cunningham, as David England's complaint had done, but only with as­ sisting in the murder of her child. The first word the Mission Board received about all this came in a letter from Leonard Butterfield written on February 16, 1833, four days before Huggins's hearing at Hyatt's Store. Butterfield appeared to consider Jones guilty as charged. I cannot write as I would. I am under the painful necessity of stating to you that Mr. Jones does not prove to be the man I expected to find. I must say for the first two or three weeks I was not disappointed. I must also say I was surprised to find that Mr. Jones had been married about a year to that Miss [Pauline] Cunningham who had resided at the mission for a few years past, and had a child some months old. Two of her sisters were living at the mission when we came. My suspicions were excited before we arrived here that all was not right. . . . We were treated with coolness. The reason we knew not... .15

He then described the sickness and death of Cynthia Cunningham, noting that Jones "would have taken the child and buried it at dead of night had he not been prevented by Mrs. Sanderson." He also credited the Cherokees for figuring out that something was wrong. "Such were their suspi­ cions [that] they threatened to disinterre the body to satisfy themselves that the child was murdered and the mother neglected, death the conse­ quence." While Butterfield had no evidence that the Joneses were responsible for the death of Cynthia and her child, he seemed to find the weight of the testimony against them. He went on to say, "Should they be considered innocent of the charge alleged against them, there are other reports un­ favourable to their christian characters which I shall not mention at this time." He did say that he thought "someone of the board" ought to has­ ten at once to North Carolina to be present at the trial. "Nothing that I have ever met with has been so trying to me as this." He seemed fearful that Jones might be convicted, and he would be left to superintend the mission—a task to which he did not feel equal. Two weeks later, he wrote again to say that Jones and his wife had been heard by Judge Huggins and bound over for trial in April. "I hope noth­ ing will prevent you or someone of the board being present at the trial. 15

Leonard Butterfield, letters, ABMU, February 16, 1833.

106 · ChapterIV . . . I scarcely know how to proceed." He said that "although this circum­ stance, with others, has occasioned considerable excitement in the [mis­ sion] church, yet I am happy to say that the [Cherokee] preachers and exhorters are still walking in the path of duty." However, two of the in­ terpreters at the mission, "both members of the church and influential" among the Cherokees, had "declined to interpret for Mr. J., therefore he has not preached for a number of Sabbaths and probably will not till some satisfaction is given."16 The Board took immediate action. "Providentially," it said, Heman Lincoln had been planning to go to Augusta, Georgia, early in April. He would therefore stop off at Valley Towns. It was not clear whether he would attend the trial. Jones finally decided to give his side of the story in March 1833, after the indictment of the grand jury was returned. He described the whole incident to the Board as a tissue of lies and malicious persecution by the Sandersons and Englands. "I write to you today under circumstances of the most cruel and malicious persecution brought about by the wicked combination of a number of unprincipled men, the emissaries of all un­ righteousness." He then described "the substance of the matter" in terms of "an unhappy female" who came to the mission the previous October, "intending to stay till a wagon, which was about to start from Tennessee to Augusta, should return with which she was to go back to Tennessee." (This was probably the wagon of her brother, Miles Cunningham.) "The woman had borne a good character during the time I had been acquainted with her, which was about ten years." He noted that she had assisted Roberts and been baptized by him. He had never heard any ill of her. When she arrived in October, "she was in a state of pregnancy, but our family were altogether ignorant of her situation, or we should certainly not have allowed her to stay here any longer than she could be sent away with safety."17 He mentioned that he and his wife could have had no part in the birth and death of Cynthia's child, for "We were killing hogs that day, and my wife was obliged to attend to taking care of the fat, etc., which occupied her time from noon till dark at the spring where the butchering was per­ formed." In the evening, "when the woman was taken much worse," the whole mission family consulted together. "We did everything we could for her, but about 10 o'clock she expired." He and his wife retired to their cabin. "In a short time I was alarmed and astonished by being told . . . 16 Leonard Butterfield, letters, ABMU, February 29,1833. One of the two interpreters was Thomas McDonald, who was married to a daughter of the Sandersons. The other may have been John Timson. This letter also indicates that Jones still did not trust himself to preach in Cherokee. 17 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, March 5, 1833.

