Inevitable’: Cherokees, Senecas, and Rhetoric in The
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DEBATING THE ‘INEVITABLE’: CHEROKEES, SENECAS, AND RHETORIC IN THE ERA OF REMOVAL By BENJAMIN TODD RESNICK-DAY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Peter Silver And approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey OCTOBER, 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Debating the ‘Inevitable’: Cherokees, Senecas, and Rhetoric in the Era of Removal” by BENJAMIN TODD RESNICK-DAY Dissertation Director: Peter Silver This dissertation is about the use of the rhetoric of inevitability to justify the Jacksonian policy of “Indian Removal” and attempts of participants to grapple with the extent of their responsibility for the tragedies, like the infamous “Trail of Tears,” that resulted from this policy. Many participants in Indian Removal struggled with their moral responsibility, but ultimately decided that Indian removal was an inevitable historical development. Some Cherokee and Seneca chiefs embraced the same logic in order to justify their decisions to sign removal treaties against the overwhelming opposition of their own nations. Because of the overwhelming trend of colonial expansion and native land loss, claims of inevitability had a great deal of plausibility to them. However, the victory of the Senecas over determined attempts to remove them reveals that removal was not “inevitable” across the board. This project locates the points at which human beings took concrete actions in this struggle—making laws and treaties, voting for candidates, mustering troops, organizing resistance—to demonstrate that historical determinist thinking played a major role in justifying Indian removal, and in attempts to convince the wavering to drop their qualms and cooperate in its implementation. Further, this dissertation shows that a conscious rejection of such logic was an important ingredient in (at times successful) resistance to removal. ii Acknowledgment and Dedication I want to thank my committee chair and advisor, Peter Silver, for his encouragement, his faith in this project and for all of his help in bringing it about, especially all that he taught me about the research and writing process. I want to thank my other committee members as well. Ann Fabian, for her unending patience as she slogged through drafts of this work. Ann not only demonstrated how much I have to learn about the English language, she also continually challenged and sharpened my ideas. Camilla Townsend for the debates we’ve had that inspired—and helped to temper and refine—this project. And Matt Dennis for his encouragement and suggestions, and for going well beyond the call of duty as an outside reader in offering feedback and letters of recommendation. Aside from my committee members, I want to thank Nicole Eustace, who saw potential in me when I was a taciturn Masters student at NYU. My parents for all of their encouragement and support as I’ve pursued this path. And also Sammy, who made me go back for the guitar, and who was enthusiastic about these ideas from the beginning. Finally, I want to dedicate this work humbly to all of the dead people who I write about, whether perpetrators or victims, hoping against hope that I have fairly and respectfully used the traces they have left us to make these arguments. iii Table of Contents ii-Abstract iii-Acknowledgement and Dedication 5-Introduction 29-Chapter One: Debating Removal and Inevitability in the Fight Over the Indian Removal Bill 77-Chapter Two: Debating Removal and Inevitability in Indian Country: The Cherokee Debate 123-Chapter Three: Confidence in Inevitability, Fears of Contingency: Debate and Consensus on Removal in Georgia 181-Chapter Four: “While I Have a Voice in the Matter”: Calling the Bluff of Seneca Removal, Averting Catastrophe 221-Chapter Five: Calling the Bluff Part Two: The Tonawanda Removal Struggle 256-Epilogue: “The Strong Saw Not How to Avert It” iv 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about the use of the rhetoric of inevitability, to justify acts of dispossession or violence against indigenous people during debates over the Jacksonian policy of “Indian Removal,” (or the dispossession of Indians and their expulsion beyond the Mississippi in the 1830s), and attempts of participants to grapple with the extent of their responsibility for the tragedies, like the infamous “Trail of Tears,” that resulted from this policy. I will define inevitability rhetoric as rhetoric, argument, or discourse that purports to justify acts of dispossession, force, or atrocity by recourse to the idea that such acts are made inevitable by the course of history or alternatively, that such acts are the regrettable but inevitable alternative to indigenous destruction. I focus on the use of inevitability rhetoric in struggles over Indian removal in particular because Indian removal is a well-known event that left a huge paper trail. The debate over removal strikes me as fascinating precisely because it stirred such an unprecedented—and unrepeated—national controversy over the fate of Native Americans, in which the fortunes of major political parties and politicians were staked. The degree of self-conscious planning, organization, and political effort that went into this “ethnic cleansing,”1 and the scale of the operation that forced the exile of tens of thousands of people meant that it generated intense ideological and rhetorical production. Why does inevitability rhetoric matter? 