Page 238 - American Stories, A History of the United States

prevent “outsiders” from bidding up the price and buying their farms out from under preemption The right of first
them. Squatters also agitated for formal right of first purchase or preemption from purchase of public land. Settlers 9.1
the government. Between 1799 and 1830, Congress granted squatters in specific areas enjoyed this right even if they
squatted on the land in advance of
the right to purchase at the minimum price the land that they had already improved. government surveyors.
In 1841, Congress formally acknowledged the right to farm on public lands with the 9.2
assurance of a future preemption right. Quick Check
What territories did the United States
Native American Societies Under Pressure acquire under secretary Adams, and 9.3
how did it obtain them?
Five Indian nations, with a combined population of nearly 60,000, occupied much of
what later became Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. These nations—the
Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—became known as the “Five
Civilized Tribes” because by 1815 they had adopted many of the features of the sur-
rounding white southern society: an agricultural economy, a republican government,
and slavery. Indeed, the cultural transformation of the southeastern Indians was part of a
conscious strategy to respond to Jeffersonian exhortations toward “civilization” and the
promise of citizenship that came with it. But between 1815 and 1833, it became increas-
ingly clear that however “civilized” Indians had become, most white Americans were not
interested in incorporating them into U.S. society, whether as nations or as individuals.
The five nations varied in their responses to white encroachment on their lands.
So-called mixed-blood leaders such as John Ross convinced the Cherokee to adopt a
strategy of accommodation to increase their chances of survival; the Creek and Semi-
nole, by contrast, forcibly resisted.
The Cherokee were the largest of the five nations. Traditional Cherokee society had
combined hunting by men and subsistence farming by women. In the early nineteenth
century, the shift to a more agrarian, market-based economy eroded the traditional
matrilineal kinship system, in which a person belonged to his or her mother’s clan.
The new order replaced matrilineal inheritance with the U.S. system of patriarchy in
which fathers headed the household and property passed from father to son. Emphasis
on the nuclear family with the husband as producer and the wife as domestic caretaker
diminished the clan’s role.
The shift toward agriculture also helped introduce American-style slavery to Cher-
okee society. As the Cherokee adopted plantation-style agriculture, they also began
to adopt white attitudes toward blacks. By the time of Indian Removal in the 1830s
and 1840s, a few Cherokee owned plantations with hundreds of slaves, and there were
more than 1,500 slaves in the Cherokee Nation. Discrimination against Africans in
all five nations grew under pressure of contact with whites. Beginning in the 1820s,
the Cherokee Council adopted rules regulating slaves. Whereas a few Africans in the
eighteenth century had been adopted into the tribe and become citizens, under the new
laws, slaves could not intermarry with Cherokee citizens, engage in trade or barter, or
hold property.
To head off encroachments by southern states, the Cherokee also attempted to cen-
tralize power in a republican government. As Cherokee historian William McLoughlin
has described, “A series of eleven laws passed between 1820 and 1823 . . . constituted
a political revolution in the structure of Cherokee government. Under these laws the
National Council created a bicameral legislature, a district and superior court system,
an elective system of representation by geographical district rather than by town, and
a salaried government bureaucracy.” This process culminated in the 1827 adoption of
a formal written constitution modeled on the U.S. Constitution.
Sequoyah’s invention of a written Cherokee language in 1821–1822 spurred a
renaissance of Cherokee culture. He used a phonetic system, representing each syllable
in the Cherokee language with symbols, eventually comprising 86 letters. While this
alphabet was complicated and lacked punctuation marks, “Sequoyan” gave the Chero-
kee a new means of self-expression and a reinvigorated sense of their identity. The
first American Indian newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published in Sequoyan
in 1828. By the time of Indian Removal, Cherokee leaders like John Ross and Elias
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