Trial for Murder · 107 that the woman had a child." He then explained that everyone "agreed to put the mother and child in the same coffin" and that "this unhappy circumstance should not be made known to my wife and her sister as it would greatly augment their distress" over the death of their sister. Later, he said, a rumor began to circulate that the child had been murdered. He talked to the three women who found the child in Cynthia's bed, but their testimony was "far from convincing me that the infant was intentionally killed at all." He preferred to believe it was either stillborn or had died accidentally. Nonetheless, Jones continued, "On the strength of these reports, a plot was formed ... for the purpose of ruining my character and destroying the work of grace which the Lord is carrying on in this vicinity. A whiteman, the leader of this unrighteous combination," went to North Caro­ lina and swore out the warrant. At the hearing, the magistrate "dismissed the suit," but "This decision so enraged the plotters that they assailed the magistrate with all the force of persecution and threatening, and, in fact, gave him no rest all night till they finally prevailed on him to alter his decision." These "emissaries of Satan" have continued to publish "a thousand calumnies" on him. Jones declared that the Cherokees had all taken his side. "Many of our dear Indian brethren visited us and staid with us to sympathize and pray, being not ashamed to acknowledge us in the hour of affliction." He was happy to say that "all this disturbance has not stopped the progress of the Gospel.. . . the Indians being well assured of the falsehood of the charges and the malice of the instigators." He closed by asking to be remembered in the prayers of the Board. The letter differed from that of Leonard Butterfield in a number of im­ portant respects. Jones omitted to say that two of his Cherokee interpret­ ers, men of standing in the mission church, had refused to interpret for him so that he had not preached for many weeks. He did his best to dis­ tance himself from Cynthia Cunningham, referring to her always as "the woman" and not as his sister-in-law. His view that this was all a plot hatched by the Englands and Sandersons had not been obvious to Butterfield, who made not the slightest reference to it. Jones never mentioned that he had wanted the mother and child buried secretly in the dead of night without any Christian ceremony. He was also the only person who did not believe the infant was murdered. Two weeks later, having heard that Heman Lincoln was on his way to Augusta and fearing that he had not seen the letter of March 5 from him, he wrote a very similar letter to Lincoln, addressed to Augusta. Lincoln's visit he called "peculiarly providential," though it seems more likely it had been the result of Butterfield's shocking letter of February 16. In this second letter, Jones gave precisely the same account of the death of Cyn-