1 Amy Sturgis, The Trail of Tears and Indian Removal (New York: Greenwood Press, 2006), 3-5, makes the case that Indian removal should be understood in terms of “ethnic cleansing,” and I agree with her. The term “ethnic cleansing” appeared in the nineties to describe a policy of forced, targeted ethnic relocation in the former Yugoslavia that was intended to separate ethnic groups, or clear people of target ethnic groups from territory claimed by another group, which is precisely what removal was intended to do. In both cases, the goal was not genocide, but the means were violent and coercive, leading to large-scale death among the target population. 2 I argue that the right to dispossess indigenous people often appeared dubious to white Americans, leading many to fear God’s judgment upon the United States, and upon their individual souls. Many white Americans—even participants in Indian removal— struggled with their moral responsibility for bringing about the dispossession and atrocity it entailed, but ultimately decided that Indian removal was an historical development outside of their hands. Indeed, even some Cherokee and Seneca chiefs embraced the same logic in order to justify their decisions to sign removal treaties against the overwhelming opposition of their own nations.2 Inevitability rhetoric was powerful for good reason. Because of the overwhelming trend of colonial expansion and native land loss, (with deadly results for native people), claims of inevitability had a great deal of plausibility to them, for both white Americans and indigenous people. Indeed, I am not claiming that the power differential between settler societies and indigenous people in eastern North America was “merely” a “construction,” purely the result of the rhetoric of inevitability, or of people believing it was so.3 Indeed, the very real (and growing) power differential between these groups in 2 So, for example, the faction of the Cherokee leadership intent upon signing a treaty of removal argued that if “the tide of white population and State jurisdiction, which is pressing upon us, cannot be restrained, it would be the greatest act of humanity to devise immediate measures to remove our people,” (cited in “A Council Held At Running Waters, in the Cherokee Nation, in Georgia, November 28, 1834, On Behalf Of Those Members of the Cherokee Tribe Of Indians Who Are Desirous Of Removing West Of The Mississippi. January 19, 1835,” in Index of The Executive Documents, 23d Congress, 2d Session, 1834-5, H. Doc. No. 91, 5), while missionary David Greene wrote to his colleague that Cherokee attempts to resist removal would end in “ruin inevitable,” (quoted in Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2nd ed., Revised (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 259). Seneca Chief Nathaniel Strong argued that because of “the encroachments of the unprincipled white men who were overrunning and corrupting us” the Seneca “nation must become extinct before many years, unless they emigrate to the West.” (Nathaniel F. Strong, Appeal to the Christian Community on the Condition and Prospects of the New York Indians, In Answer to a Book, Entitled the Case of the New-York Indian, and Other Publications of the Society of Friends (New York: E.B. Clayton, Printer and Stationer, 1841), 5, 7). 3 Hisorian Brian Dippie even claimed in the context of Indian Removal that the “belief in the Vanishing Indian was the ultimate cause of the Indian’s vanishing,” but this view seems too strong to me. (Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982) 71). Indeed, I have developed this critique of inevitablity rhetoric to be compatible with a strong conviction that the roots of 3 the era of Removal was what gave inevitability rhetoric, when applied to the debate over Indian removal, its power, and its aura of common-sense realism. However, the key is to pinpoint the way in which rhetoric and arguments about inevitability have functioned to aid in the dispossession of indigenous people at important points of political decision-making. Indeed, I argue that perpetrators of Indian removal used general claims about historical inevitability to obscure their freedom to make decisions that helped determine the course of struggles over indigenous dispossession in the era of Indian Removal. I argue that this perception of inevitability played a direct role in the decisions of wavering congressmen and Indian chiefs, to support removal.