“FRAUGHT WITH DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES FOR OUR COUNTRY”: CHEROKEE SOVEREIGNTY, NULLIFICATION, AND THE SECTIONAL CRISIS ___________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ___________________________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy ___________________________________________________________________ by Nancy Morgan July 2015 Examining Committee Members: Jonathan D. Wells, Advisory Chair, History Department David Waldstreicher, History Department Gregory J. W. Urwin, History Department Tim Alan Garrison, External Member, Portland State University 1 ABSTRACT ““Fraught with Disastrous Consequences for our Country”: Cherokee Sovereignty, Nullification and the Sectional Crisis” explores how the national debates over Indian sovereignty rights contributed to the rise of American sectionalism. Although most American citizens supported westward expansion, the Cherokee Nation demonstrated effectively that it had adopted Western civilized standards and, in accord with federal treaty law, deserved constitutional protections for its sovereignty and homelands. The Cherokees’ success divided American public opinion over that nation’s purported rights to constitutional protections. When Georgian leaders and the state militia harassed Northern white American missionaries who supported Cherokee sovereignty rights, even citizenship rights seemed in question. South Carolina’s leaders capitalized on the Cherokee debate by framing their own protest against federal tariffs as a complementary states’ rights issue. Thus, in 1832, nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cherokee sovereignty protections against Georgia’s removal efforts in Worcester v. Georgia, South Carolina issued an Ordinance of Nullification, proclaiming its state right to nullify federal taxation. Current historiography tends to suggest that most Americans at that time ignored Cherokee sovereignty to confront South Carolina’s Nullification challenge. Alternatively, this project proposes that the debates over Cherokee sovereignty exacerbated Americans’ fear over South Carolina’s Nullification crisis, because together they representing a two-state challenge to federal authority. While current historiography also recognizes that expansion was a critical feature of American sectionalism, the debate over Indian sovereignty within already established ii Eastern states demonstrates that the politics of expansion was not simply a Western borderlands issue. Nullification threatened the Union because Georgia and President Andrew Jackson simultaneously ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret constitutional law, while promoting the vital importance of constitutional law. To explore the sectional tensions that linked Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification, this project reviews the earlier period in American politics when these issues evolved separately to demonstrate the effect of their eventual connection. The first chapter provides an example that shows how the Cherokees protected their treaty rights successfully during this earlier period. Chapter Two considers the unique histories of South Carolina and the Cherokee Nation, and their collective challenges to the evolving American political economy. Chapter Three explores how the non-white republic of the Cherokee Nation contributed to the weakening of race-based slavery positivism, despite its own investment in slavery. Chapter Four demonstrates how a widening circle of congressional figures began connecting publicly the debates over Cherokee removal, tariffs, and slavery, made especially visible during the Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate. Chapter Five delineates the national discord over the extra-legal violence against white missionaries who protected Cherokee interests. As evident through the recently discovered prison journal of Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester—of Worcester v. Georgia— this chapter also demonstrates that despite their rhetoric otherwise, Jacksonians recognized the sectional toxicity when the American public connected Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been the luckiest graduate student in the world. My committee has shepherded me through this dissertation process with a perfect balance of unflagging support and useful critique. They worked effectively with one another in the best interests of my project, surrounding my thesis with a secure weave of insight and direction. With great humility I offer my dissertation and accept all its shortcomings as my own. While the political ramifications of Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification were national in scope, my advisor, Jonathan D. Wells, guided this Northern-born tourist past the most challenging landmines within Southern historiography. Steering me through regional nuances between planter authority and the slave power, from the beginning, Dr. Wells buoyed me with his optimism over the significance of my work. He encouraged me to validate Southerners as quintessentially American and respect the insider’s experience through my outsider’s observations. David Waldstreicher became nothing short of a co-advisor. Increasingly excited by the implications over the connection between Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification, Dr. Waldstreicher conducted me through a complex symphony of significant articles, monographs, and scholarship-yet-to-be-published with his incomparable command of early American political history. Known for “not suffering fools gladly,” it seems more accurate to say that Dr. Waldstreicher does not suffer foolishness gladly. He is an exceptional teacher and a generous advisor to those who accept the challenge of his exacting standards. iv Gregory J. W. Urwin provided his critical military history expertise to my study of frontier culture, Southern militarism, and “The General” Andrew Jackson. Driven by that holistic approach exemplified by the best of scholars, Dr. Urwin brought a drill- sergeant’s demand for straightforward argumentation and clear prose. His insistence that I do better than my best benefitted my project enormously from the editorial assistance of Petra Shenk. As my outside reader, Tim Alan Garrison continues to guide and encourage me through the complex historiography connecting Native American history and sovereignty jurisprudence. Patient, kind, and brilliant, Dr. Garrison has repeatedly insisted on rigorous scholarship without the polemics, a challenging balance to uphold within the dangerously ironic labyrinth of federal Indian law. In addition to the signatures that validate my dissertation, this project benefits from the unofficial but watchful eyes of the Jacksonian scholar Mark R. Cheathem and Cherokee historian Cathy S. Monholland. Both fields are life-long studies unto themselves, and I am grateful for their openhanded guidance and encouragement. The legendary Donald Fixico generously read an early version of my project. With studied hospitality, he treated me to lunch while he patiently explained why what would become Chapter Two was essential. I could not have completed my graduate studies and dissertation without the generous support of Temple University’s “gradjunct” work-study program, travel grants and fellowships. David Murray, history research librarian extraordinaire at Temple’s Paley Library, guided my research and taught me the finer points of navigating the v overwhelming digital resources available through research libraries. The Filson Historical Society, Dickinson College and the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research enabled me to branch out with my research and conference travels, and I am grateful for their assistance. Catherine O’Donnell graciously offered to me the opportunity to teach at Arizona State University during my final dissertation year, which protected my access to another excellent university research library. It has been as much a pleasure to work with Arizona students as it had been with Pennsylvania’s, and I continue to marvel at how much history I learn from teaching it. I had the privilege to travel to Cherokee, North Carolina and Tahlequah, Oklahoma and to study with scholars of the Eastern Band and the Cherokee Nation. The representations by Barbara Duncan for the Eastern Band and Julia Coates for the Cherokee Nation were neither more nor less accurate than the scholarly works I had already studied, but the altered focus gave me new insight into the significance of the outsider and insider perspectives of a nation’s history. Both presentations were driven to protect the integrity of Cherokee resources and national sovereignty. They also hold studied accountability toward contemporary representation of their own and other vulnerable Native sovereignties, as Dr. Coates, explains, “First do no harm.” In addition to accurate representation, both Dr. Duncan and Dr. Coates recognize that historic representations hold contemporary political power, and that power needs to be wielded with judicious sensitivity. In a wonderful moment of serendipity, Margery N. Sly, Director of Special Collections Research Center at Temple University, happened to ask about my topic a few vi years ago. When I told her, she asked me if I knew that the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia housed Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester’s prison journal. I scarcely believed her, but how could I not check it out? When I first read Worcester’s incomparable epiphany that