108 · Chapter IV thia and her child but added that after the burial, he and his wife had paid a visit to Cleveland, Tennessee, in order "to see and sympathize with the parents and friends" of the dead woman. They returned on February 7 to find the rumors of murder rife at Valley Towns. Again he said he was far from convinced that the child was murdered, but he did not mention his effort to dissuade the Cherokees and others from disinterring the bodies. He said that he and his wife had been "kept prisoners for seven days" (at Hyatt's Store) after her sickness made it impossible for them to travel to North Carolina. He informed Lincoln that the trial was set for April 8 in the town of Franklin, North Carolina.18 Jones also noted in this letter that plans had been made to call a council of the Baptist churches in the vicinity after the trial "to investigate all the charges." For evangelical Christians a secular decision by the courts would not suffice. He also said he had built a small addition to his new cabin in which to house Lincoln when he visited. Lincoln arrived in time to attend the trial. The records of the trial in Franklin on April 8 are lost, but the state­ ments of the witnesses taken under oath on February 21 covered the same ground. None of the witnesses had any direct evidence to prove murder. Everything was circumstantial. No one, not even Sarah Rayner, living in the adjoining room, could say precisely when the baby was born. None heard it cry at any time. None saw any evidence of the birth other than the dead child. No one even speculated on how Cynthia could have hid­ den all the evidence of the birth. However, everyone agreed that the Joneses had at no time tried to lock the door to her room to prevent anyone from entering, nor had anyone evidence of mysterious visits to it. The evidence did show that it would have been difficult for no one to know of the birth, and the evidence pointed to the Joneses as the most likely to conceal evidence of it. For example, at one point on the evening of January 8, as Cynthia was approaching death and when the child had been born and hidden (and was probably dead) at the foot of the bed, under the bedclothes, Pauline Jones brought into the room a warm rock and placed it under the bedclothes to warm Cynthia's feet. Sarah Sander­ son testified that it would have been impossible for Mrs. Jones to place that rock against Cynthia's feet without seeing or feeling the dead infant. But Sarah Rayner said that it was dark in the room; the only light being at the head of the bed, Mrs. Jones might well have been unable to see the child. There was considerable evidence about a piece of carpet being brought into the sick room on the morning of January 8. Some witnesses thought it was on this carpet that the child had been delivered, but no one saw any signs of blood on the carpet. Although no one ever heard the child 18

Ibid.

Trial for Murder · 109 cry, all were convinced that it was healthy and born alive. Asked how they thought the child died, the witnesses seemed to agree with Sarah Rayner, who said, "My impression was that the mother killed it. 1 con­ cluded she had done it with her feet." Whether Rayner meant that Cyn­ thia strangled the child between her feet or simply smothered it, she did not say. Rayner said, "I thought it was from suffocation" that it died, but when "I observed the blood at the nose and mouth, I then considered there had been violence used." The child was described as "large" and "stout." It was not a premature birth. Yet only Sarah Sanderson and Jesse Watkins said they had suspected that Cynthia Cunningham was preg­ nant, and neither had mentioned it to anyone prior to her death. Even those who saw Cynthia lying in bed said they did not know she was preg­ nant; "She was lying on her side, facing the wall," whenever anyone en­ tered the room. Efforts to indicate that Jones had contributed to Cynthia's death by improper medical treatment or by neglecting to call a doctor were incon­ clusive. No one really insisted on sending for a doctor; no one had in­ sisted on bleeding her, though Butterfield had mentioned it. Butterfield said that Jones had given Cynthia a tablespoon full of laudanum (opium), but Sarah Rayner thought he had given her calomel (a laxative). Jones had said to Mrs. Sanderson afterward that he would never have given her the laudanum had he known that she was pregnant. The most damning evidence was that Jones wanted to bury the dead child secretly. Yet all who knew of it at the time seemed to agree that it was best to keep the illegitimate birth hidden. Mrs. Sanderson herself made the suggestion to hide the dead child under the mother's burial dress and to tie it to her legs lest it slip out and become visible at some point in the process of transporting the body. Jones agreed to this. When all the testimony was given and the witnesses cross-examined, the jury deliberated. It seems to have concluded quickly that there was not sufficient evidence to convict Jones or his wife of murder, and they were acquitted. However, the judge reprimanded Jones for the secret bur­ ial of the infant. According to North Carolina law, all deaths had to be reported, especially the children of unwed mothers (who might be sup­ posed to have good reason for wanting to murder the evidence of their sins). While Jones and his wife felt fully exonerated, doubts lingered in many minds and the scandal from the trial dogged Jones's footsteps for the rest of his life. Holding a church council after the trial to look into the matter served two purposes. First, it was necessary to know whether the mission church members concurred with the verdict of the courts or whether they felt sufficient doubts to call for Jones's resignation. Second, Jones wished the church to censure those who had issued false rumors in an effort to de­ stroy his reputation and that of his wife and to cast aspersions on the

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whole mission enterprise. Most of those involved in the case were mem­ bers of the mission church. If the church found them guilty of slander, false witness, or malicious conduct, it could censure or expel them. Evan­ gelical churches in the nineteenth century considered ecclesiastical coun­ cils or trials to be as important as civil trials where Christian morality was concerned. Justice did not always prevail in secular law. Even though the decisions of church trials had no legal significance, they were considered of high spiritual import. They could exonerate where a civil court found guilt and could punish (by church censure) where a civil court acquitted. Jones had been smarting for some time from the kinds of backbiting tales that were common in narrow, ingrown communities and in which the Cherokees were as prone to indulge as whites. The church council took place on April 17 at the Valley Towns mission where, Jones said, "A large concourse of Cherokees were assembled." Heman Lincoln was present for it; so was Humphrey Posey, now paster of the Baptist Church in Franklin, North Carolina. In addition, Jones had invited the Reverend Burrow Buckner of the Achaia Church, Jesse Bushyhead, and the Reverend Thomas Dawson (now ordained as pastor of the Perkins Creek Baptist Church in South Carolina). The council members elected Posey as "Moderator" and Lincoln as "Clerk" of the proceedings. Leonard Butterfield was asked to sit with the council in the conduct of the trial, "to hear any testimony that may be adduced in support of the various charges brought." All members of the church, and other inter­ ested parties, were allowed to attend and to give witness. If Jones were guilty of any of the rumors circulated about him, the church members would then democratically vote whether to retain or dismiss him. The charges were not, however, brought against Jones. They were brought by Jones against those who had slandered him. If charges against Jones were proved false, these persons would be the ones censured for bearing false witness and dismissed from the church. If the charges were substantiated in the eyes of the council, than Jones himself would be cen­ sured by his church members and very probably dismissed. Jones, it must be said, took the bull by the horns in thus challenging all who had made accusations about his character to come forward in public. He was deter­ mined to quiet not only rumors about his part in the death of Cynthia Cunningham and her child, but also rumors that went back many years earlier concerning his conduct with Pauline. The charges indicated that a lot of people had had a lot of bad thoughts about Jones over the past six years. E. Jones came before the Church and complained that he had been treated wrong and aggrieved by a malicious, cruel charge of murder against himself and his wife.

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Also a charge of fornication in the case of his last child [by Pauline Cunning­ ham Jones] and also with an attempt to injure, if not kill his wife [Pauline] and to destroy the infant at the time of the birth of his last child in August, 1832. And also a charge of adultery in the case of the unhappy woman [Cynthia Cunningham] who died at the Mission in January last. And also a charge of adultery in the year 1827.19

If malicious rumor had circulated about fornication with Pauline Cun­ ningham and a possible effort to abort her child, did these come from his own secrecy about their marriage or because he did not marry her until after she was known (or later discovered) to be pregnant? How could he be accused of getting Cynthia Cunningham pregnant when she had been pregnant at the time she came to the mission in October 1832? HadJones deliberately raised a number of outrageous charges in order to intimidate any person who had brought any one of them? Or did he want all the charges lumped together to demonstrate their horrendous absurdity? Was he hoping to substantiate his claim about a deep-laid, long-standing plot to ruin him and drive him away? The church records for this council do not exist, but the results of the council do. From the verdict it appears that no one came forward to sub­ stantiate any of the charges. It also appears that the council did not bring any charges of slander, backbiting, or false witness against any of the church members. Apparently no one spoke when given the opportunity. The council's verdict was unanimous: "After a patient examination and full investigation of the various charges preferred against Rev. E. Jones, it was unanimously agreed that no evidence had been adduced to support them. Therefore [he] is honorably acquited."20 It would be nice to know what the full "investigation"' consisted of. It all appears to have been something of a "whitewash" or at least an effort to "clear the air." The acquittal was almost inevitable. The accusers were already discredited by the verdict of the civil court, and if they disagreed with it they probably no longer chose to be members of Jones's church. In any case, Jones and his wife and supporters got exactly what they wanted. Their church, their fellow pastors, the Treasurer of the Mission Board, heard the worst that could be said against them, gave the slanderers a chance to prove their charges, and then declared Jones to be innocent and held him up in full honor as a pastor and a missionary. 15 Evan Jones, letters, ABMU, June 6, 1833. The charge was actually made at a church meeting at Galaneeye on March 17,1833. Acting on that charge, the church called a council that met at Valley Towns on April 17. This copy of the "Church Book" was handed to Heman Lincoln when he left Valley Towns on April 24. Someone later wrote in the date of June 6, under which it is filed. 20 Ibid.

112 · ChapterIV Heman Lincoln returned to Boston convinced, and he convinced the other members of the Mission Board, that Jones was fully worthy of their continued support. The Board had not always thought it would turn out that way. In a letter from Lucius Bolles to Butterfield in August 1833, Bolles noted the good fortune which permitted Heman Lincoln to assist Jones in his time of trial: "nothing could have been more seasonable than the countenance which it was in his power to afford Mr. Jones when it became apparent that he was entitled to it."21 When did it become appar­ ent? Butterfield remained at the Valley Towns mission for another two years and Rayner for another three. Evidently they came to accept the inno­ cence of the Joneses. Nor was there any negative reaction among the Cherokees, who continued to send their children to the school and to listen to Jones's sermons.22 Jones later found what he considered firm corroboration for his claim of a conspiracy. He informed the Board that Eli Sanderson and his wife, together with David and William England, were hoping to get their hands on the mission property, for the purpose of claiming the right to be re­ imbursed by the federal government for their improvements on it when­ ever the Cherokees removed to the West. Their plan derived from a treaty made by the government with the Western Cherokees in May 1828. At that time, John Quincy Adams, hoping to be reelected, had allowed Thomas L. McKenney to negotiate a treaty that encouraged voluntary removal by Eastern Cherokees to Arkansas Territory, or that part of it that later became Oklahoma. By a clause in that treaty, the federal gov­ ernment not only agreed to give any Cherokee who went west a gun, a blanket, and five pounds of tobacco, and to pay for his cost of transpor­ tation, but it also agreed to evaluate any improvements he had made on his farm (house, stable, fences, land under cultivation, etc.) and to pay cash for these once he arrived in Arkansas. The first step in this process was for the Cherokee to formally "enroll" for emigration. Jones noted that in the years after 1828 many whites, like the Englands, came into the Nation, married Cherokees, and enrolled "a great number of improve­ ments," in order to "have them valued to them," but "to which they have no claims or right whatever."23 By marrying a Cherokee (preferably a rich Cherokee widow), these whites became Cherokee citizens and were le­ gally entitled to be reimbursed for any improvements on the land they settled on. This gave them a nice sum of money once they went to Arkan­ sas, which they could use to build upon Cherokee land there or, if they 21

Lucius Bolles, letters, ABMU, August 26, 1833. McDonald ceased serving as interpreter after 1833, but John Timson contin­

22 Thomas

ued. 23 Evan

Jones, letters, ABMU, February 3, 1834.

TrialforMurder · 113 wanted, to leave their Cherokee wives and buy a homestead in white ter­ ritory. If they could not find a wealthy Cherokee woman with a good farm and lots of livestock, they could marry a poor one but then rent land on shares from a mission agency and, if the mission were closed, claim reimbursement for those improvements when they enrolled. Eli Sanderson was not married to a Cherokee, but his daughter was; she was married to Jones's interpreter, Thomas McDonald. If Evan Jones could be driven out of the mission, and if McDonald and the Englands could make some claim to the two mills Sanderson now rented and to those twenty acres of the mission farm that he cultivated, they stood to make a sizable profit by enrolling, by having all of the mission's improve­ ments evaluated to them, and then pocketing the money when they got to Arkansas. This the Englands, McDonald, and Sarah Sanderson tried to do by a series of fortuitous and devious contrivances. Jones believed the first fortuitous opportunity came with the death of Cynthia Cunningham, which the schemers hoped would lead to Jones's conviction and/or ex­ pulsion from the mission and a decision to close the mission. Even after his acquittal, Jones feared some such scheme was afoot. To fry to forestall it, while Heman Lincoln was still at Valley Towns, Jones and he had agreed to break their lease with Sanderson to get the mills and farm back into mission hands. "You recollect," Jones wrote to Lincoln in February 1834, "the anxiety Sanderson expressed when you were here, to be al­ lowed to remain on the premises at the Mill only till fall so as to raise his crop? In opposition to the remonstrance of many friends, I persisted in letting him stay, being anxious to avoid every act that would look like doing evil for evil."24 This leniency had been a mistake. "After waiting for him to remove till a few days ago [February 1834], I sent to ask for the rent corn which was 100 bushels and to know when it would be con­ venient to let us have the house [and mill]. The answer was that he would not pay any rent and that we could get the house whenever he left it [and not before]. In a few days afterwards, I learned that he was in treaty with England to let him take possession for the purposes of enrolment [to go to Arkansas] and of introducing a set of ruffians to hold it for them."25 Jones said he believed that William England would place a "set of ruf­ fians" in the Sanderson home the minute Sanderson left, the kind of white renegades who "from their known characters, would have destroyed ev­ erything about the Mission premises that came in their way" in order to drive Jones away; what was more, they would try to harass the Cherokees in the neighborhood, cheat them, ply them with drink, and steal from them. This would put an end to the mission school and church. "In a day 24 25

Ibid. Ibid.

114

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ChapterIV

or two after this, I received a message from Sanderson, through a neigh­ bor, that he would not give up possession of the place unless I would pay the sum that England was willing to give for letting him have possession of it, viz. $100." In other words, it seemed, Sanderson was willing to double-cross England, or at least to obtain ready cash and let Jones deal with England. Jones described this demand as "a most audacious piece of swindling," but he felt he had little choice if he wished to get rid of the threat to the future of the mission. He paid Sanderson the money, but insisted that Sanderson sign a written statement that he had thereby re­ turned the land to the mission in exchange for one hundred dollars.26 But the plot did not end here. Eli Sanderson died soon after this and his son-in-law, Thomas McDonald, assumed that he had inherited the right to the mill and land (evidently unaware of the quitclaim Sanderson had given to Jones). McDonald decided to enroll for Arkansas in the summer of 1834, but before doing so he sold his presumed claim to the Sanderson improvements to William England for $100 (which England evidently thought completed his original bargain with Sanderson). England was also unaware of the quitclaim letter. Shortly after emigrating to Arkansas with his family, Thomas McDonald died. His family, assuming that he still had the right to the assessment value of the Sanderson mill and farm, put in a claim for this to the government claims agent in Arkansas. The government sent David Thompson to Valley Towns to investigate the claim and report back to the agent. After discussing the matter with Jones, Thompson submitted an affidavit to the agent (and gave Jones a copy) explaining the true situation: Eli Sanderson had charge of the Mission Mills for some years and rented a part of the [mission] farm adjoining the mill. Thomas McDonald, a Cherokee, mar­ ried to Mrs. [now widow] Sanderson's daughter and enrolled to go to Arkan­ sas. McDonald sold the part of the Mission farm in possession of Sanderson to another Emigrant, named William England, for one Hundred dollars, and En­ gland actually paid him in a note on me. While these things were in agitation [1833—1834], Sanderson offered to give up possession to the demand of Evan Jones, the Agent of the Baptists at the Station, if he would pay him the sum and not otherwise. Said E. Jones agreed.27

Thompson certified "that England had really paid McDonald the sum first mentioned, and McDonald's heirs were compelled to refund the amount to the heirs of England" because it was not legal to transfer such claims even if McDonald had really owned the improvements. The fed2